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Jack B Nimble posted:There's a middle ground between declaring gatcha games the pinnacle of design (though they are, in a hosed up way) and pretending that player count doesn't mean anything. Bethesda games, famous for being dead in the long term. Its not like skyrim and fallout regularly command incredibly high numbers on steam. Khanstant posted:I don't think you need to pretend players counts and popularity to mean nothing, those are useful metrics for a lot of things. I also do not think you need to tie best-selling to quality at all, that's just ignoring and making bad assumptions about too many other complicating factors. Especially in a world with pre-ordering, but even without it, it's always a goofy way to backup your assertion about why it's good or bad, unless specifically appealing to its popularity for a specific reason. No my point was that despite FNV fans having a huge chip on their shoulders about bethesda conspiring to keep FNV down and it still rising to the top, more people play skyrim and fallout 4 regularly. Fallout 4 has more mods for the game (a lot of which are tacticool gun mods straight out of COD). This despite the fact that more serious modding in FO4 requires you to pack ba2 files. Anime Schoolgirl posted:tbf minecraft and People don't turn it into COD, they turn it into Stalker. Things like flyable vertibirds etc are both more sophisticated and more fun than riding a robot. You have stuff like sim settlements and a generally better designed map that lets you do stuff like climb buildings and ambush enemies.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:22
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I can't comment to the chips you're perceiving, but I'm not sure what weirdoes who stick around playing old games with mods indicate about quality but I guess that's not the point.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:33
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so what is the point? New Vegas has a much better story and narrative than fallout 4 but has a worse map. It was a clear enough improvement over fallout 3 that bethesda cribbed some ideas from it for fallout 4. Being a game that came out later and the higher requirements for making moddable stuff means its major mods come out slower but the renaissance in script extender mods has given fallout 4 a longer turnaround for major mod content.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:50
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I mean it's been the big argument in video games for the last 10ish years - do players value content more or a crafted experience more? The issue with going content heavy is that you still need to provide players with a solid foundation to build their own play narratives on top of otherwise you end up with... well, Starfield. All the content in the world doesn't help if you don't give me a reason to care.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:52
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Khanstant posted:I can't comment to the chips you're perceiving, but I'm not sure what weirdoes who stick around playing old games with mods indicate about quality but I guess that's not the point. What if a game studio that was only good at doing exploration also completely drops the ball on exploration? I imagining Emil looking at Skyrim now and he still sincerely believes "it must be my poo poo-tier writing that carried this game right?"
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Jan 1, 2024 01:57
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crafted experiences eventually grow old. Sometimes its charming running into a bunch of blokes on a crossroads so you can shoot them.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:57
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It's completely good for a game to be experienced and have an end where you just don't play it anymore.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:14
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Tankbuster posted:crafted experiences eventually grow old. Sometimes its charming running into a bunch of blokes on a crossroads so you can shoot them. You have to actually play something a bunch for it to get old. I've got 150 hours in Witcher 3 and about as much in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, two games I doubt I'll play again but which I enjoyed when I was in them. I've got about 60 in Starfield and I think I'm close to the end. I doubt I'll ever launch it again. Meanwhile I've got about 500 hours in Skyrim across multiple versions, 380 in FO4, and just shy of 500 in FO:NV. Probably similar numbers in Morrowind but that was pre-Steam so I don't have playtime at my fingertips. Sure, story was involved in the first few playthroughs, but they make great gently caress around sandboxes with ample modding support to this day. Basically Starfield fails at both being a crafted experience that draws you in and keeps you engaged, and at being a sandbox for messing around.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:15
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The handcrafted areas are fine. The lack of exploration/easy fast travel is what kills much of the gameplay. NV on it's own is barely a sandbox because obsidian ran out of time.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:19
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It’s wild that I’m replaying FO3 for the first time in 2023 and it feels good to explore and uncover crazy areas and little storylines Bethesda you slippin
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Jan 1, 2024 02:21
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they wanted to take another bite at the daggerfall apple.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:22
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Ok, let me give a kind of vertical slice of this failure, coming from someone who's been playing these games since Morrowind. I'm a total and complete whore for collecting weapons and uniforms and building little museums in these games. Back in Morrowind I remember there was this dude's house in I think Balmora, where you could murder him and take over his neat 3 story pad. I just remember it had a giant circular room on the bottom floor where he was summoning daedra or something. Anyways, I'd always arrange all the armor types I found on the floor down there in order of power/value. Laid them out the way they looked - pants under chest, helmet over chest, legs and arms in the appropriate place, etc. Same with weapons. By far most of my playtime was spelunking in Daedric shrines to find high end armor pieces and put them on display. Fast forward to FO4 and yep, I'm doing the same thing. Only this time I can build my own custom power armor garage, put in a poo poo ton of weapon and armor racks, set up custom lighting, etc. My basic play loop was scavenge the wasteland for the materials to build my museum and displays, then go find power armor and epic/unique gear to put in it. So I'm at the part of Starborn where you learn the terrible secret of space while looting NASA headquarters. They've got this big museum set up and in one part of it is a full Mercury program era space suit. In any other Bethesda game I'd have been shuffling gear around, throwing poo poo on the floor, all so I could pack out this unique armor and put it on whatever the game's current version of armor stands are. Here? Really couldn't be hosed. Just left that poo poo in the display and kept on trucking. Setting aside the low key nihilism of NG+ not making anything you do matter, I gave up on my base that I was building to display all my poo poo about 30 game-hours ago because base building is just loving terrible, the gear in the game has all been so generic looking that even though I saved a bunch of golden and purple guns and armor I've had no desire to set it all up, and in the end the game just failed to grab me so badly that I'm just trying to get it done so I can say I beat it. This is a dumb thing that has been getting me hooked into Bethesda games since the days of fast travel via silt strider and they dropped the ball so hard it's kind of making me want to reinstall FO4 just to build a base and set up a silly little museum.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:36
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Yeah the biggest and most damning knock against Starfield is that it's actually a terrible Bethesda-style game and doesn't scratch that mindless itch at all. All the enemy variety went to poo poo wildlife mobs that aren't threatening and are only there for exp massacres, there's like a quarter of the weapons FO4 has, no life schedules for npcs, 90% of them are essential somehow surpassing Skyrim, and aside from the handful of static story locations there's like 30-40 procedurally placed POIs that have barely any permutations and constantly repeat even in the span of a few hours. I would not be shocked if the game had less "meaningful" content than base Morrowind or FO3
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Jan 1, 2024 03:48
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Not sure where the current conversation is but I think the game is bad EDIT: The people who are talking about the potential for this game to have a redemption arc similar to NMS, maybe, but keep in mind that NMS loving sucks George Sex - REAL fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 04:05
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WampaLord posted:Because they want you to join it as an undercover cop and take out the fleet, that's clearly the main intended way to do the questline considering how heavily piracy is punished. That is only crossing a low bar: When you reach the dead drop orders, its obvious the real Lucian writes in a strictly business style while the imposter writes as an emotional rant and it also has a different art. But can you do anything in the world with this information? No, nothing in the world even acknowledges it. Contrast with the Vizima Confidential murderer hunting questline in Witcher 1. Palladium fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 04:24
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Tiny Timbs posted:It’s wild that I’m replaying FO3 for the first time in 2023 and it feels good to explore and uncover crazy areas and little storylines FO3 felt like Starfield in that I was hooked on it hard for a bit and then instantly no longer felt the urge to pick up again. FO3 I did not hate after.
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Jan 1, 2024 04:45
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"Setting aside the low key nihilism of NG+ not making anything you do matter" I was beating this drum as soon as I got to NG+. This isn't Arkham Asylum or even Elden Ring, I care about my ship, the people I've met, and what I've done to help them. NG+ is [i]lonely [/i.
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Jan 1, 2024 05:02
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George Sex - REAL posted:Not sure where the current conversation is but I think the game is bad I'm perplexed about why is this game was even attempted at all bethsoft should just had copypaste Skyrim's formula with a different skin to TES6 and called it a day. Hell even the fans wanted to see more TES than another new IP anyway it's like they know they are too incompetent do anything beyond Skyrim's formula, yet they don't want to acknowledge it either so they went onto something hopelessly out of their depth
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Jan 1, 2024 05:20
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I don't think they are out of their depth at all, I think they just have a fundamental disagreement over which parts of their games are the way forward and work. Which is unfortunate since they make the drat rhings
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Jan 1, 2024 05:27
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Me, a Bethesda big brain person: I fundamentally disagree that it's any year later than 2006.
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Jan 1, 2024 09:06
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George Sex - REAL posted:Not sure where the current conversation is but I think the game is bad This article here? https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/30/starfield-attempting-a-cyberpunk-2077-reputation-repair-seems-inevitable/?sh=414ae1a72ee5 I think Tassi has it absolutely right. Bethesda have to try and do something. But the current comms suggest they either have no idea what to do or are in full denial over what is actually wrong with Starfield (because it means admitting their entire game design process is pretty broken). I think he's also right in the comparison with Cyberpunk: you can call 2077 broken because it was obvious CDPR had a vision and there were a bunch of gameplay systems that weren't working to deliver on that vision. There was a clear list of things to be fixed and then you could enjoy the pretty decent game that's there. But Starfield isn't 'broken' in that sense - it was born without a soul and I don't see how they can put one in without tearing the whole game apart and putting it back together.
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Jan 1, 2024 10:58
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Jack B Nimble posted:"Setting aside the low key nihilism of NG+ not making anything you do matter" Yeah. I ended up just re-loading my pre-NG+ save and sticking to that because losing everything just to continue the story I didn't like in the first place didn't seem worth it.
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Jan 1, 2024 11:16
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Jack B Nimble posted:"Setting aside the low key nihilism of NG+ not making anything you do matter" The game is about ascending to be a spacegod. You are supposed to feel lonely if you take the jump.
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Jan 1, 2024 11:21
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Alchenar posted:There was a clear list of things to be fixed and then you could enjoy the pretty decent game that's there. But Starfield isn't 'broken' in that sense - it was born without a soul and I don't see how they can put one in without tearing the whole game apart and putting it back together. I mean I think the crux of it is this subjective opinion George Sex - REAL posted:EDIT: The people who are talking about the potential for this game to have a redemption arc similar to NMS, maybe, but keep in mind that NMS loving sucks NMS is quite popular, among the people that enjoy NMS as it currently exists. 8 years after it initially came out, people 100% know exactly what the game is and what it isn't, and nobody's showing up to NMS asking "where's the multiplayer ship-boarding combat I wanted in 2016". The problem is that "quite popular" in this context is still a subset of what was already considered a "niche" genre: space exploration and space combat. The same goes for Elite Dangerous, X4, Space Engineers, etc. They Do Not Have Skyrim numbers of sales figures for a reason. Starfield feels like it's trying to be all of those subsets at the same time while trying to be a "Bethesda Game" on top of all of that and couldn't stick the landing because there's a base level of fundamental irreconcilability there. I think that it's possible for Starfield to have an NMS turnaround, but only if it accepts that A. it has to commit to a subset of the overarching niche and Actually Do That, and B. comitting to that subset means that it won't ever be all of the other things it was trying to be, and the player numbers are going to reflect that And the way they're pivoting to patching and pushing stuff for the paid creator content store in Skyrim a couple months after Starfield's release makes me think that as a business, B is going to be the thing they get hung up on, no matter what the developers and designers think about doing A.
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Jan 1, 2024 11:22
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I wonder if the intent was that people will stick with one path ie one guild per universe which is easy enough to build a skyrim or fallout character around but meaningless here without any real character building at all
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Jan 1, 2024 11:28
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Starfield feels like it's trying to be all of those subsets at the same time while trying to be a "Bethesda Game" on top of all of that and couldn't stick the landing because there's a base level of fundamental irreconcilability there. I think that it's possible for Starfield to have an NMS turnaround, but only if it accepts that So NMS has sold 10+ million units since launch - it's an extremely successful game to the point where Hello games have been able to ride its success for 8 years. It isn't pulling niche genre numbers at all. But other than that I completely agree with you, Bethesda committed hard to sandbox design with Fallout 4 and pivoting away from trying to be 'all things to all people' is something that will be incredibly hard for people who have spent over the last decade aiming in that direction. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 11:35
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NMS is something of an inventory management simulator and I do think that, with significant time, Starfield could become a more fully fledged version of that as well
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Jan 1, 2024 11:50
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Bethesda will go bankrupt before they implement a useable inventory management ui.
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Jan 1, 2024 11:54
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Alchenar posted:So NMS has sold 10+ million units since launch - it's an extremely successful game to the point where Hello games have been able to ride its success for 8 years. It isn't pulling niche genre numbers at all. "A game selling well" and "A genre being a niche in terms of overall popularity" aren't in opposition to each other-- Stardew Valley sold 20 million lifetime copies, but I'd still call the Harvest Moon-adjacent farming simulator stuff "niche" in terms of overall popularity-- FIFA 2022 sold 9 million copies in a year; 2022's version of Call of Duty sold 4.7 million copies in the first day. The scales we're working with here are a bit weird, especially on these dead gay forums populated primarily by elder millenials. All a genre being "niche" means is that there is, explicitly, a defined upper ceiling of people who will be intrested in buying the game that is significantly smaller than whatever the "most popular" genres are-- which is fine, and good, and normal, and business people hate that. Resident Evil 5 is still, to my knowledge, the best-selling individual entry in the Resident Evil series, and we all saw where that ended up.
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Jan 1, 2024 12:19
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All that legacy Bethesda "magic" from previous decades ago was clearly just talented people who are no longer with the company in modern day. Maybe they left a long, long time ago. If Skyrim was Dragon Age 1, then Fallout 76 and Starfield must be Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. Can't waitto get excited for the next releases from game_studio.
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Jan 1, 2024 12:33
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FIFA 22 is a video game menu simulator
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Jan 1, 2024 13:10
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Chubby Henparty posted:I wonder if the intent was that people will stick with one path ie one guild per universe which is easy enough to build a skyrim or fallout character around but meaningless here without any real character building at all It blows my loving mind that in a game with NG+ baked into the barely there story, that you can be King poo poo of Turd Mountain in the UC and Freestar at the same time.
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Jan 1, 2024 14:48
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It blows my loving mind that in a game with NG+ baked into the barely there story, that you can be King poo poo of Turd Mountain in the UC and Freestar at the same time. To be honest I'm surprised Starfield even bothered to take into account that you may have turned down Sysdef's offer to do life-threatening double agent work for stealing a sandwich before you started the Vanguard questline I am amused that "turning down their offer" turned you explicitly sysdef hostile in the same way that literally shooting your way off the sysdef ship does though
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Jan 1, 2024 15:04
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:"A game selling well" and "A genre being a niche in terms of overall popularity" aren't in opposition to each other-- Stardew Valley sold 20 million lifetime copies, but I'd still call the Harvest Moon-adjacent farming simulator stuff "niche" in terms of overall popularity-- FIFA 2022 sold 9 million copies in a year; 2022's version of Call of Duty sold 4.7 million copies in the first day. The scales we're working with here are a bit weird, especially on these dead gay forums populated primarily by elder millenials. I think you can see this with Baldur’s Gate 3 as well right now. The game probably has sold well over 10 million copies by now and still climbing, but the CRPG genre is absolutely niche. You aren’t getting millions of people buying Rogue Trader or Solasta.
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Jan 1, 2024 15:42
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Whelp I did it. I pushed through and beat the game. God what a wet fart of an ending. Did NG+ just enough to grab an artifact and uninstalled. I'm morbidly curious to see what the DLC will be, but that's about it. The thing that really annoyed me towards the end was how they had some interesting story hooks (the romp through NASA and learning what killed Earth in particular was cool) but didn't do much with them. The retreat into dumb mysticism at the end was also a letdown. For a game that advertises itself as "NASA-punk" and hypothetically is leaning into a more realistic vision of the future, they sure did lean into space magic and dorm room bong rip philosophy at the end, and all without even bothering to actually say who the gently caress was behind it all in the end. It's like someone over there watched an episode of Rick and Morty and thought that multi-verse hi-jinks would be a good twist at the end, but also totally misunderstood the ennui at the core of a lot of it. The whole thing, front to end, feels like someone's fanfic that got JUST popular enough to need to name-swap and file the serial numbers off. 50 Shades of Firefly.
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Jan 2, 2024 01:18
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So, I finally started playing this on Gamepass and...wow. My first impressions after 5 hours: 1. Who the gently caress thought this harvesting system was fun? I have a spaceship with scanners, and a robot. Why don't they do the work? Ok, gently caress it, I'll just scrap everything for resources...gently caress. 2. I know it's "starter" gear but why are all the early spacesuits fat? For All Mankind made a better sumo spacesuit. 3. The combat is....dull. 4. Did they remap the jump button? 5. Requiring me to do a quest before I learn how to dock. My spaceship. Well, at least I didn't preorder this like I have every other Bethesda game since Oblivion. Edit: Oh, goddammit, this is Vyger, isn't it? Music, lights... Ninurta fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 01:49
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Game pass definitely paid for itself because of this game
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Jan 2, 2024 01:58
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Unless they paid you for GamesPass this month I doubt it
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Jan 2, 2024 02:08
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i found the UC questline nowhere as interesting as the UC backstory presented in the game
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Jan 2, 2024 02:25
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Ninurta posted:2. I know it's "starter" gear but why are all the early spacesuits fat? For All Mankind made a better sumo spacesuit. It's ok, all the later spacesuits are fat too
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Jan 2, 2024 03:10
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