Thrik

Been spending more time with it. It's definitely growing on me now that I've slowed down a bit and started paying attention to the various equipment configurations, potential routes of upgrading I could take, etc. I started playing as the Infiltrator class and I'm enjoying it much more already, stalking the edges of conflicts and figuring out what's a good vantage point for sniping. Even more so than Battlefield, you can position yourself very tactically due to the terrain being so expansive and so multi-level. One thing that I remember finding really great about PlanetSide and that's true of its sequel too is the atmosphere of simply being in such a big world. There's a certain epic feeling to being in a huge world with day/night cycles, detailed environments (for an MMO) with all kinds of different terrain, etc. The graphics definitely aren't going to give something like Battlefield a run for its money, but the reasonable level of detail combined with lovely dynamic lighting works well. I was tickled to find that the lighting changes as clouds go in front of the sun. Last night there was one period where I spawned in a quiet area at night, and because the game aggressively gives you objectives unlike the original I thought I might as well just walk to the next base. I ended up going along some strange walkway with lovely trees and lights everywhere illuminating the path in the darkness, enveloped in natural sounds. There has clearly been a monumental amount of work put into creating these environments, with so many unique areas. Also, unlike in the original the bases feel like they are organically part of the environment, rather than just being clones of each other plonked onto flat parts of terrain. For example, there's one base on Amerish that is basically just built all over some hills and it looks fantastic — especially as part of the base is on top of a huge hill, which became somewhat a 'last stand' when it was being terrorised by enemies. There's just no other game that delivers an atmosphere and moments comparable to this. I don't know why huge-scale shooters are such a rarity even 12 years after the original PlanetSide showed that it could be done, but my god do I crave more of this kind of thing. If they could incorporate more meaningful and story-driven missions into a game like this it would be incredible, like Destiny but without having to sacrifice the scale or free-form gameplay. You can totally feel that Tribes DNA here, too. In many ways PlanetSide 2 is the culmination of what Tribes and PlanetSide were meant to be, before a fortunate bug turned the former series into an aerial acrobatics-focused experience. This is no surprise considering the people involved with both series' development, but it just makes me happy to see vehicle pads, slow-projectile blasters, jetpacks, and a glorious range of not-Earth environments.

In the original there were three levels of armour, the maximum of which you might as well just run away from if you're not armed to the teeth. It was pretty well balanced as the bigger guys move way slower. No idea how much of this remains true in PS2. I always found playing more stealthily with cloak camouflage, silent weapons, hacking, sniping, etc very satisfactory in the original. I don't have the equipment to experiment with this yet.

I seemed to be automatically placed into a squad, as some bloke started talking rubbish while I was enjoying the mountaintop ambience.

I haven't seen anything indicating that it's possible. When I opened it for the first time, it auto-recognised my PSN account and went straight into the account creation process. There was nothing about integrating with any other accounts.

Just reviving this thread to highlight that (at bloody last) it's been released for the PlayStation 4. I haven't spent much time with it, but it seems reasonably solid and it remains the only game really doing this kind of thing — which to an extent makes up for its various shortcomings, because holy shit some of the moments in this game are great. I suspect that Battlefront is going to refine a lot of this into a more condensed but extremely fun shooter much like Battlefield 2142 did with PlanetSide, but it's a good stopgap for those who didn't play the PC version, like, years ago. Because it's brand new on PS4 to an audience that's never experienced a game like this there's a pretty cool sense of excitement to it all right now, although how many people are actually on board I have no idea. Still, been no shortage of action for me so far and apparently the servers are getting wrecked. Here is an assortment of terrible footage I captured using the handy capture button:

I started playing this the other day and it was pretty fun, but it's really just awoken my desire for large-scale sci-fi chaos. As PlanetSide 2 has just hit PS4 I've given it a go and while ropey as hell, the craziness of it all is excellent. I really hope that Battlefront delivers what I'm truly craving, but this might do for a bit. Just having actual bases to fight to the death for with hundreds of people is great, no storyline nonsense needed.

Pills.

Jesus, I had no idea about the soft reset. Not sure if it's much faster than just committing suicide when playing on harder difficulties because you get wasted so quickly, but that's good to know of. MGS4 definitely makes you work harder to keep the game challenging. Ever since my first playthrough, I now make sure that I always make enemies of both sides during the sections where you can win their favour, which makes getting through various parts of the game much more difficult. I also don't use outfits or masks at any point, including during Europe. On top of that, I play on at least hard difficulty, ideally extreme, and as if that wasn't enough I always tranquilise both regular enemies and bosses rather than kill. Yes that's a lot of self-imposed stuff, but I find that to be one of the beauties of this series: you can tailor it to your own satisfactory level of difficulty. Now that I've replayed all of the games, I've managed to come up with my ideal blend of restrictions to make each game as fun as possible — and it looks like The Phantom Pain will have more opportunities than ever to do this. I'm not exactly looking forward to playing it with no enemy indicators or slow-motion alerts, but I know that I will be at some point.

You pretty much have no choice though, in most of MGS2's areas you'll find the attack team coming from your only way out and they're on you so quickly there's no avoiding them. Not that I'm saying you should try to take them all out because it's virtually impossible, but you can generally use grenades and a few shots to stall them long enough to get away — in MGS1 you might as well not bother, I don't think they ever stop coming. As you say, in MGS3 it becomes more about actually taking an area than escaping. MGS2 is an awkward step there that provides some cool action mechanics that get little chance to shine.

In MGS2 there was a bit of a gameplay shift that encouraged fighting your way out of alerts, as opposed to just giving up or doing a runner. It wasn't very good though, the areas were too confined for it. Fortunately you don't last long on hard. They should have saved it for MGS3, which has larger areas and more tools for dealing with enemies (including hand-to-hand combat). MGS4 and 5 are even better, and the 'incapacitate then run' action sequences that erupt from alerts can be absolutely fantastic in the more open environments.

That's one of the things I like most about MGS5: Ground Zeroes. Prisoner extraction is a major part of both the main and side-missions, which is seriously challenging when you've got a large environment teeming with enemies that you have to sneak to the edge of and you're basically right in the middle of it, all the way carrying a slightly noisy prisoner. It completely changes the dynamic of the game and I really hope to see Kojima Productions get inventive with it in The Phantom Pain.

Well I don't think they can get around that particular detail considering the premise of the series. It would be nice if there were non-lethal ways of disappearing someone, but that's arguably even more chilling.

Just let go of the fire button, as the enemy will remain in that position for at least a few seconds. I believe this mechanic was introduced in MGS2. Ah, thought I'd tweeted a video of this move. I did: https://twitter.com/thrik/status/591353546395779072 Also:

Yeah, it can be pretty damn jarring going back to earlier MGS games. You tend to forget how much difference the iterative refinements between each game make, so for example I remembered MGS3 as being extremely similar to MGS4 controls-wise (due to CQC being in both) but it's actually pretty janky in comparison. I get used to it pretty quickly though, because each game is generally so tightly designed around exactly how it controls. One big tip I have for MGS2 is to use hold-ups. Equip a weapon — ideally your tranquiliser gun — and then once you've sneaked up behind an enemy hold down the 'raise weapon' button. This will cause the enemy to hold up their hands and remain like that for quite some time, allowing you to either shoot them or choke them. I find this much better because the area of effect is much more generous than when choking, and also you don't have to stand still first.

Sure, but it seems a bit daft to lessen your enjoyment of much of the game in the name of getting a trophy. Unless you plan to play it again, in which case I guess the harder difficulty is something to look forward to.

True, just think what you could do with that trophy...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oGlhgVz5r6E&fmt=22 I'm really amazed this is still going. I think the first shots I saw were in 2004, and it looked pretty shank. But now it looks pretty much professional quality as far as Source goes (which isn't a surprise as I know a lot of pro-level people are/were working on it). I really hope what they deliver lives up to the media. If it does then that's going to be one tremendous achievement.

So, I take it everyone's spotted that Black Mesa is now being put up on Steam to be sold? They've been doing a lot of reworking and it is looking nicer. I'm glad that this game is being further lovingly restored based on feedback, plus I'm still looking forward to having another playthrough of Half-Life 1 that doesn't make my eyes burn. On a more plug-worthy note, someone on my forum had the opportunity to interview the developers about some of the technical/workflow side of things, which you can read here: https://www.mapcore.org/articles/interviews/black-mesa-lets-get-technical-developer-interview-r63/

Congratulations! Although I'm disappointed you're not pulling that weird face.

Yes it was. I couldn't say if the PS4 has fixed it because my internet is much worse than it was back then. One thing that continues to irritate me is that the new store Sony implemented shortly before the release of the PS4 has UI lag like a bastard, on both the PS3 and PS4. I could understand it on the former, but it's consistently janky on the latter too. I believe it's because they switched from a native app to a HTML/JavaScript (i.e. website) approach, however it's shit. Netflix is also a web app but has no such problems.

I'm similar to you in that I get shafted on my internet connectivity, so I don't download that much in the way of PSN content. I am quite tidy about uninstalling games I've not touched for months, although I do admittedly tend to leave what little PSN stuff I have on there and reserve uninstallation for the disc games. If I had an internet connection fast enough to be capable of using PSN properly, I'd probably just delete/re-download those too. If you're actually filling up 500GB then OK I guess the 1TB is a great idea, but I don't think that vastly under-using available space is uncommon with all kinds of devices including games consoles. And if you do fill it up, by that point you'll probably be able to get a replacement drive for about 10 cents. But like I say, if the extra expense right now really doesn't matter to you then you might as well.

1TB is probably too much for most people. I had 320GB in my PS3 with loads of games installed, my entire music collection, and loads of videos, and I still never came close to filling it. I have 500GB in my PS4, and after recording endless in-game videos and installing a bunch of games I haven't even scratched the surface. Also, you can free up huge amounts of room by just uninstalling old games you no longer play. If you have money to burn then why not I guess, but to me the 1TB version seems like the same kind of 'just in case' offering that drives people to buy 128GB or even just 64GB iPhones yet never fill a fraction of them.

Does anyone have any technical questions that they might want to see the Witcher 3 developers answer in an interview? It's for a game development community so we are primarily looking at questions related to the technical development of the game as opposed to gameplay, concept, etc.

Oh, I had some fantastic combat sequences in Ground Zeroes. Actually in previous games I always tended to just give up upon an alert, because such small areas being filled with enemies was invariably the end. I'm not sure if it was even possible to fight your way out of an alert in MGS1 like you could in later games, I recall the enemies just kept on coming. But with GZ, there are so many little places to hide and the area is so big that if you can evade detection for a moment, you can use the enemy thinking you're somewhere else to slip away. I had an excellent moment where I somehow lost the enemies over near the cliffs, and got across right to the other side of the prison camp. From there I could just see little flashes illuminating the rain and distant gunshots (which had really good audio effects to actually sound distant) as the enemy tried to flush 'me' out. Excellent. What works quite well in GZ is that the enemies across the whole camp seem to conglomerate towards the areas where you've been spotted, which means that other parts of the playing area will become comparatively much quieter. This means that you can figure out a nice blend of sprinting to evade the larger groups, then seamlessly shifting into a more stealthy movement once you dodge their immediate vision so that the peripheral guys knocking around the rest of the camp don't see you, sometimes taking them out with CQC. It's all quite fun! And so much better than previous games where you felt trapped in a kill room, and if you went into the next area you were treated to shitloads of new replenished enemies.

I'm playing MGS3 right now and can confirm that it's two buttons to aim down sights and fire: R1 to go into first-person view, SQUARE to raise your weapon (which when released will fire, unless it's automatic in which case it's immediate). MGS2 is about the same, whereas MGS4 moves things to a nice modern approach of L1 to aim and R1 to fire. MGS1 has no general first-person shooting, but I do think that its inclusion in Twin Snakes makes it more fun when combined with Extreme difficulty. Like all MGS games though, self-imposed restrictions are possible, such as not using anything but hand takedowns like in MGS1. It's not the smoothest, but then how many console shooters were in the 90s and early 2000s? Plus it does actually reinforce the emphasis on not using those weapons in the first place due to the risk attached, which MGS1 achieved by not even giving you the option. As far as I'm concerned the controls of every MGS game have been an iterative improvement on the last. There is absolutely no way that MGS1 has better controls than any other MGS. I agree that Ground Zeroes does make Snake very powerful, but that game is god damned hard nonetheless. With such a broad area to keep track of in your head, it makes managing your trail much more difficult — especially if you're avoiding lethality. Turn the slow-motion alert warning and enemy indicators off and you'll be spending a lot of time on doing just about anything. And if that isn't enough, daytime missions and/or hard difficulty make the enemies much sharper. Apparently you can choose mission time of day at least some of the time in The Phantom Pain, which I expect will be another way of managing difficulty.