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Nuebot posted:Phantasy Star Online 2 does. After a certain point in the story you can make a Support Partner. Which is just a tiny person who hangs out in your room and you can tell them to go do things for you. So if you ever get a mission to like, go collect fifty dinosaur bones you can make them go do it. Huh that's really cool, as are all the other examples people gave earlier! A shame it's not come up more often I guess.
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Jun 20, 2018 01:04
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Yeah BL2 has a one-point skill at the middle and end of each tree which changes something big. Doesn't give you another button to press but they are way better than a stat increase and some are worth building around entirely. Getting no skill points until level 5 is lame though.
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Jun 20, 2018 01:07
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It'd be far better if you got your main skill at level 2. They could even integrate it into the tutorial a bit too.
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Jun 20, 2018 01:17
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Thing dragging Nier Automata down is that Yoko Taro didn't announce a sequel yet
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Jun 20, 2018 01:35
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In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar's Legion has commanders called Centurions. The fiction behind these guys is that they build their armor out of that of defeated enemies because they're badasses. And indeed, their armor is scavenged from different bits (on the left shoulder is a piece of the Brotherhood of Steel's armor, on the right side is a bit of NCR armor, and so on.) But there's a problem with that, which extends to a lot of video games that use a "scavenged" aesthetic in general. There's actually only one model for the Centurion armor, so every single one of them took the same pieces of an enemy's stuff and arranged them the exact same way? It undercuts the story that these particular people are supposed to have, particularly at the end of the game when you're fighting a bunch at once.
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Jun 20, 2018 03:30
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I'm fairly certain this has been posted here, but gently caress it, it's gloriously dumb. This just reminds me of how Wind Waker had two dungeons at the beginning and they psyche you up for another one for the third pearl but nope it's just hanging out over at your home island. Western games have a bad habit of padding games out just for the sake of game length. StandardVC10 posted:In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar's Legion has commanders called Centurions. The fiction behind these guys is that they build their armor out of that of defeated enemies because they're badasses. And indeed, their armor is scavenged from different bits (on the left shoulder is a piece of the Brotherhood of Steel's armor, on the right side is a bit of NCR armor, and so on.) But there's a problem with that, which extends to a lot of video games that use a "scavenged" aesthetic in general. There's actually only one model for the Centurion armor, so every single one of them took the same pieces of an enemy's stuff and arranged them the exact same way? It undercuts the story that these particular people are supposed to have, particularly at the end of the game when you're fighting a bunch at once.
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Jun 20, 2018 03:48
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Lord Lambeth posted:This just reminds me of how Wind Waker had two dungeons at the beginning and they psyche you up for another one for the third pearl but nope it's just hanging out over at your home island. Western games have a bad habit of padding games out just for the sake of game length. I mean the difference here is that Zelda dungeons are usually quality content and they don’t suffer for having more. Wind Waker had that content cut out of it.
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Jun 20, 2018 03:54
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I bought Dragon Age: Inquisition recently and it's not too bad but there's some pretty poo poo things. The movement feels sorta clumsy, I can't seem to customise the AI nearly enough, the lock-on camera makes me miserable and the run speed is too drat slow. Also I remember the combat in DA:O having a reasonable amount of room for strategy but in this one it's mostly just spamming things on CD. Oh yeah and normally you can tell your party to interact with interactables while your controlled character does other stuff but for this one timed rescue objectyive I just couldn't, that was cool. I miss not having to sit through a miserable final bossfight to get to mapping in PoE, and I should really go buy the handful of cheap uniques I need to get a couple builds going but 
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Jun 20, 2018 04:00
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Lord Lambeth posted:This just reminds me of how Wind Waker had two dungeons at the beginning and they psyche you up for another one for the third pearl but nope it's just hanging out over at your home island. Western games have a bad habit of padding games out just for the sake of game length. WW is not exactly an ideal example to use for a game lacking padding, lol.
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Jun 20, 2018 04:36
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John Murdoch posted:WW is not exactly an ideal example to use for a game lacking padding, lol. And it’s funny when people say Majora’s mask didn’t have enough dungeons, when it had 8 fully involved dungeons, it’s just four of them had the usual default boss fight. That was a tightly-planned game, man.
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Jun 20, 2018 04:55
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Gitro posted:I bought Dragon Age: Inquisition recently and it's not too bad but there's some pretty poo poo things. The movement feels sorta clumsy, I can't seem to customise the AI nearly enough, the lock-on camera makes me miserable and the run speed is too drat slow. Also I remember the combat in DA:O having a reasonable amount of room for strategy but in this one it's mostly just spamming things on CD. Inquisition felt more like a diablo game for me. Just make the biggest explosion and you'll win. John Murdoch posted:WW is not exactly an ideal example to use for a game lacking padding, lol.
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Jun 20, 2018 04:59
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Ugly In The Morning posted:And it’s funny when people say Majora’s mask didn’t have enough dungeons, when it had 8 fully involved dungeons, it’s just four of them had the usual default boss fight. That was a tightly-planned game, man. Five of the dungeons had boss fights. King Ikana was a pretty good fight. Speaking of Majora’s Mask, the thing dragging down the 3D remake is the Twinmold fight and the water maze in the Moon. The second worm in the Twinmold fight takes way too many hits from Giant Link to go down, and Giant Link's range is far too short. It took me the better part of two in-game days to finish that fight. The water maze is so incredibly aggravating because between the camera's fisheye effect and the weird breaching mechanics, it's very hard to get onto the platforms, and missing the platform means you go back to the start of the maze, and have to watch the "grate opening" animation over and over. It's terribly tedious. Inco has a new favorite as of 17:28 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 17:21
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Dying Light's plot is so freaking dumb that I'm going to have to start skipping cutscenes for the first time so I can enjoy the game, ughhh.
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Jun 20, 2018 18:17
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I think it's very petty to include it as a thing dragging a game down since it's literally the end, but the final mission of Dying Light if loving terrible. You spend the entire game thinking of creative ways to use your environment and tools to avoid or fight your foes and then they decide your last hurrah should be you running through a set path, avoiding enemies like a scripted CoD sequence and making pixel-perfect jumps. And the final boss is a QTE sequence and the devs had the loving nerve to pull the "I won't kill you"*turns back to the villain and they lunge at the protag who then kills him*" moral victory completely straight. 99% of the game is spectacular but, goddamn, that 1% is balls.
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Jun 20, 2018 18:55
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The expansion apologises for the main plot by rendering all your victories irrelevant. The sequel hopes to improve by having Chris Avellone on board and adding an element of choice & consequence to the plot.
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Jun 20, 2018 19:24
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It's a shame Avellone has proven himself to be quite a hack (and possibly alt-right friendly given he seems to love posting on forums dominated by those types.) His name attached to a game now makes me mostly dread a ton of extremely dry exposition and the exact same plot beats (ex. "the truth is in the middle because all sides are actually evil/incompetent" being rammed down your throat) rearranged slightly.StandardVC10 posted:In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar's Legion has commanders called Centurions. The fiction behind these guys is that they build their armor out of that of defeated enemies because they're badasses. And indeed, their armor is scavenged from different bits (on the left shoulder is a piece of the Brotherhood of Steel's armor, on the right side is a bit of NCR armor, and so on.) But there's a problem with that, which extends to a lot of video games that use a "scavenged" aesthetic in general. There's actually only one model for the Centurion armor, so every single one of them took the same pieces of an enemy's stuff and arranged them the exact same way? It undercuts the story that these particular people are supposed to have, particularly at the end of the game when you're fighting a bunch at once. I didn't notice it much with the centurions, but the ghouls with the street sign armor in Lonesome Road stand out a lot more due to how colorful their stuff is. Mokinokaro has a new favorite as of 19:44 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 19:42
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Mokinokaro posted:It's a shame Avellone has proven himself to be quite a hack (and possibly alt-right friendly given he seems to love posting on forums dominated by those types.) His name attached to a game now makes me mostly dread a ton of extremely dry exposition and the exact same plot beats (ex. "the truth is in the middle because all sides are actually evil/incompetent" being rammed down your throat) rearranged slightly. This is precisely where I am re: "excitement" towards Dying Light 2. At least, hey, he'll get a setting where apparently everyone is evil, because the local humanitarian aid group decided to screw over the survivors because who cares, let's weaponize this zombie virus, we're the smartest people in the world.
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Jun 20, 2018 20:51
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Outside of Mass Effect, what fiction out there had villains who planned simply to sterilize the opposition and then outlive them? I know its happened in real-life but I don't want to be depressed in video-game thread.
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Jun 20, 2018 21:00
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RyokoTK posted:I mean the difference here is that Zelda dungeons are usually quality content and they don’t suffer for having more. Wind Waker had that content cut out of it. Yeah, another real dungeon would have been welcome. Wind Waker is also maybe not a game I would point to as an example of games with no padding. Gitro posted:I bought Dragon Age: Inquisition recently and it's not too bad but there's some pretty poo poo things. The movement feels sorta clumsy, I can't seem to customise the AI nearly enough, the lock-on camera makes me miserable and the run speed is too drat slow. Also I remember the combat in DA:O having a reasonable amount of room for strategy but in this one it's mostly just spamming things on CD. DA:O is definitely an RPG where the strategy/challenge comes from configuring your party before battle rather than executing during battle. And of course it's easy enough that on default difficulty you don't have to put much thought into that, even. Most RPGs fall into that category, really. The Moon Monster has a new favorite as of 21:49 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 21:46
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Outside of Mass Effect, what fiction out there had villains who planned simply to sterilize the opposition and then outlive them? I know its happened in real-life but I don't want to be depressed in video-game thread. You can do exactly that in your empire in Stellaris?
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Jun 20, 2018 21:54
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Cat Army 
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Samuringa posted:I think it's very petty to include it as a thing dragging a game down since it's literally the end, but the final mission of Dying Light if loving terrible. You spend the entire game thinking of creative ways to use your environment and tools to avoid or fight your foes and then they decide your last hurrah should be you running through a set path, avoiding enemies like a scripted CoD sequence and making pixel-perfect jumps. And the final boss is a QTE sequence and the devs had the loving nerve to pull the "I won't kill you"*turns back to the villain and they lunge at the protag who then kills him*" moral victory completely straight. Yeah, climbing the final building is really stupid because they couldn't figure out a way to keep you from skipping chunks with the grappling hook so whenever you try to use it you get a message about how you're "too tired."
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Jun 20, 2018 22:05
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Mokinokaro posted:It's a shame Avellone has proven himself to be quite a hack (and possibly alt-right friendly given he seems to love posting on forums dominated by those types.) His name attached to a game now makes me mostly dread a ton of extremely dry exposition and the exact same plot beats (ex. "the truth is in the middle because all sides are actually evil/incompetent" being rammed down your throat) rearranged slightly. uh is rpgcodex really alt right?
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Jun 20, 2018 22:06
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The Iron Rose posted:You can do exactly that in your empire in Stellaris? Given the context I think they want to shoot villains who would do such a thing.
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Jun 20, 2018 22:06
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StrixNebulosa posted:This is precisely where I am re: "excitement" towards Dying Light 2. At least, hey, he'll get a setting where apparently everyone is evil, because the local humanitarian aid group decided to screw over the survivors because who cares, let's weaponize this zombie virus, we're the smartest people in the world. I wouldn't expect anything else from a zombie game, Dying Light has its good moments in its quests but pretty much every decent person you met ended up dead or just vanished from the plot, looking at you Brecken, Mr Leader of the Good Guys who just vanishes when you hit Old Town.
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Jun 20, 2018 22:08
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What really grinds my gears is the use of ALL CAPS for regular boring text. It's patently clear to me many game designers have zero background in UIUX beyond having played a bunch of games. ALL CAPS is really unreadable for long strings of text, especially when we're talking about things like dialogue.
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Jun 20, 2018 22:18
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Lord Lambeth posted:uh is rpgcodex really alt right? From what folks around here say, they became so “free speech-tolerant” that many neonazis complete with proudly-displayed swastikas found a home there since they wouldn’t be run off for being nazis
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Jun 20, 2018 22:20
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Outside of Mass Effect, what fiction out there had villains who planned simply to sterilize the opposition and then outlive them? I know its happened in real-life but I don't want to be depressed in video-game thread. I almost sure the Tau do this in Wh40k but I was never a scholar of its lore.
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Jun 20, 2018 23:34
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Samuringa posted:I almost sure the Tau do this in Wh40k but I was never a scholar of its lore. Its in Dawn of War, one of their victory cutscenes, but its not talked about in the original fluff as a thing they do.
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Jun 21, 2018 00:38
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Mokinokaro posted:It's a shame Avellone has proven himself to be quite a hack (and possibly alt-right friendly given he seems to love posting on forums dominated by those types.) His name attached to a game now makes me mostly dread a ton of extremely dry exposition and the exact same plot beats (ex. "the truth is in the middle because all sides are actually evil/incompetent" being rammed down your throat) rearranged slightly. I have my own problems with Avellone but it's pretty dumb to act like making factions with realistic pitfalls and flaws is trying to be the truth is in the middle, like would you prefer if one side was the very picture of virtue and the other side was literal hellspawn? Trying to make the factions more balanced and not totally obvious good guys or bad guys in every way is good RPG writing since it gives the player wider amounts of choice without feeling forced down one route, but it's not like he doesn't have any perspective, you'd have to already be a fascist to play New Vegas and decide that the Legion was even equal to the NCR in most ways.
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Jun 21, 2018 00:45
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In general the less I know about a person the more I enjoy their work. I certainly enjoyed Frasier and Mel Gibson movies more back in the 90s Notable exception: anything by Tom Francis
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Jun 21, 2018 01:07
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Convex posted:In general the less I know about a person the more I enjoy their work. I certainly enjoyed Frasier and Mel Gibson movies more back in the 90s Funny, whenever I read any he wrote in PCgamer or such in the past I really couldn't stand him at all and it put me off getting his games.
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Jun 21, 2018 01:11
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Outside of Mass Effect, what fiction out there had villains who planned simply to sterilize the opposition and then outlive them? I know its happened in real-life but I don't want to be depressed in video-game thread. Half-Life 2. You and Alyx are the youngest humans alive courtesy of the Combine putting up a technobabble energy field that prevents fertilization from happening in humans.
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Jun 21, 2018 01:17
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khwarezm posted:I have my own problems with Avellone but it's pretty dumb to act like making factions with realistic pitfalls and flaws is trying to be the truth is in the middle, like would you prefer if one side was the very picture of virtue and the other side was literal hellspawn? Trying to make the factions more balanced and not totally obvious good guys or bad guys in every way is good RPG writing since it gives the player wider amounts of choice without feeling forced down one route, but it's not like he doesn't have any perspective, you'd have to already be a fascist to play New Vegas and decide that the Legion was even equal to the NCR in most ways. It's less making factions with realistic pitfalls and flaws and more that a narrative device that he's run into the ground when creating stories is presenting good and bad guys and then, whoa, what if the bad guys are actually good and the good guys are actually bad??? Planescape Torment has a Lawful Good angel as one of the three big bad guys, KotOR 2 is all about how the Jedi are just as bad as the Sith if you really think about in maaaan, Alpha Protocol has the cool international law enforcement agency actually be the bad guys, Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road is all about how your blameless blank slate Courier character was actually directly responsible for a massive calamity all along, and every other quest in Pillars of Eternity had a reveal halfway through where the person you thought was bad be secretly good and the good guy be secretly bad. It's "subversion" that has become so predictable that it is no longer actually subversive.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:28
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Just picked up Wolfenstein 2 and it’s pretty annoying that you’re not invincible while doing the very long melee kill animation. I guess that’s what I get for trying to go stealth in a game where you can dual wield Gatling gun shotguns . Also the enigma machine mini game is very obtuse and not explained well at all, you only have about 10 seconds to figure it out, then you get the super annoying buzzer and lose a card I had to kill Nazis to get. I earned those enigma cards.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:38
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Erotic Wakes posted:Alpha Protocol has the cool international law enforcement agency actually be the bad guys "Spy is betrayed by their organisation and has to work against / outside it" is a genre staple though, to the extent that it's the basis for several James Bond films and most of the Mission Impossible films.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:42
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Doctor Spaceman posted:"Spy is betrayed by their organisation and has to work against / outside it" is a genre staple though, to the extent that it's the basis for several James Bond films and most of the Mission Impossible films. In addition to this its pretty lol to me that 'Cool international law enforcement agency' being revealed to be a dangerously corrupt, unnaccountable organisation controlled by larger corporate interests is apparently a real eye-roller.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:45
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Erotic Wakes posted:KotOR 2 is all about how the Jedi are just as bad as the Sith if you really think about in maaaan, Alpha Protocol has the cool international law enforcement agency actually be the bad guys, Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road is all about how your blameless blank slate Courier character was actually directly responsible for a massive calamity all along. What, some of these are pretty  reads.They're not "just as bad" but the jedi are rigid idiots to the point of wrecking themselves. Woah the secretive super CIA agency could be pretty bad people in actuality? Also Lonesome Road is more about Ulysses being unhinged and obsessed.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:46
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Erotic Wakes posted:It's "subversion" that has become so predictable that it is no longer actually subversive. This, a thousand times over. There are genres where double-crosses and philosophical moral quandaries are great additions to whatever sidequest you're padding your game out with, but its exhausting and totally not fun when it's every single quest, or even in every single game. We get it, things aren't black and white, that's a great message to shove down my throat when I'm trying to unwind being a monster-slaying badass/futuristic cop/space wizard/actual cape-wearing superhero/totally "normal dude" in the wrong circumstances.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:47
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Yardbomb posted:What, some of these are pretty that post was dumb as all hell but Lonesome Road definitely wanted us to believe Ulysses had a point and definitely wasn't well-written enough to make that pass muster
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Jun 21, 2018 03:54
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food court bailiff posted:This, a thousand times over. There are genres where double-crosses and philosophical moral quandaries are great additions to whatever sidequest you're padding your game out with, but its exhausting and totally not fun when it's every single quest, or even in every single game. We get it, things aren't black and white, that's a great message to shove down my throat when I'm trying to unwind being a monster-slaying badass/futuristic cop/space wizard/actual cape-wearing superhero/totally "normal dude" in the wrong circumstances. That's really dumb though, you're literally saying, 'I expect this Star Wars game to be safe and dull and not really challenge anything about the preconceptions that seem to be built into the universe'. Avellone, like I said, has his problems, but the fact that he likes to mess around with player expectations and assumptions and take a more critical look at things like your average spy thriller or fantasy universe is the last thing I'd criticize about him, I cannot think of another fantasy game (or honestly fantasy story in general) that enthralled me more than Planescape Torment because of that.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:59
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