Be Excellent To Each Other

Things you need to know about playing Sniper Elite:

1) Playing it with the diamond indicator is for pussies. Figure out bullet drop and wind direction, you knobs.

2) *heavy breathing*
BOOM
*man falls down on his back*
*heavy breathing*
BOOM
*slow mo weeeeeeeeee*
*slow mo bullet penetrating mans arsehole and deformed brass flying out the top of his head*

Best game ever made.

Kevin out of 10.

Is this new? Have I already bought this ages ago?
I could Google, but I just want to be part of the conversation.

I love Sniper Elite. All of them.

It's well old. 4 is better, and challenges the top of the 'best games I've ever played' list

We should get the Zombie Nazi one and four-player the fuck out of it.

I don't think I've got 4. I'll get 4.

Did the zombies one have the x-ray kill cam thingy? Something in my ‘ead thinks not.

Oh wow, you can turn on the x-ray kill cam to MAXIMUM. I’m having some of that.

The zombie one did have the slow mo kill cam thing. It's also one of the bleakest games I've ever played. Still good though.

I've heard there's Better Call Saul DLC coming where you play Mike aiming at Hector.

I believe ti does, but you don't get it in coop.

Same as the mainline games.

You definitely get the x-ray kill cam in SE4 when playing co-op.

And it's ace.

Typical day for a sniper.

Don't you have distance adjustment in 3?

In 4 if the baddie is 100m away you notch your sights down one 'click' to line them up.

You mean zeroing distance, no, it doesn’t have that. Well, not for the two rifles I’ve unlocked so far and it doesn’t mention it on the controls menu so probably not.

There's an option for it in the settings.

Sniper Elite 4 is in the next Humble Monthly bundle for $12 if it's any use.

Wow. Not even a good shot.

I can now confirm, having played it coop, you don’t get the x-ray kill cam but just a truncated slow mo kill cam. Also it’s still fucking awesome in coop.

Sniper Elite 4 you do get the whole slow down thing (Both players see it)

Great fun distracting your partner by whacking the frequency up to maximum and constantly grabbing his view away.

Yes. It's essential. Especially for the 'in at the taint, out at the crown' special

I played SE4 a lot last night, (bought a key for it on PC), I didn't even get off the first level 'cause I kept just doing the same bit over and over trying different things and watched heads and organs explode in the awesome killcam. (I changed the killcam occurrence rate to 'FREQUENTLY' although I'd like there to be an 'ALWAYS' in honesty.)

It's a bit scrappy in some regards (it's clearly not a Rockstar-esque development team and budget), and the graphics engine isn't the best in the world, but the whole game has a plucky spirit about it that I found very endearing.

Will play more tonight!

I had less bugs playing Sniper Elite 3 than I ever had playing RDR2. #justsayin

Not enough mandatory overtime.

And here I was thinking you’d come in to say ‘fewer’. You’re slipping.

That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.

Holy crap this game is fantastic, I've just had to stop playing it because it's a school night and I need to start winding down for bedtime, and killing the fuck out of Nazis and blowing all their shit up is not conducive to a state of relaxation.

The game it most reminds me of in terms of how it makes me feel when I'm playing it is Dishonored 1/2, lots of sneaking and planning and working shit out, and then deliriously giddy bouts of extreme violence as the baddies get their heads and internal organs exploded. (I did one shot before that completely shattered the bad guy's spinal column, so the skull was detaching from the body as the killcam ended. TAKE THAT NAZI.)

I quite enjoy scoping out entire areas with my binoculars, getting all the enemies tagged, reading the little snippets about them, (one Nazi had the flavour text 'Accidentally killed a cat'), and then working out the best way to absolutely murder the bollocks out of the whole lot.

As per the Dishonored games, I'm going for 100% mission completion on every single level, so all side objectives and suchlike, although I'm not bothering with all the collectibles, if I find them then fine, but I'm not getting stressed about missing them.

And as per Satsuma's previous comment, despite its slightly scrappy sub-AAA nature (and I mean that as a compliment more than anything), it's 100% rock solid, no real glitches, no crashes, no bugs, or general misbehaviour at all. The AI is pretty dumb and is fairly easy to game once you work out what makes it tick, but that's always the case with games like this, you work out the rules it runs to and then play with them as best you can.

The way it resets all your weapons and ammo at the start of every level is daft, although I can see why they did it. But it's like, you literally finish one level escaping by boat, and then the start of the next level is you arriving at your destination on the same boat at the end of the same trip, but all your weapons and items have gone, so it's as if your dude has thought to himself, 'Meh, it's only a world war, none of this shit will be useful, I'll just chuck it in the sea and start rummaging through crates wherever I end up next'.

Total non-issue as far as the game is concerned though, which is fabulous.

I hope you’re playing it on hard difficulty with the realistic bullet drop and no diamond indicator LIKE A REAL MAN WOULD.

Er yeah. No.

The main thing is making sure all the Nazis get killed.

I might give it another playthrough on a harder difficulty level once I've finished this one, now that I've got a good idea how the game ticks.

You should really be playing it with all the helper stuff turned off when you understand how it all works. When you make that long shots you feel like a proper boss cause you’ve worked for it rather than just stuck an enemy in a reticle.

It's definitely something I'll consider for a second playthrough, TBH I'm just enjoying the ride at the moment and having fun playing with the game's mechanics.

OTHER THINGS I LIKE ABOUT THE GAME:

1) The way the enemies are finite and it remembers what you've done, no cheap respawns, allows for methodical and logical clearing of levels. I stretched this to the limit on Level 3 in that I cleared all the way to the main objective before getting a bit stuck with an armoured vehicle, so I then went right the way back through the entire level, all the other way around, and then came into the main objective from the exact opposite side. The game had remembered everyone I'd killed, everything that had been destroyed, the bodies were still on the ground to loot etc.

2) No stupid open world. The levels are large enough to allow for multiple different approaches, but properly curated as true 'hand built' single player experiences, there's actually more freedom here than in GTA5, whereby if you deviate off the Rockstar mandated path it's just MISSION FAILED.

3) Super quick loading and saving, F5 and F9 quicksave/quickload are here and both are instantaneous and I mean instantaneous. An F5 for quicksave just gives a brief spinny wheel at the top right hand corner of the screen with no interruption to gameplay at all, an F9 doesn't even drop to a loading screen, the screen quickly fades to black and then quickly fades back in with the saved game slot, it doesn't even take one second.

And other things as well which I will add to this thread.

My overarching feeling though is that this game was made by a team of folks who knew exactly what they wanted to build and had the time and enthusiasm to get it right, and more than anything else wanted the player to have fun with their game.

Me like.

You do paint an appealing picture of the game, and it is in the PS sale, but I still have sniper elite 3 to play through and this game feels like a shoe in for a ps plus monthly at some point. Will hopefully play it in future!

You spam autosave in a game? Might as well let it play itself I guess.

Hmm. When does a large level stop being a large level and start being "open world"? Is it because there are separate levels? Does that make Dark Souls open world?

As much fun as you're having, the next playthrough should be with a friend.

Oh splendid, myp's arrived to spread his message of tolerance, understanding, acceptance of others and general good cheer, it's always nice when that happens.

I don't recall indicating that I 'spam autosave' (checks actual words written, nope, definitely didn't say that). The checkpointing is really good and I generally just let it do its thing, however, sometimes I find myself at a specific point whereby I'm about to try something that may have unintended consequences, I'm not sure how close different enemies are and how they'll react, or I'm doing something new for the first time - and on those occasions it's great to have an instant restart opportunity, rather than have to constantly repeat the same few minutes of gameplay to get to the bit I'm interested in.

(One of my very few criticisms of DOOM 2016 is that the checkpointing is a bit janky sometimes, which leads to some irritating repetition from time to time, and that game doesn't have a manual save/load system.)

Ultimately, quicksave/quickload is additional functionality that someone can use or not use as they see fit, personally I like to have it there, and utilise it in certain situations. Each to their own

Yes.



Yes.

If you saw me play XCOM for even twenty seconds you would literally die. Your heart would explode on the spot.

You do you, Doc. You do you.

I ran out of autosaves on XCom2.

Of course, when Grim... and I played Sniperzz L33T 4 we didn't save at all because we was GHOSTS. They never saw us.

I'm not convinced you can on MultiPlayer anyway.

I'm not sure if there's a standard accepted definition but I'd say that a large level, or even a very large level, doesn't make a game open world. To me an open world game is where you're dumped on a map with a load of different icons you can travel to in your own preferred order, which trigger all sorts of different events or quests. Generally speaking there will be a 'main campaign' route that can be followed with these icons, and a load of other stuff that is optional. GTA5 would be the textbook example I suppose.

SE4 is most definitely not an open world game IMO. It has separate, self contained levels, there is no choice in what order you do the levels, and there is only one path through the campaign. The fact that there are choices within each level as to what objectives you do, and in what order, with multiple paths through the level available doesn't make the game open world.

Also, in SE4 each level is a distinct construct and you can never return to previous levels once completed, whereas in GTA5 you're always in the same 'level' (game world) whatever you're doing.

I don't necessarily have a preference one way or the other, both game designs have their merits, but I think the open world model has been thrust upon games in scenarios which would have benefited from a more traditional approach.

I am having an absolute blast with this game but I must confess that my playstyle basically revolves around gaming the (rather stupid) AI, as opposed to behaving as I'd imagine a real sniper would.

As far as I can tell there are simply far too many enemies to ever take them all out 'properly', so what I tend to do is tag up as many as I can in an area with binoculars (where possible, often times they're indoors), find myself a decent vantage point, and then start blowing up their heads/organs/testicles with gay abandon, caring little for an ALERT status, and not even too much for COVER BLOWN either, depending on how well they can path to me.

On the level I played last night I was having a bit of a trouble with a large factory complex stuffed to the rafters with Nazis, until I found a high roof I could climb to which didn't have any other direct connections to any other building, so the only DIRECT way to the roof was up the drainpipes I'd climbed up to get there. (There was a jump from a walkway just below the roof to a walkway on an adjacent building, which I could use with ease, but the AI didn't seem to recognise that as a traverseable path so it never attempted to use it to get onto the roof.)

The AI pathing had no way of coping with this, so even when COVER BLOWN status was achieved, all the baddies would just run around trying to take positions and look like they were flanking, but since they were unwilling to climb up the drainpipes (probably didn't want to ruin their nice crimped Nazi uniforms), they literally had no way of getting to me. As I could retreat enough along the roofline so that none of them could line of sight me, after a short time I'd drop down to ALERT status and not long after that they'd all give up and go back to their idle (albeit evil) Nazi chit chat.

(I have attached a splendid top-down diagram to illustrate.)

Now admittedly that was slightly unusual in that generally speaking the AI will have a route to get to you, but even then hiding behind a rocky outcrop and picking them off as they run at you often works well, or just running to a nearby area of cover will be sufficient, and repeating the process again. It has occasionally surprised me with how far they'll fan out from the COVER BLOWN marker, and also bring in extra baddies, but once the beats of the game have been learned, it's fairly easy to work around.

To be clear this isn't a complaint, IMO this is the way all videogames work, not just stealth/sneaky/snipey style games. I mean, I don't think we even WANT super-clevel AI in videogames, as that'd just be incredibly irritating to play against and wouldn't make for a fun game. (Two of my favourite games ever are Dishonored 1 and 2, and again, a lot of that was learning the limitations of the AI and how to play against its abilities and weaknesses.)

Maybe I wouldn't get away with this on higher skill levels, although I can't see what the AI would be able to do differently in the kind of situation outlined above, unless its pathing ability fundamentally changes or improves.

Anyway, SE4 is the bomb and I'm loving it to pieces, will deffo buy the campaign DLC when I've finished the main campaign, and then probably get myself SE3 and do that.

(I've already bought the silent weapons DLC for SE4, to try and do a whole level without getting ALERT or COVER BLOWN, as that feels more snipery.)

Just letting youknow that Sniper Elite 4 is on offer on PSN at the moment. £12 for the base game, £16 for the digital deluxe.

That's a very reasonable amount of cash for the ability to remove Nazi testicles from half a mile away.

Is that the zombie one?

No. It's the proper sniper version. Both are great.

What the zombie one lacks in sniping it makes up for in variety.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

Okay.