I'd be curious to hear more about all this: why you bounced off F4, and why you can tell you'll go back.
Also, please stream it. I've been trying to get people I know to stream F4, particularly if they haven't played much of it before. I will totally watch, possibly for long stretches of time, and I'll even let you control how much information I give (if any) about nearby locations and quests and such.
You know, I just might do that because it's also a really good fit for streaming and I tried for a little bit to stream games that I want to talk out loud about (One of my favorite experiences of all time was when someone was watching me play the beginner's guide for the first time, because I'd stop for long sections and explain what I was thinking, and it really hit me a lot harder when I actually talked through what I thought about the game).
I loved fallout 3 a lot because I really got in the head space of my imagined character. My favorite experience in the game was actually walking the dad back to the jefferson memorial (for some reason I didn't think I could fast travel). As far as I can tell, it's the longest my character got to spend with her dad after the separation, and I kinda got to experience that (that and the dad felt the need to karate chop every single boatfly in a 100 yard radius on the way there).
So I think I'll be more into fallout 4 when I can get in the role playing side, and that might be easier when I'm in talking mode. I'll ponder a bit more, a VOD might appear out of nowhere during a late night session while I see if I like streaming it.
All this Doom love really does tempt me. But I keep having to remind myself that I don't
want to be trapped between two demons
. (Basically I worry that a modern day take on all the gore-gasm wouldn't do it for me, as I'm not a horror fan. All round it does sound stellar though, and I do like fast shooters time to time, especially if they've got personality and cunning level design and that. Hmmm).
Honestly I don't care for gore at all. I don't watch game of thrones because of it. I saw one particularly gruesome MK fatality and I've actively avoided seeing any more since.
But really, the gore in this game doesn't get to me even a little bit. It feels so played up that there's just such a clear disconnect that it's like seeing Tarantino gore.
It's a very fast shooter, it's got personality, but not the dominant personality that people mean when they say personality (firefly-esque witties tossed between characters); though I don't know if I'd say the level design is cunning per se, it's just very functional (finding secrets is a lot of fun though, and often you'll see something and just know there's
something off about it that there's a secret there).
PS What games worked for you on the Vive? (I'm yet to try VR, and probably shouldn't. My vague plan is to snag a 2nd kit in a few years if it takes hold. It's a good plan. And luckily I can't afford any of my bad plans
)
A lot of stuff honestly, my head was swimming after the first time.
One of the best parts was part of Zombie simulator where there's a speed challenge to shoot 4 zombies as quickly as possible. I realized that the fastest I could get was by holding up one hand and pointing it at one zombie, holding that hand as still as possible while I looked in the opposite direction and lined up a shot on the other one, pulled the triggers at the same time and instantly moved my other hands to line up on the others. The simple act of aiming at something you're not actually looking at really tickled my brain. It was like learning object permanence all over again. The normal campaign of that game is just kinda aight though, there will be better versions of it.
The archery games have been pretty good. The archery game that comes with the lab has a lot of great haptic feedback on the vive controllers that make it feel like you're pulling a string. And when it gets stressful it gets super immersive. The other archery game is probably even better though, Holopoint. The gameplay premise is suuuuper simple. There are cubes that shoot at you after a few seconds unless you hit it first, but even when you hit the cube, it'll shoot a projectile at the location you shot it from. This
forces you to constantly be on the move in ridiculous ways. I'm in decent shape. I was sweaty and out of breath after 20 minutes of this. I just forgot about this until now, but I actually was running around so much that I kicked the wall so hard the front of my toenail came off on my pinky toe and I was bleeding pretty badly but I had NO IDEA because I was so immersed. The people watching me didn't even notice til we saw the blood all over the hardwood floor.
I also enjoyed the spaceship game in the Lab a lot. Waltz of the wizard was a great tech demo, and I hope they put that in a full game (like a VR Magicka). It's also just a ton of fun to watch someone play it in person. My girlfriend got in a shootout and it was awesome watching her crouch and roll around while she was hiding under an office desk in the game. My buddy got tilt brush since I was last there a week or so ago and has been raving about it.
That said, after having played it for about 5-6 hours by now, I think the most exciting thing is the promise. After the first night I very nearly bought my own, but now I'm content to wait until we really capitalize on this. I'm happy that Valve is involved so heavily in bringing this about, I've always been upset that so much of the Wii's potential was squandered by Nintendo's refusal to really open up their platform to independent devs, but I think this will really be something special.
Even then, once there's a few games out that really use the tech I've seen so far in a full fledged game experience, I'd drop 800 on it, no question (and I'm pretty frugal).