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[PC] [PS3] Payday: The Heist

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[PC] [PS3] Payday: The Heist

Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 13:43

Chivalry isn't quite working for us as a fallback game to CS:GO, on the one hand because many people haven't got it, and on the other hand because even I can't play it because it requires a mouse with at least four buttons, and I am on a shitty laptop mouse right now. Hopefully more people will get it (it's €3,99 right now on the Humble Store) and we'll play it when I get back home and on my real mouse. It looks pretty damn cool.

In the meantime, I thought Payday would be a better fallback game to scratch that FPS MP itch when we don't have five players (it requires four), so I just bought it and am installing it. I'll see if I can get three others to play it with me late tonight, say at around midnight UTC. Install the game and post here if you are up for it.
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Unread postby Somali Pirate » 24 Sep 2014 17:39

I'll be around for this :)
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 19:23

Great, just keep in mind that if the total of players available exceeds four we're playing PlanetSide instead, so consider downloading that too just in case.
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Unread postby Masahiro9891 » 24 Sep 2014 21:00

I'm in as well. Can't wait.
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Unread postby Hanged Man » 24 Sep 2014 21:53

I'm in, downloading right now.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 22:05

Me, Masa and The Hanged Man will be ready to go in about 20 minutes, i.e. two and a half hours ahead of schedule, but we still need a fourth player and Somali Pirate isn't answering his phone so I can't tell him about the time change. Post in the thread if you want to jump in, or come on Mumble directly. We'll play PA if we have to wait, and we are also downloading PlanetSide in the background just in case.

To be honest, I am more excited to check out PlanetSide than anything else, so I hope more people join up later.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 23:07

Somali Pirate is in and we are starting now. Drop by Mumble or message us on Steam if you want to join this or something else later. We should be on for a few hours.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 01:09

Played for a couple of hours but THM dropped out to sleep. It's a good game, in some ways better than Counter-Strike, but in others worse (the grinding mostly, tanky enemies on higher difficulties, etc.) I am glad to see that the review of the sequel we have on the site seems accurate.
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Unread postby Masahiro9891 » 25 Sep 2014 02:36

Yeah the game is really fun. It becomes really intense as more and more cops start pouring through the doors and begin flanking you. This makes it really tough to revive one of your downed teammates before he gets taken into custody. You pretty much can't do it without the other guys giving you cover fire. The level we played was really well designed, constantly forcing you to move and not get pinned down. Can't wait to play some more.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 13:52

One thing I need to say about this game is that it's not versus, as I had foolishly assumed. It's basically a co-op campaign game, so we can't use it in the same way we use CS:GO, to play with whoever is online -- you need to stay with the same team for maximum effect. It basically works almost the same way as Killing Floor: you can try all of the levels without having beaten any of them, if you want, but if you do this there is not much incentive to try and beat them after you have seen all of them. So the best way to play is to tackle one level at a time and not move on to the next until you've beaten it, which is why playing with a varying team configuration would suck, since you'd often end up playing with people who have beaten the level you are playing. So we are going to stick together as a team, and if more people want to play the game, start a second team for it.

However, I just saw that mothman bought CS:GO and fired it up for a bit, so if he likes it enough we'll have an extra player for it. Plus, he also tried Tactical Intervention, which as it happens is a freemium game, so I am downloading it right now. However, I can't find anywhere how big the teams are supposed to be, and it's gotten a lot of negative press for being pay-to-win. Still, it's free, so we could try it at some point. The major thing about it, far as I can see, is that it has vehicles.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 13:59

Other freemium versus games I am downloading in search of something that can supplement CS:GO are War of the Roses and ArcheBlade. The latter looks quite promising, but people will need a controller for it (which I have).

http://store.steampowered.com/app/42160/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/207230/
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 15:56

Some thoughts about this game and why I think we should turn the difficulty down to Normal.

This game (or at least its first level, which I have seen) is an astonishingly successful simulator of the bank robbery scene in Heat. If you ever wanted to see what it would feel like to be involved in something like that, this is the closest you can get without buying some actual guns. However, the devs done fucked up real good the way the difficulty works. How did they fuck up? They fucked up in two ways:

1. The grinding mechanics

and

2. The difficulty scaling mechanics

The grinding mechanic basically forces you to start off at the highest difficulty (Overkill), which we did, because if you start at a lower one you will inevitably level up your character quite easily, so not only will the levels be easier for you to beat, but if you later try to turn the difficulty up, those higher difficulties will no longer be that difficult because you'll be leveled up. So if you start low and progressively crank it up (as everyone else playing the game seems to be doing) all you'll be doing is keeping the difficulty curve about flat throughout the entire game. This is the essence of what the grinding system does to this game, and to games generally.

So you wanna go for the highest difficulty right away, to make sure that things get harder with each succeeding level -- or at any rate that they don't get easier -- even as your characters level up. Which is where problem number 2 rears its ugly head.

The higher difficulties seem to work by simply throwing more cops at you, and more tanky cops. But this totally breaks the immersion factor of the game -- the "wow I am in the bank robbery scene from Heat" feeling -- which as I explained is the selling point of the game and why you should be playing it. I mean when cops are basically falling over each other to jump in front of your gun as if you are playing Operation Wolf, the entire scene breaks down. These aren't cops: these are selfless patriots sacrificing their lives for the continuing existence of their nation. It's simply impossible for me to maintain suspension of disbelief when this shit is happening. It's right in my face every second of the game, almost from the get-go, and it's impossible to ignore and enjoy the experience. So Overkill difficulty is unplayable for me. Hard is better, but not by a huge amount. So I think we should try Normal.

I am not saying it because I am frustrated with the difficulty: we play each checkpoint in L4D/Expert for several hours before we get to clear it, so I can handle frustration just fine. Besides, this shit 'aint frustrating when, every time you lose, your characters have leveled up a bit, and the next attempt will therefore be a little easier. In L4D the next attempt will be exactly as hard as the previous one, and the only way to beat it is to improve. You improve too in Payday, but it's hard to say exactly by how much when your characters are improving too at the same time, and by varying amounts no less. It also makes you lazier in the actual game, because you know that, no matter how shitty you do in this attempt, you'll do better in the next one anyway. I could even see some people grinding so much and playing so lazily that even though they end up unlocking everything and clearing everything in all the difficulties, they'll be playing almost the exact same way at the end of the game as they played in their very first attempt at the first level (and, again, it seems that this is exactly how most people play the game).

So basically, my complaint, even though it centers on the difficulty level, is aesthetic, not mechanical (or, more precisely, it is in how the mechanics have been used to express the aesthetics, which should once more show you that the "geamlay" is not something separate from the "graphix"). Consider how this works in Killing Floor. Killing Floor has basically the exact same setup as Payday: they are both campaign- and grinding-based co-op shooters. The only difference is that the enemies in Killing Floor are mindless zombies, so it's perfectly fine when you crank up the difficulty and you get bigger and bigger hordes of them throwing themselves at you from every direction because, hey, they are zombies after all and that's what zombies do.

But cops don't act like zombies, dear Payday developers, and you are undermining all the other awesome behaviors you have programmed for them when you make them act like that because you couldn't be arsed to hire a decent AI expert to make them more capable at higher difficulties.

So my solution to this debacle is to clear all the levels one by one on Normal, and then move on to the sequel, without touching the higher difficulties. That is how I see, right now, the best way to enjoy the game.


And P.S., whoever is playing this game alone or with strangers is mindlessly grinding from beginning to end and getting almost no enjoyment out of it, fyi (and most people seem to play this way). Or they get a kind of zombie-like enjoyment, which is fitting, in a way, considering what I just explained about the game.

P.P.S. This, by the way, is almost a review of the game, but I have a lot more to say too, so I will say it in the full review when I have finished it. It's a borderline 4/5 so far -- borderline between a 3 and a 4, that is. It'll all depend on how good the rest of the levels are from now on, but it will take time to get through all of them.
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