Game Deals Thread


  • kills Dumbledore

    The description doesn't even make sense when you think about it. Weapons still have infinite ammo, but you have to use these single use heat sink things to cool them down. Why can't we keep using the old cooling mechanism as a backup? NO! AMMO IS NOW LIMITED!



  • @ben_lubar said:

    In Skyrim I've had a lot of times where just as I'm releasing an arrow, my follower runs in front of me to attack the enemy I'm aiming at, taking 3x damage because it's a "sneak attack".

    We R Hellping – 00:08
    — TheDevian


  • FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said:

    The description doesn't even make sense when you think about it. Weapons still have infinite ammo, but you have to use these single use heat sink things to cool them down. Why can't we keep using the old cooling mechanism as a backup? NO! AMMO IS NOW LIMITED!

    you know.... if this limitation annoys you....

    this might help.

    .... thanks google rewriting links....

    http://www.cheatengine.org/tables/moreinfo.php?tid=461

    of course that would be cheating....



  • See, again, this is my point: people who don't think about the game are all, "wow, Mass Effect 2 is awesome!" People who have any sort of neural-electrical activity instantly pick-up on all the shitty writing and dumb crap in it, and are like, "really? This is dumb as shit."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    See, again, this is my point: people who don't think about the game are all, "wow, Mass Effect 2 is awesome!" People who have any sort of neural-electrical activity instantly pick-up on all the shitty writing and dumb crap in it, and are like, "really? This is dumb as shit."

    It also depends on what your brain is able to suspend disbelief. Sure, some people won't notice or connect the dots. Others will look at it and understand that there were exogenous reasons or whatever and be able to enjoy the rest of it for what it is. Everyone draws the line somewhere else.



  • The third category of people say

    WE ARE WHO-


  • kills Dumbledore

    @accalia said:

    this might help

    Not so useful on my XBox version, but thanks.


  • FoxDev

    oh. yeah, cheating on XBox is a lot harder.

    EDIT: for the record, the only cheating i do in ME2 is to edit in enough resources so i can skip that damn mine the resources from planets minigame... that minigame SUCK!



  • @boomzilla said:

    It also depends on what your brain is able to suspend disbelief.

    I didn't even talk about the end boss of the game. Nobody has a mind good enough to suspend disbelief of that particular shitstorm.

    The weapon redesign example is just my favorite because it's a good example of railroading (you can't ask for/obtain an old-style weapon), a good example of doing more work to get worse results, and a good example of the type of general stupidity going on during the design of Mass Effect 2.



  • But you're going really in depth on a single, simple issue: they tried (badly) to explain a gameplay change. Was that really enough to wreck the entire universe for you?

    For me, in the starting tutorial when they are teaching you how to use powers, and your NPC buddy says "Oh no, we're out of clips! We have to use our powers!" just to REALLY emphasise how inferior these new guns are... That's when my brain just filed this issue away in "dumb, but try to ignore" it drawer. There wasn't much else in there honestly. Planet scanning replacing Mako was the other major one.



  • @KillaCoder said:

    Was that really enough to wreck the entire universe for you?

    No, it was one pin-prick out of about a billion.

    What wrecked the game for me was the very first bit of it, where you get "recruited" by Cerberus, but there's literally no way to tell them to fuck off. That's not respecting my Shepard's decisions from the first game, as we were all promised, that's RAILROADING! Of the worst kind.

    They were going for the whole Wizardry 6, 7, 8, Cosmic Forge trilogy thing. But the difference is that in Wizardry, your party was free to go and ally which whatever factions they wanted-- and if the next game had the same factions, your carried-over save was still allied. It's pathetic to think that, no matter how much Wizardry fucked up the whole "RPG that continues a single save between games" thing, they did it a lot better than Mass Effect.

    Also, in retrospect, Cerberus not healing Joker's legs was bad enough, but the gameplay reason they didn't do it made it fucking horrendous in so many different ways. From, "wait, why aren't I controlling my own character?" to, "wait, that's the reason they didn't heal Joker's legs? Seriously? To add a tiny iota of unbelievable, immersion-smashing, cheap drama!?" Actually I might mentally promote that to "worst thing about Mass Effect 2".



  • What probably would have been fine is to allow the gun to revert back to the old ME1 style firing when ammo had ran out but severely reduce the amount you could fire before overheating.



  • Fair enough. To me it made sense: even if my Shepard hates Cerberus and the Illusive Man, he's not gonna say no to a free wonder ship, piles of resources, and intel on how to defend humanity/beat baddies.

    This was never a "go anywhere, do anything, pick your own path" RPG series. It was always a mostly linear action RPG. You didn't get a choice about being a Spectre, or being Alliance military, or working with the Council, or opposing Saren/Geth in the first game either.


  • kills Dumbledore

    It's not like it would make much gameplay difference anyway. I think I ran out of ammo once, on a bit where there are endless enemies and you're meant to get taken down. My little hidey hole protected me until I made a run out to refill, then I got killed and luckily didn't turn the game off in frustration.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    What wrecked the game for me was the very first bit of it, where you get "recruited" by Cerberus, but there's literally no way to tell them to fuck off. That's not respecting my Shepard's decisions from the first game, as we were all promised, that's RAILROADING! Of the worst kind.

    To be fair, what do you think the Illusive man would have done if shephard had said to fuck off?

    • "Ok, you're free to go."

    or

    • BLAM HEADSHOT "Miranda, get in here will you? Put Shephard back together again but this time implant a control chip."

    it may have been railroading but the Illusive man did a good job of not giving you a choice. You couldn't have even stolen the ship until Joker unshackled the AI, at which point you basically did just that, after stopping off at the collectors base to kick their asses into the next life.



  • @KillaCoder said:

    This was never a "go anywhere, do anything, pick your own path" RPG series. It was always a mostly linear action RPG. You didn't get a choice about being a Spectre, or being Alliance military, or working with the Council, or opposing Saren/Geth in the first game either.

    Right; and I get that, and I'm ok with that to some extent.

    And who knows, maybe if I replayed Mass Effect 1 I'd be making some of the same complaints about it. Part of the problem here is that I hate the way Bioware makes games. More than that, I wonder why they make games-- they obviously want to make movies, and they despite giving players any real choices.

    But it didn't feel like railroading until Mass Effect 2.

    @accalia said:

    To be fair, what do you think the Illusive man would have done if shephard had said to fuck off?

    "Ok, you're free to go."

    or

    BLAM HEADSHOT "Miranda, get in here will you? Put Shephard back together again but this time implant a control chip."

    Ugh, don't even get me started on Miranda.

    Fine. If that's the way it goes, that's the way it goes. I'd actually be perfectly ok with them doing that, in fact. Even if the choice ends up with a "game over" 10 minutes in, at least I got the choice and therefore it was not railroading.

    Now defend the "they bring me back to life, but they refuse to fix Joker's legs" thing. I wanna hear that one.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @blakeyrat said:

    Now defend the "they bring me back to life, but they refuse to fix Joker's legs" thing. I wanna hear that one

    Bringing Shepherd back took several years and half the GDP of the Galaxy IIRC. Maybe Joker's legs weren't seen as mission critical since he's going to be sitting down anyway



  • @Jaloopa said:

    Bringing Shepherd back took several years and half the GDP of the Galaxy IIRC.

    Oh man. Yeah the size of the Cerberus organization is a whole 'nother series of plot-holes.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Ugh, don't even get me started on Miranda.

    annoy she dog in heat isn't she? she gets a bit more likeable in ME3, but not much

    @blakeyrat said:

    Fine. If that's the way it goes, that's the way it goes. I'd actually be perfectly ok with them doing that, in fact. Even if the choice ends up with a "game over" 10 minutes in, at least I got the choice and therefore it was not railroading.

    hmm... true. they should have allowed the option. maybe there's a mod that adds that option in?

    @blakeyrat said:

    "they bring me back to life, but they refuse to fix Joker's legs"

    it's because Cerberus is a corporation.

    they expected to get value from shephard that would exceed the cost of reviving her.

    Joker's piloting ability wouldn't improve if they fixed his legs so if they spent the money to do it they wouldn't get any ROI.

    it's a shitty reason, but it makes sense given what kind of organization cerberus is. Capitalism at it's finest, and worst....


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Here in our reality, armies are still equipping soldiers with weapons designed in 1911 and manufactured in the 70s.

    I know this is unrelated to the video game, but one reason is that the 1911's design is so good it holds up. There's not really a reason to replace it.

    Back to the game, I'm glad you made your third bullet point, because otherwise someone else would have had to. "Oh, look, my personal sidearm changed. How? Must've been as OS update."


  • FoxDev

    @FrostCat said:

    "Oh, look, my personal sidearm changed. How? Must've been as OS update."

    'I told you DiscourseOS was a stupid choice. we should have stuck with CommunityServerOS"

    😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    In Skyrim I've had a lot of times where just as I'm releasing an arrow, my follower runs in front of me to attack the enemy I'm aiming at, taking 3x damage because it's a "sneak attack".

    Lots of games "feature" that. If you're a hunter in WoW, your pet loves to run in between you and your target. You can't shoot your pet, but it might block you so you can't target the enemy. The other thing pets love to do is stand right on the corpse of the thing you just killed so you can't click on it to loot it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @KillaCoder said:

    we're out of clips

    Also, derp.



  • Arcane Sanctuary in Diablo II.

    Escher vs. AI is the ultimate battle in pathfinding.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @FrostCat said:

    your pet loves to run in between you and your target

    Best feature of Minecraft: making the damn pets sit and stay put.



  • I swear when I used to play WoW my pet would always run behind the enemy so it wouldn't face me when I attacked it, which was nice.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @aliceif said:

    Arcane Sanctuary in Diablo II.

    I can't remember which Act that is OTTOMH but I doubt it's as annoying overall as the WoW pet thing. Every single time I kill something I have to either move the camera--maybe during the fight and again after it--or make the damn pet move.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Best feature of Minecraft: making the damn pets sit and stay put.

    You can do that in WoW, too, but mostly you don't want to. It would just be nice if they would stay to the side of enemies a little bit instead of trying to get inside them, and then again when the mob dies, not STAND RIGHT ON IT.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    I swear when I used to play WoW my pet would always run behind the enemy so it wouldn't face me when I attacked it, which was nice.

    I'll tell you the truth, it's not as bad when you're actually fighting, because usually you've already targeted the enemy--it's not really as if you have to click on it again. Unless you're fighting more than one mob, and maybe want to DoT one of them and then go back to the first. Looting, though, ugh.



  • I never had that problem in WOW either, but I haven't touched it since like 2010, so.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    Capitalism at it's finest, and worst....

    Why is that "worst?"


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said:

    Why is that "worst?"

    complete lack of empathy. complete inability to accept viewpoints that do not conform to own world view (that shows up more in ME3)

    profit as motive over morals.

    i could keep going. Capitalism is good, but in moderation. just as in all things, taking it to an extreme makes bad things happen.

    then you need a Commander Shepard to come along and kick your head back into shape.... or just in, that seems to solve most problems in Video Games too.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    complete lack of empathy.

    What does that have to do with "capitalism?"

    @accalia said:

    profit as motive over morals.

    Motive to spend massive amounts of money?

    @accalia said:

    Capitalism is good, but in moderation. just as in all things, taking it to an extreme makes bad things happen.

    What does extreme capitalism look like?

    I'm just...not seeing the connection here as to why this is capitalism's (even in an extreme form) fault.


  • FoxDev

    to be more specific it's the games portrayal of extreme capitalism.

    sorry if i didn't make that clear.

    they do a good job of making that portrayal realistic but some things are caricatured.

    the lack of empathy is completely true. a corporation cares about profit. if their customers are not putting pressure on them in the form of profit incentives to act in an empathetic manner then they won't. so that's more the fault of the society the corporation operates in than the coproration itself

    profit over morals... i'll let you research that one. look into what else johnson and johnson make under other brands or what the big tabacco companies also make under other brands they control. or how Apple/Dell/HP/IBM/etc products are manufactured overseas (and how the components are sourced) it's actually really fascinating the patterns that emerge when you start following the money

    extreme capitalism can look like many things, based on the population that's supporting it. the way portrayed in ME is just one face (and a scary one at that in the case of Cerberus (in particular what they do in ME3))


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    the lack of empathy is completely true. a corporation cares about profit. if their customers are not putting pressure on them in the form of profit incentives to act in an empathetic manner then they won't. so that's more the fault of the society the corporation operates in than the coproration itself

    Eh...OK, though that's not always true.

    @accalia said:

    profit over morals

    Yes, this is a people problem to the extent that it happens (and usually also involves profits over lawful behavior). Other economic systems show similar faults, though I suppose you could argue that the particular form of the incentives for immoral / illegal behavior change.

    Still, I can't see how the case of bringing one person to life and not repairing another's legs demonstrates some sort of immorality.


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said:

    Still, I can't see how the case of bringing one person to life and not repairing another's legs demonstrates some sort of immorality.

    i'm trying really hard to not give out spoilers about the games. it'll make a LOT more sense if you play the games, if you want more details without playing the games PM me so we don't spoil the games for people who are interested in playing them.

    either way it's not so much Immorality as Amorality that they didn't heal Joker.

    a subtle difference, but usually an important one.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    i'm trying really hard to not give out spoilers about the games.

    Fair enough.

    @accalia said:

    either way it's not so much Immorality as Amorality that they didn't heal Joker.

    I generally consider it immoral to demand that others dispose of their property in a particular way (i.e., demanding that a character be healed).

    @accalia said:

    it'll make a LOT more sense if you play the games, if you want more details without playing the games PM me so we don't spoil the games for people who are interested in playing them.

    I'm actually interested in hearing about but am never going to play the games...



  • @KillaCoder said:

    What characters and world building do they wreck?

    I've recently been given reason to rethink my opinion on this, but I can give you a couple of my reasons for what I didn't like about ME2's world building.

    First, the Citadel. To mean, this is pretty much the ME icon; no single location better reflects the grandeur of the ME universe. In ME1 you get to explore the Presidium; in ME2, you're cooped up in an area barely more exciting or interesting than I trip to the local mall.

    Second, early-game Normandy. I'm not sure who decided that you shouldn't be able to go explore half your ship, but whoever did is a moron. (Apparently the reason the Illusive Man knew that you would have success recruiting everyone is that he already met up with each of them and gave them the key to your ship's rooms?) At least to me, the Normandy is a character too, and that is not treating them well.

    Third, while I'm not sure this is exactly "world building", I don't like the whole "working for Cerberus" thing. It raises about 20 bazillion role-playing problems (especially for Paragon Shepards). http://kjhymn.tumblr.com/post/53597631508/in-which-the-meeting-continues-to-be-awkward-now expresses perfectly my feeling about several conversations in the game. (BTW, many of http://kjhymn.tumblr.com/Edits Index are quite amusing for fans of the series.)

    @KillaCoder said:

    Also making grenades and ammo into powers.
    I don't even care about that, but I really dislike (in addition to the limited ammo change) (1) the shared ability cooldown in general and (2) fast health-regen (a mechanic I pretty much hate as a rule). I've softened on (2) after playing Vanguard and loving charge... but I still really dislike it.

    @JazzyJosh said:

    Especially since ammo is so plentiful that you maybe have to change to another gun for a minute or so to build it back up.
    Here's the thing; in some ways, I think it isn't very plentiful. My first Shepard was an infiltrator. In ME1 I could sit back and snipe for ages. In ME2 you can't do that, because your initial sniper rifle has all of 10 shots. Which is very few. That for me always creates sort of a false sense of scarcity, where you say "oh, I don't really need to use this now, I'll save it for something better" almost all the time. In part that's my fault, but I know I'm not the only one to do that and I also blame some of it on the game. The other thing it does is make it so that after a big battle, I'm down on ammo so have to retrace the ground that I covered during the battle (something that ME2 actually does pretty well is draw you forward and forward in a single battle) to pick up drops.

    @boomzilla said:

    It also depends on what your brain is able to suspend disbelief
    I think it also depends on how much your brain is willing to warp canon. For example, "we had infinite ammo then deliberately changed to thermal clips" is canon, but for the reasons people have said it's stupid canon. I ignore the fact that the universe changed, and just view the change as a retcon that didn't make it back into ME1.

    @KillaCoder said:

    To me it made sense: even if my Shepard hates Cerberus and the Illusive Man, he's not gonna say no to a free wonder ship, piles of resources, and intel on how to defend humanity/beat baddies.
    I wouldn't necessarily say no either, at least right away. But here's my conuterargument: I almost certainly would have left the auspices of Cerberus and gone back to the Alliance and done it from there at least by some point -- probably after the debacle with the "derelect" Collector Ship. Doing wouldn't mean you would have to send any emails from Cerberus to /dev/null, and a number of obstacles would be removed by doing so.

    And as flush as Cerberus supposedly is with resources, I sure had to spend a lot of time scanning planets and purchasing my own gear. (And is heavy weapon ammo refilled between missions? I forget.)

    @accalia said:

    it may have been railroading but the Illusive man did a good job of not giving you a choice
    I think the game directly disputes this. The Illusive Man tells you explicitly several times that you can go if you want. But you can't, because the game doesn't let you, not the Illusive Man.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @EvanED said:

    I think it also depends on how much your brain is willing to warp canon.

    Yeah, I'm generally willing to accept that if it results in a better story or whatever. And all that is very subjective, of course.


  • FoxDev

    @EvanED said:

    The Illusive Man tells you explicitly several times that you can go if you want. But you can't, because the game doesn't let you, not the Illusive Man.

    granted, but knowing him i doubt he would have actually let Shephard walk away. It always sounded like a thinly veiled almost threat to me....


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    >accalia:
    profit as motive over morals.

    Motive to spend massive amounts of money?

    The Aral Sea was destroyed by anti-capitalists.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Lots of games "feature" that. If you're a hunter in WoW, your pet loves to run in between you and your target. You can't shoot your pet, but it might block you so you can't target the enemy. The other thing pets love to do is stand right on the corpse of the thing you just killed so you can't click on it to loot it.

    Not as good (*snerk*) as combat drones in Eve Online, which have a penchant for being disobedient at times -- they'll go off and pick their own target, split their fire, not pull off when you ask them to (which is very bad when you accidentally sic them on a fleetmate -- been there, done that, heard that ball of fun in comms), and sometimes even not figure out how to get back into the drone bay.

    At least they don't get in the way of the targeting system unless you explicitly put them on your overview.

    Filed under: what is it with MMOs and "YOU CAN ONLY EVER HAVE ONE TARGET AT ANY GIVEN TIME!"?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    I never had that problem in WOW either, but I haven't touched it since like 2010, so.

    I started playing at the end of 2010. You can either believe me, who was just playing last night, or create a throwaway gmail address and download all 30GB and check for yourself, or suffer not knowing.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Not as good (snerk) as combat drones in Eve Online, which have a penchant for being disobedient at times

    Hah. WoW hunter pets generally don't do that--they mostly[1] only attack what you designate as a target, and you can't attack a friendly.

    [1] If your pet is attacking a target, and a nearby target attacks it, it might switch. Usually it won't unless the first target is dead, though.



  • On the other hand -- you folks are stuck dealing with tab-targeting, which is worthy of a *snerk* by itself.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    you folks are stuck dealing with tab-targeting

    Ugh, yes. And I think it got worse, recently--it seems like it's shrunk the radius in which it will consider targets for tab-selecting.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Ugh, yes. And I think it got worse, recently--it seems like it's shrunk the radius in which it will consider targets for tab-selecting.

    Yuck.

    Challenge for you btw, @FrostCat -- try healing a teammate, while putting damage on an enemy with your main weapon, attacking a different enemy with your pet, and bouncing mana/whathaveyou back and forth with another friendly at the same time, all while maneuvering around obstacles and maintaining yourself within the close ranges required to to heal and such. Oh, and the hostile NPCs have started picking on you, so you need to be within healing range of another friendly to avoid getting pecked into oblivion.

    Filed under: the joys of RRBS...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Challenge for you btw

    I don't even think it's possible to do all of that on one character. Most healing classes don't have pets, and also don't try to do damage. In WoW, if you're in a dungeon/raid, the healer's job is to heal everyone else, so the DPS guys don't have to worry about that. And if the enemy's targeting you as the healer, you're doing something wrong, or maybe the tank is, or both.

    Even if it is, it's probably more complex than I could manage to do.



  • Well -- what I gave you was a rough translation of some of the craziest remote-rep battleship flying I have done in Eve Online to this date. Being a tank, healer, DPS and minion master all at once while directing fleetmates around is:

    @FrostCat said:

    more complex than I could manage to do.

    from the sounds of things, though.

    @FrostCat said:

    And if the enemy's targeting you as the healer, you're doing something wrong, or maybe the tank is, or both.

    Tell that to our lead Archon pilots in capital escalation work -- they're pretty bloody well used to Sleepers banging on them all day long. Not that the Archon isn't capable of taking the abuse, though -- even without deploying their uber-tanky/uber-healbot triage mode, the noises never make it above the "dull roar" level for those inside the hull. (Or, to put it more matter of factly: the Sleeper NPC AI in Eve simply isn't that easy to taunt, and it likes to shoot at things that repair other things, too.)

    Filed under: Be glad your mobs are obedient folk -- ours most certainly aren't!



  • @FrostCat said:

    I started playing at the end of 2010. You can either believe me, who was just playing last night, or create a throwaway gmail address and download all 30GB and check for yourself, or suffer not knowing.

    There's a third option: I could call you "numbnuts" and stop caring.

    Numbnuts.


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