Julius

From everything I’ve heard, the reviewer and alpha versions of the game were, by far, superior experiences, which means it’s we can pretty conclusively say that EA, not any of the developing teams, are absolutely the ones to blame for this mess (nice to know that some things never change). What a waste of talent, time and money this seems to all be. Not the mood any Star Wars fan wants to be in anyway, let alone a mere 30 days or so from the release of The Last Jedi

@Hero-of-Time it’s nothing but Bantha fodder at this point. Though I wasn’t planning to play the game in earnest until next month at the earliest (due to other commitments), I was still planning to have the pre-ordered game arrive tomorrow, get it downloaded and play for a few hours before putting it down until next month. But this is outrageous and unfair. 60,000 credits/40 hours of gameplay for one of Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker in a STAR WARS GAME?! Easy fix: unlock these characters for everyone, and instead lock skins (e.g. battle-scarred Vader) begins these ridiculous walls. Further comments about credits not being able to be purchased with crystals is a confusing one: one can simply purchase loot crates with these crystals and cash-in on their cards, so you can absolutely indirectly pay for these characters with crystals. With regards to the community manager Mat Everett, we weren’t happy with him over on r/StarWarsBattlefront anyway: the guy attempted to bribe moderators to take down posts/edit the sub’s homepage so that none of this would come out. He’s been banned because of this. The EA community team’s reddit comment regarding that their aim “is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes” has the most downvotes in Reddit history: it’s currently sitting at around a sum of 124,000 downvotes. The only positive thing to seemingly come out of this absolute mess of “community management” is that there seem to be systems in place to even the odds to some extent, with match-making supposedly depending on factors such as star cards, rank and player ability. Look, I love Star Wars. I read the novels, the comics, the reference books, the art books, I watch the animated TV shows, I’ll go to the cinema to see TLJ alone more than I have in the entirety of the year leading up to release. But, yes, I’ve absolutely cancelled my pre-order after learning about this. I was on the side that DICE had nothing to do with this mess of a system, but it’s their devs defending EA on Reddit and elsewhere, so I’m not sure. They can take my £20 - £30 when the game inevitably drops in price leading up to Christmas. I’m curious about what comes next. EA has the Star Wars licenses exclusively until 2023, but could fan reaction to this force Lucasfilm and Disney into stepping in and scrapping that deal? I have to assume that there’ll be something in their agreement which has to do with the number of AAA games output by EA by 2023 (2 in 4 years and recently scrapping Visceral means we’re on track for, what, 4 or 5 AAA games by then?), and something else giving Lucasfilm an option to opt-out. I can’t imagine it will be too long now before we start seeing some petitions to get Disney/Lucasfilm to revoke the licenses from EA.

Sort of glad that I won’t be playing this until next month. It should give EA the time they need to fix this mess, because it’s absolutely set up as a Freemium model right now; whilst there’s a distinct possibility that the way things currently are is to ensure that players don’t get too far ahead simply because of trials/deluxe editions, the lack of comment by EA on the matter can, for now, be taken to speak volumes. For instance, one round of Galactic Assault awards you a sum of around 275 credits. Trooper crates currently cost 4000 credits, and at around 10 minutes per Galactic Assault round (on average), you’re currently looking at around 2.5 hours/crate. What’s more, some heroes and villains are locked, costing 60000 credits to unlock, meaning that you need to play some 40 hours or so (without purchasing trooper crates, therefore putting yourself at a disadvantage in the match) of Galactic Assault to unlock just one hero/villain. So yeah, if something strange is going on and this isn’t what you intended EA...now would be the time to speak up.

Disney and Lucasfilm are that pleased with the job that The Last Jedi’s writer-director Rian Johnson did with the film that they’ve given him the freedom to create his own trilogy outside of the episodic Skywalker Saga (so not X, XI and XII), the first of which he will also write-direct, prior to The Last Jedi’s release next month. No wonder he turned down the opportunity to direct IX. He gets to take control of an entire trilogy instead! I don’t think Hollywood’s ever seen a larger endorsement for a film’s quality than this. My excitement for The Last Jedi is through the roof

A mere 38 days to go... and a TV spot for me to avoid...

And I mean, Hoopa’s rings in ORAS were more-or-less other dimensions too (or at least they felt like it) :/ I can understand why they make every Pokémon available with every generation of the core series, but there are just so many Pokémon now that I think that there are better ways to go about doing this than just shoving them in for the sake of it moving forwards, such as having 50% of non-native Pokémon available in one generation, the other 50% available in the next generation, etc. I thought that this was the main reason why Bank was produced.

Well, I was talking specifically about villainous team leaders, not gym leaders or champions (in any case, though, PWT also had a sense of finality to it in how it brought all of those characters together in one big tournament that takes it well beyond the point of just being a nod to the older games). My point was that I’m glad that they didn’t just rehash the PWT from BW2 and went with something similar, but with a twist (that we can face all the past evil team leaders, though I won’t be too surprised if this comes with the caveat that Archie and Maxie are exclusive to different versions). My wording that this was the best way to do that is very much an absolute statement that I don’t think I even agree with; perhaps the best way to word it would have been that it’s the next best thing after the PWT Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer (I forgot that quite a few of Pokémon’s musical titles literally have the word “theme” in them); I was referring to musical themes, not tracks titled specifically as “Themes”, such as how the piece Vs Champion begins with the battle theme found at the beginning of Pokémon Red and Blue’s piece Opening. Also...all of the tracks that “returned” were remixed to some extent (i.e. altered and re-recorded, whether that be added to, taken away from, changed in tempo, etc.), not just “Red’s Theme” (I know what you’re referring to here, but there isn’t a track called Red’s Theme in any case ). Reusing them would imply that they literally used the same recording from GS in SM. Even the theme that I used as an example was remixed. Another example: the Champion Blue Encounter track in SM is clearly a remixed version of the original Blue Encounter in RGB.

By bringing back all of the evil team leaders, this feels as close a conclusion as we can get for the last 21 years of core series Pokémon being exclusively on handheld before it makes the move to Switch in a year or two. Probably won’t be picking this up for a while now because there’s just too much going on with gaming and other things in the lead up to Christmas, but I hope that I can jump in by Easter at the latest and give the franchise one last whirl on a purely handheld console before, I hope, we see some slightly major and minor changes when it comes to Switch when the time comes. Can’t wait to see what they do with the evil team leaders’ music too, if anything; I loved what the SM OST did with some of the older themes which were reintroduced in the game. Kind of hoping that they go orchestral when they make the Switch....

So, the international poster could have a potential spoiler in it which I’d rate as medium-to-high, but it could be a strange and misdirecting photoshop. Goodness knows: they’ve been pretty weird when it comes to international marketing, in my opinion. Also, here’s the international trailer (which shows barely anything new, and in my opinion, is cut terribly, both visually and musically; I found it to be rather janky): Nice to know that they’re keeping a lid on things worldwide, even if that means the trailer doesn’t hold a candle to either of The Force Awakens’ international trailers (seriously, I thought that those things were masterpieces):

Totally guessing from the trailer, but I think he’s a rōnin-turned-ninja. It seems that he was a Samurai before, until whoever his master was gets killed; a rōnin is a Samurai who’s lost their master (literally translates as “drifter” or “wanderer”). It seems like he tries to get avenge his fallen master as a rōnin, which fails, and so he turns to alternative techniques with ninjitsu. I honestly just hope that we get to play as all three types of warrior throughout the story.

It’s possible that the game might not be as Samurai-oriented as it originally seemed, and could be a ninja game instead (or as well as?). From the official site (and included in @drahkon‘s original post too): I was really looking forward to a Samurai game, but I’d be happy to see a AAA Tenchu too! It would also explain the ninja look of the character in the trailer:

It seems EA are taking some steps towards the light. From the official website for the game:

No idea why it wasn’t included in either of the trailers, but we have a release date: February 6th 2018. Ueda has also said that he proposed some changes to Sony for the game, but it’s still unclear if they’ll be included.

Odd that they split the cinematic trailer from the gameplay trailer considering how it went on-stage. Here’s the gameplay trailer:

It’s got to be dead if it’s not at PSX in December, right?

That confused the heck out of me. I heard the strings, and it sounded like TLOU. Cool. But then it not only looked like Days Gone, people were being hung and possibly left for their version of zombies, as we saw in the Days Gone stuff at E3 this year. Very odd. Perhaps we’ll get an update following the showcase?

Ahhhhhh SotC looks so gooooood!

The Force is strong with this one.

Nothing beats a trailer for BFII Nice to see the tie-in with the animated TV shows too