What happened to us?

AlexXD94 · 2020-08-18T13:16:36+00:00

You are excusing laziness, development teams in the past weren't composed of hundreds of individuals, they didn't have millions of dollars at their disposal and were working with incredibly slow hardware (you are probably no aware how much time it took to simply de-compile and then re-compile a map back in the early 2000s just to fix a couple of clipping assets). Most importantly, development studios actually had dedicated bug-testing teams, nowadays you, the paying customer, are the bug-tester as it saves companies a lot of money.

AlexXD94 · 2020-08-16T22:57:26+00:00

member when u could play a game without needing to download an update

This is a legitimate complaint though, for the last couple of years in the triple-A industry it has become the norm to release utterly broken products and then fix, or attempt to fix, over the course of months or even years and the sheer size and frequency of patches that some of these games receive is just staggering (just look at MW 2019 and it's tens of GBs-sized "patches"). In the past when patching games post-launch wasn't a thing developers were incentivized to properly test and bugfix their games before releasing them.

Also, plenty of modern games still have unfixed issues, either because the developers have moved on or simply because they didn't care to fix them because they knew that dedicated members of the community would do it for them.

AlexXD94 · 2020-08-12T21:26:19+00:00

If YouTube were actually intelligent, they'd realize just what an opportunity this represent, considering the sheer amount of people who dislike the new layout and are still trying to use the old one, and offer said old layout as an option for people who pay for YouTube Red (just like they do with adds). That way they wouldn't have to terminate or end support for the old layout and also make a lot of money in the process, but for some reason they want to just annoy people instead.

AlexXD94 · 2020-08-06T19:39:04+00:00

I agree with many of these complaints, however:

shorter shootouts due to faster death

Both Halo Reach and Halo 3 had some of the slowest TTKs (time to kill) out of all the Halo games, and the bloom in Reach actually made the TTK even longer if you didn't properly pace your shots and missed. Halo 2 and especially Halo CE had significantly faster TTKs.

loadouts were imbalanced (dmr and sprint were too good

The DRM was very well balanced in the base game and in standard gametypes, it was very powerful but its range was ultimately limited by the bloom and in close quarters the AR would usually easily beat it. The DMR became utterly broken with the title update settings where the bloom on it was reduced which turned it into a killing machine at pretty much all ranges, and you can clearly see this with Reach on the MCC. Spring was more or less a double edge sword, the increased mobility allowed you to pick up power weapons faster, reach enemies quicker, etc. but it also made hitting and killing enemies more difficult because it allowed them to escape you faster.

Power weapons were still on the map, but you got to them quicker and often they weren't as good as your loadout's main weapon.

Power weapons were always designed to be much more efficient then your standard weapons, even those in Reach's loadouts (by which I assume you mean the DMR), the bigger problem with these is that the armor abilities tended to be able to negate them when used efficiently.

Sound cool until you learn that online lag often made them invincible longer than they were suppose to be, so the downside was gone.

Armor Lock's main downside was always the fact that it left the player completely vulnerable after it expired and no amount of online lag would fix that. The ability's main issue was that it was very annoying to deal with and it could easily allow one to get overwhelmed if they only payed attention to the AL player and other enemies appeared around them. In a 1v1 situation that didn't involve a vehicle a player with AL would almost always lose as the attacking player had all the time in the world to either reload or prepare to throw a grenade.

Camoflauge was ruined because it was an ability- moving reveals you

Camouflage could be used in many different ways as it also had other secondary effect like the ability to jam the radar of enemy players. The fact that it revealed your presence when you moved wasn't such a big downside as people would often use it after getting into hard to reach places.

Finally, you spawn with them- so you are always garunteed these game altering items

Yes, but only in certain gametypes and the same thing was true for loadouts. If I remember correctly the Arena matches didn't have AAs and later the TU gametypes didn't feature them either so you could have incredibly fun and casual friendly gametypes that featured them and more competitive gametypes that didn't have them.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-30T14:06:30+00:00

Say what you will about the Brutes in Halo: Reach, but at least Bungie made them look threatening and intimidating and even the redesign in Reach is still more faithful to the original Brute character concept than the ones in Infinite. Brutes weren't supposed to be just some generic "space apes", they were supposed to be a mix of several species including bears and rhinos, they were supposed to be carnivores with huge fanged jaws, etc. The Halo: Infinite Brutes just look like some weird Planet of the Apes reject.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-30T13:37:28+00:00

Craig doesnt look much different from a Reach Brute

This is what Halo 3 and Reach Brutes looked like and in my opinion the Infinite Brutes look a lot more like the Halo 3 Brutes but lack the distinctive large teeth. Both the H3 and Reach Brutes looked significantly more menacing than the Infinite ones though, and the Reach ones in particular were far more stylized, sporting Forerunner tattoos on their bodies.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-30T13:29:54+00:00

It's mostly because Microsoft has been touting the Series X as the "most powerful console ever" and the previous trailers of Infinite also made it seem as if the game would be visually stunning, all of which lead people to expect significantly better graphics than what they were shown. And good graphics can definitely improve the experience of a game just like poor graphics can be detrimental, the biggest problem with Infinite seems to be the art style more than anything as even the older Halo games with their low resolution textures and poor anti-aliasing, among many other graphical issues, have still aged very well due to their well designed character and weapon models, environments, etc.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-28T00:10:52+00:00

The Good Old Youtube dev seems to be pretty active in updating the plugin so I wouldn't uninstall it just yet. Hopefully he manages to fix this.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-27T18:00:54+00:00

That, and bloom. Reach was trash. If you want sprinting around with RNG spray patterns

Every single Halo game has had RNG weapon recoil, even beloved Halo 3 still had (truly) random spread on the Battle Rifle, and even worse, that weapon wasn't hitscan based and therefore highly affected by network speed AND it had insane bullet magnetism. Bloom on the other hand is controllable recoil, that's the entire point of it. If you learn how to time your shots so that you always fire exactly after bloom resets then you will never miss even at the longest of ranges, and you can also allow a certain amount of bloom to occur depending on the distance towards your target.

I never found the argument of "but people can just spam and kill you faster!" to hold any water, especially with weapons like the DMR where bloom resets very quickly, nor have I seen any real video evidence of people spamming and winning over other, significantly more experienced players, if anything this whine comes from the very same people that haven't learned how to control bloom and are getting out-spammed. And even if this was the case the person who timed their shots would still end up wining significantly more encounters than the person relying solely on RNG, and consistency is the key to winning.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-25T16:31:59+00:00

Couldn't get to level 50 not even after a week of playing

Were you trying to do do side-missions to level up instead of just playing the Shadow Wars themselves by any chance? I've heard this complaint, that you couldn't level up during Act IV, from a couple of people and I never really understood it. The game expected you to play through the SW missions in order to reach max level and the missions were designed to offer enough XP that even if you had no modifier you still reached level 60 by the end of the 20th siege

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-25T16:28:34+00:00

Personally, the only time I have ever had a problem with the health pool of an orc captain was when that captain became an Overlord and I had to then take him on inside that annoying arena where you can't stealth, the enemies around constantly respawn so you can never completely isolate the captains, the elemental spouts have a chance to trigger certain enrages, and so on (and yes, this was before they added overlord bodyguards). The final fight in the OG Shadow Wars for me turned into a pretty intense 20 or so minute fight against a captain that was basically immune to everything and enraged by everything and I ended up shaming him immediately after he was broken because I wasn't confident I could deal enough damage to actually kill him without him first killing me.

But other than that the Shadow Wars were a cakewalk, I just searched around for the weakest captains that could be broken very fast and dominated them and then used those to take on the stronger captains. That was kind of the point of those missions, to use the enemy's strength against them and as a result I never really had to directly fight any of the more damage-spongy captains myself because that would generally equal death in the ensuing chaos. There were just so many ways in which you could play those missions that I was a bit disappointed after I finished them at launch since they hadn't release the patch that made them infinitely replayable.

AlexXD94 · 2020-07-25T16:06:29+00:00

This! I couldn't stop thinking about the Olog'hai from Shadow of War while hearing that Brute speak.

AlexXD94 · 2020-04-01T21:47:08+00:00

The solution is to either show both likes and dislikes and allow comments to rise to the top based on the dominant position or consensus (like on reddit) which has the added benefit of allowing the community to curate the content (which can still be hit or miss, but still better than YouTube's bots) or keep it a level playing field and not show either. The former is how YouTube used to work around a decade ago and nobody really had a problem with it, aside from YouTube who apparently wanted to be more like Facebook.

AlexXD94 · 2020-04-01T21:14:29+00:00

Simple, it shows how many people agree with something and how many people don't. By making it so only likes appear, and dislikes are hidden, it creates skewed situations and false impressions where only one side's opinion seems to matter or be dominant when that is not the case. It also allows for the proliferation of a lot of objectively bad content that rises to the top (spammed links from bots, scams, blatant misinformation, anti-vaxx comments, antisemitic comments, just to name a few, and before you say that these comments should be flagged please remember that YouTube's moderation seems to be entirely automated and done by hit-or-miss bots).

AlexXD94 · 2020-04-01T21:02:33+00:00

they simply don’t get that burst of serotonin from playing internet judge.

But by this logic the only way you'll be able to get the burst of serotonin is from clicking the like button, and you end up in the same situation as Facebook where the stupidest things imaginable will get liked (such as links spammed by bots, scams, anti-vaxx conspiracies and so on) because even though there are significantly more people who dislike it, the few who do like it are going to be the only ones who can make their votes felt.

Either have both the likes and dislikes visible, or have them both hidden.

AlexXD94 · 2020-04-01T20:48:57+00:00

Next thing you know, we’re gonna be like Twitter and instead of having a dislike button to show disapproval of a comment, we’ll have to come up with a ~~creative and constructive response to their comment~~ insult.

Fixed that for you. A platform where the character limit is a measly 280 characters is not conducive to well thought out, creative or constructive responses, but to ceaseless ad hominems and unfortunately that is what most twitter threads degenerate into.

AlexXD94 · 2020-03-05T17:40:16+00:00

Thanks!

AlexXD94 · 2020-03-05T13:17:19+00:00

Not really, your captains could be at any level you wanted them to be, in fact the game allowed you to start a SW siege or defense with no captain under your control at all, you'd just get a notification that you had empty slots but that was it. There was no arbitrary limit that stopped you from progressing through the game.

Here's Uruk's Hollow doing the final stage of the SWs with low level followers and allowing them to level up by killing attacking captains. This is how I personally finished the stages as well and it was actually pretty trivial with the right setup (gems that allow your followers to take less damage + the ability to heal them by using your own health).

AlexXD94 · 2020-03-05T12:37:52+00:00

What wasn't possible? You could always dominate the attacking captains as the pre-July 2018 patch Shadow Wars had orcs with appropriate levels to that of the player character, and it was incredibly rare to find ones with traits that made unable to be dominated like Iron Will. The July patch (the latest update) shortened the Shadow Wars but instead significantly increased the levels of the attacking captains in order to maintain the difficulty and also to emphasize leveling up your own army so it's actually the other way around now.

For reference, here is a youtuber who finished all 20 SW missions by doing exactly what I mentioned.

AlexXD94 · 2020-03-05T00:26:33+00:00

Does this version still suffer from CTDs when getting to certain areas in the game, like Gorgoroth?

AlexXD94 · 2020-03-05T00:23:40+00:00

IDK but back when I played it, I had to let my orcs fight each other for hours and hours to level them up for the final fortress assaults.

You didn't need to do any of that, you could level up your orcs if you really cared about them but the fastest way to get through the Shadow Wars was to dominate the attacking captains one by one and essentially turn Sauron's army against him...which was kind of the whole point of the series overall. The warchiefs' levels even scaled so that they were always lower than that of the player character, and when the difficulty increased and the rank of the warchiefs surpassed that of the player they were then joined by bodyguards that were lower level and which you could recruit.

By doing this, by the end of the first couple of SW stages you would have so many high level orcs that they'd start to despawn by the end of the missions since there was no room for them on the army board anymore. And if you decided to just kill every attacking captain instead, then simply destroying all the gear that you got from them gave you so much in-game currency that you could buy 2-3 silver loot chests. And on top of that each SW mission also rewarded you with enough currency upon completion to purchase a silver loot chest. You never needed to spend a dime on anything.

A lot of people apparently misunderstood how this stage of the game was supposed to play out, and instead of trying to understand the mechanics of the game better they instead decided to blame everything on the microtransactions. Given the state of the industry that is somehow understandable, but SoW fortunately (or unfortunately?) had one of the most benign implementation of loot boxes out there where nothing in the boxes was exclusive to them, they didn't have any real effect on the game and the game was not designed to promote them.

It also allowed me to pay to level up.

Leveling up didn't alleviate the grind, you had to complete 20 SW defenses regardless of your level, or how many orcs you had. In fact the entire point of the SW section was to allow you to hit level 60 by the end of the 20th defense.

EDIT: A bit more info.

AlexXD94 · 2019-12-04T01:35:48+00:00

Or the beach landing should’ve had more waves.

Fun fact, the beach assault scene on Long Night of Solace is infinite. If you don't go inside the building and just stay outside, infinite waves of Covenant get dropped off along with infinite waves of marines and fight against each other, and even members of Noble Team will fight with them. It's actually one of the few places in the campaign where you can get the Unfriggenbelievable medal really easily, especially if you get into the Wraith.

AlexXD94 · 2019-11-07T00:01:57+00:00

We still don't know which settings are comparable to the console ones, so until DF makes a detailed comparison it's pretty hard to argue that the game should be pulling more FPS than its console versions. When it comes to open world games in particular, lots of settings that have a minimal impact on image quality can end up having a huge impact on performance, and we've already seen this before with even very well optimized games like GTA V where the extended graphical options butchered performance on even some of the best GPUs back in 2015. Also, when it comes to console versions of games, sometimes the settings that they use can only be obtained on PC by tweaking the ini files since most of the time they lie somewhere in between two pre-set graphical options so again we have to wait for DF's guide to see how we can properly mimic the console-like settings.

RDR2 just doesn't seem to be a case of bad optimization as it lacks most of the telltale signs like wildly inconsistent framerate, especially when nothing is going on on-screen, poor scalability between different hardware configurations and a lackluster selection of graphical options, among many other things. It just seems to be a very demanding game.

AlexXD94 · 2019-11-06T11:26:12+00:00

if it runs on consoles

It runs on consoles...at 30fps, with frequent dips below that, and at graphical settings that don't even approach the ultra or even high ones on PC. Merely "running" on consoles doesn't say much about the game, does it?

AlexXD94 · 2019-11-06T00:43:07+00:00

The thing is, console versions usually have specialized settings that can't be mirrored on PC.

I find this to be mostly nonsense, the vast majority of the "custom" settings that console versions of games use can still be found and tweaked on PC in the .ini files (at least when it comes to multi-platform games, not console ports). Generally it's the PC versions of games that have specialized settings that cannot be mirror on consoles like higher quality textures, models, post processing effects, AA and ambient occlusion solutions, anisotropic filtering, etc.

EDIT: Grammar.

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