You know you've been spending too much time talking about games on TDWTF when...


  • Fake News

    @HardwareGeek said:

    There is a FPS game in which the Big Bad is a Belgian mobster whose name starts with "L".

    Ah, I believe you're thinking of Saints Row The Third. I didn't play that far yet (seriously, got a whole backlog).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @JBert said:

    Ah, I believe you're thinking of Saints Row The Third.

    That's not a FPS, and had problems due to the publisher being in financial trouble. (Really good sound track though.)



  • @dkf said:

    That's not a FPS

    My bad. I guess looking over the shoulder, rather than through the eyes, of the person shooting is "third-person shooter." I've said before that I'm not much of a gamer.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    I guess looking over the shoulder, rather than through the eyes, of the person shooting is "third-person shooter."

    Same with books, isn't it?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    I guess looking over the shoulder, rather than through the eyes, of the person shooting is "third-person shooter."

    Yes, exactly. There are definite differences in what people expect of the two, though there's also a lot of similarities (obviously). A major one for the Saints Row series is the focus on the look of the avatar. That's something that the majority of FPSs really de-emphasise.



  • @dkf said:

    there's also a lot of similarities

    Like how bad I am at aiming. :) I assume; I only have 3, I think, shooter games, and they're all over-the-shoulder (except, I'd say, briefly when using something like a sniper rifle, where you're looking through the scope).

    Filed under: As bad as I am at aiming, I'm even worse at driving. I hate WASD.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    worse at driving

    @HardwareGeek said:

    all over-the-shoulder (except, I'd say, briefly when using something like a sniper rifle

    Mass Effect?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    As bad as I am at aiming, I'm even worse at driving. I hate WASD.

    Using a controller pad might be easier for you. Driving with WASD requires a light touch.

    I did like the Saints Row games though. Don't use a suppressed sniper rifle, use a rocket launcher! Or a tank! Or an attack helicopter! There's no kill like overkill! (SR2 was the one I liked best. SR3 was creditable, but missed the mark a little. SR4 fixed most of the things wrong in SR3, but the plot's a bit too OTT even for me.)



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    My bad. I guess looking over the shoulder, rather than through the eyes, of the person shooting is "third-person shooter." I've said before that I'm not much of a gamer.

    Ironically, Saint's Row III has a character creator that most FIRST person games could only aspire to.

    Meanwhile, games like SOMA kind of cheese me off because they're in first-person, but they don't let me design my character's look or do his dialog in a way that pleases me. If the character is going to be me (and I see through their eyes) at least let me determine who me is.

    But oh well.



  • @dkf said:

    (SR2 was the one I liked best. SR3 was creditable, but missed the mark a little. SR4 fixed most of the things wrong in SR3, but the plot's a bit too OTT even for me.)

    Did you play the Enter The Dominatrix DLC?

    It was originally going to be a stand-alone DLC for Saint's Row III, but they actually took the concept and ran with it and it became the ludicrous Zindak main plot of Saint's Row IV. (And the role of dominatrix actually got deleted in the process.)

    Then they made a DLC for Saint's Row IV in the form of a "documentary" about the "lost" DLC for Saint's Row III. And it's the FUNNIEST THING I'VE EVER PLAYED.

    I laughed so hard through the play through of that DLC I think I dislocated something. So you should play it, is what I'm saying.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Did you play the Enter The Dominatrix DLC?

    Yes.



  • @dkf said:

    SR3 was creditable, but missed the mark a little.

    My son bought me SR3 (and all the DLC) because he wanted to play coop. For some reason coop wasn't working right, though. What he saw and what I saw were very different. "Do you see me?" "No." "I'm standing right next to you." "Oh, now I see you, but you're on the other side of the street." I get punched. "I just punched you." "Yeah, but you're still on the other side of the street."

    @dkf said:

    SR4 fixed most of the things wrong in SR3
    Because coop in SR3 was so broken, my son bought me SR4, too. I've only played it a little, but at least coop seems to mostly work.

    @dkf said:

    the plot's a bit too OTT even for me.
    Yeah, but philosophically, I'd rather kill aliens than people, so I'm ok with that.

    @dkf said:

    SR2 was the one I liked best.
    I haven't played that. My son owns it, but I'd be limited to playing as a shared game whenever he's not playing anything (which means hardly ever). I probably wouldn't spend my own money for it, and certainly not while I don't have a regular paycheck coming it.

    @dkf said:

    Don't use a suppressed sniper rifle
    I quite like the β€” I forget what it's called; it's classified as a regular rifle, but it's fully automatic and has a sniper sight β€” the description says it delivers "love taps from 500 yards."

    @dkf said:

    Or a tank! Or an attack helicopter!
    Yes, they steer with the mouse. The DLC tank is almost always my vehicle of choice. It's very slow, but it goes where I point it, and it's practically invincible.

    @dkf said:

    Driving with WASD requires a light touch.
    Yeah, I haven't yet succeeded in completing a single car theft activity; I always end up destroying the car before I get to the delivery point. Hitting the wrong keys doesn't help; @accalia has nothing on me when it comes to typos (you just don't see most of mine because I correct them before I post). I can't count the number of times I've accidentally jumped out of the car because I hit the wrong key.

    @dkf said:

    Using a controller pad might be easier for you.
    I don't have one, so that won't happen at least until I get a job. Since I've never really used one, is it possible to use both a controller for driving and a mouse for shooting, since the mouse is allegedly better for that?



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    My son bought me SR3 (and all the DLC) because he wanted to play coop. For some reason coop wasn't working right, though. What he saw and what I saw were very different. "Do you see me?" "No." "I'm standing right next to you." "Oh, now I see you, but you're on the other side of the street." I get punched. "I just punched you." "Yeah, but you're still on the other side of the street."

    Rantis and I played it co-op for hours and hours and we never de-synched.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    I don't have one, so that won't happen at least until I get a job. Since I've never really used one, is it possible to use both a controller for driving and a mouse for shooting, since the mouse is allegedly better for that?

    95% sure Saint's Row III and IV will dynamically switch to whichever controller you touched last and give you correct tooltips.

    Whatever engine it's built in is surprisingly sharp. Surprised they never resold it. Apparently it's a HUGE evolution of the Red Faction engine from way back, go figure.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    I haven't yet succeeded in completing a single car theft activity

    Those can be a little tricky in their higher-difficulty variants, even without control difficulties. You need to have a plan of how you're going to go and stick to that plan or you get swarmed.

    SR4 is easier in a few key ways though, the first of which is that you can just jump up a nearby skyscraper and fly out of range of everything until the heat dies down. OTOH, it has the superskyscraper climbing puzzles. I liked those.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Rantis and I played it co-op for hours and hours and we never de-synched.

    I dunno. My son and I were never, ever in sync. Maybe we'll try again, but right now we've got a IV game started, so we'll probably keep playing that.

    Hey, since you and @dkf both seem to have a bunch of experience with this game, have either of you ever heard of this problem that my son is having? In the mission to kill Loren (I remembered his name!), where he's taking the express elevator to the basement and you jump on the big ball attached to the ceiling and fall to the basement on it, a brute jumps onto the ball with you. In his game, the brute is consistently spawning several seconds too early, and my son's character is frozen, unable to respond to any mouse or keyboard activity at all until the brute kills him.



  • De-sync is always a huge problem with big open world games with things like physics engines. (Which is sort of a nasty case of: do you sync ALL physics objects ALL the time? Or none? Or try to be intelligent? Realistically, you can't do "none" as it could lead to impossible situations where one of the players is standing in the middle of a car from the other player's perspective. But you also can't usually do "all" because it's a shit-ton of data moving around.) Then add on to that the fact that players in vehicles can be moving very very fast, and the two players could be literally miles apart... it's not easy code to write.

    I did network testing for Crackdown, and 99% of the issues were various subtle things that could cause de-sync.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Hey, since you and @dkf both seem to have a bunch of experience with this game, have either of you ever heard of this problem that my son is having?

    I've only ever played the game in single player. I like just taking my time, messing about. And that bug literally doesn't happen in that case; the engine doesn't need to synchronize with anything then.



  • Clarification: The bug my son is having in that mission has nothing to do with multiplayer (AFAIK); apparently he's been stuck on that mission for months. The sync problem in our attempt at co-op is something entirely different; we (or at least I) just tried multi-player for the first time Friday.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    The bug my son is having in that mission has nothing to do with multiplayer (AFAIK); apparently he's been stuck on that mission for months.

    No idea what's up then. I thought it was one of the easy missions. πŸ˜„



  • @dkf said:

    I thought it was one of the easy missions.

    Yeah, except for that 5 seconds or so that he's frozen, unable to interact with the game in any way. :/



  • Pretty sure the game has cheat codes, just cheat past it.

    I didn't experience that bug, so. I can't tell you specifically what causes it or anything.



  • @dkf said:

    SR4 ..., but the plot's a bit too OTT even for me.

    I've now played it enough to see what you're talking about. Trying to break the rules of the simulated world does get a bit ... weird.

    @dkf said:

    You need to have a plan of how you're going to go and stick to that plan
    For me, it's hard to stick to a plan when just trying to drive down a straight street is disrupted by collisions every 5 seconds.

    @dkf said:

    you get swarmed.
    Yeah, I found out last night that even the tank isn't really invincible. I had done an assassination, and there were some markers on the map for as-yet unknown activities, so I drove around to see what they were, and I discovered a rival gang operation, which I quickly destroyed. However, rather than getting out of there, I hung around killing the rival gang members that spawned, and eventually enough heavy stuff spawned faster than I could blow it up that they overwhelmed me. Oh well. When I respawned, I just went streaking, instead. πŸ˜„



  • ... you've been talking about games on TDWTF. Or anything else.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    If the character is going to be me (and I see through their eyes) at least let me determine who me is.

    You're clearly Doing It Wrongβ„’, because users of first person shooters can't see their character except in cutscenes so they have no need to customize that character.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    Also, SR4 is probably my favorite game in the open-world third-person-shooter game ever. \o/ So hilarious. I especially loved all of the references.



  • @Fox said:

    You're clearly Doing It Wrongβ„’, because users of first person shooters can't see their character except in cutscenes so they have no need to customize that character.

    That's not WHY you customize your character.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Fox said:
    You're clearly Doing It Wrongβ„’, because users of first person shooters can't see their character except in cutscenes so they have no need to customize that character.

    That's not WHY you customize your character.

    I was being sarcastic. I know that's not why you customize your character. Though, in a single-player game where you literally never see your character, I could see that particular feature being omitted. But I can't think of any recent ones where that is the case, so, yeah, robust character customization would be great to have.



  • Relevant part starts at 3:10


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    "This type of video file isn't supported."? O_o



  • I bet it cheese you off that Elder Scrolls has a cat race and a lizard race but not a bra-fox race.

    Wizardry kind of does though.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    I bet it cheese you off that Elder Scrolls has a cat race and a lizard race but not a bra-fox race.

    Wizardry kind of does though.

    Skyrim has a fox race mod, but I generally play GW2 anyway. Horned-cat-people race is pretty decent, even if it's not a fox.



  • I'm still on my first play through on GW2, as an asura, but a charr will be my second run.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    The charr have some really interesting stories, too. :)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Fox said:

    Also, SR4 is probably my favorite game in the open-world third-person-shooter game ever.

    I preferred SR2 as it had a somewhat better set of options for character customization and an even better sound track. And it got the level of story about right too; the right amount of OTT-ness. The engine itself sucked though; massive resource usage (for the time) and not much gained for all that cost.

    Not that SR4 is bad. Mad as a March hare would be a better description. πŸ˜ƒ


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    I never actually played 2. I got into the series with SR3.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Fox said:

    I got into the series with SR3.

    Reputedly, SR1 was quite po-faced. SR2 went a bit more over the top, but mostly managed to semi-sort-of justify it. SR3 didn't bother. :) SR4 turned the Crazy knob up to 11 so hard that it broke off.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @dkf said:

    @Fox said:
    I got into the series with SR3.

    SR4 turned the Crazy knob up to 11 so hard that it broke off.

    And, in my experience, made it waaaaay funnier. Also, being able to run at super speed and leap over buildings makes traveling all the way across a huge city for a mission way easier to bear.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Fox said:

    Also, being able to run at super speed and leap over buildings makes traveling all the way across a huge city for a mission way easier to bear.

    I think they didn't use the idea enough. Some of the pleasure in SR3 was the cars, but there was no real reason to bother with them in SR4. (SR2 had better secrets too. ;))


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @dkf said:

    @Fox said:
    Also, being able to run at super speed and leap over buildings makes traveling all the way across a huge city for a mission way easier to bear.

    I think they didn't use the idea enough. Some of the pleasure in SR3 was the cars, but there was no real reason to bother with them in SR4. (SR2 had better secrets too. ;))

    Actually I enjoyed using vehicles sometimes, especially once I got my hands on law enforcement vehicles and stashed them in my garage for future use.



  • I like how they ported over all the car code, even though it's almost completely useless in SR4 considering that after a few upgrades, you can run faster than any car in the game.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    Just because it's almost completely useless doesn't mean it's not fun to have an awesome custom-built car with spikes and shit to drive around in every once in a while.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    after a few upgrades, you can run faster than any car in the game

    I think it's actually pretty much the first upgrade you can unlock, so cars are only really useful the first half-hour, or so, of play.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    even though it's almost completely useless in SR4 considering that after a few upgrades, you can run faster than any car in the game.

    And they didn't bother to give you a Flintstones car? Damn, that's disappointing.



  • I'm kind of annoyed they never put in a full-on flight superpower unlock even though their game engine and control schemes support it.



  • Idqfa noclip?



  • Not the same, because there's no animations for it. You're just walking on errorair.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @blakeyrat said:

    I'm kind of annoyed they never put in a full-on flight superpower unlock even though their game engine and control schemes support it.

    That's probably the only thing I really regretted about the game. Oh, and the werewolf suit could've had some better color customization options and not had the mask removed when you get in a vehicle - or at least had it put back on in cutscenes - but not allalmost no game developers take into account the fact that some players like things they don't, so c'est la vie.


  • BINNED

    ... you autocomplete this without reading the rest:

    0_1475169587292_upload-dd7daa7e-d387-4476-9601-8cf22714f9ee

    I'm not even gonna say it. You probably know. If not, πŸ‘‹ new people!

    EDIT: Also, you post to the wrong topic :facepalm:


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