BitterToad

A moment from my recent replay of Dark Souls 3 would absolutely be up there for me. The first time I'd played it at launch I'd had an anxiety attack of a weekend fighting the Princes towards the end of the game. I knew I should have just walked away from it for a bit but for some reason didn't and just kept getting angrier and angrier fighting these two bastards. I did them after two solid days of trying but it killed my enthusiasm for the game and I walked away when I saw the last boss had a second phase. Then, this year for some reason I tried the game again and got up to the Princes knowing I was in for another slog. They went down in one go. My gaming moment of the generation, or certainly one of them. Every little thing they did was so ingrained in my mind from the countless hours spent failing to them that I just knocked the fuck of them first time of asking. No chest palpitations from last time, no swearing at the top of my voice, just "oh shit I can fucking well do this" and dancing around them until they were dead. I smashed through the back half of the game, Nameless fell solo after about five tries, I bought and loved the DLC, and Cinder went down after about three tries. Slave Knight Gael is second only to Artorius as my favourite Souls boss. This generation has been the one in which I truly "got" the Dark Souls series. And I felt I'd sort of fallen out of love with them after struggling with 3. But nope, the love's still there and smashing those stupid bastard Princes felt like a summary of everything I love about these games.

I kind of felt the same at first. I'd stick at normal and remember you're playing in big spaces and there's always room to run away. Part of the fun of the combat for me is when everything goes to shit. Remember enemies react to noise, so if you make some noise then move pretty quickly, the baddies wont be tracking you, they'll be tracking the last thing they heard. So use bottles/bricks/pipe bombs, hell even gunshots sometimes to make enemies move where you want them. Also don't hoard supplies too much, it might feel like you're always low on ammo but that's to encourage you to use different weapons/try different things, not to hoard and use nothing! There's great fun to be had but it can take a little while to uhh... click.

Fairly sure they're on the website.

I think it depends what you want from a stealth game. If you're after literally just sneaking about in the shadows and the game failing when things go wrong then yeah, this is pretty limited. And it's fine if that's your thing. What I look for in a stealth game is how satisfying the Sneak > Get Found > Experiment/Reset loop is. I don't think failing at stealth is fun, which is why I find it much more satisfying that when that does happen there's that choice to either engage in full combat, or run away and reset to stealth mode again. Game Maker's Toolkit did a great video on this earlier in lockdown which i'll link to, but for me The Last of Us 2 is only secondary to MGSV as a stealth game purely because of how it nails the above loop. You can sneak around and clear out a whole area with silent stealth and feel like a total badass if you want. Or you can be Predator, and use noise/distraction/bodies to create a kind of on the fly murder simulator where enemies don't see you but are very much aware of you. You pay for this, because enemies group up and move faster and look for you when they're aware you're there, but the fun is in the hunt/be hunted/oh shit moments. I also found the combat totally lacking in the first game, Broker, and I can imagine if you watch the wrong play through or maybe even in some cases the right ones this could probably look very similar. But the areas you fight in are much much bigger in the sequel and that AI you were so impressed with combines with this to make one of my favourite stealth/combat sandboxes ever. It feels like Tony Hawks at times, zipping through gaps and over desks with gunfire zipping around you (might have lost the Tony Hawks metaphor a bit, there...) trying to reset to stealthiness or cause more carnage. As I get older I'm starting to realise it's in the moment experimentation like that that turns a good game into a classic, for me anyway. I thought The Last of Us was a great story attached to a 7/10 game. The Last of Us 2 is a great story attached to some of the best combat I've ever played in a videogame. It's that good.

Was he related to the Flubber in Flubber? I'm not sure he even had sex with it... Pretty sure it's not Flubber.

Season 2's twice as good as Season 1. And isn't it literally the point that the characters are stupid and betray themselves?

Yep. I also make sure to arrow the owner first so that they have that moment of abandoned sadness before they go. I'm basically a walking narrative dissonance machine.

Do you think it might be that you played the original and watched the sequel?

I doubt he's timing all of the cutscenes and load times, so probably not. There's so much freedom in the combat. It properly reminds me of Halo. Just a series of sandbox areas and the opportunity to take on a load of enemies in any way you want. There's so much variation in what you can do and it has that Breath of the Wild thing of "I wonder if this will work?" and then you try it out and, yes, it did. Last night I discovered you can use smoke bombs to not only stun enemies, but draw infected to a certain area. So what starts as a fairly standard tool to stun enemies and get out of tricky situations suddenly becomes an infected grenade to be used against guards. The game didn't tell me to do that, but it was open enough in its systems that it made me want to try cool shit. Even typing this I'm thinking of situations where maybe I could use the bombs to get the infected to an area and maybe molotov a few at once. It might not have an Assassin's Creed style horror map of icons to go and repeat the same activity over and over again, but in the actual systems it's up there with MGSV in terms of player freedom.

The best game of the last generation, and the reason I've still got my 360, is being ported to what is hopefully an ecosystem that means I can play it forever. I am hugely excited by this news. It also means I can stop getting a soon to be disappointed semi every time the 360 backwards compatibility thread gets updated. THE BEST NEWS.

You'd hope that's complete and utter bollocks though. You'd hope people would look at Mee and Dyche and the club's official statement and cling on to football coming together to fight this and not "Burnley are racist because one of them is racist" I find it really emotional whenever the players take a knee at the start of the match, and watching the club's responses to that singular twat's stupid actions has been really encouraging.

Oh sorry it's enemy perception, or something like that. To do with how quickly they spot you in stealth I guess?

What difficulty sliders are people using? I've gone for normal on perception, hard enemies, hard Ellie, I had gone for hard on scavenging but I found it wasn't giving me any ammo from dead lads, which was stopping me playing around/experimenting in combat.

So I'm someone that really liked The Last of Us, but have always felt the Sony first party "walk around as story plays out" took away from it a little. And with this I was feeling exactly the same after the first two hours. There's just something about the way they tell their stories that makes me feel more like I'm an actor in a play than a real character in an apocalyptic world. Everything's so beautifully designed but it still kind of felt like I was just being funnelled along a path, and everyone was waiting for me to hit my mark and say my line so that the story could continue. Then I hit day 1 and everything started to open up a bit more and this is slowly turning into something very special indeed. They've managed to take a lot of the environmental style puzzles from the Uncharted games and make them feel a lot less "find the right bit to climb up in the video game world", even if that's exactly what you're doing. And the combat, in a really weird way, reminds me of the original Battlefield: Bad Company. You're given these really big feeling sandboxes filled with well placed, intelligent enough, enemies and are basically told "have a go at this, then." There's very little freedom in the game's A > B, even if they have made it feel a bit more like there is, but in the combat you're completely free to engage enemies in any way you want and that's so exciting given how much of the game I know there is to come. Earlier on I had a moment in which I could have snuck around taking every guard and infected out one by one, and that would have been a fun, valid, tense experience. Instead though I snuck up next to one of the clickers and fired my gun in the air, before leading them on a 28 Days Later style chase outside where, after a few shots were fired at/in me, I hid and watched the carnage ensue through my rifle scope. It was a brilliant, thrilling moment that felt truly mine, despite the fact everyone on here will have had similar experiences. The game still devolves every so often into that actorly feel, but the story is really really good, the characters are well drawn and I'm having a nice time getting to know them. I think anyone suggesting it does anything new for storytelling in video games should go and play Outer Wilds, but for what this is, essentially hours and hours of walking around as exposition is barked at you, it's clearly best in class. And with that combat system there's a really nice blend between the big HBO story they're telling, and the much smaller stories that I get to tell when they crop up via the emergent combat systems. Basically I came in with a little bit of a debaser style chip on my shoulder, but rather than sit with a stopwatch as the game loads thinking "this'll get 'em!" I'm definitely being turned around to its charms. It's good. It's the good game. People should play the good game.