#I love how material from the original short stories is so seamlessly integrated

[hereticaldetective]

Thinking about…John and Sherlock…flying out of a window…hand in hand…hovering over the great city of London…gently removing the roofs… peeping in at the queer things which are going on…

[sigmalied]

Sig’s Anthem Review

Verdict

BioWare’s Anthem is a genuinely fun and engaging experience that sabotages itself with myriad design, balance, and technical oversights and issues. It is a delicious cake that has been prematurely removed from the developmental oven - full of potential but unfit for general consumption in this wobbly state. Anthem is not a messianic addition to the limited pantheon of looter shooters because it has somehow failed to learn from the well-publicized mistakes of its predecessors. 

Am I having fun playing Anthem? Absolutely. Does it deserve the industry’s lukewarm scores? Absolutely. But this is something of a special case. The live service model giveth and taketh away; we receive flexibility in exchange for certainty. Is Anthem going to be the same game six months from now? Its core DNA will always be the same, but we’ve already begun to see swift improvements that bode well for the future. 

Will my opinion matter to you? It depends. When I first got into looter shooters I was shocked at how much the genre clicked with me. They are a wonderful playground for theory crafters, min/maxers, and mathletes like myself who find incomparable joy in optimizing builds both conventional and experimental by pushing the limits of obtainable resources ad infinitum. The end game grind is long and at times challenging as you make the jump to Grandmaster 1+ difficulty in search of top-tier loot to perfect your build. This is what looter shooters are all about.

If you don’t like the sound of that, you’ll probably drop Anthem right after finishing its campaign. But if you do like the sound of that, you might find yourself playing this game for years.

TL;DR: This game is serious fun, but is also in need of some serious Game & UI Design 101. 

I wrote a lot more about individual aspects of the game beneath the read more, if you’re interested. I’ve decided not to give the game a score, I’m just here to discuss it after playing through the campaign and spending a few days grinding elder game activities. There are no spoilers here.

Gameplay

The Javelins are delightful. I’ve played all four of them extensively and despite identifying as a Colossus main I cannot definitively attach myself to one class of Javelin because they’re all so uniquely fun to play and master. Best of all, they’re miraculously balanced. I’ve been able to hold my own with every Javelin in Grandmaster 1+. Of course, some Javelins are harder to get the hang of than others. Storms don’t face the steep learning curve Interceptors do, but placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, both are equally as destructive on the battlefield. 

I love the combo system. It is viscerally satisfying to trigger a combo, hearing that sound effect ring, and seeing your enemy’s health bar melt. Gunplay finally gets fun and interesting when you start obtaining Masterworks, and from there, it’s like playing a whole new game. 

Mission objectives are fairly bland and repetitive, but the gameplay is so fun I don’t even mind. Collect this, find that, go here, whatever. I get to fly around and blow up enemies while doing it, and that’s what matters. Objectives could be better, certainly. Interesting objectives are vital in game design because they disguise the core repetitive gameplay loop as something fresh, but the loop on its own stays fresh long enough to break even, I feel.

The best part is build flexibility. Want to be a sniper build cutting boss health bars in half with one shot? I’ve seen it. Want to be a near-immortal Colossus wrecking ball who heals every time you mow down an enemy? You can. There are so many possibilities here. Every day I come across a new crazy idea someone’s come up with. This is an excellent game for build crafters. 

But... why in the world are there so few cosmetic choices? A single armor set for each Javelin outside the Vanity store? A core component of looter shooters has always been endgame fashion, and on this front, BioWare barely delivers and only evades the worst criticism by providing quality Javelin customization in the way of coloring, materials, and keeping power level and aesthetics divorced. We’re being drip-fed through the Vanity store, and while I like the Vanity store’s model, there should have been more things permanently available for purchase through the Forge. Everyone looks the same out there! Where’s the variety? 

Story, Characters, World

Anyone expecting a looter shooter like Anthem to feature a Mass Effect or Dragon Age -sized epic is out of their mind, but that doesn’t mean we have to judge the storytelling in a vacuum. This is BioWare after all. Even a campaign that flows more like a short story - as is the case with Anthem - should aspire to the quality of previous games from the studio. Unfortunately, it does not, but it comes close by merit of narrative ambience: the characters, the world’s lore, and their execution. 

(For a long time I’ve had a theory that world building is what made the original Mass Effect great, not its critical storyline, which was basically a Star Trek movie at best. Fans fell in love because there were interesting people to talk to, complicated politics to grasp, and moral decisions to make along the way.)

While the main storyline of Anthem is lackluster and makes one roll their eyes at certain moments or bad lines, the world is immediately intriguing. Within Fort Tarsis, sophisticated technology is readily available while society simultaneously feels antiquated, echoing a temporal purgatory consistent with the Anthem’s ability to alter space-time. Outside the fort, massive pieces of ancient machinery are embedded within dense jungles in a way that suggests the mechanical predates nature itself. The theme of sound is everywhere. Silencing relics, cyphers hearing the Anthem, delivering echoes to giant subwoofers… It’s a fun world, it really is. 

As for the characters… they might be some of the best from BioWare. They feel like real people. Rarely are they caricatures of one defining trait, but people with complex motives and emotions. Some conversations were boring, but the vast majority of the time I found myself racing off to talk to NPCs as soon as I saw yellow speech bubbles on the map after a mission. And don’t even get me started on the performances. They are golden.

The biggest issue with the story is that it’s not well integrated with missions. At times it feels like you’re playing two separate games: Fort Tarsis Walking/Talking Simulator and Anthem Looter Shooter. And the sole threads keeping these halves stitched together during missions - radio chatter - takes a back seat if you’re playing with randoms who rush ahead and cause dialogue to skip, or with friends who won’t shut the hell up so you can listen or read subtitles without distraction. I found it ironic that I soloed most of the critical story missions in a game that heavily encourages team play.

Technical Aspects: UI & Design 

This is where Anthem has some major problems. God, this category alone is probably what gained the ire of most reviewers. The UI is terrible and confusing. There are extra menu tabs where they aren’t needed. The placement of Settings is for some inane reason not located under the Options button (PS4). Excuse me? It’s so difficult to navigate and find what you’re looking for. It’s ridiculously unintuitive.  

Weapon inscriptions (stat bonuses) are vague and I’ve even seen double negatives once or twice. They come off as though no one bothered to proofread or edit anything for clarity. Just a bad job here all around. And to make matters worse, there is no character stat sheet to help us demystify any of the bizarre stat descriptions. We are currently using goddamn spreadsheets like animals. Just awful. 

The list goes on. No waypoints in Freeplay. Countless crashes, rubber banding, audio cutouts, player characters being invisible in vital cutscenes, tethering warnings completely obscuring the flight overheat meter… Fucking yikes. Wading through this swamp of bugs and poor design has been grueling to say the least. 

And now for the loot issues. Dead inscriptions on gear; and by dead I mean dead, as in “this pistol does +25% shotgun damage” dead (this has been recently patched but I still cannot believe this sort of thing made it to release). The entire concept of the Luck stat (chance to drop higher quality loot) resulting in Luck builds who drop like flies in combat and become a burden for the rest of the team. Diminishing returns in Grandmaster 2 and 3; it takes so long to clear missions on these difficulties without significant loot improvement, making GM2 and GM3 pointless when you could be grinding GM1 missions twice as fast. 

At level 30, any loot quality below Epic is literal trash. Delete Commons, Uncommons, and most Rares as soon as you get them because they’re virtually useless. I have hundreds of Common and Uncommon embers and nothing to do with them. Why can’t we convert 5 embers into 1 of the next higher tier? Other looters have already done things like this to make progression omnipresent. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here, BioWare. It’s already been done for you. 

When you get a good roll on loot, the satisfaction is immense. But when you don’t, and you won’t 95% of the time, you’ll feel like you’ve wasted hours with nothing to show for it. We shouldn’t be spending so much time hunting for useful things, we should be trying to perfect what’s already useful.

It’s just baffling to think that Anthem had the luxury of watching the messy release of several other looter shooters during Anthem’s development, yet proceed to make the same mistakes, and some even worse. 

Nothing needs to be said about visuals. They are stunning, even from my perspective on a base PS4.

Sound design is the only other redeeming subcategory here. Sound design is amazing, like the OST. Traditional instrumentals meet alien synth seamlessly. Sarah Schachner is a seriously talented composer. 

I’m just relieved to see the development team hauling ass to make adjustments. They’ve really been on top of it - the speed and transparency of fixes has been top-notch. They’re even working on free DLC already! A new region, more performances from the actors... I’m excited and hopeful for the future. 

[euro3plast-fr]

3 Keys to Repurposing User-Generated Content in Your Social Media Strategy

How you can use your user's content to boost your results

The best things in life are free. And user-generated content (or UGC) — which costs nothing — is one of the best marketing strategies available to brands, especially on Instagram. While its user base isn’t as large as that of its parent company, Instagram is crushing Facebook in terms of brand engagement.

How would you react if someone you feel a genuine connection with posts about how great his experience with a brand was? You’d likely believe it.

That’s why UGC is more trustworthy, influential, memorable, and, ultimately, effective for brand promotion than many traditional advertising techniques.

Download Paid Member Resource – Social Media Strategy Guide

Understand how to best use social media in your marketing strategy as an individual or as a business.

Access the Social media marketing strategy guide

What Is UGC?

While the name is fairly self-explanatory, here’s a quick primer: If a customer or fan posts a photo or video about your brand, it’s user-generated content.

Let’s say that someone wearing a Herschel Supply Co. backpack posts a picture of himself to Instagram, along with Herschel’s branded hashtag #welltravelled. Other Instagram users can search for that hashtag and engage with the picture by liking it or commenting on it — and Herschel can even repost the picture to its own feed. Similarly, if you were to post a picture to Instagram of a beautiful Airbnb loft you stayed in, with #airbnb added to the post, that’s also user-generated content that other Instagram users can engage with.

Any photo, video, tweet, snap, post, or review that’s shared about a brand can be considered UGC — which is great news for your marketing team.

Why Repurpose UGC?

Brands have a lot to gain by incorporating UGC into their marketing mix — both in terms of building customer loyalty and driving sales. UGC helps you build authentic and trusted relationships with consumers because it allows your audience to see how your products are used in real life.

Based on a recent survey, 76 percent of respondents believe that UGC is more trustworthy than branded advertising. Moreover, 84 percent of those surveyed in another study put as much stock in online reviews as they do in personal recommendations from people they know.

If that’s not enough to convince you, consider this: Engaging with a brand’s UGC makes customers 97 percent more likely to purchase than those who don’t interact with it, and this engagement boosts the brand’s conversion rates by a staggering 78 percent. That’s a pretty clear indication of just how valuable UGC can be for your brand!

Consequently, user-generated content can save you money. Every post or endorsement that’s made by one of your customers is akin to free marketing — especially among Millennial consumers, who trust user-generated media 50 percent more than any other type.

In effect, by repurposing UGC, you benefit from an army of brand ambassadors who do the work for you, providing future customers with real-life testimonials and compelling imagery. If someone is searching for specific details about a certain product, for instance, UGC can even serve as a free (and candid) type of outsourced customer service.

Is Repurposing UGC Legal?

Using another person’s social media post in your marketing efforts does raise some legal and ethical questions. Before you invest in UGC for your marketing efforts, there are some finer points you need to address.

People who use your branded hashtag may be implying that they give permission for your brand to repurpose their content (with credit), but your bedrock principle should be that all UGC is, by default, copyrighted by the owner or creator of that content.

I reached out to the lawyers at Gowling WLG, an international law firm, to ask for more technical advice on these legal matters. They advise confirming that the original poster of the content exclusively owns that content, and then getting that poster’s permission to repurpose it. You may also need the permission of any person depicted in a photograph.

That means you’re technically required to ask for permission for use. But what exactly does that mean? Does getting someone to reply “Yes” when you ask, “Can I repost this photo?” count as permission? Do you need to send a link to an agreement and have the person sign it? Can you get an agreement from certain users to repost any of their content?

I’ll use the Airbnb example again to illustrate UGC best practices. Airbnb reaches out to Instagram users who tag @Airbnb or hashtag #airbnb in their posts, requesting permission to repost these photos in its own feed. The company leaves a comment asking users to go to a link where they can read and agree to Airbnb’s terms of use for UGC. Users are asked to reply with #AirbnbPhoto to confirm and provide the link to the Airbnb home featured.

In summary, assume that all content is copyrighted, check the terms on each social network, and get permission from the original post creators. They should have no doubts about how you intend to use their content. Playing fast and loose with permissions may jeopardize your brand’s reputation in the long run. You need to ensure that your intentions don’t contradict the creators’ reasons for posting it to begin with.

Generating UGC

Of course, these questions about permission assume that you already have a system in place for curating user-generated content. If not, the first step is to create a branded hashtag and encourage your followers to post with it. By inviting your followers to post with your hashtag, you’re offering them a chance to stand in the spotlight — especially if you repost UGC on your own feed. Perhaps that’s why 65 percent of people will grant permission to use their photos within 24 hours.

Another good way to generate more UGC is to hold a contest or sweepstakes that challenges people to use your branded hashtag on a photo or post in exchange for entry into a prize drawing. Contests capitalize not only on your customers’ interest in your product, but also on their competitive drive.

Japanese retailer MUJI, for example, found great success with a contest it launched to encourage its followers on social media to post photos of artwork they had created with MUJI pens. Using the hashtag #mujipenart, MUJI saw more than 2,500 people enter the contest, greatly increased its social reach, and created an entirely UGC-driven campaign for the cost of a few special awards and prizes.

Any buzz generated by a contest will outweigh the cost of the prize, and in the process, you’ll build up a bank of user images and comments that you can draw on in the future

If contests and invitations fall short of meeting your goals, you can always turn to the power of influencer marketing. What better way to bring attention to your brand than to have a celebrity, an industry leader, or a popular media figure recognize your products in a social media post?

Instagram influencers with a large following can create content on behalf of your brand, allowing you to gain credibility and have impactful conversations with your customers. Influencers can give a shout-out to your brand or a specific product in a variety of ways, from simply using your hashtag to directly expressing the reasons they love the product. The goal of working with an influencer is to move your consumers to action by building brand trust that you may not be able to acquire easily or quickly on your own.

Succeeding With UGC

These days, repurposing UGC is considered standard, not standout. But there are a few things you can do to make sure your UGC efforts are actually furthering your business.

1. Publish UGC alongside your product.

Aligning UGC with your own marketing materials shows people how they can use it in their everyday lives, which amplifies the overall impact.

Sonos has mastered this by embedding Instagrammed UGC as part of the buying process on its website. On a Sonos product page, you’ll find not only marketing material and product specs, but also customer photos depicting how they use the brand’s speakers in their homes. These images seamlessly invite new customers to imagine how a Sonos product could improve their own lives.

2. Supplement emails and promotional materials with UGC.

When you sign up for promotional emails from shorts brand Chubbies, you receive newsletters bursting with UGC. Instead of promoting its products with models, the company uses photos of real, happy customers, which lends a sense of authenticity to the brand. In this way, Chubbies leverages its UGC to promote customer satisfaction with its products.

How does Chubbies manage to collect so much UGC? The brand actively encourages its customers to share their personal experiences with Chubbies on social media. By integrating UGC into all of its social accounts, the brand has inspired more than 331,000 people to follow Chubbies on Instagram and more than 1.6 million to do so on Facebook.

3. Build a branded hashtag.

A branded hashtag should be unique to your business. It can be as simple as your company name, your tagline, or the name of one of your products or campaigns, like Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke campaign, which resulted in a more than 2 percent increase in sales. Or it can be a hashtag that has nothing to do with your brand name but has everything to do with your brand identity. For instance, Always’ well-known “Like a Girl” campaign is meant to inspire confidence in young women and turn the common expression upside down by showcasing the stories of women doing amazing things #likeagirl.

A branded hashtag can help start a conversation with those unfamiliar with your brand, build or re-establish brand loyalty among current customers, and lead to the generation of more UGC. A branded hashtag with a good hook can spark a cascade of content from your best customers and help you reach previously untouchable — or even unknown — markets.

With these tips and some advanced planning, content generated by users can be an outright gift to your brand in the form of organic, user-generated marketing campaigns.

Thanks to Matt Smith for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Matt Smith is the founder of Later, the No. 1 Instagram marketing platform to visually plan and schedule Instagram posts. Prior to Later, Matt founded several startups, including Thinkific, an online course platform helping thousands of people build businesses online.

  from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/3-keys-repurposing-user-generated-content-social-media-strategy/

[gamerzcourt]

The Division 2 Early Review ImpressionsThe Division 2 Early Review Impressionsvideo games

New Post has been published on https://www.gamerzcourt.com/the-division-2-early-review-impressionsthe-division-2-early-review-impressionsvideo-games/

The Division 2 Early Review ImpressionsThe Division 2 Early Review Impressionsvideo games

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is currently available to play for those who purchased the Gold and Ultimate editions of the game. Because of the online nature of the game, GameSpot’s access privileges to The Division 2 are the same as those who have those editions, so we’re playing and experiencing concurrently to those players. All players will receive access to the game by Friday, March 15.

Below you’ll find some day-one impressions from me, who’ll be writing the final review. I plan to have a scored review-in-progress once I’ve completed the campaign and a final review once I’ve seen a substantial amount of what The Division 2 has to offer with its endgame content, including specializations, invaded missions, PvP, and the Dark Zones. We appreciate your patience as we dig deep into this huge game.

I’ve only been to Washington DC once in my life, and it was a short visit. I spent the better part of the day wandering the National Mall before calling it a night and moving on the next day. I’ve now spent about the same amount of time in Massive Entertainment’s version of Washington DC, spending most of the first full day of The Division 2’s life getting my bearings on the world and steadily plugging away at the game’s campaign and side activities. But in both cases, my feelings about the place is the same: I really want to spend more time there.

The Division 2 goes like this: Months after the events of the first Division, chaos and disorder still plague what is left of the US, especially in the nation’s capital. Important personnel and agencies have withdrawn as the city is upturned by armed groups with malicious intent, while remaining civilians band together and struggle to survive and establish self-sufficiency. As a secret sleeper agent of the Strategic Homeland Division, you’ve been tasked with aiding Washington’s civilian militia to regain a hold on law, order, and society.

It’s all a bit overwhelming at first, even for someone who played a lot of The Division. Several smaller things have been added to the sequel, which translates to a barrage of mission and tutorial popups for the first few hours. It’s also tough to initially get your head around the convoluted UI. But once you get a handle on the flow of progression, it doesn’t take long to get completely sucked in.

What strikes me most about The Division 2 is how much its world feels like a thoroughly cohesive, living place. Settlements, the hubs where you craft, shop, and track your progression, are believably buzzing with activity. After establishing your own base of operations at the White House, the first settlement you unlock is a multi-leveled community built around the rooftop of Washington’s National Theatre and its surrounding buildings. At first, it’s a little frustrating trying to make your way around it and track down the services you need–there’s a lot of seemingly unimportant spaces you have to traverse. But those spaces go a long way in pushing this settlement into seeming like something that could feasibly work in real life, player convenience be damned. There are dedicated areas for the logistics of the settlement, NPCs seemingly doing a variety of chores, and generally a messy, makeshift nature to it all that feels genuinely thrown together and at risk of falling into disarray at the slightest breeze. It’s charming.

After completing roughly a third of the story missions, the plot of the game so far seems to be a relatively straightforward goal of increasing the militia’s capacity to fight back against aggressors by rescuing key personnel and property. You’ll do this by going into various Washington landmarks and gunning down a lot of people in main and side missions, helping individuals out in open-world activities, and gathering resources, all of which contribute to various settlement “projects” aimed at upgrading civilian operations.

Mechanically, this means you can craft better gear and get access to more kinds of vendors, but narratively, it means you get to see civilian settlements like the theatre gradually grow and become more livable, vibrant places. This could be in the form of more lights at night so it’s not so gloomy. The empty spaces might turn into gardens and rec areas where you can see people growing and serving food for others. The kids running around might get a dedicated place to play board and video games (they really love For Honor, apparently), all because you went out into the world, scavenged a bunch of materials, and brought them back for this specific purpose. The majority of these small improvements are ultimately superficial and non-functional, but the focus on them is a big factor in your own personal sense of growth, progress, and motivation.

Out in the open world, enemy gangs can be found wandering the streets, getting into scrapes, looting places, and generally trying to survive in their own right. Friendly NPC patrols also roam the streets and have real objectives of their own, which you can follow and assist them in. They’re optional vectors to help you engage in the world, but their ability to act of their own accord helps make the world intriguing.

The Division 2 also seamlessly integrates mission areas in the open-world map, regularly requiring you to traverse the streets to get to them. The game typically dumps a ton of missions on you at one time, encouraging you to spend more time in the world and return to settlements only when you’ve achieved a significant amount. Safe havens, the city streets, and the game’s activities are contiguous, which emphasizes the feeling of a sprawling world and a prolonged passage of time, and makes returning to settlements all the more pleasant. The Washington DC of The Division 2 feels like a very material one so far, one that I’m eager to explore.

Of course, The Division 2 isn’t just about building communities, it’s a game about shooting a lot of people with a lot of different guns. The game’s combat continues to revolve around RPG-style traits and damage numbers when calculating the result of a bullet hitting an enemy, but it’s notable that the time to take down a human enemy doesn’t feel as far-fetched as it did in the original Division. It can still take a couple of headshots to take down an unarmored opponent, but unless I’m using a weapon whose power level is unsuitable to the mission, enemies don’t feel like they can withstand an unreasonable amount of damage so far.

Instead, The Division 2 creates more difficult challenges with more elaborately armored opponents. There are certain enemy types who are visibly more protected than most, and these archetypes can definitely soak up a lot of damage. But there are new combat options implemented to help you deal with them, which demand that you be strategic: Focusing fire on a particular segment of an enemy’s armor will eventually break it, opening up a weak spot for higher levels of damage. That means even if you’re up against a heavily protected elite enemy, you can crack open their helmet with some diligence, and they can then go down with a few well-placed headshots.

Even after roughly ten hours, I’m still enjoying going up against the variety of enemy archetypes, which, combined with The Division’s focus on relentless gunfire and cover-based shooting, makes the game’s conflicts tense. There are a good mix of opponents to really keep you focused on what’s happening–each faction has soldiers dedicated to rushing your position, keeping you suppressed with sniper fire and flushing you out of cover, among other things. Soldiers will frequently attempt to flank you while your attention is diverted, and you can do the same to them.

Combat skills also add a fantastic vector of strategy to things–there are eight major skills in total, each with a few interesting variants in function and behavior. You’ll eventually be able to unlock everything, so experimentation and being flexible enough to balance your loadouts between skills and the types of guns you’re carrying is encouraged. As to the guns themselves, I’ve already come across an impressive variety of different weapons with distinct feels in the way they handle. I typically have a favored style of character build, but I’m encouraged to try out new weapons and skills as I come across them, and I think about how they might be used in tandem with everything else.

“Encouraging” is generally how I feel about The Division 2 at this point in time. It’s got a fantastic sense of place and progression, and the combat scenarios and skills continue to be interesting. There’s a lot of love, especially among the minor improvements–the small design decisions that make the act of finding and equipping loot so snappy and convenient, or the smart integration of per-mission multiplayer matchmaking that even lets you call upon other players in the middle of a mission. I haven’t personally hit any server issues or major bugs, just some humorous oddities, like a floating iPad entertaining two excited children.

But it’s only been a day, and I’ve only played for about ten hours. I’ve finished 27% of the primary missions and my character is level 12 out of a possible 30. A lot of my observations here might not be particularly groundbreaking if you spent a large amount of time with the original The Division or The Division 2 beta, but there’s still a lot of the campaign left to see, and an allegedly enormous endgame. It’s important that I take the time to get to that point and see everything for myself, and I’m eager to see whether The Division 2 will still have the chops to keep me hooked when I hit the level cap and stop having a story to chase. Back to sightseeing, for now.

GameSpot – All News