marlowe221 wrote:I'm playing Metro 2033 at the moment. It's pretty cool but I enjoy fighting other humans far more than fighting the mutants. The mutants are just bullet sponges.
I plan to get Far Cry 4 in the near future since I just upgraded my GPU. I really should get FC3 too - I never finished that one (PS3 YLOD).
The new Wolfenstein game looks pretty cool too.
Far Cry 4 is like a shitty Far Cry 3 with slightly better graphics. The story blows in my opinion it's one of those games where you don't really have a lot of good choices you just have a bunch of slightly less shitty choices. Plus a lot of the stuff surrounding your family is kept insanely vague until it gets cleared up in the final few minutes.
My favorite part though was the ending because one of the antagonist sums the game up very well. Simply put regardless of the choices you made the conclusion would have been exactly the same and if you had simply sat there and done nothing at the beginning you would have reached the same outcome without having to murder a couple thousand people .
I will say this Pagan Min is a great antagonist even though you usually end up fighting his underlings instead of him directly for the majority of the game.
I played the original Far Cry on PC, and enjoyed it up until the Trigen crap emerged and ruined the game. I quit playing after that.
I played and finished Far Cry Instincts on Xbox. It was actually a really, really solid FPS. I thought it was much better than the original Far Cry. Mainly because while Crytek are fantastic technical developers, they are not the best game designers... and Ubisoft Montreal did a better job at developing the actual gameplay in Instincts.
I own the rest of the Far Cry games but haven't played any of them yet. I've heard Far Cry 4 isn't that great. But hey, at least it has elephants that you can ride on.
I have enjoyed what I have played of FarCry 2, though I haven't spent that much time with it. I did notice that it feels like it takes a bit to get going, and the enemy respawn rate is ridiculous. I appreciate it's open aesthetic, and I think its approach to an open world and storytelling is fun(that opening ride in the jeep is pretty amazing), but I have found other open world FPS games I prefer more.
Oh, and going off on a branch, but I really didn't care for Crysis when I played through it. It never felt comfortable.
I thought Far Cry 4 was better than 3. Better music, cooler location, flying vehicles, less bros.
Far Cry 1 I hate, the monsters ruin it.
Crysis 1-2 are utterly average at their best. Again, once the aliens pop in, it's not fun. And they take up a good chunk of the games.
Far Cry 2 is like the Dark Souls of these games. It's insanely weird and can be very hard at first, but I really enjoyed it. The plague thing aside. It doesn't hold your hand, unlike 3-4. I wish 3-4 were more hardcore like this one, but the AssCreed Ubisoft shopping list fever hit those games. Far Cry 2 didn't have all that clutter and garbage missions/extras etc filling up the entire map. That's my knock on 3-4, but I still had fun with them.
The thing with Far Cry 4 is a lot of the new additions also break the game. The biggest thing was the flying vehicles I got so bored climbing the ridiculous number of towers they threw in the game. So at one point I just started flying the mini chopper from look out to look out landing on the top level activating it then flying to the next one .
Also as Xeogred put it AssCreed Ubisoft shopping list fever hit 3/4 pretty hard. There were alot of really repetitive side missions in each area.
Last night I played a bit of Left 4 Dead 2 with the fellas, but while waiting for noise to get his sorry butt online, I hopped back into Quake and polished off the rest of the first episode. Cthon went down easy enough. With that done, I then hopped into the second episode and fought my way through to E2M5: The Wizard's Manse. The game has gotten a bit more challenging for the second episode, but it's still nowhere near impossible.
Oh, and GRAW arrived. I installed and patched it up while playing Quake. Once we were done with L4D2, I figured I'd hop in for a bit to see how things played. I made my way through part of the first level, picking up my squadmates and then saving one wounded man's ass from three RPG nests. At that point I realized how late it was and decided to quit for the night.
Confession time: as much as I enjoy FPS, I've never gotten into tactical FPS. Hell, I've hardly played them. That's not to say I haven't played in that style before; I ran through all of the single-player training missions in America's Army back in the day, and since several of my buds are Battlefield fans, we used to run a squad with proper tactics back in BF2142. But in that game I was never the squad leader, I was support and heavy weapons. Most of my job involved setting up defensive positions and laying down suppressing fire. Occasionally I'd get to do some knife work since I was considered the best at it in the squad, but often this was done under the watchful scopes of rifles ready to go if I suddenly ran into trouble. This means this isn't just my first experience with GRAW, it's my first real experience with a Tom Clancy game, with real tactical FPS, and with real squad control(I don't count dealing with Daikatana's crappy team member AI as real squad control). This means there are a lot of conventions that I'm having to pick up on the fly, such as manipulating my squad and suppressing my instinct to reload after every encounter.
Let's start with the AI though, as well as another comparison to my days playing BF2142 online. The nice thing about playing with those guys is that by that point, I'd already been playing FPS with them for several years. I knew how every member in the squad played, I knew how they reacted to different kinds of situations, and I knew what sorts of things I could rely on them for. If there was any kind of fuck up, I knew whose ass was gonna get chewed, but the truth is there were rarely any fuck ups. As a result we made a formidable team, usually dominating the rosters in terms of kills and score as well as winning nearly every match we played. Our greatest triumph was when we discovered people on the game's official forums complaining of hackers and using us as the example, claiming, "Nobody is this good."
With the AI, I don't have that familiarity. The game claims I do, and I admit that I can easily recognize the archetypes of roles based on the weapons being carried: one guy will serve as my heavy gunner, one guy will serve as my marksman, and one guy will serve as my fellow rifleman but also carries anti-armor equipment. Going in, I don't know if they will use these effectively, though playing a bit, it seems they have an idea how to use their guns. They're also pretty good at spotting enemies, though not perfect. Sometimes they shout them out and sometimes they flag them on radar. Often they open fire. This has admittedly been helpful, but not always ideal. Still, I'm glad they seem to have an idea of when to shoot. What they don't seem to get is movement.
At one point I directed my squad around a corner only to discover an enemy behind at an angle that I couldn't see until I was exposed while moving forward. He opened fire, we returned it, and I whipped around a corner and ordered my guys with me. I did not know if we had killed the enemy, but when I turned to look back, I discovered my marksman and my machinegunner walking into each other and blocking both themselves and my other rifleman from getting through. Later I directed my squad into an alleyway, only to see my marksman run around the far side of the building to get to where I was pointing. Sure, he took out two guys along the way, but what the hell kind of pathing was that?! If he had been a buddy in BF, Vandyl would have eaten him alive for that. I lament the inability to chew out my squad members for doing stupid shit. Also, the "Follow" command seems to do nothing for these guys. They just stand there and stare at me whenever I try to use it.
As far as gunplay is concerned, I like the rifle I've started with, it feels good to use, has decent enough accuracy(unless I'm going for long range...then it gets a bit iffy), and right now I have more than enough stopping power. However I mentioned that I struggle to repress the urge to reload often. I'm used to playing games where magazines magically refill and opponents usually take more than one bullet, so running into a firefight with a half-empty mag is tantamount to suicide. Since I also have a limited supply of ammunition, I'm sticking to single-fire mode. In general most enemies have gone down with a single round, with a few exceptions. My most entertaining moment took three rounds, as I peeked around a corner to spot a three-man team with their backs turned. I dropped two with single shots to the back of their heads, but the third guy ducked behind a car, so I shot out the windows of it to get to him. I really appreciate that I was able to do that. Plus they were using the same kind of ammunition I was, so I snagged a couple replacement magazines off their corpses. Yes, I've already learned that some guys carry similar ammunition and can be looted.
There are a lot of buttons for commands I'm not used to dealing with, and I'm wondering if I will have time to properly learn and internalize everything before I really need to know what I'm doing. The combination of squad and drone communication, tactical maps, various mobility options, ability to tell individual squad mates what to do...it's all a bit overwhelming right now to be honest. Let's see if I can make any headway in the game. Like I said, I'm only partway into the first level. I really have no idea what the game will throw at me. I have noticed that I get checkpoints every time I complete an objective, so I'm guessing this is true for the rest of the game, that I only get to save after finishing some part of the mission. Good to know.
Alright Ack, very glad to see you playing PC GRAW.
Random thoughts advice:
Yes your squadmates' AI sucks. They aren't gonna get any smarter. They are good for one thing really; holding position and being sentries. That's it. You take point solo, secure a junction, and have them hold it. You can anchor them up behind you when you're trying to advance on an enemy stronghold, they can hold your six OK. They are also good for flank maneuvers, as they do suppression fire fairly well. Have them lay down fire over an enemy choke point, and flank around back with a grenade for example. But advancing in any tactical way, or taking point effectively, or even finding their way through burned out cities on their own? Yeah, not gonna happen. Your squadmates are dumb as bricks in GRAW. That's one of the many reasons this game is burst your balls hard.
The drone is your best friend, once you get full control of it. It will live feed you tactical information like topography for finding best shot elevation, photography for building layout navigation-route planning, and even mark enemies as it spots them (IIRC). The drone will save your ass way more often than your dipshit squadmates.
Single shot is your best bet, you want to snipe enemies in the head or neck. Going Rambo with a full clip is the best way to have no ammo left and alert every enemy in five blocks of your presence. I suggest silenced long range rifles as soon as you have access to them. One shot, one kill. Eventually enemies begin packing serious protective armor, so getting good at those headshots is a must.
Your most powerful move is the knee slide. Get good at using it. You'll be using that a lot when you run like hell through automatic fire and slide behind a sandbag to survive. You will need to have some seriously greasy knees to survive the gauntlets of tanks and snipers that await you.
Reloading a lot isn't going to help you soon. Every new mission brings further and further spaced out checkpoints. And since you can't save and reload freely as you can in most PC FPS games, you're stuck relying on those sparse checkpoints. This is done to force the player to play as carefully and tactfully as possible. And is the central reason why GRAW for PC is so damned hard.
Every time you think that Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for PC cannot possibly get any harder, it will. The game will change the rules up, change the situations up, and throw shit at you that you will not believe any sane developer would do to their player. This is the hardest PC FPS I've ever beat no contest, and I think I still have a bit of PTSD to be honest. GRIN's mission was to break you soldier. Their game breaks most anyone who plays it. But if you can break it instead, fair 'n' square, you'll be one of the few. The proud. The insane.
Ack wrote:- what the hell kind of pathing was that?!
- Also, the "Follow" command seems to do nothing for these guys. They just stand there and stare at me whenever I try to use it.
- Plus they were using the same kind of ammunition I was, so I snagged a couple replacement magazines off their corpses. Yes, I've already learned that some guys carry similar ammunition and can be looted.
- The combination of squad and drone communication, tactical maps, various mobility options, ability to tell individual squad mates what to do...it's all a bit overwhelming right now to be honest.
- I have noticed that I get checkpoints every time I complete an objective, so I'm guessing this is true for the rest of the game, that I only get to save after finishing some part of the mission. Good to know.
GRAW time! [DISGUNBEGUD.GIF]
- AI pathing absolutely sucks, but if they can get a good position they can be lifesavers. In the final mission I could not have got as far as I did because their setups were absolutely perfect.
- Follow works only about 50% of the time. When you send them to a specific location, I believe you're able to map out a route for them to take, otherwise they'll go in-between buildings where enemies you don't have to deal with hide out.
- You'll find that grabbing ammunition for the weapon you currently have is going to be very useful. Later on you'll have opportunities to re-supply at certain areas.
- No worries most of the time about the keyboard shortcuts/communications. Most of the time I'd go out on my own, only because after numerous re-attempts I'd know where everything is. The drone will be a good thing in missions where it's available, it will mark enemy locations as well as its camera to spot enemies.
- CHECKPOINTS! If you don't see a "game saved" after a mission complete (more often than not), you'll start to see how much of a pain it will be. The only nice thing is that reloading from a checkpoint will restore a small amount of health for you and your teammates.
Exhuminator wrote:- Yes your squadmates' AI sucks.
- The drone is your best friend, once you get full control of it.
- I suggest silenced long range rifles as soon as you have access to them. One shot, one kill.
- Your most powerful move is the knee slide. Get good at using it.
- Every new mission brings further and further spaced out checkpoints.
- This is the hardest PC FPS I've ever beat no contest, and I think I still have a bit of PTSD to be honest. GRIN's mission was to break you soldier. Their game breaks most anyone who plays it. But if you can break it instead, fair 'n' square, you'll be one of the few. The proud. The insane.
Everything he said.
Xeogred wrote:The obvious answer is that it's time for the Dreamcast 2.
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