There are apparently a certain % of people for whom the game runs like total shit seemingly (but probably not actually) at random, so much so that they dropped an optimization patch a couple days back. This is why I don’t buy anything early access 
Lot of threads got mixed up in this discussion, let me try to separate them out:
I don’t care for any competitive pvp game at this point in my life, but if I was going to play one, I’d 100% prefer a traditional round-based structure to battle royale. I understand the level at which its tactics take place and agree that they have a high skill ceiling, I just think they suck and are boring.
The emphasis on survival - on making do with what you find - worked incredibly well in Day Z, when the map was filled with neutral enemies and other players were ambiguous dangers with questionable, shifting allegiance. Codify them into permanent enemies and the scrounging loses its meaning.
I really like the tech design - the robots, the guns. Faceless human grunts look ok too. But everything falls apart when they try to make “unique” characters, who appear to me to be formless blobs of random influences heading in no particular direction. I agree that they are readable, but I continue to insist that the kings of readability and aesthetic coherence are Team Fortress 2. Before the Hattening.
Any one of the Meet The… shorts have like Looney Tunes quality comic timing and voice acting. What can even hope to compete in the modern world of competitive fpses? Certainly not those Overwatch character vignettes, which are bone dry Avengers-style pew pew fests, all the crappiness of Saturday morning cartoons with none of the naivete.
And that brings me back around to the original point, which was the writing. My interest in Titanfall 2, as a person with no interest in competitive games and whose opinion on them can be safely ignored, was as a brief singleplayer experience. It delivered on the brevity, but I had to comment because I haven’t seen such a divide in quality between two halves of a game in a long time.
Absolutely deadened, po-faced dialogue. Sub-Marvel attempts at quippage, with a single running joke that is supposed to carry the emotional core of the story. The setting is like, there’s planets right, and there’s an exploitative empire or company or something, I guess they’re called a corporation so it’s sort of an East India Company analogue? Would this make any sense if I played the first game? Anyway they’re bad! So very bad. They don’t care about killing people? But we’re the militia, you know we’re good because militias are good. We care a lot about killing people! Every imperial stormtrooper or corporate goon or whatever we kill, we care. I mean we high five about killin em good, but deep down inside in some abstract way we care. Because we’re a militia! We fight… for freedom!
No hint of factionalism or ambiguity or subtext or ANYTHING. And no mythical or fairy tale qualities either, because they’ve buried everything in such thick layers of GWOT militarism. This I think is definitely the worst sci-fi story I’ve ever seen in a game, a title previously held by Starcraft 2. I mean TF2 doesn’t even have any weird aliens or anything.
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I liked the part where BT gives me a thumbs up
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Oh, yeah, I wrote that in response to folks talking about Apex characters. I would emphatically not recommend Apex to you, nor do I disagree about the writing in Titanfall 2, though I think it’s an excellent game regardless.
It makes ever so slightly more sense if you played the first game’s “campaign”* but I don’t think that context would make the difference for you. The only thing I can suggest is that if you’re emotionally into robots, big robots, small robots, etc. like a kid’s awe for a space shuttle or a car they’ll never drive, it delivers in spades. The beat at the end with the SERE kit also landed for the real heads who were already fans of Titanfall specifically.
IIRC the writing was bad even to me at the time, but my expectations were low from the Star Fox radio drama in the first game.
* the implication from the Fracture map is that the IMC is strip mining the “frontier” and the story is about the militia, comprised of former miners, cutting off the IMC’s FTL travel to and from the frontier. Titanfall 2 is the IMC enforcer guy just deciding to blow up the inhabited planets.
I guess my ideal Titanfall game would have very little writing at all, just a robot AI talking to you about a weird planet a la Halo.
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Tried Loop Hero. Reminds me of Heroes of Might and Magic with the tile-based spatial element and the regular drip of dopamine from gaining more resources.
It’s pretty decent, the only problem it’s simple enough to be a 5 hour game, but expects you to grind it for 50 hours. I beat the first boss and think I’m going to call it played. Probably going to be flash-in-the-pan compared to a game with staying power like Slay the Spire.
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yeah, that was my impression as well when it was one of the only games I checked out during the recent steam demo event – I felt both glad that I’d played that one out of the whole batch and satisfied that was plenty
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i played exactly five hours of silent hill 2 and i feel so exhausted, almost flattened. this game is exceeding sh1 in terms of crafting an oppressive atmosphere and i’m really trying to pay attention to how it does that.
i’m laying in bed writing this and it feels like my limbs weigh twice as much. i wanted to decompress with some animal crossing or something but i am just gonna pass out. i’m really looking forward to playing more of this tomorrow and it’s been so long since a game has affected me like this. it’s on my mind.
edit: slept for 4 hours and woke up with nightmares
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I actually do not believe this! I went into this wanting, on an emotional level, only to love my killer robot buddy, and instead I did not give a shit about him at all. He doesn’t have the tenderness of an Iron Giant and talks too fucking much yet emotes too little to be a lovable violent ape like HL2’s Dog. Just constantly blathering.
On the other hand, all the mechanics of smoothly boarding the robot and using it to kill things were great. This is the stark division I mean.
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I beat Panzer Paladin. The Wiley stages take place on an interstellar fortress that travels planet to planet collecting resources on it are stages like a brick and mortar catacomb? A sewer with Charon as the boss?
Upon approaching the big bad he asked the girl piloting the robot to join him. He had been tasked for eons constructing weapons for Cosmic Princes to fight in their Cosmic Wars. With the girl by her side he would rise up and destroy the Cosmic Princes. This sounded fucking awesome. Instead she said something like “I am gonna kick your butt into your beak featherbrains!” (He’s a bird.)
And then I had another identical to the last 16 stages with sometimes I had to get out of my mech. There were the motion-tripped pea shooters I have to turn around and use SotN backdash to get past at the last second.
How little energy heals with the “small” or “medium” heals was always hilarious. If you have too many swords it raises your spirit burden which means you have to fight Horseman after a checkpoint in every stage including the final one regardless if it makes narrative sense or not. I counted. At the second to last stage I had 62 swords. I just started absently mindedly using the throw command that will destroy my sword for…meager damage.
The moral choice at the end of the game is whether or not to take another sword. I had so many swords!! And then horseman turns into a lasso to…pull away the evil space station??
And you a sentient weapon piloting an also sentient weapon who hadn’t talked until the final battle with “that’s right” get a job in construction. The End.
Had a tenouttaten yelling at the mediocre game with friends. Playing it alone is miserable because it aspires to A-level NES which is very very hard and it should aim for B or C and would have been a much better game. The game falls apart with careful play (but also demands it).
I will always remember giant ogre that throws fire at his feet ever 3 seconds that I could attack standing still with zero danger to my person.
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i played g-string instead btw
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Hey Game Making People the idea of a weapon-maker rising up against their galactic masters to take them down and find some kind of retribution, forgiveness, penance for creating weapons of war is a great premise.
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the funny thing about sh2 for me is i’ve played through it so many times that it doesn’t really scare me at all anymore and it’s kind of like cozy comfort food to me now.
I meant like robots as objects and piloting a robot and/or being a robot as a fantasy. Might be just me.
winchester mystery house game
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I mean, architecturally this was kinda Edith Finch
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I have been playing Moon Remix for some hours on the Switch. I admire the game, it has exactly the moody tone and aesthetics I was hoping to find, and the music is wonderful.
I have reached the ranking of love backbone or love instructor (whichever is the higher), so I guess I am at midgame.
And… I think I am done with it. The initial idea is wonderful and there is a sense of mistery that I like. Going on with playing, though, I find it boring. It becomes busywork. As somebody said, you feel like you discover early on the dynamics, after which it’s less and less interesting.
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With the ending in mind, I read a certain level of intentionality into the boredom generated by the game’s busywork. The game taps into something I call time-conscious game design. That is, through it’s strict clockwork structure and themes, it pushes you to think about time as it passes, what you could fit in that time, what you may be missing in that time. If you’re in it for the atmosphere, it’s not necessary to play through it yourself. At this point, you could enjoy a lot of the game just by watching a let’s play.
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Indeed! That’s exactly the sensation that I was feeling: “I am sinking my time in this, again”.
Lately, this game and Anodyne 2 triggered me in reflecting about what I like in games (qualities they both lack… but I appreciate the vibes of Moon a lot more).
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Yeah, that’s the parasocial interaction filling in the holes in the pacing. Fortnite seems to have turned into a hangout spot for actual social interaction for similar reasons.
I guess it’s not that different from tabletop games often having long idle periods between turns.
i’ve played a couple of hours of ratchet and clank, and it’s about the same as every other one of these big busget games i’ve got for free in the past: the stages are very visually beautiful, but other than that, the game makes me feel nothing. it’s just occupying time.
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