JonCole

The first reviews are starting to come out - http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/24/battlefield-3-review-squad-score-bonus/ Despite my misgivings and poor experience in the beta, I'm thinking about buying this. I'm not particularly excited about single-player since it seems like it sucks, but the multiplayer might be worth checking out for a couple weeks. I'd really like to get a feel for this game/franchise so I can more fairly compare it to COD, and this seems like the game to do that. I have plenty of Amazon credit and preordering through them gives you a $20 promotional credit toward another game, so I might end up with just as much credit as I started with if I trade it back in.

I'd rather back out than start a flame war, hah. Very little in video games are worth getting truly upset about, especially in this forum where we all seem to keep an open mind and whatnot.

This just gets more painful the farther I get into it. They introduce this cool new thing called spellweaving, which basically just lets you combine two elemental spells into one attack. So if you use Ice Storm and Shock, you get both the AOE of Ice Storm and stunning effect of Shock. Except that some of the weapons you can get encourage you to use an unweaved spell 200 times in order to "level up" the weapon. Why introduce a cool new game mechanic then incentivize using the shittier version of it?

Yeah, hyperawareness of the press/community response cycle is pretty much the worst. And I can't help but agree with your sentiment about Call of Duty as a franchise... in fact, MW3 is actually throwing out some of the big changes in BLOPS that changed things up a little (diving when hitting the crouch button while running, contracts, etc). That said, I don't think that a game not evolving in every iteration is necessarily a bad thing. Most American football fans still appreciate Madden despite not changing a lot, and the Assassin's Creed formula hasn't really massively changed between titles to its benefit (in the actual moment to moment gameplay, that is).

I'm not nearly done with this game, but I'm feeling myself agreeing with pretty much everything you're saying. I definitely agree with the quality of the sidequests (and that they're pretty much the only enjoyable thing in the game), as it seems that the writing is about 10x better in these quests and are basically one-off cool ideas throughout. Well, with exception to the weird escort/fetch quests.

Eh, it's obviously not NeoGAF, but I recall someone saying that COD went off the rails, the implication that COD games don't look very good, and that mixing the COD formula into Battlefield is some kind of fatal mistake. I guess I'm just kinda generally annoyed with the prevailing idea that DICE can do no wrong with Battlefield games. Well... that, and a feeling I have that people completely disregard COD as a good shooter because it's so well regarded in the mainstream.

I love the shittalking about Call of Duty games in this thread. Guess we're not so different than other internet forums.

Of course the PC version is going to look better, I just kinda think the Xbox 360 version (sans HD pack) looks shitty. The lighting is horrible and that guy looks like a cartoon character.

This seems a bit like a potential clusterfuck - http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/21/our-battlefield-3-review-why-were-splitting-it-up-and-why-con/ Also, this isn't particularly reassuring to me as a primarily console shooter player -

Ugh, yeah. Battles consist of tapping Y at long range, B at short range, then X to clean up in melee. A few hours into the game, I still haven't seen any more reason to use "strategy" or "tactics".

Or better yet, Deus Ex is $29.99 ($35.99 for Augmented Edition) on Amazon. Registers through Steam, so you don't have to worry about website allegiance. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005HRZ29K/

I actually just started playing this without even seeing this thread, which is kinda odd. This game is really beginning to annoy me, mostly because of the totally bullshit inventory/pause menu system. Anyone who thought that a simple menu would be better expressed as a series of rooms with load times between them and using an interface that makes you visually scroll through every single item you have before you can access something. I feel like I'm going to really critical path this game because of this UI madness. It's really sad, considering the fact that Fable II is one of the most memorable and enjoyable games I've played this console generation. I literally bought every property in that game and burned tens of hours despite not nearly that much story content.

I didn't include the Propylon Indexes because I honestly thought it'd be a pain in the ass to explain how to actually access them. For all intents and purposes, they might as well not exist to a majority of players.

You could also equip the Boots of Blinding Speed and enchant something to permanently cast levitate on you... which basically means you can fly anywhere super fast.

Morrowind didn't have the Oblivion/Fallout 3 kind of fast travel, it actually had four ways by conventional means and a couple with spells: - There were land ferries on big bugs (Silt Striders, fwiw) that took you between cities - You could also take boats between coastal cities - There are gondolas between districts in the biggest city (vivec) - You could use the Mages Guild to teleport between Guilds in cities Spells: - You could use Mark/Recall to mark a spot where you can always teleport back to. Great resource for setting up a home base and returning there at any time - There were a couple spells where you could teleport to the nearest imperial/tribunal shine, forgot what they were called As you can see, these made a little more sense than the fast travel in other games within a narrative context. In Oblivion/FO3, the game would simply assume you were traveling by foot with no interruption (as far as game time goes) while traveling from one place to another place you've been to before.

Ah, that could be it. I did a lot of "complete 5 sidequests, buy 240 buckshot, craft 100 pop rockets, obliterate everything in one hit". Also, that dice game sucks ass. The achievement associated with it sucks too, basically just had me hitting X every two seconds while watching TV, checking back every so often to see if the achievement popped.

I agree with... most of what you had to say about this. I would argue that the minute-to-minute is typically pretty boring, especially within a modern context where DOOM simply isn't enough to compete with superior AI and level design in games like Halo. Also, I liked the racing a bit more than you, but I agree that the Rally race type wasn't anything to write home about. I just found myself enjoying the races more than the regular combat. That said, I finished the game in 10 hours completing almost every sidequest (sans one or two mail delivery quests) and skipping about half of the minigames. I completed all of the races, as well. I don't really know what you were doing in those extra 8 hours, because I was honestly taking my time with an occasional Bash TV run or hunting after achievements.

Well, there were gamebreaking things for me, but I have no doubt that they'll be resolved when the game actually hits the market. My issue is with the simple fact that EA/DICE chose to put out this sub-par version of the game in front of people with any level of confidence. They know how the publishing pipeline works for XBL/PSN/PC, so saying "well, it's an old build" isn't a good excuse for me. It's not entirely a matter of how good or bad the game is, more the attitude of EA in this particular instance compounded with previous garbage concerning Origin vs Steam, etc.

I don't understand why I should be okay with a game being buggy/rough because: The developer is notorious for it The version of the product the developer/publisher decided to show to millions of people a month before release/weeks before going gold was shoddy It's ambitious Hell, I think RAGE is kind of a shitty game, regardless of what it was trying to do or the pedigree of the developer. If you're okay with what you experienced, I'm honestly glad. The more people that enjoy this game, the better. But I know I'm not going to put any money to it any time soon.

I don't really want to get into it, as I've already bitched to high hell about the beta elsewhere. But my problems didn't end with the level design, which I thought was a big problem, but also just with the fact that you could die ridiculously quickly (especially from someone with an unlocked, quick-firing SMG or something). From that Joystiq article, it seems like you can take a little more damage which seems to inherently induce that kind of Battlefield firefights that I was hoping for. Arthur talked about the new damage modeling and feel of the guns making even Metro much more enjoyable, making the big areas a little more prone to prolonged firefights and flanking maneuvers.

So, I basically thought the BF3 beta was total shit. Apparently, the BF3 beta isn't even reflective of the actual multiplayer of BF3 as it is now - http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/10/the-beta-and-battlefield-3/

I wouldn't be entirely surprised. Somewhere I read that the internal build for the game sits at like 125gb... Carmack must be shitting himself knowing he only got to put out 20% of that.

The thing is, the map would have no value. The world between dungeon/hub areas have little to nothing to offer, save for a couple of stunt jumps (that offer little to no motivation to complete) and random encounters with other vehicles.

I don't think GRRM would let that happen. I know that he's not particularly averse to killing off main characters, but they feel so integral to his plot that killing one or both of them would certainly mortally destabilize the series.

The byline on that Dark Souls eats Skyrim article reads Casey Lynch. Which means that the writer must have been looking forward to the article, because Casey Lynch is the editor-in-chief at IGN. I usually don't like to shit on IGN, but that article was complete garbage. Lynch has done little to impress me since becoming the EIC, including this terrible review of Gears of War 3 with choice quotes like: - "shoehorn a bro-motional lump in your throat in the process" - "Shakespeare this ain't, and Gears 3 struggles at times with its forced attempts at heart-string pluckery" - "Cue the attendant grimaces, bro-vado and non-stop X-TREME one-liners." - "It's not Gears of War and Peace, people!" - "Overall, a few keg-o-rator moments (who gathers around a watercooler to talk about Gears?) will stick with you from the campaign." Y'know, it's really hard for me to tell who Lynch thinks this game is for and what he thinks about the quality of the writing.