Malfeasance 最近的评测

I've done honest work for a shipping company.

I infiltrated the pandas and observed their habits.

I've slain demons in the thousands.

And now I'm helping a young child realize his dream to become a turtle.

Blizzard continues their descent into utter madness, leaving WoW free of anything remotely risque or even interesting. Besides, of course, genocide, because murdering tons of people is cool but god forbid a painting shows a bit of cleavage, and evidently in Blizz's minds might entice someone to molest a female coworker. All this while simultaneously introducing the weakest expansion and earliest content drought yet. Warcraft 3 Reforged was a miserable failure. Diablo 2 remastered suffers from excessive connection issues because they actually didn't bother updating the network code. McCree was renamed, even though no one even knew he was named after an employee, or that the employee was caught up in the harassment complaints. At this point I no longer believe Blizzard can or will deliver a quality game again.

Bungie has concluded that removing Destiny 2 paid expansion's content is the way to go, further ruining the new player experience. Much of the community is perfectly fine with this as well, which is incredibly odd to me. The Eververse continues to be predatory FOMO bait and apparently is not, in fact, funding development costs: as it turns out, Activision actually may not have been the problem as Bungie has decided it's a great idea to not include the 2 new dungeons they made for Witch Queen in the base $40 version, so those folks who don't want the bonus stuff in the higher priced versions have to buy them separately or upgrade versions. To be quite honest, with the cult-like status of much of the playerbase I don't completely understand Bungie's willingness to prey on them at every opportunity, because they know at least some of the players will be accept and defend it.

If you're justifiably upset with companies like these, then I invite you to give the FFXIV trial a chance. For me, the grass was indeed greener on the other side. I never felt that WoW really had a reason for me to stay around after I'd done, or attempted to do, the content I'd wanted. 14, on the other hand, offers a ton of varied things to do, as well as having an extremely healthy social aspect, which I believe WoW has lacked for a very long time. This includes stuff like clubs, dancing, talent competitions, bard concerts, player housing, and more. Where WoW feels like a second job, 14 feels like a second home, a place you want to stay in, not have to be in.

Here's a few things I'd like to note before you jump in, for clarity:

1) The game is structured differently from WoW. Your first job (class) will be leveled through the main scenario quest, or MSQ. This MSQ also features dungeons, 8 man trials, and a 3-wing 24 man raid throughout, so you are required to play with others at times, the MM part of MMO.

The raid in particular is required for later story content, but also serves to give an idea of how they work. It is the only required alliance raid. If you do not like instanced content then this is not the game for you, as you have to do them to progress the MSQ.

2) Yes, the base game MSQ can be very tedious at times. This is especially true in the initial ARR patch content, where XP gain drops significantly and the story content is largely for a combination of world building, tying up loose ends, and setting up the next expansion.

Try to keep in mind that FFXIV was largely rebuilt in under 3 years, and that the pacing and overall quality increases once you enter Heavensward.

3) Yes, the default GCD is 2.5 seconds. No, that doesn't mean combat is slow across the board. At first? Sure. Certain jobs? Yeah some jobs are slower than others. A few, like Ninja, have important set burst windows with less activity in between. Others, like Bard, have near constant weaving of off-GCD abilities and are often just as spammy as some of the WoW classes.

4) There are two subscription costs when you go to sign up for one. I believe it defaults to the $14.99 USD one, but if you don't intend to make use of the benefits (mostly more alt spaces), you can drop it to entry level for $12.99 USD.

5) Social conversation typically takes place within Free Companies, aka guilds. There is no general chat as such, but shouting can typically be relied upon for zone coverage if required, and yell is decent for shorter range, though not used as often. Leveled-up FC's also offer benefits, such as improved experience gain in combat, lower teleporting cost, FC houses which can be decorated (some people hire decorators, and there are some fantastic houses out there) and offer apartments to members, and more, so even if you aren't a social butterfly, it's worth joining one.

You can also hang out in the 3 primary cities and strike up conversations as well, without necessarily RPing. Speaking in /say has a very short range, so you can easily have isolated conversations without bothering others.

There is one quibble I have to mention though: Tab targeting in this game sucks, no real other way to say it. You'll have to break the habit of doing it if you're coming from other tab target MMOs unless you're cool with targeting mobs the next continent over, or behind you even, if you fail to optimize the settings for it. You can bind tab to target nearest enemy always, and also set tab targeting to only target enemies in a cone in front of you, but that's still unreliable distance wise, unless I'm still missing some setting.

Thankfully there's also an enemy list that generates during combat so you can target higher health and priority enemies with a single click on their box in the list.

Ultimately, despite point 2, the ARR story wasn't as bad as people say. I think a lot of players get hung up on the fact that you stop gaining levels as fast in the patch content so it feels wrong, and I get that. That being the case, the patch content is often among the most interesting, at least in the expansions.

Now some general positives:

- Some of the best music I've heard in gaming. Masayoshi Soken and co are geniuses.
- The majority of the instanced content I've done has been very enjoyable, and there's been a lot of it so far.
- No retention mechanics. Play when you want, unsub when you want, you won't ever be too far behind.
- Actual BiS. No RNG other than what drops and what you roll. Endwalker is further improving this by giving weapon coffers alongside weapon drops in trials. Also no borrowed power systems as of yet; your job plays the same throughout.
- All jobs on one character, no alts required unless you want one. This one is huge and will make it hard to play other games that require alts for swapping classes.
- Community is generally friendly, helpful, and patient. If you need help, ask for it.
- Raids have their own contained storylines, generally relevant to the main plots of each expansion.
- The dev team actually listens to feedback for the most part, give honest feedback in return, and real GM's respond to your tickets very quickly. You're given the feeling of being valued as a customer and player, not just an engagement metric.

To end, my only regret is not trying 14 sooner, but I'm here now and Endwalker is shaping up to be an absolute banger. I cannot wait to see the finale if the current story arc, and I'm particularly glad the team decided to bring it a conclusion rather than drag it out another 2-3 expansions after. If the transition into 7.0 goes well, I can see myself playing for a long time. I certainly won't return to WoW at the very least, doesn't matter how many changes they make (that should have been implemented in the pre-release phases regardless), that bridge is already burned; let them eat fruit.

Doesn't really hack it in the transition to widescreen like some older games did - crashes frequently when finishing missions before loading the next if you have any modern widescreen res in your config. No autosave feature as well, necessitating frequent saves lest you lose progress after a crash or death.

Supposedly crashes affect the Steam version worse, unknown why that is, but some level loading 100% crash every time with custom resolutions. The fix is fairly easy - simply revert r_customheight and width to 600 and 800 and go again, preferably to a save just before finishing a level. Getting into the habit of quick saving just prior to exiting would be helpful.

Regardless I would recommend finding a retail version or even emulating the console edition which gets a few bonus levels at the start as well.

Supergiant Games have become much like Larian Studios for me: a game developer from whom I can safely assume a new game will be of high quality and well written, things that have been sorely lacking in the AAA market for years.

I watched a bit of NoClip's documentary that followed the post-release of Hades and one of the guys said something along the lines of "we'll have to see what game the team wants to make." I absolutely love that approach, and believe it to be the core of why their games are so good - because they care about them.

I would say with Hades's success I hope things will change and large scale devs will stop pumping out good-looking but ultimately shallow games but everyone knows this isn't the case. Instead I will say I wish Supergiant all the success they deserve with every new game release.

Consider this more negative feedback for the new UI. Absolute abomination. I appreciate that hard work might have gone into it, but what came out the other side ain't it:

- Pointlessly nested menus, sometimes within nested menus.
- Terrible use of space.
- Horizontal scrolling list of hunters instead of a neat vertical stack all on one page.
- Overly complicated/far too many button presses to do anything at all. Inspecting teammates now takes 3 button presses instead of 1 click, for example.
- Little to no consistency for button prompts between menus.
- Overall less detailed end screen.
- Word on the street is that "recommended skins" are buried somewhere in the loadout section, causing people to spend blood bonds on skins they didn't actually have already, which is extremely predatory if true. I have not verified this myself, so grain of salt.
- As people have pointed out, EIGHT total mentions of the battlepass in one particular menu.

Besides all this, there are numerous issues regarding the game itself, which was absolutely expected. As it stands for me personally, textures constantly revert to low quality any time I load into a map, and have to be manually reset to high. Also, RX-5XX series AMD cards cannot play the game at all due to some sort of shader bug that causes textures to be completely black, and some folks's DLSS won't stay toggled on.

I expect the graphical issues will be fixed in due time, but I hold very little hope for the UI to be changed anytime soon, though I'm welcomed to be proven wrong. Definitely a swing and a miss in that department.

Finally, a word to people unironically blindly defending this atrocious UI and lamenting that the "review bombing" will keep people out: you might think you're doing a good thing, but in reality you're part of why games like these fail, and causing the harm that you wish to prevent. Negative feedback and reviews are what helps get bad decisions like these changed, and what will decide whether players come back or stay once they start. Toxic positivity hurts game just as much in the long run as devs ignoring good critical feedback will, and the sooner you realize this, the better.

Crytek is a multi-million dollar company, they can handle some criticism I assure you.

I haven't played this game including both purchasable expansions since December or so, and since reflecting plenty on it, I've decided not to recommend Shadowkeep.

There's not much more I can say that other negative reviews haven't said already, but I will say that far and away my biggest problem with the game is that there's no progression past the main story cliffhanger, or at least there hadn't been by Shadowkeep season 2 when I threw in the towel. I'm not sure if this is how Forsaken went as well, but not having anything further to work towards on the Moon was incredibly disappointing and really gave a sense of money wasted.

Besides this, Bungie's continuous mishandling of updates, bugs, and the cosmetic store really left a sour taste in my mouth. Updates didn't come near frequently enough, leaving quests and weapons broken for a month or more at a time, and with new seasons and content coming out every 3 months, more bugs and broken quests/weapons would inevitably pop up.

There are other things that could be addressed, like the fact that zones support up to 9 players simultaneously IIRC, but you can only have a fireteam of up to 3 by default, unless it's a raid, but I'll leave that for others to argue.

The good things about the game are really good though, I will say that: gunplay, level design, graphics, engine optimization, and audio are all fantastic, and Bungie deserve credit for all these things. It makes it all the more disappointing that the tech issues were constantly a problem and that there'd been no real Shadowkeep progression since release.

My advice to new players would be this: play New Light, figure out what's going on, see if you enjoy the game, and then pick up Forsaken if you want much more content, especially exotics, but don't bother picking up Shadowkeep unless you want to be at the cutting edge of gear and progression. Otherwise, I genuinely don't think you need any gear from Shadowkeep in order to be successful, especially with a competent team.

-Spoilers ahead, especially near the end-

As of this review, I've completed routes A, B, and C, and know what happens in D and E.

The gameplay ended up being better than I got originally from watching videos. Initially the leveling system felt hollow without any sort of talents or anything, but the chip system ended up being solid, if needlessly expansive.

Using FAR rendered the port issues pretty much nonexistent, but I did encounter several bugs and a straight up CTD. At one point, 2B decided to stop moving at very short intervals, which caused me to become hard-locked into a pre-quest dialogue. Just tonight when finishing Route C, Anemone's console hard-locked on the white screen prior to going into the text screen, requiring a restart. Besides that, the experience was fairly smooth. I do recommend anyone playing this in the future, should they read this, to use FAR and to lower their global illumination quality to high, which vastly improved my framerates (i7-2600K @4.0 Ghz, stock GTX 980). Visuals are much improved over consoles, especially with the popular texture pack, but I did end up suffering some LOD issues as well.

Everything related to audio including voice acting was all superb, so full marks in those departments.

Story though I admit I'm split on, which I'm sure will automatically be dismissed by some of the people I've seen talk about this game. On one hand, the amount of potential legitimate philosophical discussion surrounding the main themes of being and consciousness are certainly all worthy of praise. On the other, I had an overwhelming sense of missing out on a huge amount of topics due to not knowing the established lore, which is apparently incredibly convoluted in itself. I guess since this game is an indirect sequel it's not really needed, but since looking up the events of previous Nier games, I feel I would have enjoyed this one more had I known about it all. This point kept creeping into the back of my mind throughout my playthrough and really marred the experience.

Besides that, I feel that the necessity to essentially play the game through at least three times to get to the "actual game" while at the same time trying to scrape together all the side quests and lore tidbits in order to get the full experience is asking quite a bit. By the time I ended Route C, I was already level 65 and two-shot 9S. Perhaps I could have left some side quests for route B instead of doing a ton in A, but you won't know what's missable without looking it up first.

I will say that this game is definitely unique, I won't argue that point, and worth playing at $20 on sale. However, I'm not sure I can say it's as profound and groundbreaking as it was talked up to be by some people. The story is vastly interwoven almost to a fault which assures plenty of players, myself included, will miss and have missed important interconnected things. The game doesn't do a great job of making such things apparent: the fact that 2B had been "2E" all along and had actually killed 9S many, many more times off screen is a prime example. "It always ends like this" to me was simply referring to the in-game executions she'd had to perform, not necessarily more than that, but the overreaction at the ends of A and B now make sense.

Anyway, I'll be continually plumbing the Wiki to wrap my head around everything in the coming days, find out what all I missed, and hopefully begin to piece together the obscure stuff. Maybe if I play through chapter select very carefully now knowing the outcome, it'll be a bit more rewarding to find the things I missed out on.

My last comment and biggest question by far that I haven't yet looked into to see people's theories on is this:

Why does everything in the game want to act like humans, flawed as we doubtlessly are? Maybe things are looking up for us over the course of the next thousand plus years, but take a look at what happens in game: Eve concluding that hatred is the core emotion that drives humanity, the machines continuously creating cults, governments, and wars without end but never getting anywhere with it, N1 and N2 fighting over A2's fate, etc. I suppose humans were their "gods" but given THAT much time I would have assumed reasonable intelligence would have figured out that our emotional spectrum sometimes isn't that great, especially at the low extremes, and especially an intelligence that can adapt to combat data rapidly. Perhaps it can't properly parse human emotion, the problem that will likely plague real-life AI development in the future.

Update: I have revisited Halo: CEA and will now recommend it since it has evidently received updates. Swapping the engines back and forth now uses the classic audio by default, and performance seems good, although I do have an updated system at this point.

Supposedly 343 put in good work to bring these games up to par, so that's to be commended. Reach is evidently fixed as well, which is even better, so well done to them for not releasing and forgetting about the games.

As always I'll leave the old review up for posterity.

End update.

I played the first two levels of Halo: CEA and I can't recommend it in its current state. I personally encountered the following problems within 78 minutes of gameplay:

- Audio looping/skipping issues, especially with music and shield recharge sound. Shield recharge sound skips and has erratic rhythm, music skips and jumps around to different sections as it plays.

- Related to audio: no option to use legacy sounds, which was reportedly available in the last flight. I don't like the majority of the updated sounds; plasma grenades especially have no impact to them. The sniper rifle is amazing though, and efforts have been made to make environmental reactions to sounds (echoes in the open areas, more muffled indoors, etc).

- Incorrect achievements being rewarded. First mission gave me the third mission's achievement, second gave me the fourth. Not a massive deal and will probably be fixed quickly.

- Updated engine either runs poorly or has bad frame pacing. My i7-2600K @4.0 Ghz and stock GTX 980 simultaneously felt like 60 and 45 FPS most of the time on the second level. There aren't any recommended 1080p/60 specs on either page here on Steam so I have no basis for comparison.

- Updated graphics have a funky looking black shadow/mesh at times, especially visible on Captain Keyes's uniform. This has been suspected to be a problem due to AO settings, which users have tried to fix by editing the graphic config files, which leads me to my biggest gripe:

- Anti-cheat warnings and disabled multiplayer for editing config files. This is somehow a controversial topic among certain sects of the community, but editing configs has been a hallmark of PC gaming probably since its inception. You are able to launch the game without anti-cheat enabled, but you're then unable to join matchmaking and supposedly achievements won't function at all. Evidently multiplayer also doesn't use the updated visuals either, an issue worth discussing as well IMO.

Call me what you will, but simply dismissing this issue is the kind of thing that tells developers that it's okay to put whatever restrictions they want on their games when it comes to modding and multiplayer especially.

All this combined with the fact that Reach is still apparently suffering engine and sound issues leads me to conclude that this will be a common trend with these releases, especially if they continue to release them so close to their last flights. I will consider a purchase in the future IF the problems are all smoothed out, but until then just know that it's another instance of far-from-a-perfect-experience.

Approaching 200 hour or so updated review:

TL;DR: I absolutely hate the weakening mechanic and the clutch claw and feel they don't have a place in the series, as well as dislike certain other aspects, but overall would still rate it positive.

By now I've had a good taste of Iceborne, and I have to say the deeper into the expansion I go, the less I enjoy it. My feelings on the clutch claw and weakening mechanic haven't changed: it's a needless addition and one I'm not at all enjoying. Without weakening a part, it really feels like we've had no upgrades from vanilla due to the squishing of all non-weakened damage; we should be dealing weakened-level damage at all times without having to worry about it. I feel especially bad for the light weapon users, who have to suffer from not getting weakened parts with one claw, due to how aggressive some of the later fights are. I guess that's getting patched, except for LS which is fair, but they don't gain any points for it now.

This is a huge thorn in my side, one that really brings the experience down, and quite honestly makes me want to just go back to progressing through GU where I am free to duel monsters as I normally would.

There are an assortment of other nags as well, such as the massive MR flash pod nerf which makes fighting flying monsters an exercise in patience more than anything. Luna once again handily claims the crown for worst fight in the game to date, at least for me, but there are some close seconds, least of which is Gold Rathian. Great moveset design and everything a Rathian can aspire to be, but if I'm using a gun and worrying about whether the next reload will get me carted, I'm not sure I can celebrate it.

A couple fights have egregious hitboxes as well, that old gem of a complaint that I'm sure some people out there would openly criticize, but good god. Tigrex is one of the worst offenders: I see he is massively improved from the beta, but it's still not acceptable to be hit and damaged well before the model makes impact on a lunge attack. Lingering hit detection is also a big problem here, particularly with Velkhana's tail and a few of the wyverns, again Gold Rathian comes to mind. For example, if Velkhana tail jabs into the ground and you touch it after the animation is complete, you'll eat a hit like she caught you with it, and likewise with the one she thrusts underneath her model.

And then there's Ruiner Nerg. Capcom apparently took all the complaints about the AT pepega slam and threw them into a fire, because now he has a pepega claw slam with about the same level of notice instead! My third fight with him wasn't as bad as the first two, but he's definitely not fun. I've seen people say they found him really underwhelming, and maybe that's true compared to how epic AT felt minus the cheapness, but I'm perfectly whelmed, thanks.

I won't even get into Guiding Lands itself, which has a whole slew of issues, not limited to the seeming inability for people under certain MR limits to join people past them (in my case 100+ can't be joined by a 70+), even if the host drops zone levels, which doesn't allow you to help them kill certain monsters. I know there are a ton of improvements coming in the future, and perhaps that particularly gets patched with Rajang, but again, no points for it now.

I'd still give this an overall positive review like I had it, but something like a 7/10. Maybe I'm just bad/getting too old, but I'm not enjoying Iceborne as much as I'd like to be. I had a similar experience with the final Dark Souls 3 DLC, so maybe it'll eventually all click for me.

Finally we get the best outfit. Almost had to buy the dress instead, phew!