| Title | Qt3 Games Podcast: Generation Zero, Halo: Reach, Phoenix Point |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games podcasts |
| When | December 6, 2019 |
Jason McMaster arrives on a boat that gets shot down, Nick throws some shade on Sam, and Tom Chick gets free stuff when his soldiers die.
Generation Zero at 1:00, Halo: Reach at 18:00, and Phoenix Point at 33:24…
Nice podcast. Even though I played through Reach and even played some multiplayer with friends, I didn’t know about any of the stuff Nick talked about regarding Reach. That was really interesting.
I also like the final solution though. After all, previous Halo games didn’t have loadouts and other stuff. So if everyone in the community decided the old classic loadout (or something closest to it) is the best, then why not just let them play that way instead of forcing them to not do that via nerfing that loadout?
And despite McMaster’s best efforts, now I want to play Phoenix Point on normal difficulty when it comes to Game Pass soon.
Would have thought the robots were Generation Zero of the new robot age, no?
Ahh, that makes way more sense. You’ve obviously studied up on your robot apocalypses!
-Tom
As I’ve said elsewhere, my feeling with games like this is that you play an easier first playthrough to learn the systems, then you do your next playthrough with the difficulty notched up to really flex the gameplay. I’m still only on my first Phoenix Point playthrough.
-Tom
Yeah sorta weird how Generation Zero has all this interest now, might grab it during the winter sale. I blame @KristiGaines
Phoenix point will be fun once it hits Gamepass, and I’ll probably get the complete edition with all DLC once that arrives on Steam lateeeeeeee next year.
As for Halo games I only played the first one and it was ok, no real desire to play the rest.
Glad to hear for the most part that all three of you enjoyed your games this week.
I think Reach is from much later than the first Halo - there’s a bunch more going on. I just finished it on GamePass and had a good time with it :) Looking forward to the others now.
Yeah I know, but I feel I am so far behind on the Halo story that it would take forever to catch up. :)
Anyway in 2 weeks , super excited to hear / see everyone’s top 10 / bottom 10 lists.
The story is pretty simple after the first game.
Master Chief and Cortana get married and some new upstart called Locke (he’s another Doomguy, like Master Chief) takes over the series. Eventually Cortana also has some sort of mid-life crisis, and with that seven-year itch burning in her loins, she decides they are going to separate for a little while to give her some space while she tries to find herself. Master Chief, short on patience and unable to just let things be, basically spends an entire game cyberstalking her and slaughtering all the thousands of aliens she’s since been hooking up with.
The series has devolved to basically another typical anime dating sim.
Is that how she got the gig as a Microsoft digital assistant?
Good news! Reach is a prequel and you don’t play as Master Chief, so all that nonsense is yet to happen according to the timeline. You’ll be fine playing Reach with no need to catch up on lore.
This is what I watched yesterday
You played the best. Only incentive to replay the first would be coop. All the rest can be skipped, unless you enjoy hunting for bugs and be inflicted with the stupidest pretentious storyline outside of Japan. Or if you can’t run Unreal Tournament for some reason, as Nick mentionned.
I played a few hours of the first, found it clunky and uninspired, and have watched with increasing bafflement as the franchise consumed the world. Then again, that kind of thing seems to happen a lot.
Halo 1 is NOT the best Halo game - something I think even fans of the series acknowledge. Most people prefer Halo 2 or 3, although Halo 2 was controversial at the time it came out, because of it’s non-ending. The storyline through the first 5 games (1-3, ODST, Reach) is pretty simple.
Personally I grew up with UT instead of Halo, but I still enjoy the Halo series.
Well too bad, it is to me, and by very, very, very far!
That’s cool. Personally I think the story got more interesting when they added the overtly religious aspects to the Covenant’s motivations, which didn’t happen until 2. And I think everything involving the Arbiter was interesting.
I loved deeply the unity of place and time in the first Halo. It’s something that I find very immersive in that kind of games, and the limited scope felt really special to me. Also the Cov guys didn’t speak English.
About Phoenix Point, Tom insists there is no RNG on the damage, but then later in the podcast proceeds to say there is none on the accuracy, while my watching of Jason’s stream showed me on many occasions there was a random element on accuracy, with that Valkyrie Chronicles-ish reticle, and that his soldiers could even totally miss shots.
Is that random element of the reticle absent in the Baby Mode Tom is enjoying using to study the systems? That seems quite major.
The shot will always fall in the reticle. If the reticle is NOT 100% on the target, it might miss the target. But if the reticle is completely on the target, the shot will hit 100% of the time. In other words, within the reticle, there’s some randomness, of course. But there’s no randomness in terms of whether you’ll hit what the reticle is touching. It’s got nothing to do with difficultly level and everything to do with the game’s design.
As for damage, it’s 100% deterministic. It’s never a range of values.
I actually didn’t take my own advice in Phoenix Point. I’m playing at the default difficulty.
-Tom
