RockyRan

Same. Where are all these people coming from? Is the new layout driving (even more) people away from Kotaku? In my case, yes. Though I noticed you left way before then <__<

Eh, call me crazy but I don't think CoD is going anywhere in the next few years. All the college dudebros around me are just as infatuated with the series as they've ever been, and considering the fact that college dudebros ARE CoD's main demographic, well, I just put two and two together. ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE IS GO!

In a game this busy, it's imperative to make the sounds as utilitarian (and dare I say it, minimalist) as possible. When I meant superfluous sounds, I meant more superfluous "noise" than anything else. I can recognize each sound that you're talking about, but the problem overall is that each of those sounds is too loud on its own, and it quickly devolves into multiple things all demanding your attention equally, essentially becoming glorified white noise. And this goes without mentioning the VAs, the music, or the crowd sounds. Again, too much noise, and the sounds that ARE useful are too loud and busy. The game just needs better mixing. One thing to note is that what I'm saying aren't "first impressions". These are the things I actually CAN'T get used to, so saying "learn them", or "get used to them" doesn't do anything to refute my concerns. Cute turn-around, but a completely vacuous one. A Spy can't do anything on his own, even though an Assassin can make a very high amount of kills without anybody's help. The game simply doesn't encourage any teamwork with the Assassin. If we're going to talk class design, you have to do better than childishly reposting my statement and swapping words. It actually isn't perfectly serviceable. The server browser is very clunky and buggy, taking all too long to refresh servers, often gives the wrong ping on my first refresh and forces me to refresh several times, double-clicking to join flat out does not work sometimes for no reason, servers often do not show up at all and I have to restart the game, etc. And this is just the servers. I have similar lists for the in-game UI and chat boxes, but I won't bore people with the details. And I actually did mean netcode, but I failed to specify further. That's my mistake. I've come across several servers with severe and constant lag spikes despite the game reporting low ping on them. And this is happening far too often to just attribute it to me joining crappy servers. It IS the fault of Uber if they pick an outdated engine to run off of. It's a minor complaint of mine, but still a valid one. And I never once said "this game is shit and you should feel bad for playing it", I'm voicing my reasons as to why I personally dislike it. If you can't cope with it maybe you should learn to deal with others' opinions and complaints.

I'll do this in simple list form, because I'm sure many people here don't want a multi-post wall-o-text rant and I certainly don't want to type one up 1) The art style. It's WAY too loud. The maps have too much color and the game constantly rapes your ears with completely unnecessary filler sounds, VA's, etc. As chaotic as other bright, colorful games with a lot sounds are (*coughTF2cough*), they can actually manage to trim the fat around the portions that don't have any impact on the player. Simply put, in competitive mutliplayer games, every sound needs to have a purpose. An alarming amount of sounds in MNC don't and as a result it's very difficult to concentrate and figure out what's going on if you're relying on audio cues. The same goes for the visuals. Even after playing for hours, I have a hard time distinguishing important aspects of the visuals because everything is equally vibrantly colored. (tl;dr, too much rape on the ears and eyes) 2) The Assassin. She's not overpowered in my opinion, she just has no place in the game. She's far too independent, to the point where the game makes it extremely easy for her to solo and run around killing and destroying things without any regard for her team or what should be her ultimate goal (moneyball, etc.), or anything else because she can just kill things without any help from anyone. Contrast this to the Spy in TF2, who absolutely needs help if he wants to get more than a handful of backstabs per match, if that (even the best Spies). Relying more on the help of the teammates = helping the teammates themselves = better team players. I don't think Uber entertainment realized this when they made their "lonely desperado" class. (tl;dr, Assassin is too independent, has no place in a team-based game, and 99% of players who use her only annoy opponents without actually doing anything useful) 3) Netcode/UI. It's a console port, through and through, and it doesn't look like Uber is afraid to show it at all. It's very clunky in general and the PC-exclusive portions of the UI such as the server browser and chatbox are incredibly buggy and/or very rough around the edges. It makes for a pretty non-intuitive experience. (tl;dr, Netcode/UI) 4) The goddamn Unreal engine. Texture pop-in and no anti-aliasing support can go die in a fire. I need to see either of these things because I have a perfectly capable rig to negate these shortcomings. (tl;dr, there is no tl;dr) So there, my mini-rant on MNC. Enjoy. Or not.

1:35 - ND: Web Media went down a dead end ... We’re going to pay less attention to commenters, who keep us in a ghetto... No kidding, asshole. Your dumbass "redesign" fucked up the entire network for commenters, and you didn't give a shit about what any of us had to say when we repeatedly insisted that the new site was a steaming pile of dog turd. This right here is the main reason why I left the Gawker Media sites. It's not so much the redesign, it's the smug "we don't give a fuck" attitude the higher-ups had toward the user opinion of the site, and that the redesign not only failed to solve many problems/wishes that the users had, but they actually took OUT functionality for them. I really don't feel the need to spend so much time being a building block of their community (the only damn reason I was there the past year or so) when they said "we don't give a shit" in return.

I loved Oblivion to bits and I'm still trying to find the time to play Shivering Isles (it's even better). Bethesda's promising changes to pretty much every single complaint I had, even the minor ones like dungeons that ended up looking a bit repetitive (Bethesda promises that all dungeons will be hand-made and no two areas will be alike). When Skyrim was announced all I wanted was a good, interesting game world map (and boy are they delivering on that all right), a new engine, and the same mod tool support for Oblivion. Everything else is icing on the cake, and with every new press release it's getting better and better. There's no doubt in my mind it'll be GOTY.

Some shitty PC game called Big Biz Tycoon. I was like 12 at the time and I literally grabbed a box off Best Buy. I loved those games back then (I still like good business sims), but I was under the complete assumption that if the game looked good from the box, it was worth buying. It was complete and utter ass. The game lacked any kind of long-term goal, and the entirety of the gameplay consisted of hiring employees in one of the most asinine and mind-numbing ways you could possibly think of, assign them to separate projects, literally wait around and do nothing as time passed for them to finish the project (there was no visual feedback at all to this entire process, by the way. You just saw your employees hammering at their keyboards like monkeys whether they were working on a project or not), then when the project was finished you would "distribute" the project, which consisted of pushing a button to "distribute" and see sums of money getting into your account every few seconds. That was seriously it. Oh, and designing an office space that would never get used. Employees only interact with computers and toilets. Literally everything else was there for show and served no purpose. And even if they did serve a purpose, who the fuck wants to play a video game to design cubicles and conference rooms? Fuck RollerCoaster Tycoon (best game ever, actually, and don't you forget it) and designing wacky theme parks with crazy roller coasters, let's decide what shade of grey goes best with the grey cubicle walls! Throw in sub-par graphics, extremely bad repetitive music, and horrible Korean-to-Engrish translations, and you got yourself the worst game I have ever had the misfortune of playing.

Oh yeah, I'm also called Mr. Pantaloons on Steam.

It's me. You know who I am. If you read Kotaku at all in the past few years there's no way any of you could've missed me So yeah, I'm here. I jumped off the sinking ship that is Gawker Media and most likely won't be returning. What I loved most was the community, though, rather than the actual blog. To tell you the truth the coverage is pretty replaceable, and the member-oriented posts all but disappeared at this point. Me? I like to play pretty much everything and anything. I'm mostly gaming on PC for now, though I often game on my PS3 second and my 360 distant third. Don't ask me about Nintendo unless you want wall-o-texts worth of rants (VERY jaded former fanboy, don't ask). I usually can't get together with people for multiplayer to save my life (ask the guys from the TF2 Highlander tourney about the time I ditched them minutes before the match started ), but I'll probably be around here quite a bit.