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So does the game ever explain the origins of the glitch that started the faro plague? Did the machines become self aware AIs? Or were they a neural network that had basic adaptation and combat algorithms? By that extension is the signal that Gaia got hit with from the Faro Plague? Did the Faro plague avoid total shutdown by copying itself to some kind of satellite, biding its time until it could attack? Or is it related to VAST SILVER? Where do you find out about VAST SILVER in this game? I didn't know about it till I started looking things up online. Makes me wonder if Ted works for those Far Zenith people and nuked Apollo so they would swoop in and dominate the world on their terms when Odyssey returns. Seriously gently caress Ted. His entire scene just ruined me. I felt a deep hole in the pit of my stomach when it happened.
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Feb 11, 2021 17:05
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The game leaves it deliberately vague. "The glitch" could simply mean how Ted publicly covered up for the Faro Swarm going rogue when he knew full well it was because he didn't implement a backdoor, or it could mean another malevolent entity. Sobeck might even mean Vast Silver itself, since she presumably worked on its design when she joined FAS in the 2040s and knew it would be capable of overriding the Chariot bots. Vast Silver is mentioned in 3 datapoints you find throughout the world. From these we can gather that it was a climate-monitoring AI developed by FAS that went rogue sometime in the 2040s and was recaptured two years later, leading to the Turing Act that limited the emotional capabilities of all future AIs. It's inferred that Sobeck and one of the Firebreak scientists who later worked on Zero Dawn Anita Sandoval designed it, or at least knew about the project when they worked there. VS has been getting a lot more attention as the potential main antagonist of Forbidden West when you add up all the leads of "capable of infecting GAIA, could have survived the apocalypse, can affect the ecosystem, wants humanity dead."
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Feb 11, 2021 17:21
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Additional info re the "glitch:" There are two unexplained glitches, but they may have the same cause. The first takes place in 2064 and leads to the Hartz-Timor Swarm of Faro robots failing to respond to commands and eventually eradicating life on earth. The second takes place in the year 3020 and involves a signal of unknown origin shattering GAIA's control over her subordinate functions and the subordinate functions release as independent entities. Within nanoseconds, HADES attempts to usurp control over all GAIA functions, which would allow HADES to reverse course on all terraforming operations and, over the course of a month or two, completely remove Earth's biosphere for GAIA to start over. The second glitch also corresponds with the "derangement," causing machines to become more aggressive. However, the individual machines themselves never possess more than rudimentary machine intelligence. Characters make comments from time to time that the individual machines are much less intelligent than the various live boars and goats running around. The machines are probably closer to individual ants following a pretty simple checklist of rules to gather resources, protect each other and the Cauldrons, etc. The individual machines are also being designed and constructed by the sub functions of GAIA, which are much more intelligent but not exactly super intelligent like GAIA herself was. So HADES is able to make some educated guesses and try to manipulate Sylens and Helios based on his limited information but he's limited compared to what GAIA would have been capable of in similar straits.
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Feb 12, 2021 07:30
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Additional info re the "glitch:" The derangement is specifically Hephaestus retaliating against humanity harvesting the machines by making them more aggressive, heavily armed and armored, and cranking out dedicated "military" machines designed to guard the less defensive ones. This work is furthered in The Frozen Wilds when he takes over the Firebreak facility and CYAN to make a new Cauldron just for development on explicit hunter-killer machines to go to war against humanity with. Also I'm working under the assumption that Ted Faro managed to nuke Apollo's interface but not the actual data archives because those were being stored genetically in fossils if I'm not mistaken. So the software doesn't have any connection to the database but there's no reason to assume the database doesn't exist. The question is if each Cradle has a copy of it, if only the Gaia facility has it, or some dedicated central storage facility for all of those fossils exists.
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Feb 12, 2021 13:21
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vast silver could have probably hacked into zero dawn and granted itself omega clearance
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Feb 12, 2021 13:56
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Zebulon posted:Also I'm working under the assumption that Ted Faro managed to nuke Apollo's interface but not the actual data archives because those were being stored genetically in fossils if I'm not mistaken. So the software doesn't have any connection to the database but there's no reason to assume the database doesn't exist. The question is if each Cradle has a copy of it, if only the Gaia facility has it, or some dedicated central storage facility for all of those fossils exists.[/spoiler] It's DNA, actually. 
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Feb 12, 2021 14:42
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Pyrolocutus posted:It's DNA, actually. Well, yeah. Like I said, genetically stored in fossils. Maybe not the best way to phrase it, I'm tired as hell, but that should still be accurate?
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Feb 12, 2021 14:49
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Possible candidates for backups to APOLLO: 1. The Odyssey - This one we know for sure contained an alpha version of APOLLO and everybody thinks it Probably Wasn't Destroyed as the datalogs would indicate. 2. Thebes - Ted Faro's private bunker. He might have kept his own local copy after destroying its direct access to GAIA. We'll probably end up going there either way in Forbidden West. 3. Aloy - Kind of hokey but maybe there's a backup version of APOLLO encoded into her own DNA. Seems like a Zero Dawny thing to do.
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Feb 12, 2021 14:54
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Additional info re the "glitch:" This and what happened with APOLLO makes me think the world is irrevocably hosed. Like how is any of this supposed to be fixed? Especially by people with pre colonization era aboriginal technology? Aloy and Sylens are smart but they still lack usable hardware and the lifetimes of scientific expertise needed to fix this poo poo. Even if you recover APOLLO who gets to use it? How do you convince self interested tribal power structures and fanatics to set aside everything to build a new humanity back? The way I see it, it goes one of three ways if they find APOLLO. Either someone smart like Sylens decides to monopolize the information to build a high tech feudal kingdom to dominate the others, Aloy destroys it realizing it’s too dangerous and can’t be distributed responsibly, or the tribes themselves refuse to participate. The Osream and maybe the Sun Carja are the only ones who’d likely make any attempts to figure this stuff out. Indeed their worship of the sun seems thematically aligned with treating Apollo as their god incarnate. Like you need HEPHAESTUS to keep producing robots so they can terraform the Earth and sustain life. If you kill him the cauldrons shut down and youre hosed. The cats out of the bag with the humans so they’ll continue hunting the machines which will make things worse. If they keep hunting them it’ll vindicate that humans are the greatest threat to the biosphere and need to be removed. The humans need to stop hunting and start learning how to make their own tools separate from what the machines provide. Also one plot hole that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me is how they were able to hide zero dawn’s existence from the faro plague. Don’t they sweep the entire planet turning over the earth for resources? If they don’t find the various bunkers and cradles I find it difficult to believe they wouldn’t notice a bunch of Minerva bots trying to build the signal towers and then proceed to attack, recycle and corrupt those bots? They never did a good job of explaining how they brute forced the shutdown codes.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:04
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Kraftwerk posted:Also one plot hole that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me is how they were able to hide zero dawn’s existence from the faro plague. Don’t they sweep the entire planet turning over the earth for resources? If they don’t find the various bunkers and cradles I find it difficult to believe they wouldn’t notice a bunch of Minerva bots trying to build the signal towers and then proceed to attack, recycle and corrupt those bots? They never did a good job of explaining how they brute forced the shutdown codes. I assume that shortly after biosphere collapse, the swarm went to sleep because there was nothing else to eat. Hundred+ years later, Minerva woke up and quickly built the towers to send the shutdown signal.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:30
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Yeah my understanding was that the Faro plague was strictly consuming biomass not as an act of aggression but because of the hosed up programming. It just so happens that doing so would lead to global extinction. Once they were done they went to sleep and that’s that. The code was brute forced for decades and was completed long after the plague had killed the planet and had gone to sleep. Minerva should have been able to go about doing her thing unobstructed since she wouldn’t be a target for the plague since they only focus on biomass. The 2nd glitch that had Hades almost take over and Haephastus starts building war bots might be another thing altogether as at that point you’re directly going against AI and they may have a self interest to not get killed
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Feb 12, 2021 16:33
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exquisite tea posted:Possible candidates for backups to APOLLO: That's where I'd put my money. I can see Sylens saying to her, "You are literally the key to APOLLO Aloy."
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Feb 12, 2021 16:39
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Kraftwerk posted:This and what happened with APOLLO makes me think the world is irrevocably hosed. Like how is any of this supposed to be fixed? Especially by people with pre colonization era aboriginal technology? Aloy and Sylens are smart but they still lack usable hardware and the lifetimes of scientific expertise needed to fix this poo poo. Maybe everything is just kind of fine outside of Colorado/Utah. They're just letting those crazies sort themselves out. I assume the endgame is basically to get GAIA back in control. As far as HEPHAESTUS goes, the derangement is only happening because GAIA's not there to hold him back, so restoring her would at the very least make the machines keep themselves to themselves and only operate in self defense, at which point the humans won't feel the pressure to actually eliminate them. Life seems mostly sustainable now so maybe, so maybe GAIA will be able to just reduce machine presence in general. GAIA can then control the APOLLO knowledge herself, and if she fucks that up she can just wipe everyone out and keep trying at that, like she has been with the terraforming. In terms of hiding the bunkers, the robots are apparently hunting the remaining humans through energy signatures, which the bunkers keep in - hence Elisabet's sacrificing herself to close the doors. The robots aren't an AI, they're just mindlessly harvesting biomass, and all they're seeing are big metal walls they can ignore. Same with the towers, they just weren't interesting in anything without biomass. I assume they were able to brute force the codes because Faro didn't put a "locks for 15 minutes after three failed tries" thing on them, or maybe they just had an isolated sample of the Faro code in another bunker that they could keep trying with. This bit is even more baseless speculation but I'd guess that whoever or whatever is behind everything going wrong just wasn't ready for Zero Dawn. Either they didn't know about it until MINERVA started working, or weren't able to come up with a way of stopping it in time, so had to come up with something new. Developing the scheme to unleash HADES and corrupt all the newer (more advanced) robots just took some time.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:49
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Kraftwerk posted:Also one plot hole that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me is how they were able to hide zero dawn’s existence from the faro plague. Don’t they sweep the entire planet turning over the earth for resources? If they don’t find the various bunkers and cradles I find it difficult to believe they wouldn’t notice a bunch of Minerva bots trying to build the signal towers and then proceed to attack, recycle and corrupt those bots? They never did a good job of explaining how they brute forced the shutdown codes. The in-game explanation is that the software glitch in the Hartz-Timor Swarm caused it to change its fuel preference hierarchy from Proper Refueling > Organic Matter Conversion to Organic Matter Conversion only. It didn't look for resources in the standard way, it had no search pattern or understanding of human survival instincts. Thus, to hide from the Swarm, they sealed the bunkers in such a way that prevented detectable energy leaks that the Swarm would detect. After consuming all the organic matter it could detect, the Swarm entered a state of dormancy. The actual construction process for the towers is unclear, but it's fairly likely that the Swarm wouldn't have awoken without another external signal anyway and that the construction of the towers and Minerva's code breaking was simply a measure of assurance.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:54
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One kinda cool little detail at the vantage near Meridian is that the Spire isn't in the viewpoint of Eagle Canyon, meaning that it had to have been constructed sometime between the apocalypse and the current time period. So if you're particularly observant your first time through the game, you can figure out that it wasn't built by humans.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:57
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Quick question - and I'm trying to avoid all the spoilers so that's why I'm popping in without reading the thread - has the PC version been adequately patched? I had heard there were significant issues. I have a reasonably beefy gaming laptop but I'd been holding off on picking this up until this was more functional.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:26
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Albino Squirrel posted:Quick question - and I'm trying to avoid all the spoilers so that's why I'm popping in without reading the thread - has the PC version been adequately patched? I had heard there were significant issues. I have a reasonably beefy gaming laptop but I'd been holding off on picking this up until this was more functional. Yes. At this point I would call it one of my most impressive recoveries I've ever seen a lovely port make, I have basically zero complaints vs. what used to be multiple dealbreakers.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:30
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Albino Squirrel posted:Quick question - and I'm trying to avoid all the spoilers so that's why I'm popping in without reading the thread - has the PC version been adequately patched? I had heard there were significant issues. I have a reasonably beefy gaming laptop but I'd been holding off on picking this up until this was more functional. The PC port has been improved greatly with patches and it's probably as good now as it's ever gonna get.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:32
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exquisite tea posted:The PC port has been improved greatly with patches and it's probably as good now as it's ever gonna get. I have no complaints about the PC port. I like it more for the easy aiming with the mouse. It’s much harder to play on consoles. Speaking of the vantage points. That was probably the most heartbreaking story I’ve read in a while. It covers so many relevant themes in the present and future while also touching on a genuine character development story.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:09
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Finally finished the main quest on my first play through last night at around 69 hours playtime (nice). drat this game is good!
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Mar 27, 2021 16:38
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Finally started playing this (after finally upgrading to Windows 10) and I have two questions: Why the gently caress does it do language selection on every loving launch? And why the gently caress does it try to re-optimize the shaders every loving time? At least I figured out I could autoskip the intro movie by renaming the file...
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Apr 1, 2021 02:30
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Ambaire posted:Finally started playing this (after finally upgrading to Windows 10) and I have two questions: because you keep quitting/restarting before getting far enough through a new game for it to autosave, probably
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Apr 1, 2021 02:38
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No one posted on Aloy's -1000th birthday?
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Apr 5, 2021 05:22
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Alright, I just picked this up because it was on sale on Steam, and I've had my eye on it ever since it was a PS4 exclusive and a friend of mine was raving about it. Seems like this thread is an absolute spoiler minefield, so I'm gonna try to avoid that as much as possible. I just did the first part of the intro and all I know so far is I'm a bow girl with a 30th century iPhone on her ear in some kind of post-apocalyptic mash-up of Far Cry Primal and Fallout. I gotta say that intro is one of the best combinations of story+gameplay integration that I've seen in a game, very nice. And I can't wait to see how adopted father figure dies tragically to kick off the main story. 
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Apr 5, 2021 06:11
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Haha.
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Apr 5, 2021 11:58
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Wingnut Ninja posted:And I can't wait to see how adopted father figure dies tragically to kick off the main story. I don't think Rost was on screen for two minutes before I laughed and said, "He's so loving dead." In fairness to the writers, a bunch of other things I was sure would happen didn't.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:26
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Wingnut Ninja posted:I gotta say that intro is one of the best combinations of story+gameplay integration that I've seen in a game, very nice. And I can't wait to see how adopted father figure dies tragically to kick off the main story. I'll have you know I was frequently returning home to have conversations with Rost up until the moment before the final fight.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:32
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So I finally finished this after doing all the sidequests. Liked most everything except the post-credits stinger, which rubbed me completely the wrong way. Love to blatantly sequel hook and also imply that everything I did in the game accomplished nothing It was also a weird choice to dump me back right before the final quest after the credits rolled. Like they couldn't decide whether they wanted you to be able to free roam after the ending or just end with the story, so they did both but also neither.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:18
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StandardVC10 posted:So I finally finished this after doing all the sidequests. Liked most everything except the post-credits stinger, which rubbed me completely the wrong way. Love to blatantly sequel hook and also imply that everything I did in the game accomplished nothing Making a post-ending world would lock you out of a lot of quests. It's pretty typical for open world games with a world-state changing ending like that.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:36
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Also, since going back through the thread it seems like everybody has to post their Thoughts on Ted Faro, here are mine: He irrevocably ruined the world twice, but the master override Aloy uses at the end of the game was at least partly put there at his insistence, so that prevented a third ruining... or would have, if not for that dumbass post-credits stinger which implies it'll all happen again soon enough. So, that's like... half a world saved. Bringing Ted's net total to around -1.5, which is.. still a very bad score.
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Apr 6, 2021 06:38
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StandardVC10 posted:Also, since going back through the thread it seems like everybody has to post their Thoughts on Ted Faro, here are mine: He irrevocably ruined the world twice, but the master override Aloy uses at the end of the game was at least partly put there at his insistence, so that prevented a third ruining... or would have, if not for that dumbass post-credits stinger which implies it'll all happen again soon enough. So, that's like... half a world saved. Bringing Ted's net total to around -1.5, which is.. still a very bad score. to be fair it was both faro and gaia herself asking for it
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Apr 6, 2021 07:24
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StandardVC10 posted:Love to blatantly sequel hook and also imply that everything I did in the game accomplished nothing Aloy didn't completely save the world at the end. She just stopped the immediate threat. GAIA still needs to be rebuilt and the subordinate functions dealt with or the terraforming system will ultimately fail. We don't really know what Sylens' intentions are. It's nearly impossible to believe they are altogether altruistic, but at the same time, it's not clear that they are absolutely evil. And if Aloy truly wants to save the world, she's going to need the help of people like Sylens. So I like the stinger. It's ambiguous enough to imply that there's more story to tell, not that Sylens is straight-up the new antagonist.
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Apr 6, 2021 07:52
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I don’t find the ending bleak. There’s much more to do, and I’ve now idea how Stone Age hunter-gatherers can pull off some of the stuff that needs to be done, but the good guys made strides in the right direction. Hades has no more ability to affect anything, and that’s a huge weight off everyone’s back. I think it’s implied that the terraforming process isn’t done, so it would be nice to bring the other subroutines back into harmony instead of simply shutting them down. What more there is to do is hard to say, but we are long past a point where we might want Hades to do it’s thing. Sylens is a bad, shady dude, but he wants the world to keep existing. I really think he just wants knowledge from Hades.
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Apr 6, 2021 07:57
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gently caress Ted Faro. That is all.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:57
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Zil posted:gently caress Ted Faro. 
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Apr 7, 2021 04:56
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:I don't think Rost was on screen for two minutes before I laughed and said, "He's so loving dead." In fairness to the writers, a bunch of other things I was sure would happen didn't. Welp.   Gotta say I'm really digging the world building, which I'm realizing is more Fallout 2 than anything else. It already feels like a better Fallout game than Fallout 4, at least. My rite of passage ceremony just got interrupted by some dudes that sound an awful lot like the Brotherhood of Steel. A quick screengrab of the lat/long in the following scenes indicates that I'm at Pike's Peak, though I would swear it's right in the middle of the uncanny valley because holy poo poo are the facial animations terrible in this game. Like, you've got such beautifully animated character movement and scenery overall, and then every time it zooms in on a face is just horrifying. Still, very excited to keep going and exploring this weird world. At the very least I hope to learn why everyone is such an absolute raging dickhead to me.
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Apr 7, 2021 05:11
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The facial animations get better for most of the game and are downright impressive in the DLC area. I think they learned a lot as they went along and the opening must have been one of the first parts they did.
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Apr 7, 2021 05:22
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I think I've realized that I have the most fun in this game by ignoring the story entirely and just playing it as a robot hunting game. Figuring out what strategies work best and optimizing ~efficiency~. There's nothing else quite like blasting the cannon off a Ravager, mopping it up with other stuff, then hoofing the cannon over to a Stormbird patrol area to obliterate it. Or taking the cannons from two ravagers on the far west side to kill the corrupted behemoths really fast. Ravager cannons are so GOOD... Or corrupting a Big Bad and having all the mooks nearby swarm it. Story is forgettable. Robot combat is forever.
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Apr 7, 2021 08:43
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Wingnut Ninja posted:Welp. You're literally the only redhead to walk the earth in a thousand years and they're getting incredibly freaked out with the sole exception of sun king avad and also petra. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 13:48
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Facial animations seem better in the Frozen Wilds expansion. I feel like the quality of sidequests is better there too.
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Apr 7, 2021 14:28
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