Octopus Overlords

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... Free Titanfall 2 trial this week

apparently there's a FREE Titanfall 2 week going on .. on all platforms: PC, PS4 and Xbox One. ... no mention on STEAM or the T2 website

Thanks. Will fire it up.

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... EA to Acquire Respawn Entertainment

<* a snippet *>

“We started Respawn with the goal to create a studio with some of the best talent in the industry, and to be a top developer of innovative games,” said Vince Zampella, CEO of Respawn Entertainment. “We felt that now was the time to join an industry leader that brings the resources and support we need for long term success, while still keeping our culture and creative freedom. EA has been a great partner over the years with Titanfall and Titanfall 2, and we’re excited to combine our strengths. This is a great next step for Respawn, EA, and our players.”

It's like he's never heard of EA ... if you look closely, you can see the wires controlling his mouth movements

It just means he'll be able to parlay his stock options into the funds to open up his next studio.

Considering EA just killed Visceral Games, they should be very afraid.

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... A video breakdown of the 455 million paid for Respawn .. aka .. Do well, or kiss 2/3 of it goodbye, and EA decides if you've done well

Eyeballing this. Kasey mentioned it was on sale and it turns out $6.50 is low enough to get me to bite (not sure if USD or CAD). Had a great time with the first one. The changes to the second one sounds like they tampered with a number of things I loved, but also added other things that are done better than the first. From reading reviews, it's almost impossible to tell whether I will like the changes without actually playing it.

Guess I'll have to find out for myself.

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:48 pm Thanks. Will fire it up.

Never did. No guarantee I will this time, either, but...probably.

I picked it up on sale for $10 a while back and it was worth more than that for the single player alone, in my opinion. They really did a great job with the SP campaign for the sequel...interesting story, and some really great gameplay advancements that make it a lot of fun. I never tried the MP, but it's worth the low price just to see the SP done right

Grabbed it for a little over 7 bucks after taxes/exchange/milktheconsumersurcharge.

Can't remember the last time I spent so little for such a strong AAA title. I can't help but feel I'm missing something. Like the game is unplayable without a $30 DLC or something. I actually went looking for people who might have complained about things of that nature. There is a lot of DLC, but I didn't look too closely at it. At least a couple are cosmetic only.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to take it out for a spin this week.

Surprising and pretty awesome actually, it imported my customized control scheme from Titanfall. A game that I haven't had installed in a year or two at least. I should probably be creeped out but instead I'm just like "I don't have to fiddle with everything like I normally would have to do. Awesome".

ya picket it up, too. Got the special edition, so its 10$, but still seems like good deal. I never played first one, so totally new to the series. Probably will do single player first, than see if get to multiplayer.

I hear (not just here on OO) that the campaign is quite good. I'm surprised but hopeful.

I looked at the deluxe edition and while the price was right it just didn't feel right doubling the price to get some extra skins and starting with most of the unlocks already unlocked. I mean, it's probably worth it, but when you buy a BMW for 10 bucks, spending another 10 on the undercoating just feels wrong.

But that's probably just me.

Ya, i actually was thinking almost opposite, i saw 5$.... and the deluxe 10$... sure, the difference was to small and i generally dont replay the game. So i just assumed that it will be better with more content (0 research went into this decision.. ), and amount was too small to matter. If it was 5 and 15, i probably would have went with 5... which means they marketing is working!

I joined the EA monthly pass thing for one month ($5) just so I could play the Titanfall 2 SP campaign. Not a bad game, campaign is relatively short of course. They introduce you to (almost) all the loadouts for the titans, but you play as a single actual titan/pilot for the whole campaign.

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 11, 2018 9:36 am I hear (not just here on OO) that the campaign is quite good. I'm surprised but hopeful.

I looked at the deluxe edition and while the price was right it just didn't feel right doubling the price to get some extra skins and starting with most of the unlocks already unlocked. I mean, it's probably worth it, but when you buy a BMW for 10 bucks, spending another 10 on the undercoating just feels wrong.

But that's probably just me.

The single player campaign is amazing, with some of the most memorable levels I can recall in recent memory.

Multiplayer is fun too - but not quite as n00b friendly as some others. Insanely fast, and it sure is fun hopping on a Titan and stealing power packs. Not quite as fun is when you are thrown in with a bunch of players that are a lot better than you, as you'll get shot by people and have no idea where they even were, YMMV, I'm not as much of a twitch gamer anymore, but I still had a good time with multiplayer, it just didn't stick for me in the face of other games (and I tend more towards single-player story games).

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Sat Jun 09, 2018 9:56 pm

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:48 pm Thanks. Will fire it up.

Never did. No guarantee I will this time, either, but...probably.

And...I totally did. I don't know why I forgot, but I absolutely downloaded and tested out Titanfall 2 at some point. That's also probably why I had a customized control setup waiting for me this time as well.

Getting old.

Nothing like double jumping to your titan just in time for him to snatch you out of the air and cram you into the pilot's seat.

Damn this game feels sexy.

Was asked how many players are still playing Titanfall 2. I gave an answer I thought was in the ballpark because I thought I looked before buying.

Turns out I was not in the ball park. There seems to only be around 2,000 players on the PC. More on the PS4 and Xbox.

Haven't tried matchmaking yet, as I'm a little shy without some more practice, but I'll give it a shot soonish.

Ok, small spoiler, but holy crap, it's awesome.

Parts of the campaign story are cliched, in that alien artifacts are found and used for nefarious purposes, but whoever designed this following encounter deserves a bonus.

So at one point in the game, you get a "time travel" device which lets you move forward and back in time. As you progress through a facility, you are regularly blocked by obstacles that can only be overcome in 1 time frame or another. It's the same facility, one all shiny and new, the other all destroyed, burning and overgrown with wildlife. Door blocked? Time travel to when it's not blocked, etc.

But that's just the context. At one point you get into a fight with enemy infantry in the modern facility at the same time you're in a fight with wildlife in the ruined facility. That's awesome all by itself, so when you travel back and forth you have different enemies in different positions depending on which time frame you're in. The reason you time travel during the fight is that you're frequently in danger of being overwhelmed, and the only option is to seek refuge in the other time frame.

That makes for an amazing encounter. The cherry on top is that you can often be facing a number of bad guys with guns, flash to the other time frame, run around to a flanking position and then return to the original time frame where you just suddenly appear behind the enemies and vaporize them as they freak out and scramble to figure out how you moved so fast and to reposition so you aren't slaughtering them wholesale. When they do get turned around, you simple flash to the other time frame and deal with the wildlife for awhile.

The time machine wrist watch has a cooldown that is just long enough to prevent instantly moving back and forth, but short enough that it can be used tactically.

That may be the single best encounter I've ever experienced in a shooter.

Just brilliant design, and incredibly fun.

That segment is definitely a highlight of the SP...totally unique mechanic that works perfectly and allows for some great gameplay moments. It's just a shame that it's over so quickly.

disarm wrote:That segment is definitely a highlight of the SP...totally unique mechanic that works perfectly and allows for some great gameplay moments. It's just a shame that it's over so quickly.

I loved the world building platform level too., but effect and cause is an all time great.

I'm playing the campaign on hard relying on my titanfall 1 experience and so far it has been pretty straightforward. The Ash fight really made me work for it and I lost several times before I became more tactical, and finally beating her was a definite sense of accomplishment.

I played 1 multiplayer attrition match and I was surprised it was on a map from Titanfall 1, so a lot of it came back to me and I somewhat knew the map already. It was about what I expected. I did worse than I hoped but better than I feared so in the end it was a learning experience.

There is a progression system with leveling and unlocks etc but don't be fooled, the game appears to be as well balanced as the first, which means that while each weapon has a purpose, they are all relatively balanced against each other. Whether you're using an SMG, an AR, an SR or a SG, they will all kill a pilot effectively, but of course they are better in their particular roles. As you scale the progression system, you unlock things like scopes, faster reloads, stuff like that. Incremental stuff. Not imbalancing leaps forward.

Light mechs are faster and speed is life in this game, so that's how they can take on the heavy mechs and win. That said, if you get into a straight up brawl with a heavy titan then expect to lose handily. The medium titans are the generalist titans (at least they were in Titanfall 1. It's a bit different in Titanfall 2) which are better for rookies. A good mix of resilience and evasiveness.

Speed is life as a pilot too. Always be moving. ALWAYS BE MOVING. (edit: And by moving, I mean wall running, sliding and double jumping. Running along the ground is almost as bad as standing still). Stop for a split second to ADS and snipe someone, but immediately start moving afterward. The game is FAST. It's designed like that and you need to get your keybindings down pat so everything becomes instinctual. On the plus side, after scaling the learning curve you will be rewarded with some incredible and rewarding play. Once you wall run jump wall run jump wall run land slide all the while shooting your enemies you'll feel like a god. And that doesn't even count climbing enemy titans and messing them up.

You will DIE. The game is not about any particular life. You will die, you will respawn, you will die again. Round and round it goes. It's a race to most points (for attrition game mode anyway, the most popular) so dying shouldn't slow you down. Get back in there.

Your titan will die. You'll wait minutes to be able to call down a titan only to have someone else call down a titan right on top of yours and that will be the end of it. Or you'll get hammered by 2 enemies and you'll be out of dashes (speed) and you won't be able to get out of the line of fire and your titan will die in seconds. That's the game. You'll eject (once you get competent at it. Like everything, learning curve/keybindings. There's an actual piece of equipment that will auto-eject you if you want to equip it) and keep going.

Attrition is 6v6, which means that if everyone is on from our PUBG club, we'll all be able to play at the same time, which is cool.

I don't have all the answers. It's a learning experience. Keep an open mind, remember that all games have a learning curve and 2 year old multiplayer games tend to be incredibly punishing while you climb that curve. Faster games tend to be more frustrating because muscle memory hasn't kicked in yet.

I dare you all to tell me it's not awesome the first time an enemy pilot is jumping towards your Titan intending to rodeo it and you punch that effer out of the air with a giant mechanical fist.

Also, I managed to get a melee kill Titan vs. Titan in my first match, which was awesome. Yanked his arm off and jammed the giant rifle muzzle into the enemy pilot's cockpit and went full auto. Visually amazing. Nice reward for pulling off a semi-skilled move.

Managed to get 2 matches in with Red. If you thought I was incoherent in pubg during a firefight, wait until you hear me during Titanfall.

Red says it's around the same as Call of Duty as far as speed goes, so if you have experience there, that should help.

Edit: Also I titan punched an enemy pilot jumping through the air trying to rodeo me. It was just as awesome as I remember.

If you value frustration, try the campaign on the hardest difficulty. It's an order of magnitude tougher than the next difficulty down. There was a lot of respawning, even on the first mission.

This is probably the best 5 bucks I've ever spent in gaming!

Although I find myself taking a day off after every mission because everything I've read is that the single player campaign is short, and I don't want it to end. Perhaps playing it over again at the harder difficulty will be my fix for that.

It is short and that is why I'm playing on the hardest difficulty.

I have to play much slower on the hardest difficulty because getting shot more than twice means I'm dead.

Red and I discovered that there are "clans" in the game that are mostly for organizational purposes but each network has a happy hour where you can collect a once per happy hour bonus merit (kind of an over all experience point thingy).

So anyone want to help naming ours?

They are called "networks" for the record.

Feel free to suggest some names.

PUBG Rejects?

I had a lot of fun playing the SP campaign on my XBox One (thanks, EA Access!). Took me a bit to fully get used to all the wall running mechanics, but they were spectacular once I got the hang of them. And the time travel level was perfect, though I almost missed a Titan loadout in that level the first time I played it and had to play through that level again from the last checkpoint to make sure I got it.

Cort, there is an entire category of weapon using the pistol. One has a sight, the other is a single handed shotgun. Don't feel bad about getting killed by the pistol. It's not much different than getting killed by an AR or SR, really.

Well, it's kinda worse. But not much.

Network is called: Octopus Overlords

I just wanted our call sign to be [OO]

When Sony released Titanfall 2 as a PS+ free game in December I rushed to tell my friends about it. I had bought and played Titanfall 2 when it first came out, but with no one to play it with I moved on to other things.

Imagine my surprise upon coming back to it that the developers also released a 4 person Horde mode called Frontier Defense. I convinced two of my friends to give it a shot and now it's our go-to game when we want some quick multiplayer Coop fun.

Anyone else still playing this - and specifically playing Frontier Defense?

Northstar didn't just save Titanfall 2, it completely transformed it

2021 wasn't a good year to be a Titanfall fan. With both the original Titanfall and its 2016 sequel (and briefly, Apex Legends) under constant DDoS attacks, allegedly from an absurd conspiracy of hackers. Titanfall 2 might not have been pulled from sale like its predecessor, but for the past year it's been effectively impossible to play the fantastic parkour mech shooter online.

That is, until Northstar showed up.

Released in December, Northstar is a mod that enables fans to run their own custom servers in Titanfall 2—bypassing the game's own servers and, in the process, evading the persistent waves of DDoS attacks. For the first time in a long time, pilots can wallrun and buttslide and slam their massive robots across Titanfall 2's maps without fear of having the server infrastructure crumble out from under them.

But in dipping into Northstar over the holiday break, I quickly found that a server browser hasn't just revived a cult multiplayer classic. It's completely transformed what it means to play Titanfall 2 online.

This game was so good. Even with the annoying wall-running elements, it's one of the best FPSers I've played in a long time. Easily the best $5 I've spent on a game in years. Would definitely recommend. The SP campaign is absurdly short (~6 hours), but that might not be a bad thing if you tend to have partially finished games clogging up your backlog.

We definitely need more games where you climb into a ~20' tall mech and get nutty.

Ya it was a great game. I loved both games. Finished both games and played them both in multiplayer. Im not sure if theres still a community out there for the games now. If so Id prob put it back in for mp mashups.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 7:03 pm This game was so good. Even with the annoying wall-running elements, it's one of the best FPSers I've played in a long time. Easily the best $5 I've spent on a game in years. Would definitely recommend. The SP campaign is absurdly short (~6 hours), but that might not be a bad thing if you tend to have partially finished games clogging up your backlog.

We definitely need more games where you climb into a ~20' tall mech and get nutty.

I couldn't agree more, although the fluidity of motion was one of the things I most loved about it. It was nearly effortless to run, jump, slide and wall run in combinations that were acrobatic in nature. And I am not a million actions per second gamer either. It just felt incredible to fly around the battle field, changing elevations at will. And that's before the combat, which was amazing and in my opinion well balanced despite many unique weapons.

Tactically, options were absolutely insane. You could leave your Titan, flank and fire off a round of hard hitting shots while your Titan continued to engage from another direction, then return to the safety of the cockpit when things grew too hot.

I happen to be a HUGE fan of dealthblows/finishing moves, ever since Dawn of War sync kills. Being able to smush your opponent when circumstances are right is incredibly rewarding on top of all the rest of the fun the game has to offer.

I really, really like Titanfall and Titanfall 2.

edit: Scrolling up, I see I've been in this thread before. I haven't played since then, but as you can tell, my opinion of the game has not faded over time.

Yes, I bumped it after playing. It's also on sale this week for $3, which is a ridiculous price!

I never really thought about getting in and out during combat, that's interesting and makes total sense for the extra tactical layer you add by doing so. Huh. Maybe I'll go back and mess around with that...

I can't remember what happens when you start rodeo'ing a titan while your own titan is engaging it, but I'm sure it is awesome, whatever it is!!

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Jan 23, 2023 2:32 pm Yes, I bumped it after playing. It's also on sale this week for $3, which is a ridiculous price!

On sale again for ridiculous price. Any late comers should jump on this, it is an amazing game. Almost 200k overwhelmingly positive reviews.

GreenGoo wrote:

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Jan 23, 2023 2:32 pm Yes, I bumped it after playing. It's also on sale this week for $3, which is a ridiculous price!

On sale again for ridiculous price. Any late comers should jump on this, it is an amazing game. Almost 200k overwhelmingly positive reviews.

I'll comment to draw more attention to this...very cool game that didn't get nearly the attention it deserves. At under $10, it's an absolute steal that shouldn't be missed.

Loved both games and finished both of them. I had more fun MP in the first one than the second though. Not sure why it didn't get the love it deserved./