DeadSlash

I watched the video and the part I found most disturbing was not the gore, it's actually "light" on gore as gore videos go, it was how casual, and relaxed this guy was the really disturbed me.   It is, as has been mentioned to in this thread already, an FPS of a massacre.  It's not close or high enough resolution to see much blood or gore, but knowing what it is and that it is real life makes it very disconcerting.  Also very disconcerting <in spoilers because this was especially disturbing to me> 

That was when I was kinda done watching.

He clearly had no fear of any kind of retaliation, I don't know if he was on Xanax, or something, but he doesn't even breath heavy with the exception of when he ran after people.  Very methodical, relaxed and casual.  No leaning around corners, no taking cover of any sort, he either wanted to die, or expected no resistance. 

He was also a really accurate shot. That's an observation, not a compliment of this cunt.  He hit a few people sprinting at a distance, I didn't see him miss one shot.  He had to have been training for this for some time.  I suppose the distance is exaggerated on camera, but these are still moving targets in what should have been a high adrenaline situation.  I think that's a serial killer trait, no empathy, no identifying with the reality of the situation.  

It is so disconcerting to know this can happen in any place of worship, for any religion, including your and mine.

Did anyone listen to Axl's Post of people singing happy birthday Beta like 19 times.... listening to hear if you could hear Axl singing Happy Birthday in there somewhere?

On 3/13/2019 at 10:08 AM, EvanG said:

I've never been so disappointed by a band as I have been by Weezer. Their first two records are brilliant in my opinion, both belong to the best alternative guitar records of the 90's, but they have never come close since... there have been some good songs here and there, but most of it has been a disappointment. Cuomo has never recaptured that magic.

I might give this one a listen, but I'm not really excited looking at the tracklist.

 

It's weird, I either love, or hate Weezer songs.  There is no in-between for me.  

On 3/13/2019 at 4:22 AM, Amir said:

Hah, one of my work colleagues has been putting this album on the office speakers all the time the past week. I listen to the Paranoid cover on my phone quite a bit.

That Paranoid cover is pretty intense for Weezer. 

Yeah, I meant Sentinels.  I wonder if I said Lancer because there is something in the game called Lancers, or if I just projected Lancer in as a generic name, because I look at everything's name as generic in Anthem?

 Excellent call on the tech being so out of whack, you basically live in a Colonial village, with Colonial tech + futuristic Iron man suits and radios.  I even found a note that remarked on the children making toys out of like potatoes and bird shit.  It's fucking dark ages, and they literally haven't invented the wheel... 

Hilarious side note: Something that jumped out to me as dumb, but I felt it was too nitpicky to mention? The radio shows.  Not the concept that they only have radio shows for entertainment, but the premise of the radio show.  For those not playing, the radio shows are 2 competing soap operas about Javelin life.  Simple enough, Cop dramas are popular in real life, makes sense... here's the problem... in the radio show, the sound effects are all lazer sounds, but there aren't lazer guns in the fing game, so why are there lazer gun noises??  It would be like if you took law and order, or NYPD and kept evert premise exactly the same, meaning they were a "reality based drama" but just swapped out the police guns for lazers… WTF?

@OmarBradley With the strong holds, it might make a difference that I was playing at tier 2 (Grand Master 2.)  I was lucky enough to be on during the loot bonanza "bug" and got enough good loot that night to be able to hang on tier 2, so the majority of my playing end game is there.  I'm shocked you haven't been dropped at the boss fight, because for me, it happens 2/3 times.  Yesterday, the loot spiked up again, not sure if it was a "bug" or if they adjusted it up, but I switched down to tier 1 and it was a lot more fun to play, much quicker, and still more loot than tier 2 was before the adjustment.  The whole reason I did the super grindy and long GM2 runs was because of the increase in loot.  If it bumps up macros the board, I'll stick to 1.

Another problem, that isn't Anthems fault, is that people with garbage equipment queue up to essentially be carried.  Sometimes, I'll be dropped into a tier 2 strong hold with 3 people who's suits are in the 400's or low 500's and they drop immediately.  It's a dead run at that point, because I can do Grand Master 2 without dying, and doing some decent damage, but I can't pass it alone.

PS.  My 2 cents on Reddit: The best thing I ever did, was get out of the reddits.  It was the opposite effect I expected, as I am a far superior informed gamer sans reddit.  While following Reddit might offer the luxury of hearing about something a day or 2 before legitimate media picks up on it, so much of what is said on Reddit is completely false, it's worth it to be 2 days late to the party, knowing I have the correct information.

@ 3:21, I laughed really hard.  He gives that long, deep explanation and at 3:21 he like, "And then... I just.. I lived right behind my school and couldn't make it to class in grade school"

I'm not sure why that tickled me so hard, it seemed so honest, sans any pretense or bullshit.  "It might have been this 10 minute complex explanation of all of the moving parts of my life and spirituality... blah blah <pause at end> Or maybe it was because I was always fucking late."

17 hours ago, CAFC Nick said:

I think also a counter argument for this is Van Halen's "A Different Kind of Truth". Hugely successful both from a sales and critical reception point of view, and this was based off of old Van Halen riffs from the 70s.

That is a valid point, it's kind of funny, because we're both right -in the sense that I strongly disliked that album ( I would probably punch a person in the face if they told me they liked the song 'tattoo') and had no idea it was so well received until recently.  So, we're both right in the sense that it might be a commercial success, but I'll probably hate it.

PS. I liked "you and your Blues"

I guess like DLR singing about the blues, because I really liked "You Got the Blues Not Me."

I don't know how this will be received by GnR fans, but I'll be darned if I don't really enjoy the Weezer cover album.  My favorite is their cover of Africa, but they are all really good covers, and I typically HATE cover albums, by any band.

Thought I'd share, as I had known about the "Africa" cover since September, but the whole album of covers is more recent, a 2019 I was unaware even happened!

Some additional reasons Anthem is shit:

(Curios if anyone else playing it feels the same)

1. The lore seems forced.  I'm not sure how to explain it.  There are lots of games, books and movies that make up lots of crazy ass lore, for whatever reason, the made up shit in Anthem, feels exactly like that... made up shit.   It just all sounds so hokey.  I don't recall any other game where I had that feeling.  Something is just off about it.  The closest I even came to this feeling was years ago, was seeing a commercial for "Lemony Snickets" and thinking "That's so fucking stupid, that is some shit that a writer made up when they were like 4 years old, and put it in a script when they grew up."   As on example, there are these unimportant background animals roaming around that are scifi rabbits and their name in the game is "grabbits."  It gives me that same feeling.  Some shit heel writer had an imaginary pet as a kid and called it a "grabbit" and when they grew up, thought it was clever and cute, so now I have to tolerate this fucking shit.

2.  So little of the game makes any fucking sense.  Basically, at it's core, Anthem is if Oprah was a video game and announced to the audience "Look under you seats, you get an Iron man suit, and YOU get an Iron man suit! WE ALL GET IRON MAN SUITS!!"  Like, that's the game,  everyone gets an iron man suit.  It's not called an Iron Man suit, it's called a "Javelin"  However, they needed something to provide exposition, so there is this whole thing about everyone in an iron man suit need a "cypher."  The cypher is someone with psychic powers who sits in the base and tells you what they are "sensing."  Their purpose for being in the game is clear, they provide waypoints.  Instead of just getting an arrow pointing to the next objective, you get the voice over of a cypher telling some stupid ass shit about sensing "power spikes" or "distress signals."  The thing is, I understand their purpose of being in the game (exposition) but lore wise, it makes no fucking sense.  You are in this super tech flying armor suit, its hard to imagine it would have super weapons, but not shit like a radar and GPS.  I mean, my Ford fusion has collision detection, but this iron man suit needs some bitch in a special chair to "sense a car in my blind spot."  Why?  Why can't my super suit detect a stress call?  Why do I need a "cypher" to sense it?  

3.  So there are like 3 main types of people<factions, I guess> Freelancers, which is you, flying around to save the day.  Archanists, which are basically science nerds that study old texts, and Lancers.  Lancers are basically the exact same thing as you.  They fly around in Javelin suits, the only difference is that they are organized, and the part of one large organization... Oh, and their on your side.  You're all friends.... so whats the fucking difference?  Why make a distinction?  I mean, it makes sense that you need to help out and save the nerdy science guys, and it would make sense if you needed to bail out the military, if you know, they didn't have the same fucking super suit as you.  So you use your super suit to save scientists in peril, and organized groups of trained soldiers, where they are all wearing the same fucking super suit as you. 

Also, The mission system is soooooo broken.  As I mention in an earlier post, after you complete the story line, there are 3 "strongholds" They are like "super missions" where it's really like 4 regular mission, but strung together, and loot chests between the different parts.  Basically it's what you grind for better gear<The end game.> In and of itself, the concept is ok, that's not the issue I have with it.  They are actually, literally broken, that's the problem.  The main issue is that they are uneven in loot distribution, as an example, the 3rd Stronghold is a variation of the final missions of the story.  For the first half of the mission, you are fighting groups of enemies, all capable of dropping loot, and getting a chest after each group.  The second half of the mission, you fight 1 single boss character that you have to beat 3 times.  The first 2 times, he flees and you chase him down and the 3rd time, you get a chest.  So the first half of the mission takes like 7-10 minutes and can gets you a shit ton of loot(30 weak enemies = 30 chances at loot when they are killed), the second half takes 10 to 20 min, and gives you one chest with 4 items at the end.     So what happens is everbody quits when the boss fight starts, because it's worthless, and the chests all contain the same quality of loot (You don't get better items for the chest earned after 15 minutes of fighting vs the 3 you get prior, after 5 min of fighting).   The side effect of this is that 50% of the time when you choose that stronghold, you get dropped into the goddam boss fight instead of the beginning, because everyone vacates the fucking game when the boss fight starts!  (PS. when you get dropped there, at the beginning of the boss fight, if you stay, you'll see 10 or 15 people cycly through, because they just quit and relaunch the mission, hoping to get in at the beginning.)

Anthem is like one of the hottest girls in the world offering you blow you, BUT, you have to have a fork shoved up your ass while she's doing it. 

I don't think there is "a" song, as evidenced by multiple people naming more than one.  I think that one of the most GnR things about GnR is how their songs are all over the place, as evidenced by so multiple people naming Estranged and Rocket Queen, 2 of their tracks that are two songs in one.

When you have given Chinese Democracy in you workplace's secret Santa, multiple times.

16 hours ago, soon said:

... When family and friends ask you "whats new?" you include an update on Slash mentioning a new Guns album. 

This is a really good one, because I have DEFINITELY yammerd on about GnR to people who give NO FUCKS about them.

Another TOTAL ASS thing that Anthem did is first, come up with a good idea: As a sort of rando mission, you'll get paired up on earlier missions you've completed with lower levels that haven't done it yet.  You get an XP boost for it.

Then they went and just fucked it in the ass by making the cut away scenes unskippable, in the middle of missions, and 2-5 min long....  So you hit "quick play" to jump in to a quick mission and grab some xp and end up playing for 3 min, and watching 7 min of fucking movies.

That fucking game.

On 3/3/2019 at 5:20 PM, Oldest Goat said:

You don't want to play Destiny either. I got it for free and uninstalled it after 5mins.

Bungie is dead to me.

^This

I played Destiny 2 for like maybe 8 hours, and while it's pretty simple at it's core:  Do Mission - Get new item - Level - Repeat  … it at least looked freaking different in different places.  I could tell I was grinding the same "types" of missions, but at least they were different missions.

Anthem is the exact same shit after the main campaign. I mean, literally the end game is one of 3 "strong holds" to play over and over for all of eternity.  Even the main campaign is pretty much the same shit (there are like 3 main mission types fly here, kill this, collect that) at least it was different voice acting, and different lines.

Destiny 2 is also WAY less immersion breaking as you don't have to load every GD second.

Destiny 2 is tripe.  Anthem is utter fucking tripe. 

7 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

Yeah Anthem was very impressive for the first 5 hours or so, but after that...

3 services? I have 5 launchers! Origin, Uplay, Bethesda, Epic, and Steam. If only I was an adept programmer/UI designer, I'd make a single piece of software that amalgamates all games across launchers. It would require local login access, but I think that's the heaviest lift.

@Gibson_Guy87 Here's your startup idea. 

lol, yeah I have launchers out the arse, but only 3 that I subscribe to get access to the games library.  

17 hours ago, Oldest Goat said:

Crackdown 3 and Anthem look fucking terrible. I will be livid if Halo Infinite is like Anthem or Destiny.

That would be a kick in the balls.  The more I play Anthem, the less I like it.

19 hours ago, RussTCB said:

Yeah, it's basically the Xbox equivalent of PS Now. I enjoy some mindless fun as well, but this is getting tedious more than fun lol

Shit, man everyone has one of these things now.  I fucking subscribe to like 3 services already.  It's getting out of hand.

3 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

I'm really not liking Anthem's MTX scheme/store. While the items are genuinely cosmetic only, they only put 3-4 things in the store at a time and rotate them in and out. Apparently it's a marketing technique. But what's actually a bit annoying is how the MTX store is presented in game. There are two fully voiced NPCs about 10 feet from each other whose sole purpose is to draw up enthusiasm for the MTX store via their dialogue, and of course let the player access the store through them. BioWare has literally turned the MTX store into a character. These NPCs hand out no quests - one of them just likes to talk about "looking good and bringing the thunder," but the other is a pretty fleshed out character that tells you stories, makes jokes, and (not so) subtly plugs the MTX store at the end of every dialogue with them. But neither hand out quests and neither forward main or side narratives in any manner, they're solely digital salespeople.

Identifying common ground with your customer and establishing a warm relationship/entertaining them before you bring up the sale is marketing 101, and while I have no qualms about that strategy in real life, it feels pretty scummy to be put into a game in such a fleshed out manner, especially for a AAA game that has literally nothing for you to do except shoot, loot, rinse/repeat.

Is this a common method? I've never encountered something like this before, with this level of detail dedicated to the MTX store in game.

EDIT: I remember AC: Odyssey had something a bit similar in game. That game had an awful MTX scheme that was not cosmetic only. To be fair to Anthem, you can acquire the MTX currency at a decent rate compared to AC:OD. But since Anthem is so one dimensional (not that AC:OD was terribly deep, but it's basically Skyrim compared to Anthem) this really feels over the top.

 

I've played some Anthem, I noticed that with the MTX also, kind of odd and unique as far as my experience is.  My main takeaway from Anthem is that it is always fucking loading something.  I mean ffs, there is perpetually something to fucking load. 2 minutes to load into a mission, 5 minutes for the mission, 2 min to load out of the fucking mission.  I spend more time fucking loading shit than playing!

As good as it looks, the reveal trailer makes the final product look like garbage...

On 2/24/2019 at 8:49 AM, RussTCB said:

I've been messing around Crackdown 3 because it was free with Game Pass. It's fun for free but I'd be really mad if I'd paid for it. 

Is gamepass an xbone thing?  I actually like mindless beat em ups, it's my gaming guilty pleasure. 

We haven't heard the General, but it's supposed to one of the "big guns."  

My point wasn't that "hey we've heard these songs and they are good, I want them on the new album."  My point is that NR, and Estranged were labors of love that Axl turned over to Slash for the finishing touches, and they were EPIC.  There is literally no difference between the process of creating Estranged and Slash and Duff adding their touch to any other "Big gun" that Axl wrote independently from the rest of the band post breakup.  My secondary point was that DC and NR were also both old songs.  We have literal GnR history demonstrating to us that Duff and Slash working on the CDII songs could be absolutely killer.

I feel all fucking happy now and shit.

Imma go fucking hug someone.

3 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

I missed this post somehow. Wait, you finished the entire game? How many hours did you put in? So far I've been taking it slow, listening to every conversation and combing the environments, etc. Also trying to go for "the good ending" - I have only knocked people out so far. But I hope to at least to kill some Nazis. I don't think I got "the good ending" with either of the first two games, though I watched them on YouTube. 

Also, let me know if you want the digital artbook and/or soundtrack. I just realized I get both since I pre-ordered. They're just files, don't think they're tied to my account at all.

Yeah, I really crawled through the last portion too, it was about 9 hours.  I think I might have missed something on the second to last area, it seemed way to short.  

One of the pleasant surprises that you only really get when sneaking around is the amount of care that went into the unimportant chatter between enemies, they have some legit conversations that make sense and are sometimes funny af.  I was in one section where it was really entertaining and I was waiting for the conversation to start repeating... 7 minutes later and they were still saying all new things.  There must be hours and hours of background dialogue between NPCs.  The conversations are unique to the area too, so it's not even generic "bad guy" talking.  It's really ambitious, I've never seen a game nail that part down so well.

4 hours ago, WhazUp said:

I don't want a GNR biopic at all, that would have the potential to turn out badly IMO.  The thing with Queen and Elton is there was the glamour and spectacle of it all, where a Hollywood movie seems fitting for the type of people Freddie and Elton were/are.  With GNR it would feel tacky if done in that vein, and too try-hard and cheesy if they tried to do a gritty production with it

However a documentary with all members of GNR from the classic era talking about the history of the band, their downfall, a segment with Axl discussing Chinese, and up to present day events?  Yes please!   I would love a doc that would be similar to "Pearl Jam Twenty"

I agree, beside the fact that their bio-pic would play better as a cautionary after school special:

1. There is NO WAY on God's green earth a movie about them is made without pissing off 1-3 of the members and re-splintering the band.

2. There is a NO WAY on God's green earth movie about them doesn't get enough shit wrong to piss off us, the hardcore fans.

3. Don't give them any more ideas that are not called "New Music."

I passed Metro a few minutes ago, I'll have to play through again because it is my understanding that you get different endings based on how many people you kill, and I knocked just about everyone out instead of killing them.  I'll do a second play through as a blood bath + I don't think I would have the patience to sneak around and knock people out a second time through.

I really enjoyed the last 2 areas immensely over the first 2.  I'd rate the last 2 a 10/10 vs a 7/10- for the first 2.   Very few games have a clearly better second half, most of them pack all the good stuff in early.  This bucks that trend for sure, imo.

I'll have to check out anthem, I'm not keen on the onlineness of it, but you're right, it looks really pretty.

14 minutes ago, OmarBradley said:

Didn't know that about Epic. Fair enough, I've heard their customer service doesn't honor that, but to be fair everything I've heard is from secondary sources. 

I'm managing a steady framerate, without V Sync (so far, fingers crossed). Have you tried enabling V Sync? A frame lock or dynamic/adaptive frame rate option would be nice, but I don't think the game has that.

Are you talking about the intro loading screen? If so, that confused me as well. For me, the intro cinematic is unskippable until it is about to end and I have sit through basically the whole thing, but otherwise I'd say my loading times are pretty reasonable.

Also, I think I just saw in my Origin Launcher that I can give 4 links/codes to people with Origin for the 7 day Origin Access free trial (which does include 10 hours of Anthem). If anyone's interested, PM me. 

Yes, it's the loading into game screen that hangs for me, like when you first load up the game to continue or change areas.  

I got to a new area I really like compared to the ones I've been through so far.  It's just better visuals and a nicer setting, I won't say what it is because spoilers. 

I have Origin, I have the up sized, so I can play all of their games, but I haven't tried Anthem yet.  I'll probably fire it up after I finish with Metro.  I tried that game Apex something or other that is supposed to be the greatest shit since the dawn of man, but I didn't care for it.

6 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

Steam may have that legal jargon, but if you try to return any game purchased on the platform with less than 2 hours of play, you will get a refund no questions asked. And much quicker than Epic will take care of it.

Epic's lack of preload delayed my ability to play the game. Not a huge deal as I could play the next day, but you know the feeling of waiting days/hours for a launch, right? And I did encounter an Epic specific error which prevented me from playing Metro one night. It fixed itself after 15 minutes, but it was a documented bug Epic has that I would not have encountered on Steam. The rest of the stuff, I agree some of it's overblown. But the more I learn about Tencent, the less I like being part of anything having to do with them.

As far as the game goes, it seems I'm liking it slightly more than the crowd, for me it's a 9/9.5 so far. But to each their own. Hopefully you don't run into any major issues. I had my first crash last night and a bug with a quest that caused me to have to load my previous save (only lost 10-15 minutes of play time, so not a huge deal).

EDIT: So I've been having issues using Photo Mode to take photos in Metro. I can get into Photo Mode, but I can't seem to take any photos. It appears as though this is due to Epic. Apparently, Photo Mode relied on Steam's screenshot service, and Epic doesn't have one. If this is true and I can't take screenshots in photo mode, that just about seals the deal in me permanently hating Epic, and Deep Silver. It looks like this may be a PC-wide issue, not just Epic.

Just FYI, Epic literally copied Steam's refund policy.  Meaning the Epic policy is under 2 hours played 14 days, no questions asked.  That jargon about "we reserve the right to refuse refunds for any reason at any time." Is literally on every TOS ever, not just Steam and Epic.  

https://www.vg247.com/2019/01/12/epic-games-store-return-policy-updated/

I haven't had any lock-ups, I've had to restart my rig a few times because the FPS degrades over time, so If I play for like an hour, I probably need to restart once in that time.

One thing with "freezes" on the loading screen, by dumb luck, I found out it's not "frozen" but taking it's sweet ass time to load.   I was about to restart because I thought I had hung up on the loading screen, it just wasn't popping up that "Press E to Start" message, and seemed to be in perpetual load.  I got a call and took it and when I came back it had loaded.  Now I just leave it and it loads every time, but sometimes it takes 3-5 min for wtf ever reason.

So I broke down and bought Metro Exodus, and I have to agree that it is a 7.5 to an 8 out of 10 type of game.  It's not bad but it isn't anything special either.  A lot of people are complaining that it is short, but I think it's their own fault.  The way this one works is you move from place to place and each place has an objective or 2 plus lots of places of interest.  If you skip the places of interest, you can move forward really fast, but it's pointless imo, because you are skipping most of the game.

A lot of stuff people are saying about Epic is kinda false or overblown.  It's too much to type, I could if anyone cares, but let's just say using it isn't handing your info to the devil.  The funniest one I've seen is the incessant "Epic reserves the right to refuse any refund for any reason, at any time without explanation!"  That's fine and all, that line is in their disclaimer jargon, but it is in Steams's also.  Epic literally has the exact same return policy as Steam, but there are about 10k posts on Steam marveling at what a draconian stance that is.  10k post unaware, or ignoring the fact that Steam has the exact same legal jargon.

Looks like Metro Exodous is a 8/8.5 out of 10 range.  No "amazing" but certainly not bad, or the disaster I was afraid of by any means.  I haven't read any of the reviews, just the scores, trying to avoid spoilers of any kind.  Plus, those scores might be artificially LOW given the backlash over incorporating denuvo and using the Epic store.  Either way, good news!