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I think this mission's logs were the first ones that didn't have the initial log start out with "Hey, this is so-and-so, occupation this-and-that". Either they're switching gears with the logs or someone on the writing staff dropped the ball. Edit: New episode on previous page.
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Sep 21, 2021 02:23
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| # ? May 8, 2024 07:23 |
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   Boss Fight, and the end of Act 2!
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Sep 26, 2021 13:32
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How quickly does the fusion gun drain your energy? With the homing upgrade in, I'm actually wondering whether it'd work as a mainstay weapon. Yeah, the rate of fire is lower, but it feels like it'd almost work out in comparison to how long you have to keep most other guns trained on an enemy. At any rate, between enemies dropping nova missiles and begin given the purple death machine, it feels like the difficulty spike is the game going "OK, you have the big guns now, time to take the gloves off".
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Sep 28, 2021 01:55
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I use the
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Sep 28, 2021 02:53
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GUESS WHO FORGOT TO UPLOAD THE RIGHT VIDEO AGAIN? I'll make a new post when it's fixed. Because it's only natural to stumble right before the finish line. Who cares if it's not the 'fastest' way to resolve the situation, I use the Fusion Beam more in this one level than I have in the previous games put together! And it's amazing! berryjon fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 14:53
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berryjon posted:
That level was huge! When I was playing, this was where the game pulled me back in after it started to drag some with the middle set of levels.
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Oct 3, 2021 16:22
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I'm glad you learned your lesson with episode nine, and now double check to make sure you don't accidentally upload the non-commentary version twice. (You totally uploaded the non-commentary version twice).
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Oct 3, 2021 16:32
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What the everloving gently caress??! I'm sorry. That's on me. Again. I have no excuse or explanation. Uploading the right video now.
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Oct 3, 2021 18:39
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 Now with 100% more commentary, and 1000% more Fusion Beam!
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Oct 4, 2021 12:44
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I enjoyed you guys discussing the Thunderbolt in detail like it's a fine wine. I never got much use out of the old fusion cannon. It always seemed too unwieldy.
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Oct 4, 2021 18:50
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I think what this game is missing is what makes each level distinct. In Descent 1 and 2, you had different wall color schemes along with enemy variety. In Descent 3, you had a lot of 3D architecture and some scenery pieces. This game lacks most of that. Every level looks similar. Even the new bots don't look very unique because most of the time you don't get to see them completely due to the lighting. The textures are a bit disappointing because they are pretty much the same in every level. All you see is grey, yellow, and red with orange, green, purple, and blue for power ups and orange and green for bots and shots. The story/writing is OK but it doesn't feel like you actually matter because everything happens as logs you pick up or your AI telling you about stuff. Descent 3 at least attempted to have actors and some cut-scenes but suffered due to scaling of your ship to human actors. Descent 3's other flaws are numerous as well but irrelevant to my discussion. Overall, it feels like they made a good modernization of the old Descent engine but they went fairly minimal with the resources and are still scared of going with full polygon modelling because of Descent 3, opting for limited use of meshes in their "decals". As to cut-scenes and story-telling, they have a dilemma because you are piloting a ship the whole time, so human actors can't really interact with you outside of communications and implied actions, however you could still do cut-scenes. The actual game-play is great! You can tell that they really focused on this part which is probably why everything else looks so spartan to me.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:10
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Yeah, agreed, this game seems to be calling back to more of the arcadey roots of the Descent series as opposed to D3 trying to be really narrative-focused. As you say the architecture doesn't really pretend to be anything other than geometry designed to be fun to fly around and fight robots in. I guess with this sort of thing I always suspend my disbelief and think that there's more to the complex and we just happen to be in the spaceship-accessible section that isn't full of offices, equipment, dorms, cafeterias etc... More distinct texture & colour scheme variation between levels would be neat as well. Most of the areas are that very weyland-yutani aesthetic where stuff is clean-lined and not too industrial, but a bit blocky and clunky. Semi-brutalist, perhaps? Like, following the lines and bulk of brutalism but swapping the signature raw concrete for metal panels and streaks of neon-ish lighting here and there. (Excluding the giant dark cave level, every game has its sewer map and it's always best forgotten)
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Oct 5, 2021 11:36
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I think levels 12, 13, 14 and 15 will help alleviate some of your concerns. The game is very front-loaded on being Descent 4, but as I said before, the last act quickly goes off the rails - in a good way, mind you.
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Oct 5, 2021 15:08
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I'm choosing to believe that "off the rails but in a good way" means that the grand twist is everything up until now is misdirection and the big evil boss is actually the guidebot out for revenge against humanity
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Oct 7, 2021 12:10
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 In which Kantor shows off his managerial skills!
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Oct 11, 2021 13:54
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Yeah, the whole "lol so I totally planned to murder everyone with my army of killbots" was par the course, I think. My personal theory was that he did in fact give the order for them to murder everyone, he just doesn't know how to use Outlook's calendar & scheduling assistant very well and accidentally scheduled the "murder everyone" meeting in the wrong month. In all seriousness though I am still suspicious about how the killbots seem to ignore people in stasis chambers, if I was a homicidal robot I'd think that they were sitting ducks. But I'm not suspicious about how we've spent the game so far as an amnesiac who unquestioningly follows the orders of their oh-so-helpful shuttle AI. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary here at all. Also holy crap, did they just do doors that aren't 1x1 tile-shaped?
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Oct 12, 2021 12:15
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My pet theory right now is that our ship AI is actually one of the 2 missing "Sovereign" AIs, and we're possibly the second one. I have no idea how that plot twist makes sense with the rest of the story, but it would give an in-universe explanation for how we're assimilating all of this hardware from the auto-ops, upgrading our armaments to be even better than what they have, and soloing entire bases.
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Oct 13, 2021 01:24
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Grabbing weapons has been talked about in-logs actually! One of the Thunderbolt logs mentions that they were having trouble for a while mounting it onto the UPI - the same system our Kodiak Gunship is equipped with for variable weapons. There's an un-universe technology that allows for ships to hot-swap active weapons, and that the Time Bomb fits comes as a surprise to many people. That the last two weapons fit as well is sheer  .
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Oct 13, 2021 02:14
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berryjon posted:Grabbing weapons has been talked about in-logs actually! One of the Thunderbolt logs mentions that they were having trouble for a while mounting it onto the UPI - the same system our Kodiak Gunship is equipped with for variable weapons. There's an un-universe technology that allows for ships to hot-swap active weapons, and that the Time Bomb fits comes as a surprise to many people. That the last two weapons fit as well is sheer I had forgotten about that bit! So we can strike that from my theory and leave it on the "why can we upgrade things like the Fusion Beam" (I refuse to call it anything else after all the other videos I've watched) and "really how are we not dead yet these bases are armed to the teeth". I know that last point has also been glazed over by all the other Descent games too, but this entry is doing a story arc for the main characters, and a main beat in that arc is uncertainty of who we are. Calling into question how we're doing this in one life (as there are no lives anymore) is fair game since it's easily connected to that uncertainty, and I'll be a bit disappointed if the reason eventually turns out to be "because this is a video game".
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Oct 13, 2021 02:51
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It's not stated outright, but we've been upgrading on the Iberia between missions.
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Oct 13, 2021 03:18
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Did anyone else catch Kantor name dropping PTMC in one of the last logs? Is that a little Easter egg or does this game exist in the same universe as Descent?
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Oct 14, 2021 03:20
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That's actually the second time the PTMC have been mentioned. They were name-dropped in a log in the sewer level as a possible source for the 'attack' on Cronus Frontier. And no, they don't occur in the same 'verse. It's just the developers name-dropping their old game as fanservice.
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Oct 14, 2021 04:01
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I have to say, I've been listening to the game's soundtrack almost nonstop for the last couple days. How to even describe it... It's like 80's/90's chiptunes or midi music raised to perfection.
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Oct 14, 2021 04:20
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The soundtrack has quite a bit of crossover with retrowave/dark synthwave sort of stuff. If you like it you might want to check out the Magnatron mixtapes from Newretrowave, here's a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G50IdTluXs Anyway I know I've alluded to personal speculation about plot twists, but I think the last one has voided one thing I was watching for, which is that we're being manipulated by something to attack all these installations, and that we are the threat that Kantor has been asking everyone to prepare against. After all, why are the killer robots not murdering everyone while they're sitting ducks in the cryo-tubes and instead going single-mindedly after the intruder that's busted in and is shooting the place up? But as OneWingedDevil pointed out, it is probably just a video game mechanic and I was likely reading too much into it. It's even still got a score counter! Crazy Achmed fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Oct 14, 2021 |
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Oct 14, 2021 06:59
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 I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. Or Oz for that matter.
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Oct 17, 2021 12:20
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I really like the style of the alien levels. They do get pretty drat difficult, though.
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Oct 17, 2021 15:28
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(I'm behind but) holy crap someone else read Heart of the Comet
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Oct 21, 2021 15:50
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All videos recorded. Now just to finish commentary.
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Oct 23, 2021 23:30
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 Our next Alien level, we get to hear Kantor not take it as well as we do. Poor guy.
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Oct 24, 2021 15:15
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I bent my thumuncular
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Oct 24, 2021 18:44
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Ask your physician if SpectralusTM is right for you.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:22
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Some days after the event, I'm considering that the reason Kantor and company couldn't just "turn off" or "unplug" the Sovereigns, to buy time to think about the current situation, is that the Sovereigns were receiving power via wireless power transmission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Resonant_inductive_coupling). Perhaps the aliens have figured out how to transmit power using either the universe itself as a medium, or through alternate spatial dimensions.
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Oct 26, 2021 18:16
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You're relying on Kantor seeing a thinking, learning AI hooked up to his company's Wi-Fi as a bad thing, and regarding that, see: techbro CEO.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:26
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Yeah, I'm fairly sure all the thinking that Kantor did was along the lines of "frickin' awesome, I'm rich!"
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Oct 27, 2021 12:10
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Not true, he also thought, "I'm gonna be the most famous inventor since Edison!"
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Oct 27, 2021 12:31
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Too bad it didn't also buy him a bucket to carry a tune in.
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Oct 27, 2021 14:08
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Teleporting to.... wait, what happened to the Mars mining colony? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPMWlRyJ1Fk
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Oct 31, 2021 01:23
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Very impressive. Looks like the gauss cannon is still as overpowered as ever too.
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Oct 31, 2021 07:03
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   With a Boss Fight and two relatively short levels, I just decided to end things out here and now on the last day of the month. What are your thoughts on Descent? Or on other 6dof games. I can't really put my thoughts into words at this point, as I've been doing this for so long I can't see the forest for the trees anymore.
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Oct 31, 2021 12:14
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| # ? May 8, 2024 07:23 |
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Thanks for the LP! I've got a huge dose of nostalgia for Descent (and 2) as I spent a lot of time playing them as a kid (mostly on account of my parents not letting me to play other shooters due to video game violence scares - gore was no-no but explosions were fine; taught me to hide Doom in system folders) and was surprised by both how much I actually remembered and how much I never knew (some of those secrets, holy poo poo). Looking at it from today's perspective, while I do have to acknowledge these games aren't exactly tightly designed and not much thought went into the map and enemy design, the core concept is good enough to carry them through. And then you get Overload which actually takes the concept and applies the lessons of twenty years' FPS game development on it, and the game is just great. The fact it flopped is an extremely sad testament to the state of the FPS gaming community. I'd love to see more 6DOF games but the fate of Overload makes them extremely unlikely to happen. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Oct 31, 2021 |
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Oct 31, 2021 14:11
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