Earth Defense Force 2025 is out! NOBORI GIVE A SGHIT
 

Sooooo no interest here in this game? Finally tracked down a copy at Target (my Gamestop got fucked on their shipments with the weather by UPS and wasn't getting theirs until Thursday), only a little ways in but it's fucking amazing and the true sequel to 2017, we can now officially pretend that Insect Armageddon never happened. Same mission structure, but now with multiple classes and 4-player online co-op. Also more missions and weapons, and reasonably priced DLC bringing a lot more missions soon; core game has ~95 missions, 3 DLC packs costing a total of $21 are adding another 45.

All that matters is that within 5 minutes I had dudes chanting EDF and hilariously bad dub voiceovers. So good.

I've heard the grind is even worse than last time.

Confirm/deny?

Isn't the grind always really terrible in EDF games?

I'm not super far in (around Mission 25 or so), it feels pretty much just like EDF 2017. I'm not sure exactly what you mean though, I don't remember EDF 2017 being grindy until we got to the later levels of Inferno.

2017 wasn't at all grindy. I got most of the way through the two harder difficulties solo with essentially no grinding. IA was helluva grindy but it didn't matter because it was awesome fun. Not perhaps as good as 2017 but still a really fun game and there was variety enough in the weapons to keep it interesting. I think I max levelled two of the classes and all but maxed the other two, missing only two weapons.

I hadn't ever heard there was a new one coming out but I am immediately put off by the promise of DLC announced at launch. Games companies should stop doing this and just make a full-sized game to start with then wait a while for people to finish that, then release meaningful DLC. This whole concept of chucking stuff out with the promise of more stuff online just annoys me. I know why they do it, it's because the price of a download is fixed, there's no second hand market but still, if stuff is ready at launch date then put it in the game FFS.

Anyway, now I know there's a new EDF game I'll almost certainly pick it up only on PS3 rather than 360 this time assuming it's on PS3 as my Xbox is still broken, the MS website still doesn't work properly to get it fixed and I cancelled my Live subscription because PSPlus is a much better way to spend £30.

Oh, I didn't even think that he might have been referring to IA, that game was garbage and I didn't come even come close to maxing it out.

In this case I'd give the DLC thing a pass because you also have to remember that this came out in Japan 9 months ago. Even with delayed localizations games very rarely (if ever) include post-launch Japanese DLC, since those are budgeted for separately. Also in this particular instance it's already a miracle that these games get made to begin with, much less get localized, it probably was quite literally beyond their means/scope to even get that stuff on the disc for a western release. Also the game is $50 and not $60, and for the $18 total in DLC costs you get a substantial amount of content, so in this case I'll give them a pass.

Just as a heads up if you're getting the PS3 version, it's oddly inferior to the 360 one tech-wise; the US release includes a post-launch JP patch that was put up because the PS3 one was THAT broken on launch in Japan, but even with the patch the PS3 version still underperforms pretty noticeably on the PS3 which is odd to me. Also I think there's something where only the 360 has split-screen online play, or something along those lines.

Anyway, all of that aside the game is fantastic. It is pretty much 2017 Part 2.

Oh ok, I might get the 360 version after I get my box fixed then. I doubt I'd miss playing online too much and this will drop in price like a fucking rock after it launches here (On Friday apparently).

I honestly love IA, although playing online with randoms was often an exercise in frustration.

I just played online for a while with a friend. The netcode and everything seems fine, but there are INSANE amounts of customization you can do with naming your lobby, emotes, search filters and other stuff. It's actually fucking ridiculous.

Also a heads up, your characters carry over between online and offline, but your campaign progress doesn't for whatever weird reason, so my Ranger and all of his gear were there, but we had to start over at mission 1. We did a bunch of missions, and leaving online and going back in the missions we did are still available, so it appears intentional. This is also where the weapon level restrictions come into play; as you progress in the game you get better weapon drops that have levels associated with them. As far as I can tell you don't level up individual weapons, the weapons themselves are attached to that level (like right now I'm using an AR and a Rocket Launcher that are both Level 7). When you're playing online the missions will prevent you from playing with gear that is too high a level for that mission, so on Normal when playing online you can't bring in any weapons higher than Level 3, and it will make you change your gear. Likewise, it will automatically scale your armor down to the cap for that level. Difficulty selected also obviously makes a difference, as the first level on Inferno bumps your weapon level cap up to 75.

Also in the online options there ARE options to disable the weapon and armor limitations, but they're not selectable, so I'm not sure if you need to beat the game or something to do that or what. I guess that would maybe make sense to prevent high-level friends coming in and completely carrying you through on your first playthrough or something? None of this is really a big deal, it's just weird.

Weapon and Armor drops ARE automatically given to everyone in the group once anyone picks them up so that is nice. Armor pickups do actually scale differently depending on your class though; 1 Armor pickup only gives my Wing Diver a half point of Armor, while my Ranger gets a full 1 point. My friend was playing as a Fencer and he said he was getting either 1.5 or 2 points per Armor pickup.

Edit:

Ah, per the Japanese wiki these are the HP/Armor gains per Armor pickup per class:

Fencer 0.58
Ranger/ Air Raider 0.464
Wingdiver 0.232

Also got confirmation that in order to lift the weapon/armor restrictions you have to 100% the game which takes literally 300-500 hours depending on what importer you ask. The restrictions don't practically make any difference (they're high enough where if you have weapons/armor at that level already you're still going to steamroll everything) but that's an insane unlock requirement.

More popcorn fun is always welcome; I think I'll have to sock away some dead presidents for this (along with the Strider reboot). Got to wonder, though... they've got giant ants, wasps, sipders, and mantises, and daddy longlegs... so, any word on scorpions?

As long as there are no bomb spiders.

I hate bomb spiders.

Not that I've seen so far. Were those an IA thing? I don't recall anything like that in 2017 offhand, but it's been a loooooong time since I've played that.

They were new in IA, they spit out little ticks that chased you round and they took fucking ages to kill. Like, an unreasonable amount of time, significantly longer than Mantis's or Hectors.