The PC Elitist: Dice Is Out of Ideas

When are you guys planning on making your big return?

Yeah come play Drunken Games with me and some of the Drunken Gamers crew, it'll be a good laugh and give us some colab content we can both use. Also I get to shoot you in the face :) Quite frankly the last good thing that DICE made was BFBC2, that was a complete surprise to me, it was originally a console game and they launched a "real" beta on the PC which was an entire month of beta testing and balancing, Immediately fell in love with that game, destruction was actually meaningful to gameplay and it had the right size of maps and array of vehicles and weapons, logged many hours of that. It was surprising how good it was largely because it was a cross platform/port and of course since the original BF1942 and to some extent BF2 they had been aquired by EA who routinely screw over the studios they buy. Respectively BF3 and BF4 were not as big leaps as BF1942/BF2/BFBC2, BF3 of course moved onto the new frostbite engine and introduced a few new mechanics but they also stuffed up the server browser stuff by moving to Origin which I REFUSE to install, I may have dabbled with BF3 or 4 if they were on steam but they totally messed that one up. I'm not a Star Wars fan at all and I've seen mixed reviews of Battlefront beta, I think most of the appeal of that game comes from the intellectual property and the lore, it doesn't look like much special in terms of gameplay mechanics. I'd need to play it to be able to say for sure though. You're right about the "beta" as well, a 4 day "beta" is no beta at all. Betas mean that it's feature complete and need both balance and bug fixes, respectively the BFBC2 beta was a "real beta" and lasted the month leading up to release and the vast majority of complaints made during that beta were fixed for launch including a lot of the PC elite requests such as FOV options, better mouse options and whatnot. Modern betas are just to ship pre-orders and give people early access as a bonus which is incredibly gay. Oh BTW, is PS2 any better or worse after being acquired?

It's been awhile. I hope you guys are doing well!

I can understand both sides of the Bethesda part of this. I personally am not the biggest fan of them, but I like a lot of the things that are in them. I love open worlds. I love the rich lore. I (usually) love the settings. However, the combat is usually awful (FO is alright, but TES has always been awful). The games are buggy to the point of being broken. (I know some people love the bugs, but I absolutely NEED the unofficial patches in order to get enjoyment from the games. Also, having a dragon, vampires, or werewolves killing a huge number of the important NPCs blocking out a large chunk of the game because of an unlucky spawn. No thank you, I NEED all named NPCs essential mod as well.) I difficulty choices are unbalanced number mods (that only have affect between you and everything else, so companions are broken). Some awful level scaling instances (Oblivion, and I honestly didn't like the FO3 system either) and really aggravating level cap systems (until Skyrim). I haven't played any of them in a while, but I do want to at some point, but I need some mods to enjoy it. As to whether I'd call it a "platform" rather than a game.... I wouldn't. Bethesda puts a lot of work into building a world with rich lore, and most mods don't fundamentally alter this. The mods really are various "patches" and tweaks to change the game into what the modder wants from it. Still, I would call it a game because my definition of a platform is something like Half-Life (with all the Source mods that fundamentally change the game) or UT (again, with Unreal mods and various mutators), which essentially boils down to an engine. That's at least my definition, but in extension, I probably wouldn't call the EU, CK, HoI, or Vicky series "platforms" either. They definitely have great mod capabilities, but there are certain fundamentals that cannot be changed or usually are not (because there is already a game that is being MODified). Maybe a better viewpoint is that they are both now that I think about it....Also, on Battlefront. I've never played any of them, but I've always heard very good things about the original games, especially 2. All of the top user reviews on GOG are 5 stars.... I don't know though as I've never played them.But it does seem like DICE is getting a lot worse. Again, I haven't played much of their stuff (last one being BFBC2, although I got BF4 for free from an EA tech talk), but I've seen a lot of it, and it really seems a lot is simply recycled with little improvement through each installment. It kind of feels like what happened to CoD where the original games were great at the time, but then it started to be milked for money with no regard for the IP or what a lot of people actually wanted. For CoD the driver was the addition of a tacked-on multiplayer that, for some reason, became super popular. I don't know what the deal is with DICE's games.... At least they know how to make a good engine though.... (Although that wasn't enough to save id's Rage....)

I'll comment as my normal account to address Skyrim because my other DG comment was getting out of control, lol. Just to clarify this is my personal account where I've made all my posts on youtube over the years, the DG account is the account our new channel is under and I post with that (as does the other host, my brother Brissles) to help get our content out there. I actually really wanted to like The Witcher games, if that makes any sense. I'm an oldschool gamer in that sense and I love the depth of a good RPG, ever since the original Baldur's Gate and Fallout 1&2 and probably even prior to that. On paper the Witcher games seem like the perfect RPG for me. I struggled through The Witcher 2 and really tried to keep playing despite the fact that I clearly wasn't enjoy large parts of it, in the end I just had to give up. The Bethesda games I actually mostly play vanilla, I do tend to go a bit crazy in the config files doing things like pushing draw distances to the extreme and pushing the LOD distances out because I'm normally rocking a fairly powerful GPU and the in game settings can sometimes be restrictive. But I don't do a whole lot of actual modding, never on the first play through and often after then they're graphical tweaks to make it look more pretty rather than alter gameplay. I think it's fair to say they're much less serious RPGs than The Witcher and largely that's to pander to a more casual crowd and so they could definitely be better in a lot of ways, but they also tend to really nail the character progression, the sense you start out kinda useless and then slowly become this crazy powerful character, it has an almost MMO feel to it which really plays on the mental quest/reward feedback system that keeps players hooked on leveling. They absolutely are a great platform for mods and that adds an insane amount of value to the game but generally speaking much later down the line, but it's not primarily why I like them, I think they stand on their own merit as the devs intended. Maybe I'm just becoming a casual :'( I don't think so because I backed Pillars of Eternity which is a kick back to the Baldur's Gate days, I loved DA:O but not the messed up sequels, I'm looking forward to Torment: Tides of Numenera which is a spiritual successor to Planescape tournament. There's just some things about TW series that really don't gel with me although to be fair I've not given TW3 much of a chance, I gave it about 2 hours and I just wandered onto other things.

Please get drunk for our enjoyment :)

when are you coming back?

Boo! What happened to this channel?