ToasterToastin'

Now would be a perfect day to drop the update.
 
Seems more likely the TF2 team will drop the ball instead though.

ow

Today I downloaded and participated in the Star Wars Battlefront II Open Beta and after about three hours of playing the game, I can say with certainty that I will not be giving EA and Dice any money for this particular release. Ignoring all the other feedback I could have given in regards to this game, there is really only one thing that I feel is worth talking about as it unfortunately overshadows everything good they've done with the new Battlefront II.
 
The "Star Card" system.
 
In Battlefront 2 you have access to four different classes when playing the multiplayer. Assault, Heavy, Specialist and Officer. Each of these classes are different in terms of how they appear, the weapons they use and their class abilities. The Assault for example has the ability to throw a thermal grenade, to change his blaster rifle into a shotgun configuration and to shoot a marker that reveals enemies in a small area. The Officer class on the other hand has access to a stun grenade, an activatable aura that gives nearby allies damage reduction and decreases the time it takes for them to start healing after receiving damage and a deployable sentry turret.
 
Sounds fine, right?
 
What isn't fine is how the Star Card system interacts with these classes. Star Wars Battlefront II has gone the way of Overwatch and lets you earn loot crates in-game by playing and leveling up your classes. The game also lets you straight up buy them with real money from an in-game store. These loot crates contain fun little things like victory poses for your characters, weapon unlocks that you'd otherwise have to wait for a certain level to unlock (not necessarily upgrades mind you) and other little things. They also contain Star Cards. Now comes the part where I try to explain the Star Cards to the best of my ability in a way that will make you see just how disgusting they are in their implementation. 
 
Each class in the game can ultimately equip a total of four Star Cards. You start out with one Star Card slot in the beginning and unlock more as you put time into the class. These Star Cards are essentially passive buffs for your class. The Assault class for example, can equip a Star Card called "Assault Training" that allows to regain health every time they land the killing blow on an enemy. The Officer class for example can equip a Star Card called "Battle Command: Fortitude" that causes their aura of damage reduction to affect a larger area. The Heavy class has the ability to spin up their gun, increasing its rate of fire greatly at the cost of reduced movement speed. They can also get a Star Card that reduces the spin-up time for that ability. Not only that, but each Star Card also comes in four different rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic. The effect of the card is depending on the rarity of it. Take the Assault Training card for example. A Common Assault Training Card would give you 15 Health Restored on Kill while an Epic Assault Training Card would make that 30 Health Restored on Kill. Battle Command: Fortitude is another good example. A Common version of that card would make your aura extend to 10 meters from your character where an Epic version would extend 16 meters from your character. 
 
Ultimately what it boils down to is that EA and Dice have managed to turn Battlefront II into a P2W gacha where a player who is unwilling to dump money into the game, a player who is unlucky with his loot boxes or just a brand new player will be at major disadvantage compared to a player with a full deck of Star Cards. I personally find it disgusting and wholly unacceptable that there is any sort of P2W aspect in a $60 game and will not be supporting this release. I've seen some people on the internet argue that the Star Card system is OK because there will be no paid DLC for Battlefront II and to those people I say they're missing the point.

So... I'm now back, I guess.
 
It really has been a long time. God damn real life stuff, sucking away all my free time. Add to that, that I've been trying to insulate myself from more and more prop. software. But... the call of FTL and, well, TF2 were too strong and so I just reinstalled steam. Hopefully I can start becoming a regular on these fair SPU Forums.

I am building a new PC after being stuck on a prebuilt I got years ago in which I only ever upgraded the GPU. It's very exciting

Fallout 1 is free on Steam.
 
Not as good as 2 and needs the FIXT patch to work, but its still pretty good.

I'm curious as to why you say this. Even in the games that do it relatively well, such as Overwatch, I'd still only call the practice mostly harmless. It doesn't add anything of value to any game it's in. Even when discussing server costs for multiplayer games, if games without lootboxes can get by just selling skins directly, I fail to see why these other games can't. At it's worst, it's downright predatory. At least in the days of hiding on-disc content behind dlc packs, you knew what you're getting yourself into. You pay an upfront fee for a specific amount of content. A lootbox system is never added because it adds something to the game; it's added because some suits looked at the mobile market and said "you know, I bet we could get some of that."

Been playing Fallout 4 (Not giving my money to Beth edition) and gotta say, its really a "good game, terrible Fallout".
 
The entire RPG element got thrown out of the window. Your character already has a written past, personality and voice. Makes it hard to get invested on it or feel like you are playing with YOUR character.
 
The lack of skills and skill checks annoy me. It was a pillar of the franchise for almost 2 decades, now your character cant be a nerd that bypasses quests or helps people because he had a high Medicine skill, he is just a grunt that shoots people and loots stuff.
 
Which makes me say, this was the first game which I downloaded mods pretty much after starting, because of how ASS the dialogue system is.
Instead of the menu with several choices you had in every other game, its now the Mass Effect like menu with only 4 choices: Question, Yes/Positive, Maybe/Sarcasm, No/Negative.
And the worst of all, the option doesnt tells you what your character is going to say. A couple of times I choose an option only for the dumbass to yell something different.
 
Really limited weapon choices. I get that crafting is the big thing, but wow, Fallout New Vegas had 20 different pistols (both bullet and energy, excluding unique counterparts), while 4 has 15 (both kinds, also excluding counterparts), with 6 of these being both in the 'pistol' and 'rifle' category, depending on the parts you put.
 
And talking about crafting, I hate the crafting in this game. It forces you to hoard EVERY junk you find around, because everything has crafting components.
 
Still a great shooter though. If I didnt had played any other Fallout, I would have liked it more.

I know, it's so damn frustrating. It's boring as fuck fighting a bunch of clones and the only difference being a red aura and maybe a red health bar too. The changes don't even need to be huge, just subtle hues so you're not essentially fighting yourselves.
 
Actually, what if, in a team based game, the other team looked like robots and you didn't. But everyone would see the enemy team looking like robots and everyone would think THEY were the real deal?

Honestly, I blame MOBAs and Overwatch for that one. If there's anything that the success of these games say, it's that people don't want a customizable experience anymore. Even the server browser in Overwatch doesn't add the level of customization that older games offered. PC gaming is slowly killing one of its biggest strengths, and Valve is hardly the first one to do it.

It's been over a year since we voted to have a Pyro update (before there would be a Heavy update).
 
Since that point we haven't had a real Halloween update (just a reactivation of previous updates with some new community items).  The Christmas update was more of the same, but since Christmas updates have primarily been about cosmetics in the past I guess that's not as big of letdown.  This was also the first year without a major summer update.
 
Theoretically the reason for all of these missed updates is that they are working really hard on the Pyro update, and maybe the later Heavy update.
 
I mean, why would they make us vote on which update would come first if they didn't plan on doing any updates at all?  Surely Valve wouldn't commit themselves to a project and then just drop it entirely when they got bored/distracted/found it harder than expected!
 
So sarcasm aside, I'm not sure if people are really expecting an update at this point, since we're all aware of how much Valve has let us down.  But Valve certainly promised an update (in fact, they promised two updates).

The roaming thing is what I like. I hate all the nonsense of trying to go to the End and fighting a shitty dragon and all that. Both the Nether and the End are really fucking boring places anyway.

that's not Totino's

SPUFpowered?

Something something Keeping hurricane jose out.

Trump really is going to make anime real.
 
But only "American Anime."

Scree that, communicate entirely with Tribes voice commands 

https://shop.lego.com/en-US/Millennium-Falcon-75192
 
Holy crap, its here again.
 
only 800 USD, tho
 
byebye, wallet

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/6xqtgz/an_insightful_thread_where_game_developers/dmhz7fa/?st=j74vov4h&sh=94577080
 
 
There was some Twitter discussion about hidden game mechanics and someone compiled them all into a reddit thread. Some of these are really cool

A month ago I posted in this thread complaining about the tedium of leveling in FFXIV and now I'm back to say that this game has absolutely consumed every moment of spare time I've had in the past ~5 weeks. I am positively addicted and I'm still not max level on any job yet and it doesn't even bother me anymore. When I originally started playing I was planning on rushing to endgame so I could get to play current content with my friends, but as it would turn out, the game is extremely good for playing with friends at all levels. It doesn't matter if you're level 34 and your friends are all level 70, there is still stuff you can do together.
 
The best way I can describe FFXIV is that, for me, it feels like the early years of World of Warcraft (Vanilla/TBC) only with many modern quality of life features as well. My rush to hit max level quickly came to a halt when I realized that rather than push through the main story quest and power-leveling, I was having more fun going off and exploring the world, poking my nose into dungeons that I didn't technically need to do in order to progress and finding random quests in the far corners of the world with really cool rewards such as pets, emotes and cosmetics. That isn't to say that the main story of the game is bad. While it starts off as generic adventuring, by the time I hit Heavensward content (50+) I was (and still am) pretty emotionally invested in the characters presented in the story and what happened to them.
 
Finally there is the music of FFXIV. When I was younger I don't think I truly appreciated how much a good soundtrack can improve the experience of... Well pretty much anything, but in retrospect, one of the things I'm the most nostalgic about in life is the music from all my favourite games. Luckily FFXIV totally delivers on the soundtrack department, it is fucking stellar and most of it has already found its way into my music library as permanent additions.
 
While there might have been some growing pains in the first week of me playing FFXIV, it has proven to be absolutely worth the initial hours of frustration and confusion. I'm sure any denizen of the internet who regularly browses any sort of video game discussion board will have seen the melancholic posts of former MMORPG fanatics, solemnly lamenting the fact that they can't seem to recapture the magic of when they first started playing their favourite MMORPG. Well I've managed it. I don't think I've been this invested in a video game since I first booted up World of Warcraft in 2006. I want to do it all.

Warning. Warning.