Video game thread

Why is Mass Effect 2 worse than Mass Effect 1, tho? Your guns have ammo, you only have like 5 skill specialties, you don’t get exp from killing enemies, your ship needs to be refueled when traveling interstellarly, and your crew consists mostly of cold blooded murderers, assassins, mercenaries, and medical experiments that went wrong.

@Humble Oriathan  
God, FUCK that ammo system. “What’s the mission? Take on an enemy ship stuffed with hundreds of shielded soldiers? Enh. You’ll probably only need four clips for that.” And the thing is, it would have been fine if they’d put it on top of of the old system. The way it should have worked was if you run out of heat sinks, you’re back to relying on the gun’s built-in cooling system. Which is actually worse than the previous generations’ thanks to the introduction of said heat sinks. As it stands, if you play as ANYTHING but a biotic or a soldier you’re in perpetual immanent danger of running out of ammo and effectively being taken out of the fight, leaving your brain dead companions to finish it.

@Humble Oriathan  
The switch to the ‘ammo’ system was the thing I disliked the most about ME2. It doesn’t even make sense in-universe to me, seeing as their best explanation for it in canon was “with heat sinks you can shoot more bullets downrange faster”, as if this somehow trumps the fact that any opponent that doesn’t use this system has effectively infinite ammo and can just wait out your dumb pray and spray ass. Hell, you could even cool them down with a separate system to reuse the heat sinks but no, just toss twenty of them on the ground as if they’re completely useless when there’s no other cool heat sinks within view. That makes sense.

BioWare made fun of the criticism they got for the thermal clips by putting it into the mouth of Conrad Verner.

@Humble Oriathan  
@Officer Hotpants  
That’s one of my biggest complaints about Mass Effect 2. The gun overheating and bullet spread worked fine, why do they suddenly need “heat clips” that only serve to limit the amount of bullets you can fire? Did the galaxy collectively decide to start buying weapons from coffee machine manufacturers? Not to mention the lack of weapon and armor augments, which was a major disappointment to me coming straight from finishing ME1.
 
Also the Mako was fun and I missed it. Fite me.

@ANoobis  
That would have been funnier if he wasn’t completely on the money. They moved from a system of functionally limitless ammunition held back only by a brief 5 second cooldown period at peak overheat back to a system of limited ammunition that still takes about two or three seconds to reload anyway. That is an objective step backwards. And given how many militaries have tried to experiment with magic, that parting shot is kind of blunted.
 
Although I guess pseudo-magic is actually a thing in the ME universe…
 
@EverfreeEmergencies  
I don’t know why they felt the need to latch onto the standard shooter ammo system, but the truly baffling thing is why they made the clips so piss weak. At least if a clip could spray out 30 rounds from a pistol and 90 from an AR, I’d get it. But it holds, like, 6 and 20 respectively. Maybe double that if you use the lowest yield weapons. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were trying to force people to rely more upon their class powers.

KSP 2 is going to have a binary planet, Rask and Rusk. And the devs said that they’re going to have a 3-body physics for the vessels near them read: Rask and Rusk is going to have lagrange points.
 
Imagine all the casuals trying to establish an orbit in those conditions.
 
@Officer Hotpants  
Admittedly IRL there’s a problem where larger clips have shit mass ratio; a soldier can literally carry more shots with same load weight if they’re in 30-bullet mags rather than 100-bullet drums, for example. But it’s a video fucking game, the weight concerns are nonexistent and the ammo counts are entirely arbitrary and can be anything.  

which is also a good proof that magic either doesn’t exist or only exists in a form that can’t be exploited for fighting

I like the concept behind Starship Corporation, but I wish the dev would come back and give the missions a balance pass. Maybe even fix some of the bugs while he’s at it.

Welp, the crossover nobody asked for happened. NMS x Mass Effect.  

@Azure Fang  
Hey! If you wanna talk about crossovers that we didn’t wanted, we can start to the GEARS & Halo crossover.

@Azure Fang  
They didn’t…

Fuck you all, I would totally play a Elite/No Man’s Sky clone in the Mass Effect Universe, that sounds fucking awesome. >:P
 
…too bad the one time that was attempted they took it another galaxy. And then they threw out the entire game and rushed together a cheap Made-in-China Quality bootleg Mass Effect 3. >.<

CS:GO is the closest thing to a Counterstrike 3.

@Officer Hotpants  
I know we already talked, but for the sake of the thread  
Yup, they did. Apparently, the Hello Games crew are former EA employees that worked on the Mass Effect franchise and the crossover was their idea. What’s surprising is that EA actually allowed it. It’s just a frigate, but still the entire expedition was pretty well set up and the scene where you see the Normandy for the first time was perfect. That, and I’m rather proud of that screenshot. Just enough of my traveler’s ass to piss off some EA exec somewhere.

@Azure Fang  
I’m not surprised, honestly. Andromeda was a disaster for the franchise (one notably absent from the freshly released series collection). They’ve been talking about wanting to try another game for a while and I think they saw an advantage in tying themselves to another company who released a likewise widely trashed game but actually managed to turn it around.

@Officer Hotpants  
There apparently is another Mass Effect mainline game in active development. Too bad ME2 was already so divergent that I didn’t care to even look at 3, let alone Andromeda.

If anybody likes clunky oldies, for some reason Space Empires: Starfury is only $0.99 until the end of the month. Not the best game in the world, but definitely worth the price of seven packs of Top Ramen. Wouldn’t be shocked if this is some kind of farewell sale, but that’s just personal speculation.
 
EDIT: Turns out all of the Malfador Machinations games are on 75-90% sale until the end of the month.

@Azure Fang  
Ooh. Never heard of that one.

@Azure Fang  
Paradox products are also on sale through the weekend, but the prices still aren’t great and personally I’d just wait until the next Humble Bundle.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
I saw that. Buy now and it’ll only cost you $120 for one game!

@Officer Hotpants  
Be reasonable. It’ll be at least another $60 for the updates that rebalance the game around the expectation you bought the latest DLC.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
Ah yes. The Paradox model: release DLC that requires other DLC to unlock 60% of its content and stick balance & bug fixes for other content into it. Though I don’t know if they’ve been as bad about that since CK2.

@Officer Hotpants  
It’s definitely still bad.

@Terminal Red  
For me that depends on the game. There are some I wouldn’t wanna pay full price for, but there’s definitely some where I think “I’d like to see more from this studio, so I’d like to financially support them”
 
yes, I’m replying to a 10 month old post, sue me

@Sapphie