Wulff

It's all part of Abe's plan.

I'm only six hours into it, but Nier Automata is blowing me away. The gameplay, boss battles and soundtrack have all been 10/10 so far.

The problem here is that I think that the SWBF2 playtesters probably did do things differently, but not to the level of the clown in the video that was linked, whereas you don't believe enough was done to make the game goof out less. Let me start out by saying that I agree with you when you say that a game shouldn't be made to be "played right" but I also think your comparison to Portal 2 is a little unfair considering the major differences between the SWBF2 SP campaign and the Portal SP campaign. SWBF2 is a much more focused and in many ways linear experience and the game doesn't really encourage you to try weird alternate ways of getting through a mission, whereas Portal 2 encourages you to think creatively and explore every possibility on the later maps in order to get through them. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to individual opinion, but I'm just saying that a lot of the "bugs" that the SWBF2 video highlighted are very unlikely to happen to 95% of the players going through it and as such I think it's pretty fucking unfair to try and sell the campaign as a "broken mess" when all it really is, is 5 minutes footage of someone doing weird shit other people would never think to do. I don't even think the SWBF2 campaign is good, but I still think it's being portrayed in an overly negative light for the wrong reasons. I also disagree with your initial statement.

I dislike videos like this one. While there are some genuine goofs like the melee takedowns bugging out, the person recording is trying their fucking hardest to break the game by doing weird stuff that no person just playing the game normally would ever do and then pointing and laughing when the game bugs out because you're doing goofy shit. Yeah it's pretty funny that you can make dumb shit like that happen, but it's hardly game ruining. It's one thing when a game fucks up basic animation such as walking/running or lip-syncing like ME: Andromeda, another thing is when a player goes out of their way to break the game. I watched a person play through the campaign and he experienced no bugs or weird graphical/animted glitches, but he was also playing seriously and progressing through the game as his objectives updated. The part on Endor with the rebel soldier walking over the burning debris and dying was pretty hilarious though.

In more positive video game related things, I got around to play DOOM 2016 this week after missing its release. Absolutely stellar experience, easily one of my new favourite games.

My anime watching has sort of gone down the drain over the past couple of months. Haven't been watching stuff nearly as regularly as I would like to, I blame the fact that after getting a new computer, I've been so occupied with playing all the great games I missed out on over the years, that I've just not felt motivated to watch much anime. I'd rather play cool video games. That being said, it hasn't been completely barren in terms of anime this season. Of the current season I've given two shows a try. I usually don't like watching anime as it is airing (with a few exceptions) but because my overall watching has been so sporadic, I've just ended up saying yes when a friend asked me if I wanted to watch something. Dies Irae is the anime adaptation of a fairly popular(?) visual novel by the same name. Imagine if Hellsing and Wolfenstein had a crazy anime crossover except instead of being good like Hellsing and Wolfenstein, it was just really convoluded, poorly thought out and starring shit characters instead. I'm fairly certain this anime will only be enjoyable for someone who has read and enjoyed the VN. I dropped it after three episodes. Net-juu no Susume was an anime I had no idea even existed until my good friend Marcus told me about it and asked if I wanted to give it a shot. It's an anime about a Japanese Christmas Cake who willingly gives up her career after her 30th birthday in order to become an "Elite-Neet" as it were. She considers herself above regular NEETS because she actively chose that lifestyle after working for over a decade and saving up enough money to sustain herself. She picks up an MMORPG and gets invested with a guild called "@Home Party", in particular one of its members, a support class player named Lily and together they gain a bond through playing together. A romance starts budding, but as it would turn out, the players behind the screen might be closer to each other in real life than any of them ever could have guessed. It is VERY corny, but oddly endearing at the same time. I enjoyed the first 3 episodes and considering it's only going to end up being 10 episodes total, I'll probably stick through it until the end. That's it for the seasonal stuff. Other than that I've been watching Princess Principal from last season and it's OK so far, only 3 episodes in. First episode was good, second and third less so, but not bad by any means. We'll see where it goes. Also been watching New Game!! and that anime is very cute, can't really complain about that one. Just more of the same from the first season. Finally I've also been watching Idolm@ster Cinderella Girls and it feels like the original Im@s except without all the character drama/development that made the first series interesting. Actually I think Cinderella Girls is kinda shit, but at least it's cute... I guess. Probably won't be picking up the second season once I finish the first.

I personally think that the reasoning in your first sentence is very flimsy and it is my layman's assumption that it isn't even true for the bigname publishers such as EA. That being said, I also understand that game devs and publishers are out to make money at the end of the day. I think a lot of the online gaming population underestimates just how much effort that goes into keeping a game company afloat (see the head of Respawn Entertainment's response to the outcry that came after he allowed Respawn to be bought out by EA) and as such, I actually think lootcrates are an OK idea. I also agree with your ultimate statement of it being an alternative to paid DLC. HOWEVER The moment these lootcrates start adding Pay-2-Win Elements in a game that is already Pay-2-Play, that's where I draw the line. Unfortunately that is the case for EA's upcoming Battlefront II. If you rephrase your question to "Would you rather have Pay-2-Win gambling elements in your game OR paid DLC that will potentially split up the community?" the paid DLC is the lesser evil for sure.

Star Wars Battlefront 2's release is turning out to be a figurative rollercoaster. With the launch of the beta I denounced the game due to it's inherit P2W systems with Star Cards, then some time later, EA made a statement talking about changes to the Star Card and lootbox system. These changes were not perfect, but it was a step in the right direction and actually rekindled my interest in purchasing the game once more. Now people have had the ability to play the game via Origin Access, a subscription-based service for your Origin account á la Playstation Plus and the last three days have revealed that while the lootboxes and Star Cards might be less invasive, there are a slew of other issues cropping up with SWBF2. The game locks hero characters such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker (among others) from immediate play. Yes, a $60-$80 game is locking away content from the player straight from the beginning. In order to unlock these iconic hero characters, you have to pay for them using the in-game currency known as credits. Unfortunately these hero characters cost tens of thousands of credits (40.000 per character to be exact) and as a player, you don't earn a lot of credits actually playing the game. You receive a fixed number of credits after finishing a match, regardless of your performance in said match. This number of credits is in the low hundreds. Not only does this system encourage AFK botters, seeing as how a player with 0 kills and 0 deaths will receive as many credits as a player with 43 kills and 2 deaths, but someone actually did the math and figured out that it would take you 40 hours of playing to unlock a SINGLE hero character... Unless you buy lootboxes and earn more credits through them. Some people have speculated that these inflated numbers are purely for the early access playtest that came with Origin Access and that they will be significantly reduced, but the silence from DICE and EA on the matter has been deafening. In short, it seems that a $60 game is releasing with an in-game grind most F2P games could only ever dream of. .

Fair enough

Why is your OP divvied up into 10 posts for no reason?

I'm jealous as fuck. Been waiting for that shit for so long

A little over a week ago, a bunch of us here got together and watched the long-awaited "Kimi no Na Wa" or "Your Name" by director Makoto Shinkai, who is known for having directed films such as "5 Centimeters Per Second" and "The Garden of Words" among others. Watching this film had been a long time coming after its absolutely glowing reception both in the west and in the east, rivaling the Ghibli classic "Spirited Away" in terms of income globally and having shot to the top of practically every single anime database out there in terms of popularity and average rating. In preparation for watching Kimi no Na Wa, the aforementioned bunch had gotten together in the months prior to watch Makoto Shinkai's older work. We watched "Voices of a Distant Star" along with some of his newer and more critically acclaimed work, namely "The Place Promised in our Early Days" and "5 Centimeters Per Second". I must admit that I had my concerns about this film initially. It's rare that an animated piece from Japan gets this much attention on a global scale and the general online opinion seemed to be that Kimi no Na Wa was undisputedly one of the best animated films to come out in decades. That sets the bar pretty high and I'd be lying if I told you that my expectations of the medium aren't a bit different from your average anime fan. As such I was worried that the movie would not live up to the hype and that I'd be disappointed by the end of it. Makoto Shinkai is notorious in the animation community for putting an insane amount of work into his films. While his official title might be "director" the truth is that he actually does pretty much everything. His earlier works were created almost entirely by him and his wife, including everything from storyboard and animation to sound design and voice acting. As he grew in fame as a director he has since gotten people working under him, but he still very much has a hand in the entirety of the creative process. With that in mind, it's quite simple to discern a Makoto Shinkai movie from other contemporaries because Shinkai has a very unique way of presenting his films. There is always a focus on the backdrop to the point where you could pause and screenshot almost any moment from a Shinkai film and it would make a great desktop background. Example from Kimi no Na Wa Example from 5 Centimeters Per Second Example from The Place Promised in our Early Days Kimi no Na Wa is insanely beautiful. A still image cannot do this movie justice at all. The backgrounds are so detailed that one can only assume the animators worked for days on every single frame. The characters move with fluidity rarely seen in anime and the use of CG animation is very cleverly hidden away to the point where you'd really have to look for it in order to spot it. I don't think it would be an understatement to say that Kimi no Na Wa is the most well-animated movie I've ever seen. If you're not familiar with Kimi no Na Wa I will briefly summarize the plot for you. A high school city boy and a high school country girl from two entirely different places in Japan begin mysteriously swapping bodies for no discernable reason. Every time they go to bed, they swap bodies. That's it. That's the simple plot of Kimi no Na Wa. Of course the situation develops as the movie goes along, but I won't talk about that in detail because it's major spoilers. The bodyswapping aspect leads to some absolutely hilarious but also adorable moments for both the characters. The girl gets called out for speaking like a girl when she is in the boy's body (Certain Japanese words and phrases are considered masculine/feminine, women use "Watashi" while men use "Boku" or "Ore" fx.) and the boy has no idea how to do his hair properly while stuck in the girl's body. Overall, it's pretty damn hard not to be endeared by the characters in Kimi no Na Wa. They have just enough genuine human elements in their portrayal that you can't help but get attached. This goes for the side characters as well (BASED TESSIE). Earlier in this post I talked about how certain things repeat in Makoto Shinkai's work and Kimi no Na Wa is no different in this regard. One of the biggest overarching themes that exist in all of Shinkai's work is a sort of melancholy, longing or sadness. Every single one of his movies is sad in one way or another. Be it sadness over the loss of a friend, a lover or melancholy feelings of times past. Kimi no Na Wa has this aspect as well and there is a certain point where the movie twists into this theme. I won't speak of it in any more detail, just be aware that it does also happen in this movie, just like all the rest of Shinkai's films. Personally I was very invested in this part of the movie, it didn't feel stupid or contrived to me instead I was just feeling genuine concern for the characters involved and by the movies' end I shed a tear. You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether that tear was one of happiness or sadness. In summary I can tell you that my concern about Kimi no Na Wa being overhyped was totally unfounded. The movie really is just that good. It hits all the right beats in terms of pacing, plot progression and characters on top of having an absolutely fucking stellar presentation that is practically unprecedented. Kimi no Na Wa is a film that can be enjoyed by people of all ages and is something I wouldn't be ashamed to show my parents, who know nothing about anime whatsoever. It's just all-round a great film that I really recommend that you watch.

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.

I've been pretty enamored by Titanfall 2 over the past month and it's easily the game that's taken up the most of my free time throughout September. As such, I suppose it can't come as much of a surprise that my most recent dream that I can remember was TF2 related. In my dream me and Silent (who doesn't even own or play Titanfall, fuck knows why he's there) were members of an elite mercenary team known as "The Fast Guys" and we were sent on a mission by the team leader to kill a renowned titan pilot named "Lastimosa" (Who is a character from the single-player campaign of TF2). So we travel to the planet this Lastimosa is supposedly on and a whole bunch of fighting ensues, but we pretty much take out all opposition with ease. Finally we find Pilot Lastimosa and have a long 2v1 duel with him. After a hard fight we blow up him and his titan and Silent turns to me in his titan and goes "Looks like Lastimosa just had his Lastimoment" Then I woke up.

For the most part, I don't really type anything at the end of a multiplayer games. There have of course been times where I've typed out a smug "ez" in a particularly frustrating game (dota 2) or times where I've had a genuinely close and intense game and I'll type out gg, but I mostly stay quiet. As for the concept of "manners" in video games, I really have no issue with it. My first real experience with a very competitive online community was with the release of Starcraft 2. In Starcraft culture it is considered a standard show of respect to type out "gl hf" or something of a similar vein in the beginning of the game and type "gg" when you tap out. Pros did it tournament play and casuals did it on ladder, that's just how people interacted in that game, be it Brood War or Starcraft 2 so I got used to it. Does gg being used as a courtesy/manner term take away from the meaning of it? I'd say there's an argument to be made in the literal sense that people type it out of habit when a game ends, regardless of whether it was a good game or not, but I can't really say I get hung up over it. I'm more upset when you're playing a team game and the shittiest player on the team that beat you is talking shit in allchat as if they weren't fucking garbage and got carried hard.

Alright, makes more sense now. Appreciated boss.

I'm out of the loop in regards to TF2, are we expecting a new update or is this just people being overly hopeful and subsequently disappointed.

The PUBG situation right now is very interesting to me and even though I don't actively play or follow the game, I have been following the most recent debacle with Epic Games and Fortnite. PUBG has been pretty solidly in the spotlight for the past half a year roughly and it has even grown to become the most popular game on Steam, beating out giants such as Dota and CSGO. That's a very good thing for the game. Unfortunately it's also been in the spotlight with some more mixed and even negative press over the months, most notably the whole situation with PlayerUnknown making a fool of himself in a public chatroom, the stream-sniping ban controversy, the implementation of loot crates with paid keys during early access development and now finally with the POTENTIAL lawsuit against Epic Games. There's a lot to discuss regarding these things if you choose to care about it and I wouldn't blame you if would rather just shrug and go about your day. As for my self I am a relentless and thirsty drama-whore, so I'll dig into it in hopes of finding the juicy bits. So far my conclusion has been that PUBG is probably a fairly solid game and easily the best of the several different battle royale games we've seen since the inception of the original mod in Arma 2. I would probably enjoy playing PUBG with friends quite honestly. Unfortunately I have also concluded that PlayerUnknown is an arrogant prick who has no reservations about shitting on his fanbase and who is willing to go back on his word for the sake of a quick cashgrab (Loot crates in early access after an explicit promise that they wouldn't make it into the game until it had been fully released). Furthermore we're now at a tipping point where PlayerUnknown and his team are considering legal action over a fucking videogame "genre" that they have questionable legal rights to anyway. People are seriously talking about whether making a genre of videogames intellectual property is OK or not. Absolutely fucking ridiculous if you ask me.

God Titanfall 2 is so good

Around 10 minutes I finished up the Witcher and watched the credits roll with pretty unsatisfied feelings. I'm sure everyone and their extended family have heard of the Witcher 3, widely praised as one of, if not the, best RPGs of all time, but it seems most modern Witcher fans haven't bothered playing through the first entry of the series and after having suffered through that game, I honestly can't blame them. The entire reason I even decided to give the original Witcher game a go, is because I belong to the group of people who have yet to play the third Witcher game, or the second one for that matter. I've been wanting to play it for years and now that I finally own a computer that will actually run that game, I figured it was time. I couldn't get myself to jump right into the third installment however, even though a lot of people apparently did. I had to experience the story from the very beginning and so I booted up The Witcher: Enhanced Edition and dove into it. It's a mess. The game released back in 2007 and the visuals are most definitely a product of that time. While the game isn't offensively ugly to look at, it certainly doesn't stand out. The terrain is surprisingly detailed and the developers managed to make Vizima feel like an actual city, but the character models are very basic, which puts a damper on the combat and a lot of the dialogue. Hair physics flipping out during cutscenes, limbs stretching weirdly and mouths not really moving properly are all commonplace in the Witcher. Speaking of the combat, it's fucking awful. I won't bother with the details of the combat system but suffice it to say that it is basic and quickly becomes very tedious. The game is bad at recognizing certain fighting stances you can take and you will only really make meaningful use out of two of them. Magic in the game is also insanely broken and enemy AI is slow and stupid, meaning you can quite literally run circles around your opponents endlessly, trivializing a lot of boss fights. As for the story, it is pretty damn forgettable, with the most interesting twist happening in a CGI cutscene AFTER you've beaten the game. The game's quests consist mainly of kill and fetch quests, much akin to stuff you'd find in a typical MMORPG. Go to this area and kill 8 Ghouls, go to this area and collect 5 Vampire Fangs, you get the idea.The one stand out sidequest involves you having intercourse with a trio of young blonde vampires. That quest was pretty good. The main story is poorly conceptualized and as a player you have no real motivation to follow it. A character you've just met is killed and you must find and avenge him. The game also attempts to throw a romance subplot at you, but unfortunately it leaves little reason not to pick one of the options over the other, so there isn't really any real choice outside of a meta choice by the player spurred on by pure curiousity. The same goes for the choices you have to make in the main quest. You're often presented with options, but the game does such a terrible job at promoting the choices equally and it ends up not being hard at all. Geralt himself comes off as kinda poorly written in the first Witcher game. His personality seems to swing wildly. One moment he doesn't want to get involved in the politics of the realm, the next moment he is acting as a diplomat. One moment he kindly helps the poor folk with Witcher work for no reward other a personal sense of fulfillment the next he is charging extortionist prices for very basic jobs. This isn't anything you can choose in your dialogue most of the time, I might add. Don't even get me started on the whole plotline of Geralt considering settling down with the Sorcererss Triss and the young boy Alvin who remains a constant from the beginning of the game to the end, or the fact that Alvin It's pretty bad. All in all the Witcher ends up a fairly bland and forgettable experience. There are some interesting ideas inside of the game, such as having to obtain knowledge about unnatural beasts in order properly harvest reagents from their bodies, not to mention fight them more efficiently and playing as a Witcher is pretty fucking cool lorewise. The ending is weird and inconclusive, the game is a slog pretty much from start to finish and the combat is frustrating. Compare it to other RPG titles released in 2007, such as the original Mass Effect, and it's not hard to see why the franchise didn't exactly take off into mainstream with the first installment, though it did do quite well for itself.

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.

Dead on arrival

Having played some more of the Destiny 2 beta, my perspective has changed a bit. There is one weapon type available for use in PvP that seems pretty obviously overpowered and it's the Hand Cannon I mentioned in my giant blog a few posts up. Its rate of fire is way too high for the amount of damage it deals per shot and it basically has no loss of accuracy while firing, it feels like McCree's revolver in OW except it deals way more damage. It seems like it's supposed to be balanced by the fact that its long-range accuracy is pretty lacking, but the playable PvP map is so small and condensed that there really isn't anything one might consider long-range. I went from topping the scoreboards every match to doing average/poorly switching from the Hand Cannon to any other weapon. Another issue that has become glaringly obvious after playing the game a bit longer is the fact that "Power" weapon ammo management is sucking a lot more fun out of the game than anything. The Titan class gets two primary weapons and a Power weapon, which is a weapon that is very strong but has limited ammunition available. For the Titan, the options I've seen are a high-powered shotgun and a rocket launcher. I love shotguns in any video game that I play, so I went for it and while it feels very satisfying to use, it pales in comparison to the rocket launcher, that does the same damage as the shotgun close-range, but also doesn't have damage drop-off when fired from afar. There is also no friendly fire in the game, so you don't have to even think when using the rocket launcher. On top of this imbalance, you get power ammo drops from enemies so fucking rarely, that you get to maybe shoot your power weapon ~10 times during a Strike Mission. My final complaint lies in the cooldown of your class abilities. They're PAINFULLY long. I didn't pay much attention to it in the first hour of gameplay because I was busy taking everything in, but now that I've played it some more, I've realized that your abilities take a fucking life-time to cool down and aren't even that good to begin with, so the long cooldown seems pretty unjustified and only serves to slow down the pace of the game for no reason.

I played it some hours this morning and I'll give you my take on it. This is coming from the perspective of someone who never touched the original Destiny game. I'd like to make a note that I had zero graphical/performance issues while playing the open beta, it ran great throughout. Starting from the very beginning you are given the choice of 3 different classes to pick: Titan, Hunter and Warlock. Distilling those 3 classes to their core essence, they are the classic Strength, Agility and Intelligence based roles. As I discovered later, all of these classes also have subclasses, which opens up the gameplay variety a fair bit. I picked the Titan class during the beta. Right away you load into a cinematic cut-scene featuring a group of characters that I can only assume are from the original game, which I imagine would be fun for returning players to see, but as a new player I didn't care much. Bad guys known as the "Red Legion" are attacking and you and your fellow "Guardians" muster a desperate defense in order to buy the civilians under your care time to escape. Long story short, you get your ass kicked by the big bad leader of the Red Legion known as Dominus Ghaul and the player character is left for dead by the end of it. The beta then jumps you into the action by skipping you to player level 20, giving you a full set of armour and weapons and immediately allows you to matchmake with other players. After playing through the tutorial and messing around with my inventory a bit, I joined up with two of my friends and proceeded to play the one and only PvE mission that is available in the open beta. Skipping over a long-winded detailing of my experience with the PvE mission, I'll just tell you that it was honestly pretty fun. The game has your standard fare of enemy variety in the PvE mode, everything from simple grunts to more specialized and dangerous enemies, including mini-bosses and actual bosses with abilities and different phases you have to fight through. Flying through the environment using the thrusters attached to my heavy armor and blasting through the Red Legion with a high-powered shotgun was awesome. Depending on your class, you also get a range of abilities to play around with in addition to your arsenal of weapons. Playing as the Titan with the Striker subclass, I got access to a Flashbang Grenade and two different types of Barricades that you can cast anywhere you like as a means of instant cover from enemy fire. I also had enhanced melee capabilities along with an airborne combo-attack that allowed me to jump sky-high and then dive fists first into enemies. Finally there is the "Super" ability, as Destiny 2 takes a page out of the MOBA-genre's book and gives each subclass a unique ultimate-type ability that you charge up by doing stuff in combat. For the Striker this ability was "Fist of Havoc", which turns you into a head-smashing, shoulder-bashing melee god for a small time. The PvP mode is your standard arcade-shooting experience with a Destiny 2 skin layered on top, which isn't a criticism by the way. I really liked how the PvP played out. It has all the game-modes we're used to in these kinda games like Domination and Sabotage, only with different names for some reason. It also has a competitive mode where you're down for the count and the rest of the round when you get killed, unlike the quick-play mode where you die and respawn after a short timer. I didn't play enough to really comment about balance at all, but it seems that whatever loadout your Guardian has is universal for both PvE and PvP, which worries me a little bit because unless gear stats are normalized in PvP content, that might mean that you'll see people with really high-end PvE gear absolutely dominating the PvP scene by sheer force of better weapon stats rather than player skill. I grew very fond of the my Hand Cannon when fighting other players, as it effectively 3-shot any enemy at medium-close range, which synergized nicely with my melee-focused class. Revolvers in space are always cool. Overall, I had fun with the Destiny 2 open beta, more fun than I thought I would. That being said, I still won't be spending money on this game come release. I am unconvinced that this game is worth the $60 price tag they've thrown on it. The PvP, while fun right now, seems like something I would most likely get tired of in a few weeks at best. I've always been more of a PvE focused person and while the one mission available in the beta was really fun, it would not surprise me if the full game launched with <25 missions, which in my mind is not enough. I'm ready to be positively surprised though, if the game releases and it turns out it has like 50+ PvE missions to play, I might seriously consider buying it.