The reason the railgun was popular was because it was the only effective way to deal with chargers. To nerf that and leave other AT weapons / charger health and armor untouched is really fucking stupid.
It feels like the game balance team hasn’t played the game on the higher difficulties. If your primary weapon isn’t supposed to be able to deal with tanks, then your strategems are your only option. But nerfing the railgun without giving us other alternatives makes killing massive amounts of tanks impossible. I doubt the buffs to the flamethrower and laser cannon are going to be enough.
Meh, I disagree. With the “meta” loadout of breaker, shield, and railgun, even helldiver difficulty can be relatively easy as long as you can avoid getting surrounded. If the goal is to always feel like you need to work together and barely make it out alive, these changes make sense. I personally prefer that there isn’t one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I personally prefer that there isn’t one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I agree that there should be many viable ways to at higher difficulties. I just think that nerfing the only way that seems to work without providing alternatives doesn’t seem like the way to go about making that happen.
The man in the ivory tower even says under the railgun heading that they are aware that one of the reasons the railgun is popular is because other anti-armor sucks. Respectfully sir that’s like the only reason. Your CEO said on Twitter that the ass of a charger is not a weak point, merely an unarmored point; well all the same I need my partner to get the charger to face the other way to hit its butt since I need multiple recoilless rounds to kill it.
Maybe my friends are too drunk but with the shield and the railgun we still get about three bile titans per breach and breaches retrigger regularly. With automatons it is easy for us to kite circularly, thereby reducing the number of patrols we drag in, but the speed of bugs leads us to back pedal across the map. If you care to share advice I would welcome it.
Mostly just “keep moving”. If you spread out a bit, generally one person or group will take most of the heat while things are relatively quiet for the others. Heat team basically just has to keep running while the other team does the objective. If a bug hole opens up on the objective, run away and circle back. Chargers and hunters seem the most capable of catching up, but the hunters are pretty easy to kill. For the chargers, they seem almost hard coded to take a longer stagger if you dive out of the way instead of just moving out of their turn radius, so you can dodge a charge and gain a little more time to escape.
Don’t underestimate smoke, it can be pretty handy in keeping things off your back. Call down supplies often, even if you can’t necessarily get to them all. They have a pretty short cool down so don’t be afraid to waste a few or take multiple if no one else is nearby. Honestly I wouldn’t worry about bile titans too much unless they’re on an objective (or are an objective). They can be outrun and will eventually lose interest, and their attacks have fairly limited range with a big windup.
Granted I haven’t tried all this since the update so take it with a grain of salt. I do plan to try it again this weekend so I’ll report back.
I rather disliked the whole ‘your primary weapon is not supposed to be the weapon you primarily use’. Fine then rename them to small, medium, large or something instead of leading me to believe I should be able to kill a smaller horde without a Destroyer or Eagle.
I think what I didn’t like is: I could maybe agree with their line of thought for the changes they made to the weapons. I don’t like that they prioritized these as the first balance patch.
As many have said it was meta because of the abundance of chargers/heavy enemies in 7-9 for folks trying to get the super samples.
Before the high difficulties felt chaotic but at least doable. Now… it still is but it’s even more running and kiting. To me it’s a less fun gameplay loop.
And the “arrogance” is probably perceived from the other dev comments like “get good” “stop clutching your pearls” “goodbye crutches”. If that’s how the devs feel, it’s easy to imagine the balance person, who prioritized removing tools vs making the reason the tools were needed first, thinks the same way.
I don’t think it’s arrogant, I think it’s actually really interesting how they talk about the “fantasy” of the game. I get not everyone plays the game for the same reason, but I understand the devs’ vision of the game really being about the feel of being a hero against the odds, not having the most effecient loadout or unlocking everything as fast as possible.
I’m getting irrationally angry at everyone crying about the hard difficulties being “too hard”. Diff 7, which is the last “mandatory” difficulty to obtain everything in the game, has decent balance imo. It’s not easy by any stretch but it’s not impossible, or even “too hard”. It’s challenging and can definitely get very chaotic, even if you bring your A-game, and that’s good.
No the laser cannon is supposed to be an lmg that you don’t need to reload. It only got its buff because people were confused about a weapon with ‘cannon’ in the name, that you have to rest on your shoulder, getting completely blocked by armor. But initially the lascan was completely in line with other laser weapons.
Even the orbital laser weapon only kills chargers and bile titans by reapplying the fire DoT unless you strip top armor first. And the scythe primary weapon is a complete waste of everyone’s time since it is eclipsed by any DMR.
The chargers work pretty well with a shot from the recoilless rifle in one of the front legs followed by a magazine of the primary gun in the now exposed leg.
HMG + recoilless also works pretty well, rocket in leg and 1-2 seconds with the HMG and he’s gone.
Only downside is the reload time so if you have 2 or more chargers somebody has to kite them while you reload.
Aside from the HMG and recoilless both being support weapons, it’s not really feasible to use the recoilless if there are multiple of them, not to mention ammo concerns
But the HMG is not a support weapon and the railgun is? I don’t quite get the point.
We can take down 4 chargers at the same time with this strategy with 2 people with recoilless. More than that and the orbital laser or railcannon have to come out.
I played a few games after the patch and I came to a similar opinion. I don’t think the railgun was the real issue. The chargers were the issue and people were using the railgun because it was by far the best option against chargers.
I don’t think the railgun needed such a nerf. I think the flamer buff and breaker nerf together would’ve brought railgun numbers down, because flamer is now crazy good against chargers while also being good against patrols. At least you would’ve had to choose between the range of the railgun or the crowd control of the flamer. Now I’m just going to be using the flamer, which creates the same issue as before just with a different gun.
The expendable AT rifle and recoilless rifle are both more effective against chargers than the railgun is, with the exception of a high number of chargers at once. They both take off leg armor in one hit and stagger the chargers.
Easy thing to say when you’re only playing up to 5. Where my group stands, playing 7-9, the rail gun, with its higher dps, is the gun we need to complete ops.
I realize you address the number of chargers in your comment, but this change also cripples players that are more solo oriented.
Not gonna lie, I’m a little concerned after this patch. I don’t think it’s entirely unfair to make comparisons to the first game seeing as it’s a sequel (up to you to agree/disagree). But with this patch especially, the philosophy differences between the two are becoming more apparent.
In 1, there was almost no primary that was useless altogether. Certainly no support or AT that was useless. And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.
If they want things to be harder, why did they change the reinforce system to be objectively easier? That system change is my single biggest 1>2 gripe.
This after seeing one of the devs back this balance patch by constantly (and imo not so professionally, but I’m a boomer like that I guess) on Discord chide people not happy about the changes to “just go play an idle game” if they want an easy power fantasy cake walk.
Like I said, major concerns for me. The response to this will tell the tale. I never could get into DRG primarily because they seemed to prioritize difficulty balancing way over having fun in combat. Same thing with Deadlink which should have been a fave of mine. I really hope to not see HD2 go that route when I’ve touted HD1 as one of my faves and a contender for best coop game of all time for years now.
And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.
We have very different memories of this game. I remember the tanks spam at higher levels was even more egregious than in HD2. However I do agree that the anti amor options were basically all better. Especially in the stratagems department
In Japan PCs always had this weird association with porn, and Japan wouldn’t be Japan without all the antiquated traditionalism, so PCs fell out of favor for a while. Now that they’ve noticed PC as a gaming platform prints money in ludicrous amounts they’ve started changing their minds… So it’s a matter of time until the boomer execs get a stroke or something and younger people take their jobs, really.
Weird, considering how low quality Japanese porn games usually are, and how big the porn industry in Japan generally is. But hey, even Sony saw the light, and overall actually does a half decent job with most of their ports.
Though, we've heard the whole mantra of the death of the gaming PC for decades in the West too. And if anything, consoles got closer and closer to PCs, so arguably it seems kinda the other way around.
virtually anyone can watch an adult video without context. not everyone can play a japanese game with no context. the latter also takes more time to develop.
thr console pc paragdim imo started to switch around when consoles are no longer bleeding edge tech. although price/performamce optimized, they are no longer considered visually the best experience, and everything outside of switch carts needs a digital connection to update. on the PS3/360 launch, their performance was considered high end. Nowadays consoles release with middle of the pack performance to minimize cost. Consoles are slowly losing their plug and play status and resorting to other methods of monetization.
Weird, considering how low quality Japanese porn games usually are, and how big the porn industry in Japan generally is.
This is precisely the reason why though, in Japan porn games have existed since the introduction of the home computer and they flourished because of the lack product standards in the platform. With the release of the Famicon, consoles started getting really popular to the point where many devs and consumers stopped buying PCs for gaming, and since Nintendo (among others) enforced strict standards porn games obviously weren’t allowed on their platforms. After a while, because of this shift most games available on PC were Visual Novels, many of them having porn in it in some form or another, so the platform got increasingly associated with pornography and a stigma was created.
Before getting all mad about bad articles, this is probably more a case of vanillaware not being able to afford to port right now and wanting to focus on what they know. It’ll likely come later
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently.
That’s from the game’s producer at Atlus. If the publisher wanted to get a PC port, they would have found the money to do it (or found a third-party to manage the port if Vanillaware wasn’t willing/able). Per the quote, Vanillaware themselves do not want it on PC - nothing about not being able to afford to port it or anything like that. This tracks with how they’ve never released a single game on Windows aside from an MMO they made for Square Enix almost 20 years ago, before they were even known as Vanillaware.
Vanillaware just doesn’t have any interest in PC, and while that’s quite frustrating, it’s their prerogative.
I would have really loved playing this game on my Steamdeck but looks like the only way that’s happening is with some sprinkles of what Nintendo calls piracy
The way I see it, there could be three things going on: 1) Vanillaware was so done with this game after ten years of development and didn’t want to spend a minute more contributing to their first PC port, 2) they are still ignorant/disbelieving of the recent ascendancy of the PC market despite Sega and Atlus surely pushing otherwise, or 3) someone high up at Vanillaware doesn’t want mods.
We’ve seen the aversion to modding for whatever reason with Japanese developers for a while now. Sometimes they get fiercely protective.
It’s effectively non-functional. “Absolute shit” is overselling it.
I know I could just use the proton version and get decent performance, but the fact that it has a native client that just doesn’t work kind of killed my expectations for the future. It’s one thing if the issues were new, but the map bug was reported over 4 years ago…
I just bought Brotato for like $3.74, because I just finished 100%ing Vampire Survivors on my Steam Deck.
Mandatory you should own Stardew Valley by now, and his big v1.6 update finally comes out next week.
Hades is on sale for like $12.50. It’s on sale for $12.50 more than it’s not on sale, really.
Red Dead redemption 2 and two spider man games are also on sale.
Really, it’s a steam sale. Just buy everything that’s at least 40% off till you’re broke. My backlog is probably already bigger than I have years left.
I’m VERY tempted to buy Fallout 4: Game of the Year edition due to my hype for Fallout: London (which releases in April of this year), but I’m worried of getting burned if it turns out to be a bad/disappointing mod. :/
As someone who couldn’t tolerate F3/NV because they paled in comparison to 1/2, I actually really enjoyed 4. It lost a lot of the engine jank and felt like a decent FPS with light RPG mechanics, wearing the aesthetics of Fallout.
Imo, FO4 did everything better than FO3, except the plot. But FO3’s plot was already kinda bland to begin with. I mean, back then… It was incredible. But not by today’s standards.
It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.
The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.
Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.
As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.
It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.
My Deck is for playing single player games when I can’t use my desktop, such as when I’m on the train heading to work. I’ve finished more games since I’ve had the Deck than the few years before that. Love that thing.
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