@NEStalgia looks fine on my pro, now granted I don't have an X to compare side by side but have no complaints at all with how it looks. Would say get it on whichever one you have more friends playing it as it really is a social game. Also the ps4 has 1 year exclusivity with certain things, not much I think 1 or 2 strikes and some weapons but not too much. And yeah just the base is essentially a 15 - 20 hour demo at this point. Still not bad of a freebie imo and there is a good amount of content if you go for the $60 forsaken bundle legendary or whatever the hell they call it edition lol
@NEStalgia Nice to hear you're really getting into Gears. It has always been a favorite series for me personally, and the multiplayer and co-op is great. Try and find people online that want to play the alien waves co-ops with you, or the capture the flag games. Brilliant fun.
Kinda surprised you're considering Destiny 2, though, seeing as I've only seen you and a couple of others being rather negative about the series, or perhaps that was purely based upon the first game. Wouldn't be able to comment on that, since I never played the first, but I've had a great time playing the second game, both alone and in co-op with two friends, and I never had to buy any loot boxes or any other extra stuff, to finish the campaign, and to level up to a point where I can quite easily hold my own in online multiplayer.
As for why it looks so much better on the X, I'd say that's simply down to the superior hardware, and native 4K. Resolution will go quite a way in improving looks, vs the faux-4K of the Pro, and then there's the considerable jump in memory and processing power on top of that, making it possible to get more out of the upscaling/optimizing functions, such as frame rate and HDR, giving it a considerably wider range, in comparison to the Pro.
@DarthNocturnal I'm the same as you. Never cared much for MMO's and the like, and I only play online with friends or family, but that has never deterred me from thoroughly enjoying Destiny 2's campaign and side quests, so even as a non-MMO fan, I can still easily recommend this game to anyone. And the voice acting is pretty darn good as well.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@DarthNocturnal I've played close to almost 800 hours between D1 and 2, id say 80% of that was solo, with 1 or 2 friends or with in game matchmaking. While it is a "social" game there's plenty of fun to be had even playing by yourself.
@DarthNocturnal That was more or less what I meant, could perhaps have phrased it differently. It's not that I really don't like them, it's just that I'm not really one for playing with total strangers, so I only play both regular online multi player and MMO's with friends.
As for Destiny 2: from what I've understood, the second game has considerably improved upon the first one in several areas, but I do think that the raids and similar objectives need to be played when there's still something of an active community going on. Then it's like pack of friends vs a whole bunch of strangers, and that can be really entertaining. But if you ask me if that's a make or break thing for getting into or not getting into the game as a whole, then I would probably say no.
I have mostly enjoyed the main campaigns, both with friends and alone, and leveling up/grinding by hanging around a single location and just destroying a truck load of aliens. Or wandering around the map all by myself, and discovering (secret) areas.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@DarthNocturnal ehh I didn't find the raids to be the end all honestly. Only did the first one and the 3rd one one time a piece. Found them to be more frustrating than fun.
@redd214 It looks fine on the Pro certainly. But the difference to X is kind of "wow". IMO Pro should look a lot closer to X. Bungie did something.... The fact that the contrast and luminosity is all different there's a whole extra system of shaders in place on the X. Most games do not have that level of night and day difference. I'd compare it to Deus Ex HR on the Pro versus XBox but in reverse (it has a Pro patch but has no XBox patch....and is made for OG X1 so it renders low res on XBox.). The scene when you first drop planet side with your damaged Ghost and are forced to slow walk as troops march across the bridge up front....it looks like daytime on the Pro. It's just silhouettes at night on the X. Really different lighting like it's not even using the full SDR let alone HDR (which my display doesn't support.)
And yeah I'm interested in solo and coop, and the campaign stuff mostly, not too into MMO random stuff. I bought ES:O and I don't know why
@ThanosReXXX Yeah Gears I was never into, it just never looked appealing to me, but the mechanics just feel fun. It also occurred to me Killzone is Gears of Sony. Even the environments are meant to be similar.
Yeah I was basing D2 mostly from the first game and seeing what they're doing with the second, money wise. It intrigues me for free. And with the Forsaken bundle seems like an ok value now. Main game and 3 expacks for the price of one game is pretty viable. OTOH they've killed off Cayde in Forsaken....even from my brief play that's my favorite character. 2/10: Not enough Cayde. I guess they got tired of buying Fillion's lunch.
The world is cool. it's Halo+Borderlands+Skyrim is both it's cool part and it's failure IMO. For now it's stealing attention from Halo and Gears, so there's something to it.
Hooo boy and I have so many RPGs across 3 platforms to play. Witcher and FFXV on X, NNK, DQ11, Persona5 on PS, and Torna, Tales, valkyria, YS8 on Switch..... why am I playing Destiny 2?
Destiny is a very well made game, it just sucks that it's had so many missteps. But all along, they've always had the gun play nailed down. I'd say 98% of my time between the two games has been solo, though working up the courage to find randoms to do raids with are some of my fondest memories of the game.
@NEStalgia I wouldn't compare Destiny to a series like Killzone. Sony's series with the less than scary/impressive "let's dress 'em up in black and give 'em German helmets so they don't look too much like Stormtroopers" neo-space nazis, is a far cry from the in my view way more alien and (for the in-game world and citizens) far more awe-inspiring/fear inducing antagonists in Destiny's universe.
Some of them, particularly the bigger aliens and the main evil character, more or less reminded me of the aliens that you fight in the Gears of War games. And to a point that I could even imagine them being in a shared universe. I personally wouldn't even be interested in that series, even if I would have had a Playstation. Destiny on the other hand...
(or maybe I'm just a Bungie fan. Stranger things have certainly happened.)
Funny that you should come to that mix of what Destiny is, but I more or less agree, and I'd say you're pretty close, but it's missing one more ingredient, in my opinion: the whole being able to leap across buildings in a single bound, once you're fully powered up again, always reminded me of Crackdown, so put a little sprinkling of that on top of your formula, and I think we have the right cocktail.
And why it keeps people hooked? Forget about Activision's part in it: Bungie simply knows its stuff, and it shows, or rather: feels, and it attracts and sticks. Regardless of some tiny and arguable niggles, and besides the interesting story and world, the gameplay just feels right, and much like @MisterPi already mentioned, they also have the gun play nailed down, and for an online shooter, I'd say that's pretty much essential...
@ThanosReXXX Gears was the Killzone comparison. A cover shooter in a similar environment of East European early 20th century imagery in ruins. Yeah neo-nazis in space versus bug aliens isn't the same, but the gameplay and environment is clearly designed to be similar.
And then I read your next paragraph and you accurately compared it to Gears....just as I'd done originally So yeah, we're seeing it the same way And I agree, I'm not much of a KZ fan...the gunplay is tight but the game is just generic as heck in so many ways.
Interesting addition of Crackdown to the mix....yeah hat's a good point!
@NEStalgia Cover shooters are bound to share some similarities, but that doesn't mean that they're the same game. Replace Destiny with Gears, then, and then I'd still say that Destiny and Gears could share a universe, where Killzone could not, because it has a weird, or in Playstation speak "unique" story. Except it's not so unique and/or interesting, and as such, I wouldn't compare it to Gears OR Destiny.
@DarthNocturnal Ah, my bad, then. That's what you get sometimes, when you have to assume that text means that which you got from it...
I guess the whole "maybe if I had gotten to play the raids... " kinda came across as if that would have been the deciding factor of being able to get into the game (more).
But yeah, matchmaking issues are bound to be a thing, in general, for heavily online-based games like these. At some point, the "world/universe" a game takes place in, just becomes a bit of an empty shell. I remember having the same feeling about Test Drive Unlimited on the Xbox 360. I got in rather late, but the island was still full of people playing online, but only a few months later, it was only ghosts or NPC cars, also because a lot of people had moved on to the sequel, but I wasn't about to abandon my game after hardly having played it yet. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought, so my interest faded pretty soon as well.
But then came the day that I got acquainted with Forza Horizon... Never looked back since, where open world racers are concerned, other than one tiny sidestep with Burnout Paradise.
Speaking of Forza Horizon, I think it's time to market it again, both to people already playing/buying it, to show how great it really is, and to newcomers to show what they're missing, and why they should buy it. Or maybe just for the heck of it...
So, without further ado, here are 15 great things you should know about Forza Horizon 4:
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@ThanosReXXX LOL, well I have no love for Killzone, so I can't disagree with you there. It's not a "unique" story, it's just a half made story. In generic environments with solid but uninteresting gunplay. I have to admit, Shadowfall definitely gave new dimension to an otherwise flat series with the open world (more or less) and the drone/IR abilities and such that gave some dynamics and strategy to the gameplay rather than just being a shooting gallery. But ultimately the "Nazi's in Space" Helghast are a derrivative, uninspiring enemy, they all look the same, their environs all look the same, and there's no interesting backstory hook to them other than that they live on a toxic world and seem to all be a mix of top brass SS and KGB type operatives with no grunts. Shadowfall took you away from the "everything looks the same" problem the series had.....it could have maybe rebooted it but didn't go that far. It was Quake 4 all over again. Remember Quake 4? Yeah...nobody does....
Technically Gears suffers much of the same problems, but it has interesting characters and banter that attach you to the world where KZ is more "srs bsns" in a boring bland world. And the gameplay is faster which makes a difference.
I'll give Killzone 2 one thing: The intro cinematic is one of the coolest video game cinematics ever. Unfortunately it led to a bland brown shooter where every environment was a half ruined industrial site. Then they did it again in 3. But the movie was cool.
Space bugs is no less derivative than space nazis but the world of Gears feels more "pleasant" despite also being post-Gothic ruins.
@Dezzy Plus 4k textures for the X for Halo 1 and do (not sure if they changed much for 3, ODST, 4.)
@ThanosRexxx btw Earthlock was on the sale yesterday so I picked it up. Then discovered it's also on Switch where I probably should have bought it instead.... I played about 2 minutes of it to see what it's like. It's interesting....feels a little "rough" at the start, but a lot of RPGs do. I'm a little hesitant about a JRPG made by Nords unless it's Skyrim.
@Dezzy You can just pick up your computer and ask Cortana.......
@Dezzy The "update" is more like a remaster of the whole collection, making it 4K (or supersampling to 1080p), HDR and apparently include better textures.
@NEStalgia Well, there you go. We do actually agree sometimes...
And yeah, I can even agree on that intro animation, since I remember having seen that, either on E3 or on one of the other big shows. But that's the thing with this series: it has nice or even great intros that set the stage that is ultimately never built within the game itself, and that is why I don't find the games interesting.
They most certainly don't belong to the small handful of games that theoretically might have made me regret not having a PlayStation...
As for Earthlock: true, the beginning is a bit... course, for lack of a better word, but after the first real battle, and the unlocking of a new area, the game really comes into its own and grows on you. The skill trees of the individual characters are really diverse and interesting, and the gameplay has just the right amount of tension, frustration and good things, to balance it all out into a really great experience.
And the music is great throughout, so this is a game that I can VERY easily recommend to any fan of the genre.
@ThanosReXXX LOL. Yeah they set up an interesting, dire world in the intros, cut to gameplay and it's just "Run down brown corridor. Shoot waves of guys in gas masks in brown twisted metal arena. Repeat" without a sense of importance. Toward the end of 2 you get an area that looks more "royal" with the red banners so you know you're in an "important place" but nothing about the environment feels different than the previous hours of brown metal corridors. The train in KZ2 was really the most interesting part. But it still didn't feel too different. It fees like an animated version of someone's Deviantart gallery for apocalyptic Communist architecture.
3 was more or less an expac for 2. And not in a good way. Shadowfall really wasn't bad, it made a lot of needed improvements, but it didn't go far enough. KZ 3 mostly reminds me of everything I hated about the PS3 era, and half of why I bought a 360. Which was more of the same but at least it wasn't' a stuttery mess!
To be fair, Gears isn't really all that different in most of that description. It's a light brown to KZ's dark brown. But the gameplay and characters make it alive. KZ tries to be a serious military experience and it falls down from that. Gears doesn't mind feeling arcadey, and that works to its advantage. I'd say Epic is just a much better studio than Guerilla, but Guerilla created a truly fantastic game in Horizon: Zero Dawn, so it's not that they can't craft a compelling game, it's just that something about KZ doesn't let them. It has its fans I suppose, though Shadowfall kind of flopped for a launch title when there were few other launch titles and the X1 was a steaming pile at the time
Still, you aren't rooting for the home team. Guerilla's in Amsterdam!
Good to know about Earthlock. It's always risky to have any RPG from an indie, let alone a JRPG from outside Japan ...if it turns out it's one of the rare successes!
This is not a joke, I have a huge backlog on Xbox One now and I just bought Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy which is a Deal with Gold this week. I don't know if I'll ever be able to beat all these games on the console "without games". And Forza Horizontal 4* is around the corner.
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