@stylo today my partner referenced your tweet (?) that Cortana in Halo 5 is “just like mom.” absolute legend
I picked up Battlefield 1 on XBONE when it was on sale a week or two ago and I really have enjoyed what I’ve played so far. Though I am still salty that they took away LMGs from medics after Battlefield Bad Company 2.
do we have a fortnite thread? i’m having a lot of fun (read: stress) with this shootman. only my second night playing and i got up to #8/97 by killing 2 guys with shotgun in close quarters and hiding in buildings.
someone described it as “PUBG for kids” - i think the way i would describe it is,
PUBG : fortnite :: halo : murder miners. [is that too deep a cut?]
i spectated a game till the very end and the level of mindgames you can play with the construction mechanic actually seems fairly high. the lack of matchmaking means you’re mostly killing scrubs for the first part of the game, but each encounter is still very tense, and i could imagine a 100-person game with skilled players would be something to see.
I have no clue what this game actually is. I thought somebody just said it was like a free version of battlegrounds. I didn’t know it had all this building shit in it. all I know is at some point there were suddenly a bunch of kotaku articles with the word “fortnite” in the headline like it was the most common everyday thing I should already know all about but nothing to explain what it was. great job game journalism
Apparently it’s got two very distinct player bases / game modes. One is sort of a Halo-meets-Minecraft coop and PVE thing. The other, added recently and causing much ado in the games world, is PUBG-style battle royale. It so happens that the building mechanic adds a significant level of escapability to encounters, especially unexpected ones, that isn’t present in a “bullet realism” game like PUBG. This is broadly the same dialectic as existed between Halo and Call of Duty circa 2007.
Yeah, and even the menu screens of the game convey this sense of poetry and loneliness, with these tranquil shots out of windows onto Shanghai. They remind me a lot of the pre-production shots that you took.
Very much. Some of them were basically texture bashed from photos I took there, and sort of restaged using that same mentality. The reason why we chose to do that was because in action games, where it’s all about running and gunning, there’s very little time for repose. The production art we did, in terms of research photography, focused much more on the non-action parts such as the cigarette you have after a tough day of shooting and being a gangster. That stuff can be more interesting than action parts because it’s more revealing of character and their space to think. I wanted to try and make sure that the audience had a little bit of that waiting and non-action as a strange, awkward contrast to the game, which is running at full speed at all times. Once again, this is not the story. This is just driving from the airport or looking out the window of an apartment. This is not what it’s about, but where things take place. Maybe it’s where you sit and think of the things you did, and this is where something dawns on you. Something doesn’t dawn on you when you fight for your life, right? You’re busy. So I think it’s to give space to both the characters in the game and also the players to have that moment of solitude and reflection.
I’m glad you bring this idea up, because one of my favorite moments in the game is a very brief scene where Kane and Lynch are eating at a restaurant in silence before a shootout breaks out. That moment always stuck with me because even though they’re being hunted down all this time, they still had a chance to sit down and eat, which I really liked.
Yeah. Karsten Lund, the director, was also very much focusing on these quiet moments. We tried to put as much of that stuff in as we could. Meanwhile, we were very aware that the game itself was going to be full-on, all-out, all the time. But sitting and eating and not having a conversation was our version of what that new Hollywood would be. It’s not a conversation that’s character revealing, it’s actually just them sitting there and having half a conversation. Or maybe Lynch wants to say something, but he doesn’t. And then there’s that moment of no communication, which speaks volumes. Even in the introduction of the game where they meet on the street, it’s all half-conversations. Lynch tries to ask about Kane’s daughter, and Kane is like, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And that’s it! Because he’s in denial and that’s the whole point. It’s as shallow as a real-life conversation, but that’s because everything is hidden. It’s about the back alley, not the storefronts. There’s a lot of metaphor going on there; it’s all behind the scenes.
That was excellent.
I don’t hate Fortnite (or battle royale in general) but I’m not crazy about it, but every time I see how popular it is, I just have to sit and wonder if I’m the one out of touch
in the grimdark future of space there are no effective flash suppressors
So it’s Black Ops III but without a jump pack?
I really wish this game had a practice mode. Or any of my deadbeat friends ever had time to play it with me. If you have Fortnight on PS4 Tiburon, we can re-enact that scene from the hunger games where we’re the last two people alive and i promise to kiss you with poison in my mouth so the judges have to throw the whole concept.
That’s how I rememebr it anyway