Thrik

There are a certain few games I always replay every few years or so — just long enough for me to forget a lot of the dialogue/gameplay specifics.
Monkey Island 1–3 Grim Fandango Super Mario World Yoshi's Island Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Metal Gear Solid 2–4 Donkey Kong Country 1–3 A huge part of why I love Nintendo is that their games often let you scratch that nostalgia itch while still experiencing a new game. For example, Super Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze are just an absolute god damned joy and will probably join my list of replay titles. Hopefully they'll re-release Super Mario Galaxy in HD too because that is such a nostalgia ride.

Just updated my portfolio but I'll upload it here as well. Art dump from the areas/missions I worked on. Level Design though so I can't take all the credit for all the nice details/shaders/textures, you know the drill. Luckily us level designers were pretty involved with the geometry so there's a lot of stuff we influenced and were able to do a ton of propdressing as well. You'll have a better feel for what exactly it is I did by playing the game but it's as close as I can get for now if you didn't buy it!  Enjoy!









 
 
 
 
 
 

That front is confirmed to be in the base game

Is there any news if the game is focusing on any particular front (expanding on others afterwards with DLC), or it will be offering maps from the different areas like 1942? Me and my fellow Italian friends will be very interested to see the Austro-Italian conflict on the Alps… I come from the area where the war songs sing "the foreigner will go no further [than the Piave river]" (yup, an early version of "you shall not pass"), our grand grandfathers dug in the cliffs and were moving weapons and ammunition on the back of donkeys. The Alpini corp is probably the most celebrated in Italy.
Havent seen anything suggesting our front will be in the game for now.

There are a certain few games I always replay every few years or so — just long enough for me to forget a lot of the dialogue/gameplay specifics.
Monkey Island 1–3 Grim Fandango Super Mario World Yoshi's Island Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Metal Gear Solid 2–4 Donkey Kong Country 1–3 A huge part of why I love Nintendo is that their games often let you scratch that nostalgia itch while still experiencing a new game. For example, Super Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze are just an absolute god damned joy and will probably join my list of replay titles. Hopefully they'll re-release Super Mario Galaxy in HD too because that is such a nostalgia ride.

I agree, I've seen idiots and very rational, intelligent people alike voting both ways. It's just not as simple as you're an idiot for voting out, even though that wouldn't have been my choice. These are nonetheless some interesting albeit unsurprising observations:

I must say that as someone who comes from a backwater town and who now lives in a multi-cultural city, it's impossible to not draw a link between the casual racism that permeates throughout that town and its huge sway towards voting to leave the EU.
I have no doubt that many of these leave votes were fuelled by xenophobia, racism, and/or frustration at not earning very much, none of which will be helped by leaving the EU. Of course a lot of fine citizens did vote leave for entirely sensible and rational reasons — but those people aren't the ones who tipped the scales.
Essentially, I think that we're leaving for entirely the wrong reasons, but the good news is that voters' motivations and what politicians decide to do with the country upon leaving are two entirely different things. My hope is that we'll be able to arrange a new set-up that retains free movement of workers and access to the common market — which would inevitably involve taking back on various EU laws much as Switzerland does — which even Brexit politicians are now starting to hint may be the case.
The holy grail would be a general election where we can vote in a party with a mandate to scrap Brexit, which I believe would override the referendum in terms of adhering to what the public wants. If Scotland is successful in stalling the referendum as it intends to, this is actually a (remote) possibility.

I really hope that free movement of workers somehow ends up being maintained, which I think is something that Switzerland has negotiated with the EU despite existing outside of it. For me that's one of the saddest parts of this whole thing because being able to easily live around the world without incurring huge expense and/or cost is a wonderful concept. It'd also be an entertaining blow to the segment of 'out' voters who are basically just a bit racist.

I really hope that free movement of workers somehow ends up being maintained, which I think is something that Switzerland has negotiated with the EU despite existing outside of it. For me that's one of the saddest parts of this whole thing because being able to easily live around the world without incurring huge expense and/or cost is a wonderful concept. It'd also be an entertaining blow to the segment of 'out' voters who are basically just a bit racist.

I really hope that free movement of workers somehow ends up being maintained, which I think is something that Switzerland has negotiated with the EU despite existing outside of it. For me that's one of the saddest parts of this whole thing because being able to easily live around the world without incurring huge expense and/or cost is a wonderful concept. It'd also be an entertaining blow to the segment of 'out' voters who are basically just a bit racist.

The way the zombies practically pour out of things in this game is absolutely excellent haha.

Sorry, I missed this before. Topics that've been inactive for three years are archived but they can be unarchived if you really want that. Let me know the address and I can do it.
Edit: I've decided to disable archiving as it was only in place for performance reasons, but the newer software is much more efficient. A background task is running to return the threads to regular status. This means it'll also (with time) be possible to search those threads as archived threads weren't included in results.

Yeah I do agree with some of what you're saying.
Overlapping functionality and over-complicated functionality do often cause me to just ignore some features, although part of me also likes the sheer novelty of — for example in Metal Gear Solid — being able to use different items such as empty magazines, balloons, making a noise, etc to achieve the same effect of distracting an enemy for a while. There are subtle but meaningful distinctions to how exactly you use these, but they do largely produce the same result.
I think a really important factor is that like you say the player isn't excessively powerful to the point of the game being devoid of challenge. I think that Dishonored did a really good job of keeping the game tricky despite the load of powers at my disposal largely because of the stealth element. Many powers would expose my position, so I had to sparingly use the less conspicuous stuff to creep around. If I was spotted, that's when the big guns would come out. That's actually how I played Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid too.
I guess that a lot of it comes down to self-impose player discipline. It's my personal experience and observation of others that even though you can just run and gun through games like the aforementioned, it's a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience to use stealth but when shit hits the fan segue into the more action-packed approach rather than just dying/giving up as older stealth games tended to enforce. Uncharted 2–4 actually use this formula to great effect.
I do enjoy seeing games playing around with these questions, along with how to keep games engaging in terms of storyline and progression in a world of increasingly open environments — something that can very easily cause a game to quickly grow boring once the initial rush of exploring the world wears off.

I do like the look of this a lot, but then I loved the original so that's no surprise. I get what you're saying Sentura about the powers but honestly I think you could apply that criticism to virtually any game that provides an open-ended approach to the gameplay. I'd say that it's a fairly necessary side-effect of not designing in a 'rock, paper, scissors' type way where problem A requires weapon/ability B.
Indeed, in most games you just get a big arsenal of weapons and I personally end up using a few favourites most of the time as per my preferred playing style. I found that I did the same thing in Dishonored — rarely using many of the powers — and in similar gameplay types such as Metal Gear Solid 5 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. For example in MGS5 you have many options for absolutely decimating an area using brute force, but many people will use the various more time-consuming but thrilling stealth options.
Maybe in some ways it's just not your type of game, and you prefer ones with a more controlled approach to the obstacles you encounter where each puzzle has a very specific solution. I saw you say similar stuff about the new Deus Ex too yet both these games' gameplay look superb to me.  

I think I was demo'd out when I saw this during the Sony Conference because it was "bam! Game. Bam! New game! Bam, trailer! Bam game!" so I thought this looked a bit too similar to TLOU... and it's zombies on top of all the other zombie games I'd seen...
...HOWEVER... watching it again, holy shit the zombie flow which reminds me of like World War Z seems to be its USP! The AI/animation/flow system looks insaneeeee, and it reminds me of the first time I saw the horde of zombies in Left 4 Dead but amped up and more next-gen!
Can't wait!

I think you're right in thinking that many games have this kind of approach, but that doesn't mean it is a good approach. Popular opinion should not dictate whether something is inherently good or bad, as I'm sure you would agree. More so when you consider that there are still many open questions/problems that still haven't been solved in game design and the games industry as a whole.
I'd wager the reason these kinds of approaches are still used is because novelty matters more to people who play games than game depth does, and given that most players may only play the first 20 minutes to 1 hour of your game, you can use these gimmicks to your advantage as a wow factor early in the game, at the cost of making them less useful later on, when you will (hopefully) have engrossed players into the story and world so much that they don't notice or care.
And of course there is always going to be an "arsenal" of abilities at the player's disposal, but in my experience what makes an ability system great is that each ability should not overlap with other abilities in their use, and that they should not break the game by conventional use. I have the following arguments for this:
The argument for the former is that players will always use the path of least resistance, so if an ability is complex to use (in terms of setup time, timing, placement etc.), but has the same effect as an ability that is simple to use, then players will favor the simpler ability more. That makes the other ability gimmicky at best, and redundant at worst. The player should not use an ability once and then forget about it because the game emphasizes too many new abilities or just does not provide enough situations where setting up an ability is "worth it" for the player.
The argument for the latter is that abilities can allow you to break the game experience by either overpowering the player to the point where the challenges in the game become trivial, or by allowing players to avoid gameplay challenges altogether. In these situations, it's very easy to break flow/immersion and therefore make the player's experience worse while at the same time forcing players to use these abilities to progress the game following their "playstyle."
I think you're also right that in many ways it's not my type of game. I like the core loop experience of these types, but it feels like they are adding too much clutter/gimmicks/Michael Bay obscuring the core of what could otherwise be a great game. Maybe it's because it's 2016 and people think the genre should evolve in terms of the tools at a player's disposal. I personally think that games should evolve the gameplay challenges first before evolving the tools.
I think this video explains these kinds of issues much better than I can, so feel free to watch (Thief series are by no means perfect games, but they do have some very, very good design):
 

Enjoy your storage man. Just part of the excellent deal that is MapCore.  

I noticed this at the bottom of a private conversation lol

I'm so happy for Kojima man.
Can you imagine, walking down a stage with a live orchestra, the floor lits up with each footstep, and in very humble and badass way you shout "I'm back" and drop the most mindfuck trailer ever! This guy is at the apex of his career, can't wait to see what this game will actually play like, but if it has even a fraction of the love and personality that was poured into any of the MGS games, this will be fantastic.

I really hope they tighten up how the new Zelda looks... like, a lot. I appreciate the scale but even compared to last-gen games like Skyrim it's looking really plain in many areas and way short of the teaser shown a couple of years ago. Surprising considering that this is meant to be coming to Nintendo's next-gen NX. It's painfully obvious how fidelity and scale are holding back the gorgeous art direction in some places.

Bumping this thread should be a bannable offense IMO!!!

Yeah I was hoping they'd go a bit more all-in with the choice of gender, complemented by plentiful outfit choices — that'd put it somewhere close to being more on par with other open-world RPGs. I'm a bit bored of a blonde git in a green (sometimes blue or red) tunic.
I'm optimistic that the NX version will look better. This is all running on a Wii U so unless Nintendo has suddenly decided to throw their usual artistic brilliance out the window I expect that greater hardware will bring it closer to what we saw in 2014 (skip to final minute):
That seems completely attainable to me with more polish.