the first person shooter game thread (eew fps)

[Lander]

Joe Blackburn, design lead for Destiny 2 did an emergency unscripted live stream walking back a lot of those announcements, hands shaking, voice cracking and looking for all the world like he was trying to stave off a rolling mental breakdown for 15 minutes and only half succeeding:

Oh dear. It's like a much intensified version of Jeff Kaplan's perpetual deer-in-headlights look for the early Overwatch community comms stuff.

Yep, Warmind. That was D2 year 1, which was right before they took it from D2 vanilla's soulless Marvel movie writing to kind of amazing with Forsaken and all the Dreaming City stuff, and much needed system reworks across the board.

Not bad. And Chief?! My head knows they're playing with fanservice, but it works a little bit.

Also, petty, but another fun case of the script getting leg-swept by its multiplayer conceit, since every non-NPC guardian dropping their hat to go after Sov at the same time is effectively Ikora's plan but less official bless MMO writing.

Having seen the sizes of all those updates, I'm inclined to believe them. When you add up the strikes, raids and campaign missions those annual expansions are a full AAA game's worth of content, never mind the season pass areas and story on top of that. Even if they share some assets, after years of adding new sandboxes there's no amount of video streaming that's going to fit it onto a 500 GB PS4, Sony has guidelines for system overhead they can't just ignore (though Sony says they expect PS4 to be done by 2025, so maybe that'll change). They did go the streaming route with the Stadia version, and most players hated it. The last thing Destiny needs is more latency and network hitches in a matchmade game without dedicated servers and mountains of in-game dialogue and physics setting off chain reactions all over the place.

I don't mean literal video streaming - heaven forbid

I'm talking about on-demand retrieval of models, textures, sounds, etc. via network. And not even necessarily in the potentially fragile 'open world game' sense of fetching stuff as it's encountered during gameplay; in broad strokes D2 is still effectively map-based, so it could keep a list of zones visited by the player and their associated assets, then clear the oldest off disk when downloading a new one puts you over a potentially player-configurable local storage limit.
The tradeoff would be a longer load screen (and potential connect to the internet to go here error) when flying to an uncached area, which could be avoided for most-current content by keeping it on-disk.

The upside has been to de-bloat the less important early game. Keep in mind that D2 is already a sequel in an ongoing story with thousands of pages of lore and hours of cutscenes, and it famously passed the point of being a nightmare for onboarding new players a long time ago. It's built to keep having new things for players to discover in hour 2000 or 5000, so I blame nobody who finds it impenetrable at this point. I definitely feel the "you took away stuff that I paid for" angle, but streamlining things by vaulting some content wasn't a bad move in terms of making a more enjoyable overall game. And it's not like that content is lost, they rotate elements of it back in every season after reworking things. They're still working in areas and raids from D1.

In that sense it recalls FFXIV, which also had its early game de-bloated recently to make way for the much better stuff that comes after the first couple of expansions. I suppose the difference is in the sales model, since as far as I know FF's was met with hearty at last! from the playerbase.
Rotation is well and good for now, but won't last forever. Perhaps future consoles will open up the possibility of a definitive edition, but it's a weird prospect to think about how a game that conducts itself like an MMO but sells like an annual AAA will hold up on the preservation side.

[Sima Tuna]

Doom 64 is a cool game. It really feels like the n64's console limitations were taken into consideration, while those aspects that could be improved or changed from the original PC releases were. Doom 64 has some kinda terrain deformation, lots of colored lighting, a darker, more somber atmosphere and all the gameplay enhancements found going from DOOM to DOOM II. Fewer animations for sure, but a fairly high enemy type count (just with a lot of palette swaps.) I think it has better level design than vanilla DOOM II, but it retains those gameplay improvements from the sequel. Doom 64's double chainsaw is amazing, definitely a massive improvement even from the single chainsaw of DOOM II. Which was already sick. Between that and the super shotgun, you have excellent options for close range. I don't know if the chaingun is actually buffed or if it just feels buffed, because the chaingun in Doom 64 definitely puts in work.

Those who say Doom 64 is the real Doom 3 aren't wrong. Shame it was locked to a trash console (I say as somebody who had one as a kid) for so long. The Nightdive port makes this game look and sound like a million bucks, to say nothing of the massive improvement in controls. Even playing the switch version portably still feels better than holding onto the n64's triple-pronged backwards banana dildo.

[Lander]

On paper, Doom 64 is a knockout. Certainly the classical Doom 3 we never got. Never had it for my own 64 BITD, but a friend was super into it, so I absorbed a degree of reverence by proxy.

In practice, I had a really hard time liking it when the remaster came out alongside Eternal, and it came down to the level design.
All the mentioned stuff around it - darker vibe, improved tech, level scripting - is awesome, but the escalation to mazy key'n'switch hunt was way more intense than the original two games, on top of having some downright spiteful gimmicks propping it up.

Hectic (the secret map accessed by doing a bunch of arcane barrel-related bullshit in MAP01) takes that overall degree of spite and fully exemplifies it. Mean traps, meaner encounters, and some more, even meaner, traps for your trouble once you think you're halfway safe.
I know Hectic is specifically intended to be an absolute bastard of a map, so isn't fair to use as a yardstick, but I swear you can feel that influence permeating the game as a whole.

I'll have to give it another go in isolation one of these days, since having Eternal sat next to blasting muffled BFG Division and shouting PLAY ME probably wasn't an ideal chance-giving environment.

[Austin]

In practice, I had a really hard time liking it when the remaster came out alongside Eternal, and it came down to the level design.
All the mentioned stuff around it - darker vibe, improved tech, level scripting - is awesome, but the escalation to mazy key'n'switch hunt was way more intense than the original two games, on top of having some downright spiteful gimmicks propping it up.

That basically sums up my issue with DOOM 64 and why I don't care for it nearly as much as the original two games. The level design later on is lackluster, more so tedious than anything, especially with the ridiculous amounts of Barons and Hell Knights thrown at you in tiny corridors. It becomes a grindfest. It's like.. not even all that hard in a lot of maps, it's just boring. The lack of enemy variety is part of why this is. No revenants and no arch viles limited the level of enemy variety they could implement in each map.

There are some *mean* "gotcha" moments too. One of my favorites is an exit where the floor falls and tosses you into an inescapable fire death pit. On original hardware this was extremely frustrating, as there was no quick-saving and you would have to do the entire map over again. Such a dick move on the dev's behalf, and there were several of them over the course of the game.

The modern conversions are definitely the way to go with this one, as the quality of life differences make it a lot more enjoyable. At the end of the day, it's still a grind compared to DOOM 1 and 2.

[Sengoku Strider]

Not bad. And Chief?! My head knows they're playing with fanservice, but it works a little bit.

That one goes way beyond just fanservice nods; D2's Bungie 30th Anniversary expansion literally has a hidden mission where you find the cryo chamber Master Chief awakes from in Halo CE, and inside is the Halo magnum, which is reworked into an exotic weapon called Forerunner. In fact the Vanguard gunsmith Banshee-44 directly presumes its wielder (Master Chief) must have been a titan of some sort:

Banshee-44 considered the relic on his workbench and the questions on his mind; one stood out above the rest: who were you meant for?

The form of the weapon suggested an oversized sidearm—a secondary weapon for a giant's hands. The function presented more so as an anti-material rifle. "Looks to be 12.7mm... it's like they were making a hand cannon but didn't know it yet."

Banshee wondered further about the warrior who could wield such a thing. His attention drifted momentarily, drawn by Shaxx's voice booming nearby. "Huh. Yeah. A Titan, maybe… and a big one too."

The weapon was laced with fractures from a life of fire and a sleep of ice, and perhaps other, more exotic stresses. Banshee wished he could've heard the relic's voice, but he knew from earlier examination that it had fired its last round. What a last round it must have been.

Destiny and Halo are revealed to be different reverse-mirror image timelines that split off from the events of the Marathon series. At one point areas on Mars in Destiny 2 begin weirdly shifting across timelines, which ties into the lore for the MIDA Multi-Tool scout rifle:

2472/11/17 -- 4.9°S 0°E
AUDIO ONLY
Strauss is gone. Whole sky alight as his ship set off. I might be the last MIDA survivor on Mars. The gun detected teleports yesterday and I had to move camp. Cannot shake the fear that they will send battleroids; even this AI marvel couldn't save me.
Shot the ice this morning. The gun fired a thermal round and then a pellet of water purifier. Came out pure and sweet. Marvelous. I've been reading the gun's Encyclopedia Arcana. All about the crash that became Strauss's obsession and hope. "Metastability in the salvaged construct!" Ha ha! Let's hope our ideals too can pass through grief, fury and envy into a new freedom elsewhere.
Wonder if the gun hear me when I asked to go somewhere better. Wonder why it led me here. Going to follow it's compass tonight. Down Below.

The player character in Marathon is a battleroid, and Bernard Strauss was the leader of MIDA and the core antagonist behind the AI Durandal going nuts in that game. It leads me to wonder if The Traveller is connected to Deimos, the moon of Mars turned into a colony ship run by AI in Marathon. Other weapons like the Wastelander shotgun reference Marathon as well.

I don't mean literal video streaming - heaven forbid

I'm talking about on-demand retrieval of models, textures, sounds, etc. via network. And not even necessarily in the potentially fragile 'open world game' sense of fetching stuff as it's encountered during gameplay; in broad strokes D2 is still effectively map-based, so it could keep a list of zones visited by the player and their associated assets, then clear the oldest off disk when downloading a new one puts you over a potentially player-configurable local storage limit.
The tradeoff would be a longer load screen (and potential connect to the internet to go here error) when flying to an uncached area, which could be avoided for most-current content by keeping it on-disk.

Oh, they already do that. Being that sucker still playing on a base PS4, I get to spend a lot of time waiting for shaders, models and icons to load in on the menus (PC & current-gen players seem to be fine). PC Gamer just put up an interview today with Blackburn, where he brought up how the disc space thing is still a big problem for them:

He's understandably coy when it comes to talking about whether episodic content will stay in the game for longer than the seasonal stuff did. "I don't think we're talking about that yet," says Blackburn when I ask him whether episodes will be moved to the Destiny Content Vault at the end of the year. "The answer that's not great here is that the pressure of how much stuff can fit on the disk is still immense for Destiny. For the last few years, we've been really focused on how to keep all the stuff that's critical to the Light and Darkness saga in the game.

"We want to make sure that in the next year of Destiny, the most critical content, both from player enjoyment of logging in every day, and from knowing what's happening in the narrative and seeing the best content, remains in the game. That's the lens that we're looking through. We have not been able to defeat gravity in terms of making Destiny twice as big as it is, but we want to make sure we're keeping the stuff that's important."

I'm quite sure it's also related to the manpower challenges of maintaining 20 planets/moons and their sandboxes, which I think would be over 100 now if they kept everything across D1/D2. But it's clear the game would be bigger than it is if they weren't up against platform constraints.

In that sense it recalls FFXIV, which also had its early game de-bloated recently to make way for the much better stuff that comes after the first couple of expansions. I suppose the difference is in the sales model, since as far as I know FF's was met with hearty at last! from the playerbase.
Rotation is well and good for now, but won't last forever. Perhaps future consoles will open up the possibility of a definitive edition, but it's a weird prospect to think about how a game that conducts itself like an MMO but sells like an annual AAA will hold up on the preservation side.

FF XIV tanked sales-wise out of the gate, and so was completely nuked (in a nice touch, during a literal in-game event) and replaced with a new game with a better engine and new mechanics. D2's been more like, "keep the stuff people seem to like, cut the stuff that's outdated (in terms of gear or mechanics) or that nobody plays." The seasonal modes end up being brought back as strikes or similar content if people liked them, vaulted if the response was 'enh.' The FOMO sucks, but at the same time that one might be for the best, dividing the player base across 20+ modes may not be the healthiest thing. But losing whole sandboxes is a shame.

[Sima Tuna]

Fuck Destiny, I want to see a Marathon trilogy remaster. Halo CE is now fairly accessible, but where is Marathon? I don't mean a trashy extraction shooter with the same name, either.

[Sengoku Strider]

Fuck Destiny

So if it's not your thing that's totally fine, there's tons of stuff like Overwatch that people worship that I can't seem to get into either. And I can relate to a reflexive desire to reject any game recommendations that require hundreds of hours of your time. But honest question, when was the last time you played it? Because the game is really, really different from where it was even a couple of years ago.

[Sima Tuna]

I've seen it but haven't played it. I don't play subscription games. I'm sure they're "fine" because it's Bungie. I love Halo CE and Halo 3/ODST was pretty alright.

Spoiler

I meant "fuck destiny" in a tongue-in-cheek way

Unrelated: the two first Metro titles were on sale, so I picked them up. I remember trying the first one ages ago and not liking it. For $7 on the two, I figured I'll try again. I don't expect to love these games, but I'll give them a shot again. What I remember not liking was the extreme linear hand-holding and all the story shit.

[drauch]

Yeah, I think a few of us talked about the first Metro in the "What are you playing..." thread a while back. Also did not like for the reasons you mentioned. Interesting premise hindered by dull exposition and mediocre gameplay.

Just play STALKER. And if you already have, play it again

[Lander]

Just play STALKER. And if you already have, play it again

And if you're tired of it, find one of the many, many megamods that smash all the games together into one big zone and take the safety limiters off the A-Life systems!

[Marc]

The Metro games were a series I wanted to love, but they're so incredibly linear that it sucks the all enjoyment from them. Even Exodus with it's semi 'open' world.... I turned that off when it dumped me in what appeared to be a large explorable environment, then insta-killled me for stepping in water.

[Sengoku Strider]

I've seen it but haven't played it. I don't play subscription games.

Mercifully, Destiny has never been subscription based. But they've experimented with so many different models since before and after leaving Activision that I don't blame anyone for not knowing what the deal is.

A couple of years back they made the base game free to play. It's monetized through annual major expansions, cosmetics and then a $10 season pass every 3 months that moves the story forward each week and adds new activities & gear. But you don't have to buy any of that, you'll just be locked out of specific activities. Like I don't own the last expansion, Lightfall, but I can still go to the new planet it's on and do stuff, just not the story missions & certain core modes. But things like the new raid are free for everyone. I often dip out for 7-8 months at a time if it's not working for me, and usually wait a while until the major expansions go on sale for 50% off.

Of course now they've said they changing again next March after Final Shape releases, to a model of selling 3 'episodes' a year, which will come out in three 6-week acts.

I love Halo CE and Halo 3/ODST was pretty alright.

Bungie have been iterating on their own secret sauce for so long it's kind of hard to compare those older titles. It's like comparing SFII Champion Edition to Ultra SF IV; they're still worth playing and great in their own way, but there's just been so much refined and added in terms of movement, weapons, abilities and buildcrafting since then.

[Sengoku Strider]

Incidentally, is Halo Infinite dead? Infinite has only 38 000 players on Steam. That doesn't include Xbox or Game Pass players, which obviously matters a lot, but that's a 98% drop from its peak so I'm sure it's not a lone data point. 343 had to come out and tell players there would be no new narrative cutscenes going forward, which is kind of a bad sign when you're a multi-billion dollar company's flagship live service title.

For context, Destiny allows community tools which give access to its stats, and it's been in a down-period following Lightfall:

D2 Population: September 04/05

Overall: 998.68k
PvE: 945.58k
PvP: 242.53k
Gambit: 102.61k
Raid: 328.36k
Event: 64.90k

via warmind.io | Guardians Tracked: 63.30M

I could see them trying to reboot the franchise with numbered releases again, Infinite had a troubled development cycle that seemed to be more than 343 could handle. On the other hand, according to the many comments present and former employees have left on Glassdoor, their big problems seem to be cultural, with bad management, poor morale, bad resource allocation, bad data retention practices and people quitting all over. I don't know what you do in that situation, they can't just summon a AAA FPS dev out of nowhere, and the alternative is putting their flagship franchise into cryo-sleep for a while.

Spoiler

I swear to God I'm not a Destiny shill. Shut up.

[Sima Tuna]

343 suck balls. Halo hasn't been good since Reach. 343 fucked up the game balance with Halo 4 (plasma pistol taking 2 ammo per bullet is garbage, among other mistakes they made) and Halo 5 was just a cod game with halo skin. At some point, it feels like the Halo devs stopped playtesting Legendary difficulty and that's when the game balance of the whole series fell out of whack.

I heard Infinite was better but I refuse to give them more of my money for games I will probably hate. Halo CE, Halo 3, ODST and Reach are fun games. If I want to play Halo, odds are I will just play CE again (with original graphics, because the new ones are mega cancer.) I can replay 90% of Halo CE forever and not get bored (minus the library.) Halo 2 is a fun game, but with caveats. Namely, the whole lack of balance thing that I mentioned was a problem in 343's Halo games? It's a problem in Halo 2 as well. I believe every melee attack from enemies is an instant kill on Heroic or higher and so are all sniper shots. Snipers are basically hitscan (and encountered in packs), so that's fun. Level design is otherwise good though and melee/snipers aren't instant kills on lower difficulties, so new players won't even notice. I do think Halo 2 was probably the worst of the Bungie-developed games on a purely gameplay level. Dual-wielding is very awesome but it's also pretty overpowered and kinda jank.

[Sengoku Strider]

I only played through the campaign on normal in Halo 4, so I didn't have to experience balance issues. I didn't play 5 because buying an Xbox One wasn't on the menu, but the people I know who did swore by it, claiming its PvP was way more balanced than Destiny 2's (this was during Forsaken when it was a total roaming super spam-fest, so I can believe it).

[Lander]

Infinite marks the point where 343i finally figured out how to do proper Halo shooting, but also the point where all the stuff holding it up was corroded beyond repair.

The open world is sandboxy fun for a few hours, but underutilized and unfinished in broad. And the story / writing got Marvel'd into the ground - Chief is as Chiefy as ever by virtue of being easy to write, but everyone else has a bad case of insufferable.

Especially Quiptana, ye gods. AI rampancy is a demonstrable font of fascinating mania thanks to Marathon:

Remember The Just Fate of Fools? Yeah.

Yet has been reduced to cracking a bad joke and / or shallow existential musings whenever it's time to update the POI. Bleh.

I played it on the Ninja Gaiden Box via game pass when they were still doing the two quid introductory month thing, and it was decent enough to fill a period when my PC was down for maintenance, but come on. Forget damning, that's execution by faint-praise firing squad

[Lemnear]

343 suck balls. Halo hasn't been good since Reach. 343 fucked up the game balance with Halo 4 (plasma pistol taking 2 ammo per bullet is garbage, among other mistakes they made) and Halo 5 was just a cod game with halo skin. At some point, it feels like the Halo devs stopped playtesting Legendary difficulty and that's when the game balance of the whole series fell out of whack.

I heard Infinite was better but I refuse to give them more of my money for games I will probably hate. Halo CE, Halo 3, ODST and Reach are fun games. If I want to play Halo, odds are I will just play CE again (with original graphics, because the new ones are mega cancer.) I can replay 90% of Halo CE forever and not get bored (minus the library.) Halo 2 is a fun game, but with caveats. Namely, the whole lack of balance thing that I mentioned was a problem in 343's Halo games? It's a problem in Halo 2 as well. I believe every melee attack from enemies is an instant kill on Heroic or higher and so are all sniper shots. Snipers are basically hitscan (and encountered in packs), so that's fun. Level design is otherwise good though and melee/snipers aren't instant kills on lower difficulties, so new players won't even notice. I do think Halo 2 was probably the worst of the Bungie-developed games on a purely gameplay level. Dual-wielding is very awesome but it's also pretty overpowered and kinda jank.

Make a favor to your self...never download Halo Infinite. Looks like a game maded by 10 persons, everything is below avarage for a "big" production .
by the way:
Old Halo->Destiny->New Halo

[XoPachi]

I literally ran to my computer.

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-titanfal ... ng-bigger/

[XoPachi]

Well, after about 20 hours over the last week, yeah. TitanFall 2 is...fixed.

It's live. Connections are just as good as they were year 1. No one cheats anymore. I've only had one connection drop after a match was already completed but all it took was 1 second out of 20 hours of play to fix that. And the community is still just as I remembered. The match queues aren't even long for an unsuccessful, largely dead game that was utterly fucked and unplayable for 3 years. I've gotten on at weird hours and always get into full games with unique people in roughly 10-30 seconds. The only thing is you won't get into tons of different game modes. But that was a thing with TitanFall 1 and 2 even at both their peaks. Just kind of a thing with most arena FPS's in general. You pretty much will only be playing the standard game modes. I do still get Pilot vs Pilot, Bounty, or Amped Hard Point semi regularly though and Attrition never wears itself out anyway because of how excellent and unique a game mode it is.

So if you wanna play TitanFall 2 again or ever had interest in it, yeah, go for it. Now's a great time. $30 on Steam with frequent sales and a great single player to get you started.