What video game are you playing?

[nlroma1o]

For those of you playing the Witcher 3, how are you enjoying the secondary quests? I just played for like 6 hours yesterday and got lost in side missions. The game is so freaking amazing! Theres a secondary quest called Cardinal Sins, so awesome. The writing in this game is best of the best.

 

[gkIrish]

For those of you playing the Witcher 3, how are you enjoying the secondary quests? I just played for like 6 hours yesterday and got lost in side missions. The game is so freaking amazing! Theres a secondary quest called Cardinal Sins, so awesome. The writing in this game is best of the best.

The side quests are incredible.

 

[IrishinSyria]

I've been sitting on a copy of the witcher for a couple months now, I had it flagged as my post fallout game but then I went on the mother of all KOTOR (star wars, really, kicks)- played 2 for the first time, then went back and played a darkside run through 1 and am in the middle of the same for 2.

 

[Veritate Duce Progredi]

For those of you playing the Witcher 3, how are you enjoying the secondary quests? I just played for like 6 hours yesterday and got lost in side missions. The game is so freaking amazing! Theres a secondary quest called Cardinal Sins, so awesome. The writing in this game is best of the best.

The side quests are incredible.

Damn it you guys, I keep trying to prolong the time before purchasing a system. My wife implored me to not buy it because I'll get sucked in. I'm seriously tempted to go buy a system with Fallout and Witcher. And I know I want to play Tomb Raider and Halo 5 after I've given 300-400 hours to the first two games.

I've missed Skyrim so much.

 

[greyhammer90]

The side quests are incredible.

The side quests in the Witcher are better written and occasionally have more content than the main storyline of most games. It's really pretty amazing. Especially since they sell this game DRM free for 30 dollars on PC.

 

[nlroma1o]

The side quests in the Witcher are better written and occasionally have more content than the main storyline of most games. It's really pretty amazing. Especially since they sell this game DRM free for 30 dollars on PC.

^This 100%. I just finish AC Syndicate, and I enjoyed the game. The story was solid, and the mission design and overall gameplay was fun and better than Unity. But man... it is an empty shell in some ways when compared to The Witcher 3. Theres just so much to interact with in the world, and so much out there that can be explored. AC Syndicate was an amazing rendition of London, but there's just not enough to interact with. There's no secrets in the map that you can stumble upon. I'm just over 40 hrs in The Witcher and it just seems like the content is never ending. My game of the year for sure.

 

[nlroma1o]

The Division Beta went live yesterday. Everything I've watched so far is much more impressive than what I expected.

 

[NorthDakota]

Was thinking about getting into Rust on PC. Open world survival type game. Looks fun. Heard good things. Anyone here given it a go?

As for now, I am stuck in the past playing FIFA 15 on 360 and a fair amount of Company of Heroes 2. The more I hear about the Witcher the more I want to give it a go but I fear I will find myself single(perhaps unemployed?) as I tend to immerse myself in those kind of games.

 

[ulukinatme]

Was thinking about getting into Rust on PC. Open world survival type game. Looks fun. Heard good things. Anyone here given it a go?

Not a fan really. I may have posted some screenshots and info a year or so ago. The game has changed a bit since then, and honestly I think I liked it more before. There are better survival games out there imo. The Rust dev team basically scrapped Rust almost completely a year or more ago, then rebuilt it. I'm not all that happy about the changes, and last I checked they were still missing features that were in the old game.

I have an issue with any Survival game where your character never logs out from the game world. Rust is one of those games. When you log out, your character basically goes to "sleep" and lays down on the ground. That's fine usually if you're among the Top 3 players on the server and you have a massive base to protect you. If you're a lowly peon in a shack, that means people can bust down your door, take all your stuff, and kill you in your sleep leaving you naked and broke the next time you log back in. How do you avoid that? You really can't, unless you're logged in all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. For people that have lives, that's impossible. There's some other solutions too, like only playing on servers with friends, like private servers. I can tell you that gets old after awhile though, there's little conflict and the NPCs in Rust aren't particularly dangerous.

In the end, games like Rust always devolve into one thing: base raiding. At some point, and usually pretty early, once you've overcome the "Survival" aspect and you're stronger than the NPC critters, the game either gets boring and you quit or you're forced to either raid or prevent yourself from being raided. At one point on a server I labeled myself "The Law" and I went around busting base raiders and turning the tables on these people by taking their bases for myself. That required countless hours farming materials for C4 to bust into their bases and then put down my own doors in their own bases so they couldn't get back into their homes. Gets old.

There are some cool aspects of Survival games like this though. I remember one of my first nights in the old Rust (Before the devs rebuilt it). I was in a small shack I built. I felt like I was well off the beaten path where people wouldn't find me, hidden away. I was very careful not to have any lights/fires lit to draw attention to myself. That didn't matter though. In the dead of the night as I sat quietly and tried not to make a sound, I heard someone moving around outside my shack. I still stayed silent, hoping whatever it was would leave, but they may have seen my character through the cracks in the shack. Suddenly there were smashes of an axe hitting my front door, and a dude with a thick German accent speaking over voice chat. He demanded "Open the door! Open the door now!" over and over, all the while chopping at my entrance. This went on for several minutes, and it kind of gets your heart pumping the first time it happens. I had nothing but a stone hatchet on me, and no armor, which was no match for a more experienced player. I knew it was just a matter of time before he chopped through my door, so instead of letting him have my stuff I started throwing everything I had on the ground effectively destroying it. I had no other choice, as there was no other escape for me and I wasn't about to let this guy have my stuff (As little as it was). He eventually did chop his way in, and then promptly shot me and looted what little junk I wasn't able to destroy. That was my first night in Rust. I had never really experienced a Survival game like that before, and it was actually a bit scary, but an entertaining experience despite losing all my stuff.

In any case, it's kind of a fun game, but I've enjoyed other Survival games more. Not sure if you've played it, but I really liked 7 Days to Die. You don't see a lot of base raiding in that game, at least not when I played last. If you try to break someone's containers it usually destroys anything inside, so people really can't steal your stuff if it's locked up. Also, you get base "Claim Blocks" which increase the durability of your doors and walls, making it much harder for people to break in. Couple that with the fact that the zombies can be a very real threat in that game, and people are usually too busy surviving to bother raiding others (Unless they're playing on a real easy server). Zombie hordes at night can bring anywhere from 25-75+ zombies trying to break down your walls, even concrete is no match for them given enough zeds and time.

 

[IrishLion]

I got hooked on some youtube videos, maybe about a year ago, of an open-world survival game (I think involving zombies) where this guy was basically running around doing whatever he wanted. I remember that he build a "helicopter" of some sort in one video, and found four identical high-rise apartment buildings to loot in another.

It's gonna bug the shit out of me now that I can't remember what it was.

 

[ulukinatme]

Still playing quite a bit of Fallout. I'm getting heavy into the modding now that I've been through the vanilla game once. I've been taking a bit of a break recently though to play Battlefront. I'm up to Rank 46 currently and got a couple buddies into it, but they royally suck at most of the smaller maps like Cargo, Droid Run, Drop Zone, etc. They've all but boycotted those matches because they usually die twice as often as they kill, if not worse. Lately all I've been able to get them to do is Heroes vs. Villains and Fighter Squadron. I like both game modes, but that's all they ever want to play...gets a little old.

 

[NorthDakota]

Not a fan really. I may have posted some screenshots and info a year or so ago. The game has changed a bit since then, and honestly I think I liked it more before. There are better survival games out there imo. The Rust dev team basically scrapped Rust almost completely a year or more ago, then rebuilt it. I'm not all that happy about the changes, and last I checked they were still missing features that were in the old game.

I have an issue with any Survival game where your character never logs out from the game world. Rust is one of those games. When you log out, your character basically goes to "sleep" and lays down on the ground. That's fine usually if you're among the Top 3 players on the server and you have a massive base to protect you. If you're a lowly peon in a shack, that means people can bust down your door, take all your stuff, and kill you in your sleep leaving you naked and broke the next time you log back in. How do you avoid that? You really can't, unless you're logged in all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. For people that have lives, that's impossible. There's some other solutions too, like only playing on servers with friends, like private servers. I can tell you that gets old after awhile though, there's little conflict and the NPCs in Rust aren't particularly dangerous.

In the end, games like Rust always devolve into one thing: base raiding. At some point, and usually pretty early, once you've overcome the "Survival" aspect and you're stronger than the NPC critters, the game either gets boring and you quit or you're forced to either raid or prevent yourself from being raided. At one point on a server I labeled myself "The Law" and I went around busting base raiders and turning the tables on these people by taking their bases for myself. That required countless hours farming materials for C4 to bust into their bases and then put down my own doors in their own bases so they couldn't get back into their homes. Gets old.

There are some cool aspects of Survival games like this though. I remember one of my first nights in the old Rust (Before the devs rebuilt it). I was in a small shack I built. I felt like I was well off the beaten path where people wouldn't find me, hidden away. I was very careful not to have any lights/fires lit to draw attention to myself. That didn't matter though. In the dead of the night as I sat quietly and tried not to make a sound, I heard someone moving around outside my shack. I still stayed silent, hoping whatever it was would leave, but they may have seen my character through the cracks in the shack. Suddenly there were smashes of an axe hitting my front door, and a dude with a thick German accent speaking over voice chat. He demanded "Open the door! Open the door now!" over and over, all the while chopping at my entrance. This went on for several minutes, and it kind of gets your heart pumping the first time it happens. I had nothing but a stone hatchet on me, and no armor, which was no match for a more experienced player. I knew it was just a matter of time before he chopped through my door, so instead of letting him have my stuff I started throwing everything I had on the ground effectively destroying it. I had no other choice, as there was no other escape for me and I wasn't about to let this guy have my stuff (As little as it was). He eventually did chop his way in, and then promptly shot me and looted what little junk I wasn't able to destroy. That was my first night in Rust. I had never really experienced a Survival game like that before, and it was actually a bit scary, but an entertaining experience despite losing all my stuff.

In any case, it's kind of a fun game, but I've enjoyed other Survival games more. Not sure if you've played it, but I really liked 7 Days to Die. You don't see a lot of base raiding in that game, at least not when I played last. If you try to break someone's containers it usually destroys anything inside, so people really can't steal your stuff if it's locked up. Also, you get base "Claim Blocks" which increase the durability of your doors and walls, making it much harder for people to break in. Couple that with the fact that the zombies can be a very real threat in that game, and people are usually too busy surviving to bother raiding others (Unless they're playing on a real easy server). Zombie hordes at night can bring anywhere from 25-75+ zombies trying to break down your walls, even concrete is no match for them given enough zeds and time.

That was one thing I was nervous about...always being logged in pretty much. I'd hate to log in and be dead all the time. Thank you for your input. I'll look into the genre more before committing to one.

 

[ulukinatme]

I got hooked on some youtube videos, maybe about a year ago, of an open-world survival game (I think involving zombies) where this guy was basically running around doing whatever he wanted. I remember that he build a "helicopter" of some sort in one video, and found four identical high-rise apartment buildings to loot in another.

It's gonna bug the shit out of me now that I can't remember what it was.

Maybe DayZ? I was going to get into that one, but never got around to it. Other than building a helicopter (Was it a working one?) everything else you described sounds similar to 7 Days to Die. I really like the crafting aspect of 7DTD. It's very Minecraft-esque, but with better menus and more dangerous NPCs. There's nothing like having a zombie horde attack your base in the middle of the night when all you have to fight them off with is a bow and arrow. You'll see zombies breaking through walls, and you're either busy trying to shoot at them from the roof, or you're trying to frantically patch walls as they bust them down. That doesn't always happen, but it can when you're first starting out. Most survival games have weak ass NPCs that never threaten your player much after the first few gaming hours. 7DTD provides a very real threat of NPC attacks.

 

[ulukinatme]

That was one thing I was nervous about...always being logged in pretty much. I'd hate to log in and be dead all the time. Thank you for your input. I'll look into the genre more before committing to one.

I've tried a handful of different survival games like Rust. Here's my take:

Ark is very similar to Rust, but with dinosaurs. It was pretty fun actually. Depending on the server settings it can take a very, very, very long time to tame a dinosaur. Smaller ones are easier to tame, taming something like a T-Rex can take a lot of man hours, resources, and maybe more than one person. Some servers have reduced the required taming time though. Just know this: similar to Rust, people can bust into your base and taking your things or steal/kill your dinos while you're offline! I didn't encounter this issue personally because I was playing on a private server with friends, but I have a buddy that quit the game because he was constantly getting raided on another server. The dev team seems to push out updates pretty quickly.

Life is Feudal is a medieval survival game. It has RPG elements, and you're usually provided with a limited amount of experience you can gain. You use your experience in a variety of ways to train abilities, like black smithing, wood cutting, masonry, alchemy, cooking, etc. Because most servers limit your experience points, it forces players to specialize in just a few fields. While this limits you, it also forces you to join communities and build together. It's kind of neat when you see groups of people band together to build castle walls, towers, houses, and other buildings. There's a good sense of community in the game, it's very, very hard to make it on your own as it takes a long time to accomplish large tasks. I once built my own little village, and just to build a stone wall around the place it took a few weeks by myself! I haven't played in about 6 months, but the NPCs aren't much to speak of. As far as hostile NPCs there's wolves and bears, that's about it. You can hunt deer and pigs too for meat. There used to be a real issue with people stealing your stuff in this game, but not anymore. It used to be people had to dig holes in the ground and bury bags with their items in them. The devs implemented a "Monument" system which acts like a Claim Block in 7 Days to Die. It provides a radius around your area where people are considered trespassing if they enter, and it prevents trespassers from messing with your stuff.

I got Empyrion: Galactic Survival a few months ago. I only played it for a few weeks, it's still a pretty early Alpha imo. Fun little game though. You start off crashed on an alien planet, your ship mostly in pieces. You have to use what remains of your ship to provide basic life functions, like machines to cook food and provide oxygen. After awhile you can go mine resources and collect meat from alien creatures to become self sustaining. You can build a little speeder, then you can build a small spaceship (Or fix your old one) and leave the planet. From there you can explore space and land on other planets. Other planets provide new challenges and better resources. It's got "Very Positive" feedback on Steam, and it's only $18 right now. Downside is, last I checked, you can't run a server with lots of people connected yet. You can do some local connection stuff to play with friends, but not much more than that last I checked. Like I said, it's a smaller developer, and the dev team don't move as quick as say...Ark. Kinda fun blasting out of a planet's atmosphere though and cruising around space, there's a sense of accomplishment the first time you're able to break out into space. I only played single player, so I don't know how base security works in this game.

Other than 7 Days to Die and Minecraft, I've played a few other Survival games or at least researched them. The ones above are games I've either played or bought in the last year or so. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll provide some input if I'm familiar with the game.

 

[blueNDgold44]

Loving Ark on X1 right now. Can't wait till its an official game and you can host dedicated servers

 

[ulukinatme]

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[ulukinatme]

There's a big Steam sale going on right now. Tons of games are marked down big time, some are newer (Released within the last year) games that are seeing 50% cuts, like Witcher III at $30. I'm thinking about getting Elite Dangerous finally to try it out, Lion mentioned it back in July, it's $15 right now. Farcry 4 is down to $20. Mad Max is $20. Dark Souls II is down to $18. Just a handful there. Sale ends tomorrow morning at 10am I believe, just saw it this evening.

If you go to your main Steam Store page there's some kind of banner with a monkey on it with two options. It's a "Choose your own adventure" type deal, but whatever you pick will determine what deals Steam will show you. Example: first obstacle is a body of water, do you swim across or drive around? If you choose the swim option, Steam shows you a bunch of underwater type games that are on sale, like Bioshock or Shark Attack Deathmatch 2. Drive option gives you a bunch of driving games naturally.

 

[NorthDakota]

Steam Sale, just got myself PayDay 2. Some of my friends play it. I believe the premise is armed bank robberies.

Also just bought Cities: Skylines. I think its supposed to be SimCity on Roids.

 

[ulukinatme]

Steam Sale, just got myself PayDay 2. Some of my friends play it. I believe the premise is armed bank robberies.

Also just bought Cities: Skylines. I think its supposed to be SimCity on Roids.

Payday 2 is excellent, it's THE heist multiplayer game to have. I picked it up while waiting for heists to be implemented in Grand Theft Auto V Online a few years ago, and honestly Payday 2 blows GTA heists out of the water. I've played it quite a bit on PC. I bought it for console too because my real life friends don't have gaming PC's, but unfortunately Overkill Studios sucks at console support. PC has dozens and dozens of DLCs for Payday 2, but Overkill just does a shitty job keeping the DLC coming to the console side. That said, I wouldn't pay full price for most DLCs for the game. They usually go on sale frequently and often, and many DLCs are nothing more than weapon packs and maybe a new character.

Great game though. There's tons of modding to be done on guns, and they keep adding new weapons all the time. Find some friends and start doing heists together. The best part is once you reach max level, you have the ability to go "Infamous" and reset your level to 0, but you get +1 to Infamy. Infamy levels give you bonuses each time you reach a new Infamy level, some bonuses are increased xp, some bonuses are reduced requirements for perk levels, and other bonuses are just trivial things like cool masks or color options. Overall the whole Infamy system adds replay value to the game, because starting at level 0 again takes away all your cool abilities you used to have, adding some challenge back (You keep the guns you've bought, but some of them you won't be able to use until you've leveled back up sufficiently)

If you're looking for a friend to play with, I can stop in and run some heists with you sometime. Send me a PM and let me know.

 

[calvegas04]

Been playing Battlefield 4 on PS4, such a great game

 

[ulukinatme]

Just saw Wasteland 2 is also on the Steam sale, it's 50% off at $20 and worth it imo. The sale actually goes till 10am PST, so most of us on the East Coast have till 1pm. Anyone who likes turn based isometric wasteland fighting and humor, Wasteland 2 is a great game. It's made by many of the original people that worked on the Fallout franchise, and it spiritually feels like the successor to the old Fallout games, so if you enjoyed those I highly recommend checking out Wasteland 2. When you finish the game you can restart using your old characters and choose all new paths/quest options that you didn't do the first time, so there's replay value too.

And who doesn't love misguided clergy with miniguns?

 

[wizards8507]

Is $49 for a year of Xbox Live from Amazon as good as I'm going to find?

 

[NorthDakota]

Payday 2 is excellent, it's THE heist multiplayer game to have. I picked it up while waiting for heists to be implemented in Grand Theft Auto V Online a few years ago, and honestly Payday 2 blows GTA heists out of the water. I've played it quite a bit on PC. I bought it for console too because my real life friends don't have gaming PC's, but unfortunately Overkill Studios sucks at console support. PC has dozens and dozens of DLCs for Payday 2, but Overkill just does a shitty job keeping the DLC coming to the console side. That said, I wouldn't pay full price for most DLCs for the game. They usually go on sale frequently and often, and many DLCs are nothing more than weapon packs and maybe a new character.

Great game though. There's tons of modding to be done on guns, and they keep adding new weapons all the time. Find some friends and start doing heists together. The best part is once you reach max level, you have the ability to go "Infamous" and reset your level to 0, but you get +1 to Infamy. Infamy levels give you bonuses each time you reach a new Infamy level, some bonuses are increased xp, some bonuses are reduced requirements for perk levels, and other bonuses are just trivial things like cool masks or color options. Overall the whole Infamy system adds replay value to the game, because starting at level 0 again takes away all your cool abilities you used to have, adding some challenge back (You keep the guns you've bought, but some of them you won't be able to use until you've leveled back up sufficiently)

If you're looking for a friend to play with, I can stop in and run some heists with you sometime. Send me a PM and let me know.

I'll have to do that.

 

[ulukinatme]

I'll have to do that.

Fair warning, I haven't played a number of the newer heists, but my character has a number of Infamy levels already and should have plenty of cash, so I can pony up the funds for the heist extras, like experienced get-a-way drivers and extra ammo bags, so that can save you and your buddies some coin. I'm familiar with all the heists through Hoxton's Breakout. I can help answer any questions on builds and perks too, I've toyed with a number of different setups. I know they nerfed it on PC recently, but stacking Dodge has been king for survival, more so than heavy armor.

 

[blueNDgold44]

Is $49 for a year of Xbox Live from Amazon as good as I'm going to find?

Got mine for 35 a month ago. But 49 isn't a bad deal.

 

[wizards8507]

Got mine for 35 a month ago. But 49 isn't a bad deal.

Ended up joining Best Buy's Gamers' Club Unlocked. It was $30 for two years and I get 20% off all new games and Disney Infinity Figues. They had 12 months of Live for $40 for new subscribers.

Sent from my Galaxy Note4 using Tapatalk.

 

[ulukinatme]

Bethesda announces first three Fallout 4 DLCs with more to come. Also, the price of the Season Pass is getting jacked up from $29.99 to $49.99 on March 1st. If you've previously bought it, or you purchase it before March 1st, you're good.

https://bethesda.net/?utm_source=fa...nd-workshop-far-harbor-and-more/2016/02/16/77

 

[ulukinatme]

Downloaded and played a trial of Elite: Dangerous on XB1 last week.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ISR4ebdGlOk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The trial only allows you to do some training runs, and the training doesn't actually help you learn the controls in any way, so it took me about 30 minutes of messing around to learn how to fully control my personal ship... but once I got it, I appreciated it right away.

You're a first-person pilot, and the ship interface is beautiful as you check gauges, look at navigation and cargo menus, deploy weapons ("hard points"), and so on.

The ship has controls for acceleration, reversing, flying horizontally up and down without moving forward/backward, deploying your hard points to access your primary/secondary weaponry. You can toggle the ship's power to balance the effectiveness of weapons, shields, engines, and systems; give your weapons/shields a bit more juice during combat but sacrifice top speed, or juice up your engines and sacrifice your defensive capabilities.

You can initiate a jump to one of the billions of actual star systems that are included in the game, but the trial doesn't allow the jump drive or whatever they call it to be activated.

I was very impressed and will probably pick up the full game. I'm curious to try the open world and to see how interactions are with other players.

Did you ever pick this game up, Lion? I got it in a Steam sale earlier in the week and I've been trying to play it...but sometimes I think the developers were dropped on their heads and children. The flight mechanics are all pretty good, I love the twitch based flight model that requires a flight stick over the Eve style of "micromanage flight and battles with various settings and configurations." Another thing I like is the fact they don't hold your hand in this game. They have some tutorials on how to accomplish basic flight, how to dock, how to shoot, and that's about it. They don't step you through a series of quests to get you familiar with how the factions work, or where to go, or anything like that....and with that comes good and bad stuff.

The bad: the quests can be fucking awful at times in this game. They start you out at a random station with a loaner Sidewinder ship and 1000 credits to your name which can't buy anything really aside from fuel. There are no starter missions really, so I looked through the available jobs at the starter station...one asked me to procure some super rare metal and deliver it to the station (Not happening without a mining laser, and I couldn't buy the metal at another station even if they had it due to my lack of funds), so that mission was out. The other mission involved killing some local pirates, so I took that. On the way to find said pirates I ended up running into a Wanted NPC in a much higher class of ship and promptly got destroyed. I eventually killed the pirates and got a small reward for the effort, fortunately the loaner ship costs nothing to replace. Unfortunately, once I completed that mission there were no more available missions at my starter station, all remaining missions were blocked because either:
A) I did not have the required combat level, trader level, or exploration level to accept the mission
B) I did not have the required reputation level with a certain faction to take a mission
The above two issues prevent you from taking 95% of the missions at any given station. The kicker is to increase BOTH combat and trader levels, as well as reputation with factions, you typically need to take missions! You can raise combat by fighting random ships, but every ship outguns you in the beginning and there's no "newbie" zones with weak ships you can pursue for experience. You typically need to take a mission that will hopefully spawn lower level ships for you to destroy, otherwise you're at the mercy of whatever random ships are in your sector (And those ships will run the gamete of weak to insane difficulty, with most ships falling in the moderate to insane categories)

So, I went to another station. Nothing there. I went to another system, took some crummy trader missions to ferry "x" goods to a different location. The missions weren't particularly well paying, but they got me some very much needed Trader xp. No more missions at that location, so I did some snooping around online and found out that Exploration was a decent way to make some early coin. Exploration involves going to nearby galaxies and scanning various stars, planets, etc that previously haven't been discovered. In all likelihood they have been discovered at some point, but that's beside the point. You then can sell your discoveries to a space station in a nearby galaxy, but the kicker is it has to be 20+ light years away, you can only sell the data once, and you get more money the further you are from the original system when you sell it. You get Exploration xp from selling the data. After a few hours of compiling data and jumping several systems away I had enough cash and xp to make some tweaks to my starter ship and take a few extra missions, but not much.

Overall I seemed to find myself spending an awful lot of time actually looking for missions I could do, and trying to find ships to fight that were both "Wanted" and within my ships capabilities of destroying. Attacking anything but a Wanted ship will put a bounty on your head, and that's bad news. When I DID finally get some more combat missions I could do again, some of these missions involved the most convoluted bullshit you've ever seen, or they required you to hunt down a specific target they may (or may not) decide to show up in the system they're said to be in. I spent a lot of time in supercruise mode (A speed somewhere between normal ship top speed and hyperspace) flying around systems not finding my target, or if I found my target he would be in supercruise himself and I couldn't pull him out of supercruise to fight him without buying an Interdictor tool which I had no money for. As far as other convoluted bullshit when it comes to missions, you may get a mission to rescue a hostage that's stowed away in a cargo hold of a ship. To rescue said hostage you have to drop the other ship's shields and repeatedly shoot the cargo hatch on his ship which will periodically leak cargo out into space...but not all his cargo! Twice now I've hit a target's cargo hold and had it eject hostages, and I skillfully scooped them up all while the enemy ship was firing on me, but when I went to return the hostage I got no credit for it and couldn't complete the mission. Turns out a given enemy ship may have many hostages on board, and you have to get lucky enough to have the "Mission specific" tagged hostage get ejected when you're hitting the cargo hold. That's where the developers have gone stupid, because based on research from other players it seems most enemy ships will be destroyed long before you empty the entire contents of their cargo hold due to the fighting. That means your hostage may not be ejected from the enemy cargo hold before the ship explodes, which means the mission automatically fails. You can use some limpnet tool or something to hack a target's cargo hold, but much like your blaster shots these limpnets only eject part of a target's cargo hold, and I could only carry a few of them on my ship at a time.

So yeah...long story short, I'm not sure what developers were thinking when it comes to providing decent, available missions for the players, and their requirements for completion are ridiculous at times. I don't like my hand being held, I prefer some challenge, but Elite Dangerous goes beyond that imo. The whole hostage situation I outlined above is just one example. Sometimes you go to a system and the contact doesn't show or doesn't want to come out of Supercruise so you can't fight him without an Interdictor. Sometimes you're supposed to meet a contact and they tell you to follow them into Supercruise, but when they drop back down into normal space they're not there. Sometimes you're asked to kill 15 random pirates at an asteroid belt and there are none. Sometimes you're asked to procure 4 tons of Platinum as part of a multi-part mission, then you're asked to deliver 4 tons of Copper somewhere else...and the mission is bugged and won't let you start that second step! I mean...it's bad. If the game was just flying around and shooting stuff, that part works pretty great even though it can be hard to find ships that you're both capable of defeating and are "Wanted." The missions though....they're fucking awful at times. The best paying missions I've come across for starting players seem to be ferrying illegal goods to other locations. Typically they provide the illegal goods up front, so it's no cost to you to go and get them (Unlike a lot of trader missions), and all you have to do is drop them off at another station without getting scanned. Obviously there's some luck involved with the scanning part, but if you're fast there typically isn't an issue.

It probably seems like I'm bitching a lot, and I probably am, I just really want to like this game and I'm having a hard time cutting through the bullshit. I'm no stranger to flight sims, I grew up on TIE Fighter and I've played a number of flight sims since. That's why it's so hard to swallow how poorly designed and buggy a lot of these missions are. The game itself is beautiful, pretty nice graphics without an incredible drain on my system. The mission designs are just awful though. I just saw this review in Steam, it's the "Most helpful" review right now listed, and I kind of wish I saw this one sooner It spells out the issues pretty well:

"Oh... my... God. Is it really you? Commander Zigglepants?"

"Yeah. Heh. Nice to meet a fan."

"I can't believe it. I've always wanted to be a space pilot like you. You've done EVERYTHING. How did you get started?"

"Well, believe it or not my first job was doing delivery runs."

"Really? That must have been tedius."

"It was. And the pay was terrible. You'd accept a mission in one star system and do nothing but hop from star system to star system for an hour or more before accepting your tiny payment.

"Sounds pretty bad."

"Yeah. I only did that for a short time before I got into smuggling."

"Oh, cool. Sneaking into heavily armed facilities with illegal cargo? That sort of thing?"

"Exactly. Although you only do the sneaking at the end bit of your journey. The rest of it was just as dull as the deliveries. And even the sneaking was only fun the first few times. After that it became pretty routine. The pay was a lot better, though."

"So how did you become a famous bounty hunter?"

"I'm afriad the stories are exaggerated. I took my first contract at my local station. It told me to fly to a nearby star and hunt down a notorious pirate."

"Did you get him?"

"No. I showed up at the star and he wasn't there. I flew around scanning promising signals, but each one turned out to be a dud. To make it worse, it took about 10 minutes to fly between each signal and there wasn't much to do in the meantime. After a few hours of this, the contract expired."

"That's too bad."

"Yeah, the next few contracts turned out the same so at that point I gave up, bought a warrant scanner, and decided to go freelance."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, it means you sit in one place next to a navigation beacon or resource extraction point, and hope to catch pirates if they show up."

"Neat. How many did you catch?"

"None. It took me about an hour to pick up the scanner and fly to a promising system. Then I waited around for a few hours scanning ships but no pirates showed up. Well, a couple did... but none of them came out of supercruise. After a few nights of this, I decided to dump the stupid scanner into the sun. When I got home, I received a strange message. Someone wanted to hire me to carry some mystery cargo to a certain sector and wait for further instructions."

"Did you take the job?"

"Of course! It seemed like the first interesting thing that had happened to me as a space commander. Yeah, I accepted the job and headed out to the sector they named. Took a lot of time to get there. Then I started waiting for my contact."

"Who was it?"

"I dunno. He never showed. I waited around for a couple hours and eventually the mission expired. I did get to fight some pirates, ironically. It seems like they really wanted that cargo, whatever it was. They should have just asked. After waiting around for a few hours, I tossed it into the sun too. Hold on, I have a customer."

Commander Zigglepants turns away and talks into his headset.

"Hello, welcome to McSpaceport. Can I take your order? Combo #2? That will be 4,000 credits. First window, please." He turns back. "Sorry about that."

"No problem. So you work a drive-through window now?"

"This is WAY more fun. Trust me."

"You know what, I still think I want to be a space commander."

"Suit yourself... but can I offer a word of advice?"

"Please!"

"You're going to spend most of your time travelling and waiting around, so bring a video game to keep yourself entertained."

"Got it."

"...and make sure it's NOT Elite: Dangerous."

 

[ulukinatme]

Oh, and you were curious about the interactions with other players, Lion? There are no interactions. Space is a big place of course, and with hundreds of star systems in the game it seems like everyone is pretty spread out. Most times when I'm in a system there are no other players there. Some of the larger systems will have a player or two at the biggest space station there, but they're never chatting with you or even chatting among themselves in a local chat. Most of them are just busy doing their own thing. One time I accidentally killed a target that wasn't Wanted, and this goes back into mission BS, because SOMETIMES when a target is traveling through a system he will despawn and may come back as "Clean" which will put a bounty on your head if you attack and kill them. Well, that happened to me, a target was Wanted and reappeared as Clean and I killed him. I didn't want the threat of a bounty hanging over my head, so I asked two other players if they wanted to clear my bounty for me so things could return to normal. I got no response, and I never saw another player after that. I ended up sacrificing myself to some local NPC police force so I could be done with the matter. Elite Dangerous has been a pretty lonely game.

 

[nlroma1o]

I downloaded Helldivers for free on PSN the other week. Just played it last night for the first time. Its pretty awesome. I recommend ppl check it out since its free to PSPlus memebers.