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Earth Defense Force 4.1 coming to PC via Steam on July 18

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
My party and I had the hardest time yesterday clearing that mission with all the giant spiders in a cave. Those spiders fire their webs across large areas, long distances, which partially clip through walls and are generally very hard to avoid and hurt a lot.

The one with the queen bees on hardest (or was it Inferno?) was a pain too. They're veritable bullet sponges with 1M+ HP.

A few musings about Ranger weapons:
- Stingers are overall the best rocket launchers. Great range, great rocket speed, good damage and reload times, no gimmicks. Higher lvl Stingers are usually straight upgrades, which is more than can be said for most other weapons. Upgrades always seem to come with a trade-off or a quirk, but Stingers don't suffer from that problem. The Volcano B1 is pretty good too. Fires 10 powerful rockets in 2 seconds.
- Grenade launchers with bouncy grenades are a bad idea in cave-type missions. I keep killing my teammates and myself even when they're standing behind me.
- Snipers and shotguns get really good at higher levels. High level sparrow shotguns are basically shotgun-machineguns. They're great.

Overall I find myself playing mostly with rocket launchers, sniper rifles, shotguns and maybe machineguns every once in a while. Grenades, grenade launchers and special/healing guns are boring.
I have a soft spot for Air Tortoises though.

Anyone wanna play in EU tonight? What's the GAF Discord?
 
Anyone wanna play in EU tonight? What's the GAF Discord?

There's only a few of us in it so far but we play together every so often. We're located in the US though so timezones/changing servers might be a bit of an inconvenience for you.

Quote to see link.
 

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
There's only a few of us in it so far but we play together every so often. We're located in the US though so timezones/changing servers might be a bit of an inconvenience for you.

Quote to see link.

Thanks. When do you guys play together usually?

What should I do to switch servers, and what does it entail? Do I have to reinstall the game? Does it have any impact on my Steam account?
 

Llyranor

Member
Thanks. When do you guys play together usually?

What should I do to switch servers, and what does it entail? Do I have to reinstall the game? Does it have any impact on my Steam account?
You go to settings -- downloads -- and pick a NA region.

It has no impact on your account, you just switch back to whatever region you're in if you want to download something later
 

manfestival

Member
Man I'm starting to feel the weight of the 50 dollar price tag.

I can't convince any of my friends to try the game out in co-op with me. They are all interested but they aren't willing to drop 50.

I just wanna laser chainsaw with my friendsssss

The only reason I bought this game is because many moons ago I bought the insect invasion on ps3 and loved the game despite it being ugly as sin. Then I got a key for this game for like 28 dollars so I plunged. Best pure gaming experience I have had in a while
 

Mohasus

Member
I hate this loot system. I was thinking about how it would be better with a store for weapons, or pre-determined unlocks after a mission.

Then I realized that weapons dropping from the aliens making no fucking sense. They are the EDF equipment.

So, I just quit the game, I can't keep playing a lie. (I was bored as fuck too to think about this, those flying lizards and shit are even more boring to fight agaisnt).
 

Theonik

Member
I hate this loot system. I was thinking about how it would be better with a store for weapons, or pre-determined unlocks after a mission.

Then I realized that weapons dropping from the aliens making no fucking sense. They are the EDF equipment.

So, I just quit the game, I can't keep playing a lie. (I was bored as fuck too to think about this, those flying lizards and shit are even more boring to fight agaisnt).
Clearly that equipment was part of the enemy lunch.
 
I hate this loot system. I was thinking about how it would be better with a store for weapons, or pre-determined unlocks after a mission.

Then I realized that weapons dropping from the aliens making no fucking sense. They are the EDF equipment.

So, I just quit the game, I can't keep playing a lie. (I was bored as fuck too to think about this, those flying lizards and shit are even more boring to fight agaisnt).

It's weird. I thought at first the weapon crates just gave you more ammo, but you have infinite ammo so I was super confused.

I think you only get weapon drops for the class you are playing, and if you get a lot of dups trying playing at a higher difficulty.
 

eastx

Member
I think you only get weapon drops for the class you are playing, and if you get a lot of dups trying playing at a higher difficulty.

Yes, Weapons only give you weapons for the class you're playing. The range of weapons that you can find varies by the level and selected difficult. So you'll find more advanced weapons later in the campaign, but the minimum and maximum Item Level of the weapons you can find also goes up with the difficulty.
 

Kiriku

SWEDISH PERFECTION
I love the EDF series, but one thing that becomes more and more clear after being a Wing Diver fan for a long time is that the other classes are just too slow. Makes it hard to go back to rolling around on a huge battlefield trying to pick up all the weapon boxes as a ranger or air raider, for example. It also becomes kind of frustrating to play with a friend who is using Wing Diver and takes off immediately, picking off all the enemies before I can even reach them, so most of the level is just me trying to catch up. :/
Granted, we've unlocked some great weapons with the Wing Diver so that helps I guess, but I still wish it was better balanced in that regard.
 

Llyranor

Member
I love the EDF series, but one thing that becomes more and more clear after being a Wing Diver fan for a long time is that the other classes are just too slow. Makes it hard to go back to rolling around on a huge battlefield trying to pick up all the weapon boxes as a ranger or air raider, for example. It also becomes kind of frustrating to play with a friend who is using Wing Diver and takes off immediately, picking off all the enemies before I can even reach them, so most of the level is just me trying to catch up. :/
Granted, we've unlocked some great weapons with the Wing Diver so that helps I guess, but I still wish it was better balanced in that regard.
With dash-cancelling, fencer is the fastest class :D
 
It's really annoying that online and split screen/single player have separate progress. Was going to play some split screen with a friend and I had no mission progress.
 

eastx

Member
It's really annoying that online and split screen/single player have separate progress. Was going to play some split screen with a friend and I had no mission progress.

Yeah, it's obnoxious. Earth Defense Force 2017 and EDF2 on Vita share progress between single-player and online, so it's a shame Sandlot didn't make that same improvement for EDF4.1.
 
They don't share progress because it's not 100% the same stages. There are more stages mixed in when you play online. Also, some stages are slightly different.
 
They don't share progress because it's not 100% the same stages. There are more stages mixed in when you play online. Also, some stages are slightly different.

From what I understand, the coop stages are harder

This is how it works. If you play splitscreen it's on the main player's account only, as well. If you play online the game changes a few things mechanically regarding spawns and drops and difficulty. My wife and I play in separate rooms for this and also not having to split the screen and lose viewing ability.

The good part about this, too, is that the drops are shared, not like one player hogging all the weapon drops or armor or something. So usually I'll let her continue on with the rest of the enemies on the tail end of a mission while I Wing Diver around grabbing items.
 
Was pretty regretting my Fencer choice in my coop playthrough until I learned I could wave dash with the javelin catapult. Dual light mortars and a jackhammer is pretty fun.
 

Jonbo298

Member
I was inferno farming with some Asians earlier (Yay no region lock) and got the Lysander Z. Legitimately. I spent an unholy number of hours farming with my brother in edf 2017 and never got it. Oh boy
 

derFeef

Member
I am new to EDF but I can't for the love of god enjoy other classes than Ranger. It feels true to me for a weird reason. Altough I am starving for a new AR weapon already.
 

bede-x

Member
As someone who didn't play this on console, are the mission packs worth it?

If you like the base game, absolutely. It's more of the same and I mean that litterally considering how over the top some of the missions are. They just throw everything into the mix not caring about technical issues like framerate, clipping or collision detection. Battles can be freakishly huge. On one stage you're fighting two of the walking fortresses (amongst other things) and they can walk right through each other :)

The mission packs are slightly harder than the base game, but no where near as difficult in 4.1 as they were in the last-gen versions. A couple of videos from the later/harder stages of pack one (I'm the Fencer):

http://youtu.be/5yJ1YKteChE (part 1)

http://youtu.be/-8H9xpl1CG8 (part 2)

http://youtu.be/6-G1xzK9aE0


What about the other DLC?

Nope, not worth it unless you want to support the developers. It's just some low level weapons/vehicles that are outdated as soon as you play a single mission on a fun difficulty.
 

bede-x

Member
I am new to EDF but I can't for the love of god enjoy other classes than Ranger. It feels true to me for a weird reason. Altough I am starving for a new AR weapon already.

I think everyone has their favorite. Personally I love the Air Raider and Fencer. Air Raider not just because he's the most powerful class in coop (debatable in singleplayer), but because of his indirectness. Everything is always two steps before something happens, even the Limpet Guns that has to be activated after being fired, meaning you have to strategically stay ahead of everything happening and imagine what happens next, otherwise you'll fall behind. It's a fun strategic challenge.

Charging into melee combat with the Fencer is one of the most exhilarating feelings in all of gaming. He's practically indestructible in close quarter combat against ground enemies once you get the timing right and learn to read the radar, and it's nicely balanced out with him being weak against flying enemies, though some of the later spears are decent in that regard.
 
Hell yeah, DLC missions :D! There were some online-only stages in Zangeki with a few unique enemies that never showed up offline, so I was kind of disappointed when nothing particularly 'special' appeared in this game. These are gonna be great.
 

bede-x

Member
I've only scratched the surface of the PC version since I'm still not done with the game on PS4, but based on my short time with it (40+ hours), this is how I find it compares with PS4 version:

- PC version loads almost twice as fast in my case (SSD vs regular PS4). 6.6 seconds to load the first stage on easy vs 11.2 with same character and settings on PS4. Stage 80 was roughly 3.3 seconds on PC vs. 6 seconds on PS4. Other stages gave similar results.

- Texture loading happens very fast on PC. On PS4, like many Unreal Engine 3 games, it can take a few seconds before the textures are fully loaded (and again I'm using SSD compared with a regular PS4 hard drive).

- PS4 has a very short break, a slight stutter, when spawning new waves, which is almost absent from the PC version.

- Some menu text in the PS4 version is upscaled, where as it renders natively on PC (only tested it at 1080p).

- PS4 version runs entirely without anti aliasing. On PC you can do the same and there's an option to turn it on, though it doesn't say what kind it uses (FXAA?).

- PC version supports dual language options, while PS4 doesn't.

- PC version doesn't have full controller support. In order to start the game you have to name your save file with a keyboard, something most people won't have a problem with, but speaking as a big picture comfy couch gamer it is annoying, even if it is a one time thing.

- Online is easier on the console version due to a standardized interface. On PC even finding or sending an invite can be difficult until you learn you need to press right d-pad when standing on the proper option menu. I also had difficulty with the voice where I couldn't get Steam chat working, because the game somehow interfered with it, but on the upside the PC version doesn't require a subscription to play.

- There seem to be more hackers on PC, which can ruin your progession if you play with random people. It's not a big deal to me since I mostly play with a team of my friends, but if I didn't I think I would go with the console version because of this.

- They removed region locking from multiplayer on the PC version, but it's still in place on PS4.

- Performance is night and day in this. At times my PC (i7-6700k/GTX 980 Ti) outperformed the PS4 version by a factor of ten or sometimes even more (2-3fps becoming 20-30fps) and in general play it's much better. It isn't perfect and with how much is going on it never was going to be, but after playing the PC version in the weekend it took some adjusting returning to the PS4 version at my weekly EDF meet-up.

While I prefer it on PC, both versions come highly recommended if you enjoy coop shooters. It doesn't get any better than this.
 

Llyranor

Member
Finally finished the game coop (wing diver/fencer) on normal for the first time. Man, the whole buildup to the finale was pretty epic. Amazing game.

The gameplay is pretty spot on. The shooting is satisfying, as is mowing down massive enemy waves. The wing diver flying is well-implemented, with delicate but well-balanced energy management required. The missions are short and numerous, which allows for the devs to spice and vary things up constantly, all while also allowing you to play around with different loadouts.

Overall, this is one of my favorite shooters. EDF EDF EDF!

Now to jump into hard!
 

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
The first Mission DLC Pack comes out tomorrow on Steam. Apparently it contains 20+ new missions, with new variations on existing enemies (e.g. green ants, purple retiarii...).

But are there any new weapons? I heard about weapons like the Genocide Gun that can be found in the code and unlocked through hacking, but are there any legit new weapons in the pack?
 

bede-x

Member
But are there any new weapons? I heard about weapons like the Genocide Gun that can be found in the code and unlocked through hacking, but are there any legit new weapons in the pack?

Assuming it's the same as on PS4, there are no new weapons.
 

KingKong

Member
So am I wrong or is the idunn (using version c currently) one of the best weapons for wing divers? Good damage, huge clip and it only uses up energy on reload so as long as I time it right, i never run out of energy
 

Llyranor

Member
So am I wrong or is the idunn (using version c currently) one of the best weapons for wing divers? Good damage, huge clip and it only uses up energy on reload so as long as I time it right, i never run out of energy
The Idunn is a beast, especially in narrow crowded zones like tunnels. My fav is still the rapier, though. Slaying giant robots at pointblank is so satisfying.
 
Only played the first few stages of the DLC with my friend on hard so far, and I think I can safely say
OH GOD THE BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

Aw. Do those missions have higher level drops on average at least?
I'm not sure what the exact ranges are, but I got level 22~35 stuff from the first mission(Hard), which is about the equivalent of the range available from around stage 48 of the standard online missions. Dunno if 26-DLC will drop things equivalent to ~74-standard, or closer to endgame/beyond drops.

So am I wrong or is the idunn (using version c currently) one of the best weapons for wing divers? Good damage, huge clip and it only uses up energy on reload so as long as I time it right, i never run out of energy
The Idunn series are nice for closebutnottooclose range, taking down small/medium targets. They don't do as much as, say, the equivalent level Rapier Thrust would do, but you can stay at a safer range and sweep across groups more easily.
 

derFeef

Member
I am slightly confused about the loot/items in this game.
I am not getting any new AR for my Ranger, nor do I level it up?
I get new armor (or something like that), but how do I equip it? Did I miss a menu of some sorts?
 

bede-x

Member
I am slightly confused about the loot/items in this game.
I am not getting any new AR for my Ranger, nor do I level it up?
I get new armor (or something like that), but how do I equip it? Did I miss a menu of some sorts?

Armor is "equipped" automatically. You simply get more health. How much you get depends on which class you play, but it's never 1 armor = 1 health, always less than that. According to gamefaqs guide the values are:

Ranger: Armor Gain Per Box: 0.464
Wing Diver: Armor Gain Per Box: 0.232
Air Raider: Armor Gain Per Box: 0.464
Fencer: Armor Gain Per Box: 0.58

Other places list slightly different values and I'm unsure which is correct, but in general Fencer will be the quickest health gainer, while Wing Diver will be the slowest. There's an option to lower your armor, if you want more of a challenge.

Weapons don't level up, you find new ones. It's random which weapons you get when you pick up a weapon crate, but adjusted so higher difficulties and later levels has a chance to yield higher level weapons, which lower levels/difficulties do not.
 

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
I am slightly confused about the loot/items in this game.
I am not getting any new AR for my Ranger, nor do I level it up?
I get new armor (or something like that), but how do I equip it? Did I miss a menu of some sorts?

Yeah, Sandlot games don't do a good job of explaining how the upgrade system works, even though it's fairly simple.

Basically, for weapons, each weapon has a set level and stats. You never get to upgrade it in any way. Instead, you might get higher level weapons in the same series of weapons, with a similar naming scheme. You get new weapons by collecting the green weapon boxes that monsters drop. But you can get duplicates, and to get higher level weapons, you need to do better missions and/or do them in a higher difficulty.

Also of note: you get the sense that weapons go up to lvl 100, and that every weapon type goes up to 90+, but they don't actually. For instance the very best Ranger rifle is lvl 85. There's nothing beyond that. Same with rocket launchers: the best Stingray rocket launcher is lvl 78, and there's no higher lvl rocket launcher for rangers. Note however that levels aren't entirely indicative of how good a weapon is. Just because a weapon is sub-80 doesn't mean it's bad, or worse than an 80+ weapon - again, the lvl 78 rocket launcher is a very straightforward, good weapon all around, and the second highest-level rocket launcher, the Cascade Iota, is lvl 70 and fires 15 rockets in a salvo. It's not inherently better or worse than the lvl 78 Stingray. It all depends on the mission. And there are no other rocket launchers between lvl 70 and 78. Weapon levels serve more as a limitation: when you're playing multiplayer, the game limits the weapons you can use in a given mission/difficulty level based on their level.

For armor, the game automatically upgrades it to its maximum value at the end of a mission based on how many red armor boxes you looted. It lets you reduce your maximum armor because, as is the case for weapons, there are limitations in place in multiplayer. You might be limited to 1500 armor in a given game, in which case you have to lower your armor to 1500 or less if you wanna join the game.

Note that any weapon or armor box picked up during a multiplayer mission will be picked up for everyone. You don't have to personally pick up a box to get its content. As long as one of your team mate picks it up, you're fine.
 

derFeef

Member
That makes a lot more sense now, thanks so much! Game is a blast but I can only do one mission at a time. I do not enjoy the underground levels one bit though.
 

Kilrogg

paid requisite penance
That makes a lot more sense now, thanks so much! Game is a blast but I can only do one mission at a time. I do not enjoy the underground levels one bit though.

For underground missions, you want:
- A weapon that provides a light source. They're especially useful in higher difficulties against annoying bosses with tons of HP like giant spiders and hornet queens. You need to know where they are at all times, and you can't tell in the dark. E.g. get a rocket launcher, grenade launcher, flamethrower or napalm gun. Napalm guns are especially good for that because the fire lasts long and act as a sort of protective barrier/trap monsters get caught into. Alternatively you can use a homing weapon, but those can be dangerous and weak against single targets.
- A weapon that works well in confined areas. Some ranger weapons have bouncing bullets for instance, and again, some weapons light a big fire that lasts for a while before going out and will stunlock and eventually kill enemies before they get to you.
 

The Orz

Member
Played with a group of random folk last night for a couple of hours (apparently). I can't think of the last game I was able to just jump into a co-op match with strangers and have so much fun. Even with zero communication (aside from "Waaah! and "Arg!," of course), we managed to coordinate attacks and help one another out.

I love this game.
 

Zanzura

Member
If you like the base game, absolutely. It's more of the same and I mean that litterally considering how over the top some of the missions are. They just throw everything into the mix not caring about technical issues like framerate, clipping or collision detection. Battles can be freakishly huge. On one stage you're fighting two of the walking fortresses (amongst other things) and they can walk right through each other :)

The mission packs are slightly harder than the base game, but no where near as difficult in 4.1 as they were in the last-gen versions. A couple of videos from the later/harder stages of pack one (I'm the Fencer):

http://youtu.be/5yJ1YKteChE (part 1)

http://youtu.be/-8H9xpl1CG8 (part 2)

http://youtu.be/6-G1xzK9aE0




Nope, not worth it unless you want to support the developers. It's just some low level weapons/vehicles that are outdated as soon as you play a single mission on a fun difficulty.


Thanks for the info, mission 23 of that DLC looks like a lot of fun! I'll probably pick it up after finishing up Inferno with one of the classes.
 
:( that stage with the two walking fortresses in the DLC has permanently scarred my friend and I. I think we spent at least four hours trying to complete it on hard as Ranger+Wing Diver, and we only barely managed to eke out a victory through the storm of lasers and explosions and why with our flimsy weapons. Those stupid blue drones are almost as bad as the floating eyeballs from Zangeki that just vomit all over you and lock you in place until you're dead... Both of us were completely empty inside during the 10+ minute armor drop collection run after all but the last couple enemies were gone.
 

SDF-1

Banned
Finally got a chance to play this after being away from my gaming PC for 6 weeks.
This game is pure fire!

Air Raider seems kinda useless unless you're playing co-op. Does he get better weapons for solo if you play alot with him?
 
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