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So the king3pj and I have embarked on the Black Ops 3 Campaign mode...

I guess I should start with the combat. Yes, it's that tired tried and true formula that we've all grown to loathe love. There have been some noticeable changes. First off, unlike past games where you start off with a standard weapon and then pick up ammo/new weapons as needed, this time you have load-outs like you do in multiplayer and keep the same weapon-set for the entire chapter, with ammo crates scattered all along the level. It's okay I guess but now you need to micro-manage and learn about all the weapons and various upgrades. The other big change is the introduction of modifiers for characters, where you can remotely hack/blow up enemies, send bees out to attack them, or give yourself super melee attacks. I actually like this change. It is a nice alternative to just having to shoot everything, and it reminded me quite a bit of Mass Effect, where it's the combination of being a Soldier with the big guns and an Adept with the biotics. I was being brought back to memories of playing as my Adept Fem-Shep at times. Oh, and you can also revive people.

Unfortunately this is the only way that BO 3 is like Mass Effect, because it sure as hell isn't in terms of voice acting and writing. I can't remember the last time I cringed so hard, so many times during a CoD Campaign at dialog. The king3pj and I on more than one occasion just burst out laughing at the dialog we were hearing. This is especially weird considering the higher quality of Treyarch's campaigns. I always liked them more because I thought they took the whole thing more seriously, as opposed to Infinity Ward which seemed to always put in the Campaign as a complete after thought starting with MW2 (I can't speak for Ghosts but I didn't exactly hear glowing reviews about it.) And it's not like good acting has been devoid of CoD games. They've had talent including Keifer Sutherland, Idris Elba, Timothy Olyphant, Keith David, Michael Keaton, to f-ing Academy Award Winner Kevin Spacey. Christopher Meloni of L&O: SVU and OZ fame does a good job, but the other characters just sound awful, like they completely just phoned it in. I'm not saying every CoD game needs to have well known actors doing all the voices, but even the popular voice actors in this game don't seem to be competent enough. It really breaks the immersion and the mood, as the story isn't meant to be light hearted and genuine humor is quite scarce.

Speaking of the story, we're 4 chapters into this 11 chapter game, and I honestly couldn't tell you what the overarching plot is. That's REALLY sad in a CoD game. Every game I ever played at least had an easy to follow overarching story, whether it was Modern Warfare's US/GB vs Middle East/Russia, World At War's WW2, or Black Ops 1's flashbacks to try and figure out what the numbers meant (I didn't finish BO 2 and didn't get into Ghosts.) Hell even Advanced Warfare's PMC story, while VERY tired and predictable, at least always kept the endgame very well known. Maybe this game is assuming that we all played and beat BO 2, but from what I can tell, the CIA is basically fighting terrorists. But the targets keep changing so frequently and the lack of a definitive "behind the scenes" villain is making it hard for me to get invested in this whole thing. The most recent story point seems to be that one of your other captains may end up being a traitor, but I don't think that gets revealed until we finish the chapter we stopped on. So basically I'm just shooting things because they're in between me and the next checkpoint. Not exactly a great motivator and way to give the players a satisfying end.

Still, none of these complaints are enough to stop me from playing and I do plan on seeing this through to the end. The gameplay is still fun and I am curious to see how this ultimately ends, if even if it's the train wreck some people are describing it to be, as I enjoy seeing such things. Hopefully we can finish this up in time for Battlefront.
 
yourbeliefs said:
So the king3pj and I have embarked on the Black Ops 3 Campaign mode...

I guess I should start with the combat. Yes, it's that tired tried and true formula that we've all grown to loathe love. There have been some noticeable changes. First off, unlike past games where you start off with a standard weapon and then pick up ammo/new weapons as needed, this time you have load-outs like you do in multiplayer and keep the same weapon-set for the entire chapter, with ammo crates scattered all along the level. It's okay I guess but now you need to micro-manage and learn about all the weapons and various upgrades. The other big change is the introduction of modifiers for characters, where you can remotely hack/blow up enemies, send bees out to attack them, or give yourself super melee attacks. I actually like this change. It is a nice alternative to just having to shoot everything, and it reminded me quite a bit of Mass Effect, where it's the combination of being a Soldier with the big guns and an Adept with the biotics. I was being brought back to memories of playing as my Adept Fem-Shep at times. Oh, and you can also revive people.

Unfortunately this is the only way that BO 3 is like Mass Effect, because it sure as hell isn't in terms of voice acting and writing. I can't remember the last time I cringed so hard, so many times during a CoD Campaign at dialog. The king3pj and I on more than one occasion just burst out laughing at the dialog we were hearing. This is especially weird considering the higher quality of Treyarch's campaigns. I always liked them more because I thought they took the whole thing more seriously, as opposed to Infinity Ward which seemed to always put in the Campaign as a complete after thought starting with MW2 (I can't speak for Ghosts but I didn't exactly hear glowing reviews about it.) And it's not like good acting has been devoid of CoD games. They've had talent including Keifer Sutherland, Idris Elba, Timothy Olyphant, Keith David, Michael Keaton, to f-ing Academy Award Winner Kevin Spacey. Christopher Meloni of L&O: SVU and OZ fame does a good job, but the other characters just sound awful, like they completely just phoned it in. I'm not saying every CoD game needs to have well known actors doing all the voices, but even the popular voice actors in this game don't seem to be competent enough. It really breaks the immersion and the mood, as the story isn't meant to be light hearted and genuine humor is quite scarce.

Speaking of the story, we're 4 chapters into this 11 chapter game, and I honestly couldn't tell you what the overarching plot is. That's REALLY sad in a CoD game. Every game I ever played at least had an easy to follow overarching story, whether it was Modern Warfare's US/GB vs Middle East/Russia, World At War's WW2, or Black Ops 1's flashbacks to try and figure out what the numbers meant (I didn't finish BO 2 and didn't get into Ghosts.) Hell even Advanced Warfare's PMC story, while VERY tired and predictable, at least always kept the endgame very well known. Maybe this game is assuming that we all played and beat BO 2, but from what I can tell, the CIA is basically fighting terrorists. But the targets keep changing so frequently and the lack of a definitive "behind the scenes" villain is making it hard for me to get invested in this whole thing. The most recent story point seems to be that one of your other captains may end up being a traitor, but I don't think that gets revealed until we finish the chapter we stopped on. So basically I'm just shooting things because they're in between me and the next checkpoint. Not exactly a great motivator and way to give the players a satisfying end.

Still, none of these complaints are enough to stop me from playing and I do plan on seeing this through to the end. The gameplay is still fun and I am curious to see how this ultimately ends, if even if it's the train wreck some people are describing it to be, as I enjoy seeing such things. Hopefully we can finish this up in time for Battlefront.
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yourbeliefs already nailed my feelings towards Black Ops 3 pretty well so I won't go into much detail. The story has been laughably bad so far but I think the gameplay is a lot of fun.The biggest positive change for me is the addition of a co-op campaign mode. It makes the game more fun and it gave me a reason to finish my first COD campaign in years.

I would equate Black Ops 3 to a dumb action movie. The lines are cringe-worthy and the story isn't very coherent. There are plenty of crazy set pieces that set you up for cool looking action moments though. More than anything, the story just seems to be there to move you to the next major action moment.

This isn't Gone Home, The Last of Us, or even Advanced Warfare in terms of story but it is fun to play.

Edit: I just realized I didn't even mention online multiplayer or zombies. I have had fun with both of those modes. At this point you know what COD multiplayer is but I'll talk about Zombies a bit.

Zombies mode is 4 player co-op survival against a horde of zombies. I played it for the first time yesterday with a full party of my friends and it was a blast. We played a ton of Zombies in the older Black Ops games and this game does it right too.

I will say that Zombies always has 4 players and it requires you to work together if you want to make it more than 4 or 5 rounds. When you are playing with a full party it's a blast but it's significantly less fun when you have random players brought in from matchmaking. Also Jeff Goldblum voices one of the playable characters in this mode.

I would say that when all 3 gameplay modes are brought into consideration Black Ops 3 is a better total package than other COD games.
 
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I pre-ordered the digital only version of Fallout 4 for my PS4 a little over a week ago and it worked great. I had never pre-ordered a game this way before so I wasn't sure how I would like it and it was great! The game downloaded Sunday afternoon and was ready to play Monday night, or Tuesday morning, how ever you want to call it.

I never had time to play it until last night about 7:30 and made sure I finished at 10 so I could get some decent sleep. I'm still getting over influenza. The intro of the game was very cool and just put me in the mood for Fallout. Fallout 3 is one of my favorites games of all time and the intro gave me those old Fallout 3 feelings. The start of the game is kind of cool to help get the story going and allows you to create your character. I spent a good half hour just designing my characters look.

Once I got started and into the wasteland I didn't really get far. I spent a lot of time just looking around the area and picking up crap. I met my first companion which is a German Shepard and then I messed around with the crafting system. After screwing around just getting a feel for the game, the next thing I know it's 10:00 and I need to get to bed. I could see spending an entire day playing this game without even realizing it. I really look forward to a day when I can actually do that. This game is going to be EPIC.
 
Scherrman said:
I pre-ordered the digital only version of Fallout 4 for my PS4 a little over a week ago and it worked great. I had never pre-ordered a game this way before so I wasn't sure how I would like it and it was great! The game downloaded Sunday afternoon and was ready to play Monday night, or Tuesday morning, how ever you want to call it.

I never had time to play it until last night about 7:30 and made sure I finished at 10 so I could get some decent sleep. I'm still getting over influenza. The intro of the game was very cool and just put me in the mood for Fallout. Fallout 3 is one of my favorites games of all time and the intro gave me those old Fallout 3 feelings. The start of the game is kind of cool to help get the story going and allows you to create your character. I spent a good half hour just designing my characters look.

Once I got started and into the wasteland I didn't really get far. I spent a lot of time just looking around the area and picking up crap. I met my first companion which is a German Shepard and then I messed around with the crafting system. After screwing around just getting a feel for the game, the next thing I know it's 10:00 and I need to get to bed. I could see spending an entire day playing this game without even realizing it. I really look forward to a day when I can actually do that. This game is going to be EPIC.
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I've been a big proponent of digital copies of games on my consoles ever since this generation started and I actually had enough storage space to not worry about it. I didn't like discs last generation either but my Xbox 360 only had a 20GB hard drive so it wasn't really practical to go digital then. My 120GB PS3 was a little better but even that could only fit a handful of games.

I'm glad to hear you're liking Fallout 4. I'm excited to get into it myself. I just need to finish Arkham Knight first. In the meantime I'm really liking that game. This has been a pretty strong year for video games for me.
 
Me and yourbeliefs finished Black Ops 3 last night. We already posted about it and I don't really have much to add.

I wanted to point out an interesting stat I saw when looking at the trophies after we finished though.

Only about 4% of people who have played the game on PS4 have the trophy for beating the game on any difficulty. Just over 1% of people have the trophy for beating it on the hardened difficulty we played.

This backs up what I heard in an interview with someone who works on the COD games a few years ago. I don't remember who it was but the person interviewed said their internal numbers showed that the vast majority of people never play the campaign. The trophy percentages on PSN back that statement up.

I did have fun with the Black Ops 3 campaign but I have to wonder how long Activision will continue to invest millions of dollars and big name actors into campaign development if so few people are playing them.
 
king3pj said:
Only about 4% of people who have played the game on PS4 have the trophy for beating the game on any difficulty. Just over 1% of people have the trophy for beating it on the hardened difficulty we played.

This backs up what I heard in an interview with someone who works on the COD games a few years ago. I don't remember who it was but the person interviewed said their internal numbers showed that the vast majority of people never play the campaign. The trophy percentages on PSN back that statement up.
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While I don't deny the idea that more people play MP than SP, I don't think those trophy stats are a proper representation. Don't forget, the game came out 8 days ago, and we plowed through it over the course of 5 days. I'm sure given some time those percentages will increase significantly. I can't possibly imagine that on average, less than 5% of players beat a campaign.

As far as my thoughts, they didn't change much from my first impressions. One nice change was that eventually a semblance of a plot DID emerge. However, said plot was rather out there. I've heard opinions on the story range between "A great new concept for the CoD series" to "CoD meets Indigo Prophecy." I wasn't a huge fan of it myself. The last section of the game had a particular "Would this damn thing end already?" feel to it that we both shared, which isn't a good way to end things. Also, the ending will likely make you go, "Wait, WHAT?"

Still, I did undeniably have fun, but we both agreed that we were glad it was over. It's not the worst CoD campaign I've played but it's definitely the worst modern Treyarch one. The best analogy I can give to the campaign of Black Ops 3 is like a night of bar hopping on Bourbon Street. You'll probably have a lot of fun, quite a few laughs, and see some things you never saw before. When it's all said and done though you'll be shaking your head, have forgotten most of what happened, and not be in any rush to experience it again.

Now I'm waiting for Battlefront to arrive, but in the meantime I'll be returning back to Catherine. After 5 straight days of FPS with horrible dialog and corny acting, I need a nice brain teaser wrapped around with a good story and great acting/dialog.
 
It will definitely be interesting to check on those trophy numbers in a couple months. I agree that the percentage will go up, but by how much?

Next for me is the last couple missions in Arkham Knight. I already have Fallout 4 downloaded and I'll hopefully be able to put some major time in with that this weekend depending on how long Arkham Knight takes to wrap up.
 
I wrapped up Arkham Knight last night and it was easily one of my favorite games of the year. I won't go into the issues the PC version has in this post since we have already covered that from basically every angle in the Arkham Knight thread. Just know that for the purposes of this post I will just be talking about the game itself unless someone asks to know more about performance or the settings I had to use.

For me the combat is better than it has ever been in this series. They added new enemy thug types that weren't in previous games but they also added new gadget skills to deal with these enemies. The tag team fights with Batman's allies look cool and I even like most of the Batmobile stuff. I was originally skeptical about the Batmobile being included because traversal has always been a strong point of this series. Even with those feelings and the general attitude most other players had towards the Batmobile I actually enjoyed it.

There were a few problems with the Batmobile stuff though. First, I highly recommend changing out of the default Batmobile controls to the toggle tank mode. It's so much more natural driving a car with the triggers and the tank combat makes more sense to me this way too. The early parts of the game force you to use the Batmobile for basically every mission. They make you use it to solve puzzles, and worse they make you do some weird car platforming with it. Luckily after the first couple hours this stuff stops happening as often and the times you do have to use it make more sense. The only other time the Batmobile really annoyed me was later in the game when they make you do Batmobile stealth to get behind enemy tanks and shoot a specific spot. They throw in a lot of these tanks and they destroy you with just a couple hits. I found this to be pretty frustrating.

When the game is at its best it is allowing you to attack a situation however you see fit. Sometimes the Batmobile can play into this in awesome ways but I wish they would have left more of it up to me instead of forcing it on me. In general, it's fun whipping around Gotham in the Batmobile though.

The game looks great and all the main characters look cool. The acting is also at the same high level as the rest of this series. The story was compelling as well. I did have the Arkham Knight's identity spoiled for me so I didn't really feel much impact during the big moment when it was revealed. It's hard to say for sure whether I would have or not if I didn't already know who he was.

Steam says I put 31 hours into this game. That 31 hours includes me doing the story and taking down all of Gothom's Most Wanted besides the Riddler. There are 296 Riddler challenges in the game and unfortunately they locked the "secret" ending behind completing 100% of this game including those missions. I recommend just playing the content you want and watching the ending on youtube like I did. I also played the Harley Quinn story DLC but I haven't played the rest of the season pass content yet. I am definitely keeping the game installed on my SSD because there is still more season pass content coming and I really do want to play it all.

If this really is the end of the Arkham Series it went out on a very high note. The game will definitely be in contention for my personal GOTY in a couple months. Even if you are playing on PC like yourbeliefs and myself I recommend just turning down the settings until you can get solid performance or locking the FPS at 30 and giving it a shot. No, you shouldn't have to make those concessions on PC but this game is worth playing.
 
Scherrman said:
Are you going to play Fallout 4 now, King?
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yourbeliefs said:
He already is, unless Steam has been lying to me for the past few days.
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Yep, I started playing it over the weekend. I just took a look at my Steam profile and I'm 7.6 hours in so I'm still very early into the game. So far, all I can really say about it is that it's more Fallout. They obviously updated the visuals quite a bit and you are controlling a voiced protagonist now but it's definitely a Fallout game.

I'm liking it so far but I can't really give a strong opinion about it until I put quite a few more hours in and see more of the wasteland.
 
I'm about 15 or so hours into the game so far and have barely done much of the main story yet. This is why I love the game so much. I'll go on a side mission and when done I may spend some time working on my settlement and maybe do some weapon/armor crafting. After being satisfied with that I'll hit up another quest or just wander around. I could spend all day playing this game but so far it's just been about two hours at a time.
 
meStevo said:
I think I'm still in Sanctuary wondering how to get food.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk
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This is not a story spoiler in any way but I'm still putting it in spoiler tags for anyone who doesn't want to know anything about the game.

If you have discovered Diamond City yet it's really easy. There is a little farm in Diamond City with a few different kinds of fruits and vegetables growing. All you have to do is harvest some of it and then you will will be able to plant it in Sanctuary from the workshop mode. Each piece of fruit you harvest is enough to grow one plant so make sure you grab a bunch.

It's also not like all the other items in various cities in the game that show as red text indicating that you are stealing it from someone. It's in regular green text like everything out in the open wasteland so you can feel free to take it without everyone in Diamond City trying to murder you.
 
Scherrman said:
I'm about 15 or so hours into the game so far and have barely done much of the main story yet. This is why I love the game so much. I'll go on a side mission and when done I may spend some time working on my settlement and maybe do some weapon/armor crafting. After being satisfied with that I'll hit up another quest or just wander around. I could spend all day playing this game but so far it's just been about two hours at a time.
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I have barely done any of the main story because that story line is far less interesting than everything else going on in the world. All the side quests and exploration have much more compelling story beats than what becomes your main objective in the first 5 minutes of the game.

The same could easily be said for Fallout 3 where the main line objective is just to search for your dad. You have to follow the main story at some point to meet important characters and find interesting areas full of awesome side content. However, anyone trying to main line the primary story missions is missing out on most of the best parts of the game though.
 
I still haven't been to Diamond City and I'm 20 hours in now. I've been watching some YouTube videos and getting tons of ideas for building settlements.
 
Scherrman said:
I have yet to run into any glitches like that yet. That's a funny one though.
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I haven't seen anything like that either. The only glitch I have seen is that a couple times my weapon or Pip Boy have disappeared. I can still fire my gun, I just can't see it so it's hard to aim and it looks like the shots are coming out of thin air. The Pip Boy is more challenging because it still works but I can't actually see any of the menus so it's worthless.

Both issues are pretty rare. When it does happen I found out that I can simply make a quicksave and then load from that save. This fixes the problem and since you can save at any time in Fallout games it's an easy fix.
 
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