juv3nal

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Everything posted by juv3nal

  1. You talk as if there is some underlying objective truth to this, but what a game "says it is" or what makes something the "best example" of a type of game is a fundamentally subjective call. Lock a bunch of games journalists in a room and I'd bet you can't even get them to agree on the two best first person shooters (purely from a mechanical standpoint, leaving aside issues of theme) much less on one. And as for the former (what a game "says it is") we had reviewers treating The Beginner's Guide as if it were non-fiction ferchrissakes.
  2. Except that they were really specific about the changes to crafting and didn't say anything about more drops or making it easier to buy stuff (aside from DZ supply drops, I guess, which is not helpful for someone like me just trying to gear up to even be able to survive in the DZ). Even assignments, which presumably have some kind of reward attached to them, they chose to say nothing about what those rewards would be. edit: missed this All of the new avenues they mentioned have minimum gear requirements (not necessarily technically gated, but in terms of either difficulty or PUGs kicking you from the group because you don't meet some threshold) which I already don't meet, is my point, from a casual point of view.
  3. oops, missed that bit, my bad. in other news ubisoft is all "fuck you casual players": http://tomclancy-thedivision.ubi.com/game/en-GB/news/detail.aspx?c=tcm:154-245851-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32 translation: everybody who was is already geared up enough to be able to do challenging mode missions and the upcoming incursion is fine, but anybody picking up the game now can just forget about it.
  4. There are like ten entrances. You'd have to be profoundly unlucky to pick the one this guy happened to be at each time on more than 2 occasions in a row.

  5. The Dancing Thumb (aka: music recommendations)

    juv3nal replied to Wrestlevania's topic in Idle Banter

    i have recently been obsessed with this song a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPZ29zUpAAk it's from 2002 but love them drums
  6. If you're talking about the article, it doesn't say that the entire faction is black people, it says they're majority (i.e. more than half) black...which I have no idea if that's true either, but it seems possible. I was actually keeping an eye out for this because other articles have definitely made the mistake and said they're all black, which seems to say more about those writers' respective assumptions about criminality and hoodies etc. than it does about the game's attitude.

  7. Share Exceptional Articles You Have Read

    juv3nal replied to sclpls's topic in Idle Banter

    thread necro! The Mastermind: preface/background part 1 and update part 2 part 3 part 4 there are going to be, I think, 7 parts in total not including the preface related, a side story about TrueCrypt by the same author over at the New Yorker. and Stilwell, a *redacted for spoiler reasons* person who figures in the story is quoted in this article in the Washington Post about a gun show.
  8. imo, you're probably going to want to do some extra side missions anyways just to unlock abilities/ability mods/talents to play with.
  9. finallly squared away all the collectibles because im ocd like that. my stats (~70k dps, 60k hp, 10k skill power) are nowhere near some of numbers I've read spouted from some other lvl 30ers so I guess I need to get on that loot grind next. As I understand it, as someone with nil interest in pvp/dark zone I'm meant to be doing the dailies plus hard mode UN mission now..? edit: also it shames me to admit it, but it was only upon getting to level 30 that my curiosity overcame my laziness and I googled what the heck that number is below your ammo count
  10. I've been grabbing all the intel collectibles in the game because I'm OCD like that and there really is a TON of stuff going on in that game outside of the core shoot dudes-get-loot loop. It's not all handled with deftness (there's a lot of menacing-graffiti-messages style "environmental design"), but there are a few neat short stories in among all the grimdark worldbuilding, plus the whole ECHO system is in many ways what I imagine the core conceit of Return of the Obra Dinn looks like when AAA gets its hands on it. For all that the division's a cynical skinner box of a game, I definitely get the sense that people cared a great deal about individual bits and pieces of it even if it never hangs together. Also looks like someone who got this tie in book made was a huge fan of S.
  11. I did the silliest thing the other night. There was a named enemy I found while free roaming that killed me a bunch of times (he was at par level with me, whereas everything else in the region was 3 below) so I did a bunch of kiting to kill off all his entourage. Then I resorted to shooting him a bit, then running the long way around an entire city block so I could get a few shots on him from the other side before he could figure out where I was to shred me apart with his machine gun and repeating that process like 4 times before taking him down. I don't think he dropped anything good, but after dying to him 4 times in a row trying to take him on head on, it was most satisfying. Take that stoopid AI.
  12. As far as taking the time to smell the roses, I came across an example of this when I rolled up a second character in the Division. Right after you switch over to Manhattan, before you've even hit that first hub (the one way in the bottom left of the map, not the Home Base across from MSG) there's a merry-go-round/carousel thing which is exquisitely rendered. I'm not sure I even noticed its existence at all passing by with my first character because I was in full on gung-ho 'show me where a dude i can shoot for my loot pinata is' mode. edit: found a pic of it online. like look at that. someone modeled and textured it and I bet a lot of people like me barely registered it as being there (your intial pass through the area can occur at night time)
  13. I think Kickstarter's willingness to just let a project die on the vine speaks well of them. In a business model where they don't get a cut unless the project gets funded, there's the inherent conflict of interest in that there is incentive for kickstarter to have projects funded even if the project ends up disappointing in some way. If you ask them to make a call about where to draw the line as to when a project is "close enough" to being funded, that only exacerbates the potential conflict of interest (it is not 100% gone because in theory kickstarter could have an employee kick in the last few dollars if it turns out they'd still turn a profit). The way things stand feels much cleaner to me from a "is kickstarter potentially doing something hella sketcha or no" standpoint. To be clear: I'm not saying they have done or have the propensity to do anything sketchy in the future, but the inherent potential of that happening is always there. edit: haha this is me realizing i am an idiot and replying to a year old comment because I thought I was on the last page.
  14. waaaay behind you in level, but also I'm on ps4. I mean I am only presuming that everyone listing uplay ids is because they're on pc, that's the case, right?
  15. I am never one to play the hard version of a mission but I did the one story mission in Brooklyn with a rando and he wanted to keep hanging out but it was another 25mins until manhattan would be finished downloading so we went ahead and did the hard version of that first mission. I can't say the supposed extra in-game reward was worth it but it was fun figuring out how to exploit the AI (after many, many wipes...thankfully the checkpointing is pretty generous at least on that mission). Basically you can kite the enemies waaay back into previously cleared areas of the level (often way past the last checkpoint) in order to isolate more managable, smaller groups.
  16. ok im in on ps4 dc_juv3nal

  17. The Next President

    juv3nal replied to Vader's topic in Idle Banter

    Not to say that either of those things are not happening, but the extent of them compared to the US, well I only have a subjective sense of it, but as a dual citizen (so moving is actually a legit option for me as opposed to a lot of people who talk about it), and a member of a visible minority, I'm glad I'm in Canada rather than the US.

  18. Beyond Good and Evil 2

    juv3nal replied to Bjorn's topic in Video Gaming

    In unrelated news I recently found out that Raynal, the guy behind the original Alone in the Dark and Twinsen/Little Big Adventure worked at ubisoft at one point. What a supergroup that would have been to have them both on BG&E 2.

  19. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    juv3nal replied to melmer's topic in Video Gaming

    I think the Ned situation is not as extraneous as some have made it out to be. Thematically it's of a piece with what is going on with H&D; broadly speaking all three are in a situation of "did some some bad shit/had some bad shit happen->go hide in the woods to avoid dealing with it" so H&D finding out about Ned is basically reinforcing the idea that that stuff is going to catch up with you eventually. In the metaphorical sense, of course, that's because there's no escaping the inside of your own head rather than a third party somehow stumbling across your seekrits, but still I think it sort of holds up in a gestalt thematic sense. I mean part of what is unhelpful about running away to the woods is that you're still the same person that made bad choices and (possibly) by yourself you're unable to come to the realizations necessary to make better ones in the future, but (again, possibly) seeing a similar situation played out externally might be the catalyst to some sort of change?
  20. "intended" is imo not so easy to pin down tho. I've definitely seen publications claim that a 5 is indicative of "ok," when what they actually do doesn't seem to really align with that.
  21. Look, the latest iteration may not be up to the standards of My Pony Dress-Up Hair Stylist Gaiden Championship edition DX, but it wasn't shovelware/5 of 10 territory. For not fucking up anything they got right in the earlier titles in the series, it's at least a solid 6/10.

  22. Cows in Space! A MoO thread

    juv3nal replied to Bjorn's topic in Video Gaming

    I remember picking up moo2 from gog when it showed up there and thinking to myself "god damn I used to be able to beat this game wtf even the easiest difficulty is wrecking me." I am just dumber or have less patience than I did as a kid; the former seems more probable.

  23. SUPERHOT

    juv3nal replied to juv3nal's topic in Video Gaming

    I don't see that the game being about mind control or whatever makes it any more gross than, for instance, them just having that as a bullet point on the description on their steam page. It's a claim which ultimately nobody sensible is going to parrot unless they already feel positively about their experience.

  24. One Day In San Fransisco

    juv3nal replied to Patrick R's topic in Idle Banter

    It can be time consuming, and it is not particularly cheap, but if your schedule allows it and you like souffles, maybe consider Cafe Jacqueline. It's kinda an institutions and, well not to be rude about it, but Jacqueline isn't getting any younger.

  25. The Idle Book Club 12: Umberto Eco

    juv3nal replied to Chris's topic in Idle Book Club Episodes

    I like mysterious flame better than island or prague cemetery (or Baudolino which is my least favourite of his novels barring possibly his last which I also haven't read). On the non-fiction side, how to travel with a salmon etc. and travels in hyperreality are pretty accessible. I liked Six Walks but that kind of thing (broadly, narratology) is precisely my bag, and with that one it's not so much a matter of accessibility as it is I wonder whether someone not of a similar bent would find it interesting. I bounced pretty hard off A Theory of Semiotics, and only have vague recollections of The Open Work and one other of his that I read...I'm thinking it was either Misreadings, The Limits of Interpretation, or Interpretation and Overinterpretation...not sure which.