thepaulhoey
-
Content count
223 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by thepaulhoey
-
-
You can upgrade the comms relay and assign engineers to it. I think I can get to a max of 5 or 6 by doing that.
Getting to the chopper is indeed awesome. There's nothing more intense than dashing for the extraction zone, carrying a guy while enemies in overwatch fire at you.
-
I definitely felt that a few months in there seemed to be a string of tough missions one after another and if you had a team of rookies then things could go bad fast. I'd power on through though, I genuinely thought my campaign was toast and then my fortunes turned quite fast due to some upgrades and story missions.
-
I've just remembered some other things after reading your post.
Yes, the new weapons and other items are confusing regarding if they're a once off or not. I always find myself checking to see if it's infinite or finite. Anything from the proving ground seems to be finite and most from the Engineering department are infinite, I think other than the nano scale vest they're all infinite. So far anyway.
I also had one unbeatable map. I had to access a control point in 8 turns and it was in a train carriage. It took about 4 to get there and there was 3 enemies inside, 3 outside on one side and 3 outside on the other side. Tried a few times from different angles and there was just no getting in there, I always got shot to pieces on the way in.
-
I've put about 20 hours into it now and I am really really enjoying it. There's some annoying things still, like line of sight that makes no sense(Vipers frequently use their tongue through walls) or some suspect chances to hit an enemy that will make me quit in annoyance but I'm always back 30 minutes later. Those moments are almost forgotten though with everything else that there is.
Note: There's some mild spoilers here.
The way the World Map part of the game works now is far more enjoyable than in XCOM for me. In XCOM it felt like I was failing, you were losing support places were going into chaos it felt like I was doing a bad job. Now it feels like I'm not doing enough and it motivates me differently in the game. I feel less pressure overall but more pressure in certain situations. So day to day it's all ok I'm researching things contacting new regions but then when you see the Avatar countdown getting close to 12 it's panic mode and I'm desperately upgrading my power to upgrade my comms to reach a new group to attack the new base that I found out about from the research project that I had replace whatever else I was doing at the time. t's incredibly exhilarating when there's all these things going on and I prefer the bursts of panic rather than the sustained panic that I felt in XCOM.
With the Tactical Missions the big change is the way most missions have a time limit on them now. Most of the time this makes sense, there's a relay we need to activate and the enemies are trying to destroy it, someone is being transported and we have a shot at rescuing them, I get that these things have a time limit. Then there's the times when you have to rescue someone from a prison and after 12 turns there's a forced retreat, even if you spend the first 3 turns concealed so no one even knows you're there. So that kinda annoys me but they're there so I'll deal with it. The added time pressure really makes you play differently, overwatch isn't something you use very often because you're either trying to make too much ground to get to an objective in time or else you're firing a shot every turn because you are massively on the offence now, which makes sense. In XCOM you were defending Earth, now you're the one attacking Earth. Early on you'll probably play a bit sloppily until you get into the mindset of being rushed and you'll breath a sigh of relief when you get a mission with no timer. I think it's going to be fairly divisive, I don't mind it too much but I think there's a few too many missions with timers.
For the actual battles, in terms of how you play things haven't changed an awful lot. Concealment changes things but you're usually out of it early on in the mission because staying concealed is suicide as once you're revealed all the enemies start to converge on your position so you're going to be really up against it. It works really well if you have a soldier who can remain concealed or re-renter concealment, they're perfect for scouting the map and combined with squad sight can be a really good way to safely take out targets from a distance. I'm happy with the less punitive approach to explosives, previously there was a reason to not use them and I ended up not bothering with them unless I really really needed them, Now they're a great way to take out cover and to make mince meat out of a group of enemies. I like this because they feel like they have a place now without being incredibly overpowered, they feel like a utility item that also work well at damaging enemies if the opportunity arises. The addition of the flash bangs is also very nice.
What surprised me the most is that I was dreading the Vipers after seeing them in the previews but really they're a walkover, they're rarely any trouble and the odd time they manage to grab one of my soldiers they're usually dead in the next turn.
That's about all I can think of now as far as mechanics go, I love it. I'm on my toes and completing some missions feels like a real victory. I was 10 on the Avatar countdown thinking I was done, but two missions later and it's down to 7 and I think I have a fighting chance again.
-
The Mario Maker race where they had never seen the levels was fantastic, incredibly entertaining stuff. The crowd reactions really made it. Link at roughly the start of the race:
-
Nope, I'm not getting that vibe at all.
I also don't think there's any malicious intent with the use of the term casually. Anytime I hear it they're saying it as a way to differentiate playing the game competitively versus playing the game just for fun.
-
So long as you have bombs you can get into the level as far as I remember.
-
It's a shame some of the best stuff is on in the middle of the night for Europeans, can't wait to catch all the Mario stuff from last night.
The highlight for me so far was the 2 controller 1 player run of Goof Troop and the 2 players 1 controller run of Super Metroid. Incredible to see brains work like that.
-
Yep, the best way to deal with cameras is to hack them, bombs are for sticky situations with cameras.
The best advice I can give you is that you should always be on the most recent area you unlocked and you should be unlocking those areas as soon as you can, the cash in levels goes up exponentially. 10% of the cash from Area 2 is better than 100% of the cash from Area 1.
-
You wanna blow up the tile above them to get rid of them.
-
I'd hold off on the controller. It works quite well but there's just a lot of little things that leave me picking up my 360 or PS4 controller instead. I've been playing Tomb Raider over Christmas and while I got the Steam controller set up to my liking anytime a QTE came up I was left wondering what way I had bound the keys to the buttons on the pad. With Mad Max the right touchpad won't work properly as a right analogue stick for me so the camera just moves around like crazy so it's of no use. I think the simple fact is that anything designed for a controller is way better with a 360 pad and anything that's designed to be played with a keyboard it's cool to be able to map it to a controller and play comfortably on the couch but it's kinda hit and miss if it will map well. It's also very time consuming to tweak things to how you like them.
Maybe in a few months when games support it better(with layouts provided by the developer and correct button images) but that's hopeful thinking. It's been in development and there's been early versions sent out to developers and Valve didn't convince anyone to add in proper support for it in time for launch? I don't have much faith that's going to change, seems like that's counter to Valve's philosophy.
-
Yes I also only play tested and gave feedback, didn't do any actual work on it.
-
It's also 50% off on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/369110/
-
Good debut, I really like the intro song.
-
Yeah I have that problem too, I can't tell either if it's intentional. It's really frustrating because you're searching the room next to you and then there's nothing there.
-
I started Quake 2 and I agree with much of what Ben said. To add, the weapons don't feel very good, Doom and Quake felt really vicious but Quake 2 doesn't at all, there's no feedback when you're shooting enemies due to both the sound of the weapons and the animation of the enemies. The setting is very dull, just large empty brown rooms and while I do like the character of the enemies insofar as their last stand etc. I think they're not as visually interesting or fun to fight as the monsters of Doom and Quake. Not having much fun with this so far.
-
Yeah I thought it was official, it's very mis-leading to just put in there without saying it's a fan image.
-
How scary was Quake viewed upon release? I'm noticing a lot of enemies hiding in the dark and only activating when you pass, jumping from around a corner etc. It seems like it was designed to always have you on edge and I can imagine when this was cutting edge tech these were pretty good jump scares.
-
Masters of Doom covers what went on with Quake. From what I can remember id was and would be for many years a tech house that games were then built around. Quake was very ambitious in terms of what Romero wanted and the tech wasn't there to achieve a lot of it and it was generally too big and the engine was already taking a lot of time as it was. It also wasn't going to be a FPS in that style, it was going to be sort of RPG with FPS-lite stuff in it. They got to a point where they needed to ship a game so they kept all the art etc. and made it work as a Doom style FPS and created something magical. This was one of the events that was the beginning of the end for the relationships between the founders.
-
Hi! I'm new here, please be nice.
I've been listening to Thumbs for years and I finally followed Ben X here as it seems like a nice place to talk about video games. I have gone under the name seregrail7 on other forums so you might have seen me knocking around other places, such as the Size Five Games forum.
-
From what I remember Duke 3D was fun to play, but I haven't played it in about a decade. I think for me the point at which I stopped having fun was when I realized the game wasn't poking fun at these misogynistic action movie tropes, it actually thought they were awesome. That's when I stopped liking Duke Nukem, when I realized the devs were taking such ridiculous content a bit too seriously. This is way more obvious in Duke Nukem Forever I think.
RE: Dark Forces, I played a few levels but gave up on it for similar reasons. Levels were confusing to navigate due to repetitive scenery so I was just getting bored trying to find my way around. I agree that it feels like Star Wars though, which is more than can be said for many other games with the license.
XCOM 2
in Video Gaming
Posted
Early on the Lancers can just destroy a mission. I got unlucky and had 2 troops get knocked out(not killed) by lancers and I was just totally screwed.