Okay, now, the concept of real-world police that teleport in behind you wherever you are is almost too terrifying: it feels like a hat on a hat, like giving Freddy Kreuger a chainsaw.

No, I mean inconsistent in terms of ‘how difficult it is to reach gold/silver/etc across various maps’, rather than ‘the fact that the length is different at all’. I’d say there are two-three maps I can hit gold on pretty regularly if I have a really good run at the challenge tier below my cap (which is where it feels…

Oh, Destiny definitely has a lot of grind to it, for sure; it’s just not a grind that exists purely to drive people toward ‘XP Boosters’ or some other kind of microtransaction. So it feels more like a design decision - right or wrong - that Bungie made from a ‘this is what we want our game to feel like’ standpoint,…

I think the easiest examples of ‘games with microtransactions that don’t make the gameplay experience less grindy’ are things like Destiny, which limit microtransactions to cosmetic items - but that’s admittedly not a solution for Outriders, really, since it’s less ‘social’ focused; I don’t know that cosmetic items…

I’ll say this for the endgame: it’s Outriders, but in its purest form, essentially. Basically, take a mission from the campaign, then cut out everything that isn’t the combat - dialog, looting, exploration - add a slightly different leveling system, and you’ve got the endgame*. Which, honestly? It works pretty damned…

I did something similar - picked it up on sale a few months back - and had pretty much the same experience: it’s solid! Surprisingly so! My take on it was that it basically felt like a really, really good game... that came out in the mid 2000s or so. (Which, now that I know the stuff about Bethesda and the remake…

Right there with Zack on the notion that it should be a live service game. Campaign expansions sound... fine? But what it really needs is more variety: more map variety, more enemy variety, more gameplay variety - maybe even a new class or two, down the line. All of which seem more likely to come out of a live-service…

Cheers, thanks!

Yeah, I’d figured out enough about it via cultural osmosis - mainly reading about it and its predecessors like PuBG on sites like Kotaku and RPS - that I got the basic ‘gist’, in terms of what I was supposed to do, but in terms of actually using the systems (like building stuff) there was... just kind of nothing. Not…

Ha! I just discovered that mod last night - broke down the legendary, put the mod on a single-shot rifle, and it’s... almost kind of broken in how much damage it does. (I still can’t ‘gold’ most of the expeditions, though, because a) I’m solo and b) I just ain’t that good.) But still, that means the focus is really…

In general, I don’t love competitive multiplayer, so it’s no real surprise I bounced right off the genre - but even in terms of ‘PvP’, it appeals even less, somehow. I get how it’s fun in theory, but in practice, it just never really clicks for me. (Which is fine; people like different things!)

No, all that I get, as far as the base game is concerned (it’s just not my cup of tea, which is fine - not everything has to be!), I’m just saying I don’t get what all the licensing tie-in stuff is. Like, is ‘be the Predator’ a pickup you can find in the level, or something? How, exactly, is Iron Man involved in a…

As someone who’s played approximately 37 seconds of Fortnite*, I am eternally confused as to what’s happening in Fortnite, just in general. There are always these announcements as to all these licensed characters joining the game, and, like... is that part of the Battle Royale mode that everyone actually seems to…

I also kind of wonder how much of it is People Can Fly kind of being a ‘victim of their own success’. Not to excuse/blame them for anything about this bug - it hasn’t affected me, so I’m not taking a stand on that issue - I’m just curious if it’s the sort of thing that would have happened/would have been easier to get…

I feel like ‘it just seems arbitrary’ is definitely part of my problem with timers, though I think that would still be the case if the clear times were just ‘13:00' rather than ‘13:38': it still feels so, so bad to ‘miss’ that good clear by one or two seconds, usually because you’re hunting down one little asshole who…

I think that’s an admirable ‘perfect’ system... except ‘so much depth I drown in minutiae and not so much width I can’t figure out where I’m going’ is going to be different for every single gamer. I’d also be willing to be you come down pretty far on the ‘more complex’ end of that curve, so I think it’s a little…

Pretty much the same experience; I let it auto-scale for a while, and then I started adjusting it manually... but all that did was make me feel like I wasn’t making progress (on the gear/leveling front) when I was playing at a lower level than I ‘should’ have been at. So eventually I just said ‘nope, screw it,…

I think comparing Destiny and comparing Outriders is a fundamentally flawed comparison, though - hence why I was only comparing the strikes, rather than the full game. (Raids should probably factor in as well, but I’ve never raided in Destiny, and haven’t seen what Outriders’ final expedition is like, either. I tend…

Working my way into the endgame, I’m slowly coming to realize how true the second part of your statement is*. They talked such a good game about it being ‘fully playable solo’, too... but, nah. I do not understand why the approach isn’t ‘build the game for solo players, then scale up the difficulty when additional…

It’s a pretty fair comparison, if you take out the ‘Dark Souls’-elements of Remnant and add in the skills-based combat of a Diablolike instead (‘skills-based’ here meaning ‘hero skills on a cooldown’ rather than ‘tests your twitch reflexes’). I’d say it’s roughly as linear in nature, probably roughly the same length…