Completing Terminator Dark Fate Defiance On Realistic Difficulty Final
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- Why hello there! In a world where Skynet a murderous self learning AI has taken the unthinkable step to wipe humanity off the planet there is one man who can save us all. Join me as we attempt to play this new RTS Terminator Dark Fate Defiance on the most dire of difficulty modes Realistic mode that will see countless men die for the cause of saving humanity from certain doom.
Chapters
Game Info + Link
store.steampow...
Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance is not just a game; it's an adrenaline-fueled journey where your strategic prowess decides the fate of mankind against the machines. After the machines took over, the greatest threats may not come from the machines but rather from other human survivors.
Series Info
I have been looking forward to this game since I played the early previews many moons ago we are going to be smashing out a full let's play on this fella I am not sure what is going to be in store for us but I'm sure we will manage to survive!
No recording schedule for release as this is a 2nd channel series however If I have spare time I will be recording and playing this game so will aim for daily but do not count on it life finds a way to mess stuff up XD
My Links
Discord
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Main Channel / @threatx
#letsplay #terminator #rts
![2042: Soldiers vs Rev-7 | Terminator: Dark Fate [UltraHD, HDR]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0O8LnV1yLLU/mqdefault.jpg)
I love that the final shot to the boss was done by Big mfukin Bob himself
They call him Bob for a reason 🗿
Actual is not a robot, he is the same US Army officer from the first mission that recruited major Stevens
is actually tho
@@pizzaspy9992 i think its the other guy who tried to punish Church, I mean him and T-force has been destroying legion and helping the movement and destroys the cartel. Plus why would Founders command would work with literal scum?
Releasing this a bit earlier as I might start dragons dogma 2 on this channel a bit later today depending on how it does.
Main Channel Link is www.youtube.com/@ThreatX
If you do not see a DD2 video today It means I am going to be doing all of it over on the main channel so do not expect more videos over here for a while while I smash out that game :)
Been here since episode 1, sad and glad its over
One hell of a rollercoaster this one was. Incredible game, suffering from mild technical issues overall, but since the gameplay is solid as a rock, I'd say it's a 9/10 for me. Hope they do an expansion. So much untapped potential.
To explain the situation with Saxon: He’s what in the military they call “Special Investigators” that are centered about extra-judicial investigations and apprehension. Most are Military Police but can come from other sectors based on skill set. In this case Saxon was tasked with hunting down deserters (which is the whole arc with you and Blair lying) and if you refuse to execute Kelso then you’re nothing but a criminal in Saxon’s eyes.
Regards to Founder Actual: He a former junior officer who was thrust into command in a world where everything failed. His only goal is control and ability to fight Legion. He sees his men as nothing more than a means to an end and will do anything achieve his goals. This is in contrast to Major Stevens whos only goal is helping humanity survive Legion
Why the fuck would an Lieutenant execute him instead of detaining him? Stupid game.
@@mimir4965 summary executions can be carried out by any ranking officer still recognized by the uniform code of justice. So yes, Church could do it because Kelso is not recognized by the uniform code of justice.
Edit: and speaking on the detention: given that a wet work team had been dispatched to handle Kelso, the option of detention was long gone.
@@mimir4965 Removing him from the chain of command ASAP to stop his men from defecting along with him
Why a junior officer though? I mean wouldnt him being a former colonel or Lt. Colonel make more sense, especially since I doubt the average butter bar would be able to coordinate units on the same scale the founders are?
@@Randomusername56782 You're talking about the setting of this world. Officers and NCOs would be expected to do more and more based on lack of trained officers.
And honestly, by the end of the game they set up a nice little civil war in the Founders that could see the rise of what we know as the Resistance
Honestly, they missed out on a vacant niche with this game. They could have made it where you travel between various towns, slowly growing your company as you salvage supplies while fighting the machines, interacting with the other factions, and with campaign missions scattered in there pushing you along the story - instead you spend 70% of the game fighting cartel, and by the time you grow your company to something resembling roaming mercenary company, you are on longer roaming and only got like 2 and a half missions left where you actually fight against the wireheads. And you are stuck following a pre-planned path, that doesn't even bother try and pretend there's any choice. The amount of vacant un-interactable towns on the map implies the devs originally wanted to go in that direction too...
So much potential in this game, could be such an enjoyable masterpiece, all wasted away :(
Something like The last Train Home?
@@cassidywest5539 Yeah somewhat similar concept you could say, though I'd argue it would be a vastly different game considering the era, genre (this feels more like RTS whereas LTH feels more like a company mission), interactions with the map, overall gameplay mechanics etc.
But basically yeah, to use your comparison, this game was designed in a far more railroaded fashion than Last Train Home - pun intended - which didn't need to be the case and would have made it far more enjoyable imho.
I love that the video just begins looking at a literal GIANT ENEMY SPIDER
I would give it all that there are so many gaps in the game because the developer changed in the middle of production. There are a lot of logic failures and the one mission where you had to steal the truck from the integrators is completely unfinished. There are tons of explanations missing about what exactly you should do.
As for the frustration. I'm convinced you would have had more fun with the normal difficulty level. That would have been more fun to watch you have more fun. Logical, right?
Okay, thank you for the lets play. Was fun !!
Awesome job getting through the final gauntlet, that was a huge mess. About the story characters: I kind of understand why Saxon was hell-bent on scalping you as his entire job is to punish disobedient Founders, and Command Actual became obsessed with gaining as much power as possible - to the point of wasting his troops as "lesser resources".
Mostly agreed on your thoughts about the game, especially the unit skill trees were kind of half-baked and unit AI was horrendous. The supply demands for traveling felt very forceful to keep you on task and became a joke towards the end when you just drive back and forth as a messenger, without somehow using any supplies despite dragging your entire army along.
I really appreciate your extended thoughts at the end, though of course watching the entire series showed the causes for most of your frustration or reasoning step-by-step. :D Tongue-in-cheek, I think the save scum hindsight near-requirement for many of TDFD's missions actually aligns quite well with the Terminator franchise's whole shtick about time travel.
TLDR edit: Fun game mechanics but frustrating mission design. But maybe could be considered fun if player expectation managed better with more transparency for hit/damage rates, or communication of the magnitude of deliberate difficulty/unfairness?
rest is optional reading.
From watching your edited gameplay, I felt the same on most of your criticisms. A caveat to your observation about inconsistency of unit hit rates and damage that I've mentioned on a previous video -- this is pretty familiar ground to people who play a lot of Eugen games, in an RTS format. And I know XCOM type players love to make jokes about RNG being out to get you. Not saying this is a good choice for "fun" gameplay, but it can help to manage player/buyer expectations if we go in knowing that this game is a bit winner-takes-all RNG more similar to Eugen games. Does TDFD do this as well as Eugen games do, question mark? :P Both Eugen games and XCOM style games usually explicitly show percentages to hit, to penetrate, hit points, etc. Maybe that's enough to manage player expectations.
As you said, I also liked most of the game mechanics and flow of combat. I think the infantry could have been kept just as squishy, but maybe significantly buff their damage resistance in all buildings. This would give the player some scarce agency and make even weak buildings useful as slightly hard cover, and infantry in heavy buildings would be like 98% safe from anything (artillery, plasma, tanks) -- at least until the building is destroyed. On the high end, it would nearly necessitate storming the heavy buildings, which in turn would require some reworked CQB mechanics so that the infantry will actually use their automatic rifles and shotguns instead of having to engage e.g. Rev-6's in melee. :D
And you nicely tied in peer RTS games (including Eugen ones) with the painful mission design, specifically for infinite waves of enemy spawns that those games generally don't do. Finite (and often heavily constrained) resources versus infiniite AI resources feels unfair in an unfun way. THough overall you did manage to live up to player loot goblin expectations, with a net increase in vehicles and weapons on every mission that gave you time on the map at the end of the mission. :D
But perhaps the infinite AI spawns are meant to really drive home the story text about Legion forces too large to defeat (explicitly stated in the last mission, as well as at least one other that I can remember). It's meant to be unfair beyond a certain amount of time spent playing a mission, question mark?
The world map with the heavily constrained supplies for movement might as well just be a railroaded FTL-style node map though. It gives you a very thin illusion of choice, where you actually have no choice beyond the balance of which unit types you build out for a very tight range of supply consumption. You can't go with a team so lean that it gives you 2X the travel days, because a force that light will get obliterated. Obviously can't go 2X as heavy, b/c there aren't many POI options to punch through a tough mission with brute force to save half the travel time -- you just run out of supplies and lose as well. There's no real player choice in POIs to visit in alternate ways where maybe that half-sized force could trade mobility and travel more or longer to avoid heavy fights but still advance the story. There just weren't enough total POIs for that kind of "more open" world travel and branching decision-making. So why bother with giving the player a choice at all for supplies?
The occasional decisions on additional vehicles, weapons, or supplies were nice though, letting you tailor a little bit of how your force developed; but as you mentioned a few episodes ago, it wasn't until the last such choice that you had enough of a supply buffer where you could take advantage of anything other than more supplies. Given how hard some missions were (maybe b/c of your methodical play style, which I totally relate to), I wonder if it would have been possible for you to cut units and thus supply consumption by 10-20% to save up more of a buffer earlier and thus let you pick better weapons or vehicles earlier. With your firepower, the game already made you a bald time traveler though, so I don't know. XD
Different games and content creators have made me think about the fun meta. We play games as simplified abstractions of and escapes from complexities of real life over which we often don't have the agency we desire. And often real life feeds us events that don't have clear, direct causal chains we can perceive. That's why we play games (or read/watch fiction, movies, anime) -- to give us a story or experience that has more agency or causality than real life.
So it feels not fun when we run into a game that doesn't provide the gratification we expect -- that we've been conditioned to expect from decades of game design intended to feed us constant, frequent positive hits of dopamine. Yeeears ago I remember an article or interview with a game dev (for one of the early Call of Duty games, I think?) who explained why they and the FPS industry went with the convention of "player heals while hiding from enemy shots/damage." They said that getting shot and lying there helpless, with no agency, wasn't fun for players. You were at the mercy of teammates who might or might not come heal you, and opponent players who might or might not finish you off or teabag you.
But choosing to hide from gunfire was rewarded with health recovery. Grants both agency and streamlines gameplay by avoiding having the player start over from the mission start or some arbitrary checkpoint.
I think this, and many small separate design choices that led in aggregate to a gaming culture that now often expects longer TTK in many game genres. Not all, of course. There are plenty of games that still insta-kill you if you mistime a jump, fall off a platform, fail a boss scene quicktime event, etc. I played the waifu gacha game Nikke for a while, and of all the reasons I quit the biggest one was the insta-kill QTEs with certain bosses -- it was like the devs were throwing it in my face, telling me that all my time (or hypothetically money) fed into the game was worthless at certain progression points gated by high damage or health requirements. So feed them MOAR time (or money). The game design deliberately denied me agency in order to trigger my FOMO. I'm kind of a grumpy contrarian, so this just made me resist giving them money even more, and ultimately I finally realized a bit late what a waste of time mobile games like that are. :D
Thankfully with PC games that aren't AAA lootbox sales pitches, the denial of agency just tilts us instead of milking us for cash. :D
And this hasn't stopped some FPS games (Arma, Squad) from continuing to use the old-fashioned paradigm of leaving wounded players helplessly stationary until they are healed or die. Though I think a lot of players would say that Arma is a bit of an acquired taste for fun. Still, I never felt like I was denied as much agency as I felt by proxy watching you suffer through some of these TDFD missions. Like when the successive objectives came up for the final mission, I was like "they're making him hoof it across the map AGAIN?"
Funny enough, one of the reasons I drifted away from Starcraft paradigm RTSes was precisely because their unit hit points measured an overly predictable TTK, requiring excessive suspension of belief. Let your infantry units swarm a tank with enough small arms fire, and they'd chip the tank down to 0 health. This was true to some degree even with armor against different kinds of damage, like in Company of Heroes. I feel like Eugen gets this mostly right, where sufficiently heavily armored vehicles are fully proof against light to mid weapons calibers. An infinite amount of 5.56mm rounds will never destroy a tank. Guided missiles, gun systems with good/bad stabilization, etc have certain XYZ percentage hit rates. And sometimes RNG will mess with you for 4 misses in a row with 60% accuracy -- but 1000 shots at an effective 60% accuracy will overall see roughly 600 shots hit. And somewhere in the combination of simulated real life units and game mechanics, the player base knows this. We still get tilted when we're the one who hits the bad RNG streak, but we know that playing enough rounds will probably see us revert to the mean. :D
I don't fully like it, but for a moment I'll take the devil's advocate position that TDFD in particular and Slytherine games in general have a pedigree of being more committed to hardcore by the numbers gameplay, disregarding any flexible or accommodating crafting of a positive player experience. You learn to play the game by the numbers available, or you lose. So then it comes down to expectation management. Did TDFD sufficiently inform us that it was going to be unfair? I think the story fluff text pretty clearly stated it at several points. Does that give the mission designers or game mechanics designers carte blanche to deny us agency through high-consequence RNG or infinite AI spam?
In theory, I'm willing to give TDFD a pass on the inconsistency of hits and damage. I'm sure they're working with some kind of percentages under the hood. We just don't get to see it. Just like IRL we don't have a Fallout style AR overlay that shows us the percentage chance to hit or penetrate a target when we throw a ball, shoot a gun, etc.
I really enjoyed watching your playthrough. I just completed it on hard today, I totally agree that infinite spawns are not fun, especially on Fort Worth. Your troops have limited ammo and repairs, some engagements go on for too long due to rng and now a new pod of enemies is spawning in to replace the ones you just destroyed. For the final mission I camped the 'danger' spots with mines and like 75% of my army and that managed to keep it manageable since the AI didnt get time to react before they were instant popped.
I wouldn't mind if there was a bar above showing the total available enemy reserves of tanks, infantry, light vehicles. It's fine for them to have overwhelming force, but they should not have an infinite amount and you should be able to deplete their forces. E.g if you know the enemy has 4x artillery incoming but 100 tanks and 1000 infantry squads then it's still worth taking out that arty to remove an enemy capability. You should also be able to capture some 'danger' spots so that your flanks are secure.
I also feel like the missions up and until Oklahoma were really good with lots of choice and consistently being able to improve your army. And then after Oklahoma it's just goes a bit downhill. Less side objectives, less side factions etc. The enemy relies on numbers more than the strength of their technological superiority.
Overall I agree with the 8/10 score. I'll definitely replay this game on realistic when a few patches are out to try and get all achivements. An underrated part of this game is the music. And I loved the modern vehicles contrasted with the movement ragtag stuff and futurisitc legion units. Doing thunder runs with M113s, Strykers and Bradleys with smoke, reaching buildings against the human enemies and breaching them was really fun. The story was also decent, I wish there was a more satisfying ending against Actual for betraying you but overall I thought it was good.
End of the campaign, end of the video recording. But hoping in future fun vids, threatx will play "SKIRMISH". You vs AI without PAUSE BUTTON
1:03:45 the fact that all you need to get is the truck and the two squads to the end part, I WISH they would just say that!!
Yeah those Armored Trailers are BADASS if you kit them out with Guns and Armor, plus any infantry inside can shoot out of the sides.
1:09:54 So, basically Empire at War but in Terminator?
check out Last Train Home for RTS with troop management between missions. for me, everything is good about the game, except the story :)
Sad it is ending, but it was a nice journey
I just finished the game a few days ago, and I enjoyed it. What I'd love to see for dlcs would be playthroughs of the other factions, like playing as movement and taking albuquerque, or playing as the integrators and forming your base, and even playing as legion for the Atlanta attack. For a game expansion dlc, I would love something like X-Com 2 war of the chosen, where you make strategic decisions on where to go and what to do on the map, and then have the tactical battles play out on the individual maps like in the current game.
6:55 bro turned into Scooby for a second xD
Thank you for the video ThreatXtra. It was an interesting game.
I agree with almost all your points in the review. My mission at Fort Worth bugged out, on me exiting. I realized i felt relief on finishing the mission, and not a sense of joy of completion. Your first three vids on this got me to buy the game. I had 50 hours of fun. The game up till Fort Worth was a blast. But watching you do the last two will be sufficient. I wont do the last two missions. They seemed mostly unfair and stressful.
Also i am glad to realize that you played on a different version. I could not understand why you killed tanks so easily.
Thanks for all your great work. I followed you for three years now. And all games that you enjoy, i enjoy. Except probably manor lords ;)
How is the skirmish mode? A lot of time for RTS games that's the only thing I play so wondering if this is worth a pick up
Gratz dude, quite the slog.
dude amazing series i got addicted watching this
while you voice pretty much every valid criticism of the game i cant believe they went for the most mind numbing way of finishing a game, while bashing you over the head on how comically evil actual is
Good comments and agree with your assessment of the game. I just finished it myself on Normal and that was frustrating at times due to the AI just spawning units non-stop. The lack of resources also hurt and not sure why you were so limited all the time. Hard enough but then you run out of supplies quite easily. The last mission I found was the only one where mines actually helped and did something. I just kept 4 engineers laying mines all game and resupplying over and over.
Would have liked more details on the objectives as you almost had to play a mission, get killed or lose a lot of guys, then restart knowing what happens. Not sure why the hostility toward your guys at the end. Seems like they are setting up for a sequel where your troops form the "resistance" and now get a whole new game. I'd play a sequel, but like to see some things cleaned up (like more details on objectives). It was tiring having to run your guys over to 1 place, then 5 minutes later run to another place, then run back, repeat, rinse, repeat again. Made I played it wrong.
But fun watching and listening to you play. Good job.
When I did this mission, I kept the right side of the map occupied so the enemies didn't have a chance to spawn more artillery or anything else. They never had the chance to build up on that side. Pulling everyone to the exit was your big mistake that caused much strife... the kicker was.. there was no exiting at the end.
In hindsight yes I was making moves without prior knowledge I would of done the mission very differently the 2nd time around of course knowing the back and forth stages it contained.
The more i watch founders flailing around the more I am convinced that movement is way more competent than those idiots.
At the begining of the game I thought it is just church who is a moron leading legion into heaven but now I see this is norm for those guys and church is at least redemable.
Anyway, if there is way to describe this whole game in single sentence it would be Half Assed.
They took so many amazing ideas and halfassed them all.
Game engine belongs in 2010 game, and should stay there, in the good old times when processors had only single core and maps looked like blended cardboard.
Whole strategic map is halfassed, they made this whole caravan idea and traveling aroud what seems at first glance like somwehat open world and put whole game on rails anyways, you don't even get random ecounters traveling around.
We could have gotten battle brothers/mount and blade in terminator universe where we travel around the map fighting baddies, helping allies and pushing legion back and instead all we get is crappy resource managment sim that ducttapes bunch of missions together.
UI is halfassed to the max, we get nothing, can't set what ammo is used aganist vechicles or infantry, can't even hold fire without disabling weapons completly, there is no hold position command to stop squads in a buildings from flailing around, there is ZERO information on what your people are aiming at, like give me bloody line betwen squad and enemy they shooting ffs.
There is no pathing indicators at all, no way to see where unit is going and no way to see with way they are taking, bloody emprie at war had it, and that game had terrible UI. there is not even a way to see firing arcs for squads sitting in a building, or anywhere in that matter, in a game that puts so much imporatance into utilising terrain(mainly because they could not figure out how to make working cover system) we can't see that we can shoot in said terrain.
Game dialogues are just sad, aside from few moments writing is more bland that in brazilian TV series and whole game had 2, TWO cutscenes, rest is done via poorly made talking heads with most art being "generic blank soldier" in a bloody 40$ game!
Saxon was a man of duty. In post-apocalyptic world the majority of founders would probably be "let the higher ups do the thinking, I will do the killing" guys outa there who sleep peacefully convinced that they do their duty for better future, not asking any question. Hell, there are guys like this even now.
Actual betraying you is absolutely in the character. The dude was power-hungry tyrant, pretending to be Big Dad, while tossing figures around. He'd never want Church to survive that mission - more competition for commanding roles is not what he needs to sleep well.
Open world would benefit the game significantly, but it's clear that they had limited budget and couldn't afford more.
1:14:35 The game could use LOS indicators a'la Wargame, if you know how they look like.
Thank you 👍 there is still room for improvement, you just need to use that pause and micro management a little more careful and slowly.
Imagine if you could EMP the giant robot and have it as an ally. That should be an achievement
Loved the series watched since the beginning. I do find the gameplay a bit lacking and there is lots of room for improvement. One thing regarding Actual betraying you, you get a hint of that if you talk to Kelso (I believe), the deserter Saxon is after when you first encounter him. When you talk to Kelso about why he deserted the founders he tells you it's because Actual used their families as bait for legion so they could complete some offensive which ended up failing and Kelso and the rest of his troops deserted. Then in the last mission Actual does the same to T-Force
so this is the finale mission ? man...my army was just get good enough...but i have a problem it stuck at the end and mission wont finish...founders forces evac from the map...i get engineers back to exit...but it say protect the explosive truck...which i cant control or move it and crew inside just left it and leave the map.
i notice same problem happen for u as well 31:02
Watching this series some map design are bad since they spawn you in front of a whole enemy army and insta pop you with arty
Personally, I hope they get rid of the supply system and instead add a logistic size limit. Which you can upgrade the further you get into the game.
just spawn camp the the legion lol, that'll make the mission very ez
Would have been bad ass if actual was really a remnant of skynet that. Helps but only bc it trying to take legion down lol
Multiplayer plz!!
Hello there!!
The founders are a sack of crap.
Amazing 🎉🎉❤❤
It was good.
After seeing a full playthrough of this game I can't say it's great. It feels like early 2000s RTS game aspiring to be CoH, only to be clunky, lagging, and despite having great material on Terminator they've spun a pretty mediocre story about some lame anime main character.
i cant agree with you, but i do agree with you is the story especially the ending, Ive never watch the movie, since this game is a tie in for the movie but i feel like its shitty they make the founders to be as an elitist military faction, they can easily makes church into the hero same at the same time make founders to be not assholes
I watched the whole series and I loved it until you started to throw your vehicles and squads away, because you think you finished the mission.
Next to this, I am very happy to find your channel and enjoy your funny comments. Keep up the good work!
Yippeeee🎉
Founder Actual betraying is simple. This guy waste lives smashing Legion defence at Colorado while T-Force making alliance with civilian militias and make friendly relations with local communities. Even within Founders faction T-Force popularity is rising after winning Colorado.
Movements, Founders, Cartels and people like Belzanos are demi warlords in wasteland. They become kings in the collapsed civilization. So yes what the story want to do is, the king become jealous of popular general 😂.
That massive bloated machine is just a sitting duck. The articulating legs are an obvious flaw. So dumb.
Why are the humans not focussed on destroying machine power generation? No power = no machines.
If they were smart skynet would not be able to start judgment day in the first place.
Nooooooooo
Loved the game but the final mission is a complete joke, its easy to the point of being just straight up boring, very predictable+ a stupid betrayal, not only is it stupid because Actual does it for no reason, but also forces that Church has are like five times bigger so others leaving doesnt affect a thing and in every other mission you fallback normally but in this one you cant again for no reason.