I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.

I would say to go and check out independent local game stores. It’s not uncommon for people to run 3D printing as a side hustle, and game stores tend to have boards where people put up flyers or cards.

You want resin for 28mm characters. FDM, the alternative leaves noticeable printlines and not what you want if you’re paying for a mini.

In U.S. pricing, I’ve found these individual print people charging $1-3 USD for a human 28mm figure. Part of the idea is paying less than it costs to buy figures out of the box.

I posit that ratings in a franchise like Star Wars are a downstream reflection of previous material. Part of Andor’s low ratings I think are a reflection on the other shows that came out and weren’t good. It creates an environment where so many viewers check out. I’d say that Disney reducing the amount of Star Wars shows it puts out and giving the shows to properly talented creators to make unique high quality projects should be the takeaway.

I really hope the executive takeaway is “let individual creators have unique takes and expand Star Wars” and not “All Star Wars should now be dark and depressing and grim.”

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.

You don’t have any problems with it cycling? I’ve heard really big cans on tilt barrel handguns can cause problems with the weight of the can interfering with barrel movement.

What’s the can model? Do you like it?

A paintball filled with capsaicin or something similar. Technically many of the guns are sold purpose made as pepper ball launchers, but they are literally rebranded .68 cal paintball guns and compatible with commercial paintball gun parts.

I see two in the photo. Along with what I presume is a 37mm break open launcher.

Yes, they are repurposed to fire pepperballs.

I think the article was tailor written as ragebait/smugbait:

I looked up Louisiana’s SB46.

It’s literally just talking about cloud seeding and geo-engineering. It doesn’t say anything about chemtrails. Cloud seeding and geo-engineering are, per the article on top of this thread, real things.

Edit:

Looked up Florida’s SB56.

It’s about weather modification and geo-engineering.

Edit edit:

Tennessee HB2063. It’s about cloud seeding.

This is getting dumb. The bills are about real things and nothing in the text- which is what becomes the actual law has anything to do with chemtrails.

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The last Black Ops I cared about was 2. I could almost feel the developers of that one screaming that they wanted to break out of the COD mold. It actually had a lot of cool, if underbaked ideas. There were the sidemissions where you commanded an NPC squad ala Brothers In Arms, there were the pre-mission loadouts where after beating a mission set in the past you could go back and load up with future guns, there were multiple endings driven by choices in the missions.

There was a lot of stuff going on in that game which if it had been given a longer development cycle than the COD treadmill, and more freedom to stray from COD mainstays could have been something interesting. All of the above features could have really been pushed and refined beyond the small implimentation they ended up as. BO2 also tied the setting back to the cold war era roots, which makes it far more interesting that the cutout metal angular girder future design that is just the most generic looking thing ever. Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare was forgotten for a reason and it’s disappointing that Black Ops ended up eating all its aesthetics.

None of this matter of course, since no matter how many story trailers they release or how much people like me talk about what could make single player good, in the end the series is kept alive by tweaked out multiplayer addicts so I suppose it is all just a waste of time to think about.

I don’t support using it as a basis to shove politics into everything, I was just following that this is a common trope of people who do, which leans on semantics while ignoring the spirit of people not wanting everything to be a political debate.

For such people, there’s no way to word a rule ironclad enough, and you simply have to make judgement calls at some point.