Thrustache

Totally agree. I've been cutting up whole chickens for years with my 10" steel chef knife and it hasn't "decayed". Maybe I have to sharpen it once a month. I just wish the developers would make game mechanics like this less obtrusive. These weapons fall apart way too fast and it is obnoxious. I feel like someone should make a video and send it to Techland to prove how silly it is. I'm thinking something along the lines of Rocky punching sides of beef, but with a water pipe instead of fists.

I just picked this up but I do not see an option to repair it. My durability shows 6/7, does it require a special resource to repair it? I'm playing on the PC.

I actually have both of these set to 0 on the wheel, I checked last night to be sure. So SEN: off Drift: 1 are my settings on the wheel.

@sascha: Thanks for digging that up. I ran into that post during my searches before posting here but haven't tried it yet. I don't know that I'll need to. My problems are essentially gone after turning SEN to OFF on the wheel.

I tried SEN: OFF before and it seemed horrible. I think I know why: FFB must have cut out when I first tried that setting. Letting the game control the sensitivity with FFB working is markedly better. When FFB is not working nothing feels right because there is no feedback about where I'm going to lose control or not. It was super floaty (as previously noted) and impossible to control. FFB working makes all the difference, which shouldn't surprise anyone I guess.

My game experience is night and day with regard to controlling the vehicle. I'm actually having a lot of fun now. It even makes the takedown missions a little less painful too. I did the one in STL and it wasn't a frustrating disaster like a previous attempt ended up being. I haven't had to do an escape mission yet but I imagine those will be a little less infuriating because that seems all about breaking line of sight and that means lots of turns. Since I can now drift around corners with something approaching accuracy, I'm hopeful. All previous attempts at drifting were pretty much all high speed crashes into a turn.

I switched my car to that BMW you get as part of the pre-order (or maybe season pass). When I have more time I'm going to pop back into the Nissan I was using before and see if it also handles better.

On the wheel the important settings I've got are SEN: OFF, DRIFT: 1, SPr: 1 and DPr: 2. Honestly these last two come down to preference and how much you want your wheel to fight you. I highly recommend folks tailor those to their preferences. I think that SEN/DRIFT are more important and some people might want to go higher on drift. Since this is a more arcade like game, I think turning drift to off might work against you.

The NPC cars and police in this game seem to be held to an entirely different set of physics than the players do. The first escape mission I did really demonstrated this for me, as did the first takedown mission. The handling, speed and expertise the AI gets access to is just ridiculous. I totally get that a V12 police interceptor is probably going to be faster than my entry level Nissan. That I can deal with. What I can't stand is that they seem to be able to take turns at crazy fast speeds with none of the physics involved in doing such a thing. The AI seems like it is on rails at all times while my car feels like it is on snow.

The police cars seem to have engine and brakes that use some kind of inertia dampening system. More than once I've tried to use oncoming traffic to get them to crash or slow down and it never works. If they do slow down it is with a level of precision and control that isn't possible in any vehicle I've driven (in this game or any other for that matter). I haven't ever taken the time to look at what happens but they're driving something other than a car. They can then match and exceed my speed in a way that just shouldn't be possible.

It genuinely feels like they took shortcuts with the AI so the game is challenging but didn't properly balance it. I had to restart that first escape mission like three times because I was absolutely owned by the cops over and over.

I started playing this a bit over the weekend and while it seems pretty fun, I'm struggling to find a good setup for my CSR wheel. As I'm sure you know this game does not provide wheel specific profiles so I'm juggling the in game wheel setup against the on-wheel settings.

It seems like turning SEN off on the wheel or anything higher than 720 results in very unresponsive handling. My car seems to take the wheel input as a suggestion more than a command. It just feels too floaty. I've tinkered with 270 and 360 and it seems like once things get to high speed, these lower settings encourage loss of control and result in spectacular crashes.

I've tried playing with the in-game dead/middle/full options for steering and it seems to be largely unhelpful. With throttle, brake and clutch it seems to do what I want (i.e., pressing the brake a little doesn't lock up the tires at high speed).

Beyond sensitivity I'd like at least some resistance at the edge of traction. Usually I tinker with the SPR and DPR settings on the wheel to do this but the game's FFB cuts out enough that I never can tell if what I am doing is working or not. Restarting the game fixes this but that makes fine tuning the settings a real pain. Anyone have a work around for that or some SPR/DPR numbers I should go with?

I'm hoping someone else has gotten something more substantial that they could share beyond my trial and error that hasn't really resulted in a better feeling experience.

For GiantBombsquad on 360: Thrustache

EDIT: I managed to invite myself using the rockstar site so ignore this one.

I had this conversation with a friend recently when I asked him why XBONE is any worse than Steam's method of ownership validation. He said pretty much the same thing as @dfl017 did here.

I explained to him that my personal experience is that this isn't always the case. There have probably been a dozen times where I lost internet access or was somewhere without it and Steam would not let me play a single player game or let met go into offline mode. After trial and error I determined I would have to go into offline mode before disconnecting from the net in order to play my games. This happened to me a handful of times on pretty much every gaming pc or laptop I've used steam on so it wasn't just one install going funky.

I haven't really used Steam in the last year or so but before that offline mode was just a cruel shitty joke from my point of view. Every time I needed offline mode to work, it never did. For the cases not involving traveling with a laptop I basically would have to into offline mode every day just to make sure it would work if I lose my connection. Not only is that annoying but I'm sure even if I got into the habit of doing it I'd forget the one day that road runner took a dump on me.

I'm not the only person who experiences this nonsense either . Google search "steam offline mode doesn't work" and you'll see plenty of people having this problem. I didn't bother to click beyond page one of the 73,000+ search results. I am sure many of them are irrelevant but imagine how many people aren't posting about this problem because the answers are already covered! My point here is that steam offline mode is not perfect and frequently you're stuck without it when you least expect to need it.

Stepping back a bit I feel like this underscores how little the DRM complaints matter. I see so many people answer "steam offline mode" when asked why DRM is bad on XBONE but OK on valve's platform. The thing is I really question how many of them had tried to use it in non-ideal circumstances. My friend that I mentioned earlier took up my challenge to unplug his cat5 and try to play a single player game when steam was closed. Didn't work for him either and he insisted steam offline mode "always worked". He was also convinced that he could just run every game by using the exe file instead of the steam UI and he was wrong about that too.

With all of that said, I'm probably going to just keep playing my 360 well into the future because my stack of unfinished games is like a dozen strong.

@fredchuckdave said:

You're ignoring that there are different classes to play with in these games. After all, who cares about how many endings their are, certainly not Mass Effect players, right? (Yes I am being sarcastic here)

In my opinion the fun of most games is in the playing not the finishing.

I played through each Mass Effect game in the series at least 3 times and more than that with 1 and 2. All three of them included some type of the standard RPG class breakouts with Adepts as casters, Infiltrators as stealth and Soldiers as, well soldiers. This gives you three obvious reasons to replay the game. Each different class style provides new strategies for encounters and provides fun in different ways.

Beyond that the hybrids of each class represented a fun way to try something totally different, yet familiar. Look at how the Vanguard class changed over the game trilogy for an obvious example of that.

Ultimately if someone finds a game fun it isn't absurd, ludicrous or stupid to replay it. Fun is fun and isn't only found in the CG animation at the end.

I totally love the multiplayer. The problem is that once I get a certain amount of time in, I start taking it too serious. Definitely not burned out, I just get in this head space where I have to play super well. That just means I need to do something else a bit.

The flying vehicles are a pretty exciting challenge but they're tricky to use properly. That is probably what I'm going to focus on once this debacle of a campaign is done.