Quote from: Uranium on November 28, 2016, 12:52:04 PM

Quote from: Vien on November 28, 2016, 05:28:08 AM

The book Smoke and Shadows was good.

Basic premise?

The year is 2557 and we focus around a group of scavengers led by Rion Forge. She searches The Roman Blue one day to find leads of her father, John Forge from the Spirit of Fire. They eventually locate a downed covenant vessel with a buoy just beyond Arcadia and eventually acquire coordinates to the former shield world. The group stumbles across a brown dwarf surrounded by debris from the after math of the first Halo Wars, but locate a fragment still intact. The AI managing the shield world was partially intact, and after a brief skirmish with Gek 'Lhar, Rion acquires the chip with said unit. The group makes a return to Venezia, and after some questioning with the AI, she discovers her father passed from performing a heroic act. It concludes with them making a possible return to the shield world.

There was an ONI operative on board, but it didn't involve bashing Halsey or anything the Travissty Trilogy provided.

Quote

Ace maintained course for the next few hours and then swung aft by eleven degrees. Not long after, Arcadia emerged like a ghost from the darkness and dominated the viewscreen. A pale blue atmospheric ring circled the planet, creating a spectral glow around an otherwise ashen gray surface. No one spoke on the bridge. They all knew what they were looking at— a planet-size tomb. A grave marker of millions.

This was pretty inaccurate, since the evacuation of Arcadia was somewhat successful.

I think there was a second battle of arcadia where the covenant came back and fucced up the humans

Space.

It worked for Kennedy.

Quote from: Icy on November 28, 2016, 10:10:16 AM

And what would you propose is the common goal for 300 million Americans?

That's only because you were in a dick measuring contest with Russia and wanted to one up their first man in orbit.

In any other circumstance the moon would not have been anywhere near as much a priority on people's minds.

This is exactly why I'm not joining the new chat. Online drama will never amount to anything other than a total gong show.

A what?

Quote from: A Cheese Potato on November 25, 2016, 06:39:38 AM

Locke punched the nanobots in chief's armour so hard that they broke his visor

I know Halo is a sci-fi, but the nanobot shit I find to be extremely forced and pushing the setting. The MC should have received either new armor or an upgraded to it on the Infinity, not by magic.

That's because it's used as a cheap deus ex machina to give token explanations for what would otherwise amount to an unworkable plot.

Well there's a pretty much infinite number of ways something can go wrong and one way it can go right. If something goes wrong it means we can account for it in future launches - this probe was to test landing a rover further down the line, with samples and stuff a secondary goal.

By going wrong now, we can fix it for the final launch, and that's ultimately what this one was all about.

It was an armour given out by bungie specially to certain people. Until ODST came out you couldn't get it without it being awardrd to you.

Star Wars TCW didn't have one either.

This ain't a democracy anymore

I mentioned earlier becoming the mask

RRRREEEEEEEEÈEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE E333E

Art style/ aesthetic. Art style usually goes hand in hand with the type of tone the game is trying to set for its world and narrative; one that is really cartoony with exaggerated features (Such as, for example, Overwatch) is clearly setting a tone of a more comedic and lighthearted setting. That just doesn't interest me in the slightest, though I guess I could get over it if the gameplay were really special. The kind of art design used for JRPGs actively repels me though.

Kind of stuff I like is that gritty near-future "lived in" scifi aesthetic. One where you feel the world around you is one being lived in and works. A couple examples I can think of that do this well are Halo (pre-343), Alien, Titanfall, Avatar (james cameron) and Mass Effect to a degree. Even the newer CoD games are starting to interest on aesthetic alone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are series which just go flat out retarded in their designs like 343 Halo and Destiny. Mass Effect sort of toes this line but the games themselves really pull it back.

Same for fantasy stuff; a technically accurate fantasy game that feels accurate to medieval warfare or whatever generally trumps ridiculous stupid designs (see: JRPGs).

None of this is concrete but as a general rule, if I'm gonna play a game I wanna get invested in the world. My interests align with hard-scifi and low-fantasy so that kind of stuff interests me. I can generally accept a less technically impressive game as a product of its time (Texture quality, lighting effects etc aren't as important to me unless its particularly noticeable).

In terms of gameplay mechanics; platformers, JRPGs, pretty much anything produced by Nintendo, Sports games and the Ubisoft Sandbox formula (AC/ Far Cry/ Watch Dogs etc) all disinterest me entirely. Though the only one I'll actually refuse to play is JRPGs, anything else I'm willing to give a chance.

So yeah. Bad/ uninteresting art style, being part of a genre I dislike, P2W/ Microtransaction bullshit, Day One DLC, copypaste mechanics like Ubisoft games, obnoxious fanbases (bringing their thing up whenever they can, aka Witcher 3) and digital-only games (I live in a rural area so internet speeds are crap, so I rarely buy digital. Only game I have on my XB1 is Elite Dangerous, everything else is disc based). I only pick up two or three games a year so I tend to go with stuff in a category I already like, so usually shooters/ rpgs. I'm willing to stray out of my comfort zone but that usually means buying pre owned when it's cheap.

Legendary your one-handed skill. It'll reset it to 0 and give your perk points back.

I'm still impressed with Skyrim.

no you're not allowed to like bethesda games made after 2006

Quote from: Luciana on November 18, 2016, 10:11:55 PM

[snip]

Believe me when I say I understand where you come from, and even how I approached it at first could give you the notion of what I was on about. When it comes to challenges, I want to do it fairly, with no cheating, otherwise I don't get the sense of accomplishment. If I cheated on the Mile High Club achievement on CoD 4, or beating World at War on veteran while cheating, I wouldn't feel good about it at all. Because believe me, I still think beating WaW on veteran was one of the hardest things I've ever done ever in a video game, and it took some determination to do it. But I digress.

Skyrim to me is a game I can sit back, put on my headphones, and bask in the world around me. Not worry about challenges (anymore, though I do have a mod that makes the combat harder via better AI, but fair), or how to make the best min/max build. For me it's role playing the character I made. A thief who was down on her luck (her home got destroyed in Morrowind via the Red Mountain) explosion, life hit her hard.)so she joined the Thieves Guild, not knowing she is even the Dragonborn yet (got an alternate start mod so I didn't do the beginning bit. Started in a tavern, after a night of drinking), and instead just trying to make a living, albeit an immoral one.

That's basically what it is to me. Living another life that isn't my own.

Yeah, I can definitely see the appeal of that--especially if you've already beaten the game normally and want to try out something new. It's why I exclusively do nuzlocke challenges when playing older Pokémon games, because playing the game normally is frankly just boring as fuck now. Setting restrictions on the number of Pokémon you can catch, releasing them when they faint, etc. tends to add an interesting take on the game to increase its shelf life, so I absolutely understand the need to try out new things every once in awhile. And I appreciate the imagination that goes into your role-playing and such, too--and if mods help with that, then that's cool.

I can do all that stuff without mods, though. They're just not for me. I can spin a neat little story for my avatar in my head, and if the game doesn't allow me to see his breath fuming when he's out in the elements or whatever, I can deal with that. It's not gonna adversely affect my immersion if I can't see the individual veins on all the leaves of this low-res, low-poly tree that's barricaded by a set of invisible walls. It's very easy for me to look past that stuff. Adding hyper-realistic shit in for the sole purpose of immersion would paradoxically make it less immersive for me, because (like I said) I tend to find it so very inconsistent with the rest of the game's design. If your goal is total immersion, I think you should go all out--but there comes a point where you're not really playing Skyrim anymore.

Not to mention, there are various aspects of the real world that don't translate well to video games. If you wanted to make Fallout 3 more immersive, you'd have to install a mod that alters the mechanics of limb-breaking. That is, if you break your legs, you'll be rendered completely immobile, and you'll just bleed out and die. Because that's what would happen--that's the authentic, hyper-realistic breaking-your-legs-in-the-middle-of-nowhere experience. I don't really know where you modders draw the line between "immersive" and "fun," but that would be a huge conundrum for me.

It would be hard for me to justify cherrypicking the little aspects and nuances of nature and physics without also adding the ones that would likely make the game less fun to play--because consistency matters to me when it comes to immersion. You shouldn't be able to set a campfire if there's no danger of burning your tent down, for example. Not the best example, but you see what I mean.

So, ultimately, when it comes to games, there's just something about the idea of working with the tools you've been given that I just value and hold sacrosanct. For me, mods just needlessly complicate things, at best. A lot of that is my own attitude, but I think my attitude is justified, if a bit fastidious.

Regarding the leg breaking thing, there's people who play games like ARMA, where you walk roundim a forest for two hours before being shot by a sniper 5 miles away and crawl behind a rock before bleeding out.

If there's a mod that adds that (and I don't doubt there is), you can bet there'd be an audience for it.

Quote from: Verbatim on November 18, 2016, 11:53:57 AM

Quote from: Luciana on November 18, 2016, 11:32:27 AM

I don't understand why you're not modding it if you got it for the Xbox. That's the entire point of getting it again.

He explained that. Achievements.

There is a mod to add that back in~

Xbox