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Kestral posted:It's Polycule Collapse #[Infinite] with no greater significance than that. Hicks is a minor Internet Personality but he's not a game designer in any meaningful sense. as opposed to notoriously well-behaved monogamous dudes?
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Apr 1, 2024 20:01
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admanb posted:as opposed to notoriously well-behaved monogamous dudes? In addition, naturally. People like Hicks seem to love using “I’m poly” as a cover, it happens constantly.
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Apr 1, 2024 20:13
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Gabe Hicks lying about his level of involvement and work and input for Mythic Grove, and his firing from that company, is TG as an Industry relevant and something to talk about. This person's infidelities don't seem relevant to me and not really worth talking about, it's just gossip. This is not a good place to deconstruct the challenges of polyamory, for example. If someone's grooming at game conventions, OK, everyone needs to be warned... is that the accusation? If not I think it'd be best to leave that sort of stuff to the social media on which it already proliferates.
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Apr 1, 2024 20:14
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^Efb Its less that. It's just a dude cheating on his partner. Dude said monogamy is what he wanted when offered an open relationship, and then cheated a bunch. Which is bad and sure take him off of the kickstarters or stop watching him or whatever as a sorta "morality clause" type thing, but isn't really worth the consternation and big picture takes about content creators or designers or whatever. People cheat on their SO's every day b. I can't get that worked up about it. Edit 2: It's probably just a bit of my default tinfoil hat, but I am fascinated by the oddly specific way they phrased the contributions for the project. Words published is just like a very specific metric, as let's say someone wrote up like notes or worked with someone else hashing out details but the other person was the one who actually wrote them into something that could be published in a book does that negate the work the person who didn't do the writing for the actual products did? This is more global, and is extremely not meant to defend the dude and his work or whatever, I as someone who has never published or released something like that am just fascinated at the notion of how much writing seemed to just be one person. Dexo fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 20:16
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Dexo posted:It's just a dude cheating on his partner. Dude said monogamy is what he wanted when offered an open relationship, and then cheated a bunch. Yeaaaah. Cheating is lovely for sure but some people who aren't even personally involved have been running around breathlessly Posting Warnings about the idiot, trying to turn him into D&D Harvey Weinstein and tbh they need a new hobby.
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Apr 1, 2024 20:40
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Megazver posted:Yeaaaah. quote:Which is bad and sure take him off of the kickstarters or stop watching him or whatever as a sorta "morality clause" type thing, but isn't really worth the consternation and big picture takes about content creators or designers or whatever. Its a common enough issue that probably when stuff like this comes out it boils over and people just start venting. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 20:44
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MadScientistWorking posted:To be honest cheating on a person while calling them a crazy fan is pushing it into abuse territory and not just cheating. Also, actively sabotaging someone's career is once again not just cheating its abuse. good point, I didn't really look too deep into it
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Apr 1, 2024 21:33
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Yeah I think the industry relevant part is that he was manipulating her by lying to her networking contacts and potential collaborators so that she looked like an overeager hanger-on, leading those people to then "warn" others about her, when she was a victim of his lies the whole time.
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Apr 1, 2024 23:08
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I'd heard him before from a guest stint on an actual play in the Marvel Universe where he played Spiderman as opposed to everyone else's homebrew or at least lesser known heroes (ie, apparently official but this casual comic knower had never heard of). Takes bit of ego to come in and think you're going to live-quip like Spiderman, and he did not pull it off.
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Apr 2, 2024 00:03
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JMBosch posted:Yeah I think the industry relevant part is that he was manipulating her by lying to her networking contacts and potential collaborators so that she looked like an overeager hanger-on, leading those people to then "warn" others about her, when she was a victim of his lies the whole time. Yeah it's right there in the first tweet I posted. quote:He has been telling the entire TTRPG community that I’m just an obsessive fan, that I’m riding on the coattails of my partner, ThePlayMatt, and that I made him uncomfortable. People have been saying they won’t work with me based on false info, and this is putting me and my partner’s livelihood at risk. This seems pretty fuckin pertinent compared to "oh people want to turn him into elfgame Harvey Weinstein just because he did some sleeping around."
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Apr 2, 2024 00:43
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Kestral posted:If you want to make an angry effortpost about this, I’d certainly be interested. Amalur is something I’ve been fascinated with from afar for a while, though I’ve never played it. Okay, okay fine. I avoided posting this because I thought it was mostly off topic, but I also got messaged by Leperflesh through steam asking me to do it which counts as permission. I am going to make liberal use of spoiler tags here, since it involves lots of spoilers for the original games plot and sideplots. The games central concept is that the player has no fate. That because they have no fate they are able to change what is written by it. It turns out what was written was really really bad for everyone. Throughout the game and the side stories, and the original two DLC you repeatedly defy fates plan that has everyone facing a very unpleasant end. An old hero being doomed to be killed and made into stew, People doomed to be stuck staring at a door unable to pass it to get what they need, towns doomed to be destroyed by plague, towns doomed to be destroyed by spiders, a Niskaru Lord being freed (Chaos demon), Power being Usurped, Serial killers, Undead Pirates, Reversion of a race of Giants to Savagery, etc to name just a few. Your deeds, throughout the game, in changing and breaking fate, are portrayed as a universal good. Giving choice meaning. One of the cutscenes even spells that out explicitly. It is important to note that Fate is not as how it is portrayed in other games and settings as a guiding force that ensures major things happen despite your attempts to stop them. It cannot be cheated. Every single action and thought of every single being, every movement of a pebble, has been pre-ordained since the beginning of time, start to finish. This is why being free from fate is so important, it means that this plan can be changed, but only by a single individual free from this plan. Then at the end of the main story you meet a being fated to escape a prison and kill literally everyone. And instead you kill it. After that you are told that the people who read fate cannot read the fates of anyone any more. Yay! Fate has been defeated. Glorious freedom! The Fatesworn expansion in the remake shits all over this. It is set after the main story of the original and can only be accessed then. What you did was actually bad. Chaos God is trying to destroy fate with cultists and Chaos Demons. Fate still exists. The story starts with you being contacted by the head of an order of "Fateweavers" (Name for people who can read fate with cards). The very first thing they do is show awareness of the big bad from the main story as an entity that actually exists. Given that in the main story, people who even suspect the true nature of that being and it existing are routinely assassinated by a secret order, this knowledge literally should not be out there, and if they did know they would certainly not talk about it in public. People also call you "The Fateless One", which is not used anywhere in the game. You do obtain multiple titles through thee story, and those are well known, "Hero of Mel Senshir" being the biggest one. Literally the only place "Fateless One" appears is wiki's and reviews. It indicates they didn;t really play the game before writing the DLC. You are then sent to a place relatively close by that nevertheless has never been mentioned before in game or in the lore, populated by a race of basic humans that have never been mentioned before or appeared before despite being right nearby geographically speaking, and were likely only selected because they wanted to use the default human models for them rather than actually put in a little effort to be lore friendly. These indivduals follow the God of Order, and both they and their region are named for him, though it takes a long time to reach them bcause you have to progress through refugees fleeing... the war that already ended because you won it in the main story. Along the way you encounter many strange things. First of all is the fact that, unlike the rest of the game, the plants you gather for alchemy are generally located in places that make sense for them to be. In this they are just dropped wherever. Likewise, there is an extremely rare plant, only found in very well hidden areas of the main game, that allows you to harvest "essence of fate", used for top tier potions. These are growing, somewhat uncommonly, out in the open in this lovely region. Likewise, but more lore-relevantly, is an ingredient calld "Prismere Dust" used for high end mana stuff. In the main game there are lore reasons for it existing only in the final region of the game (Prismere is an emanation of Tirnoch's power) and in a single cave right near the start of the game (The facility you start in was built there because there was an unexpected lode of Prismere there). However, in the DLC this ingredient can be found all over the place with no explanation. It's like going to an arctic region of a world and finding tropical bananas growing there on the glaciers. Or cacti in swamps. As you pass through you find a facility allegedly used by the gnome responsible for your resurrection at the start of the story. This is despite the fact that lore in the main story had them active only in the desert region the gnomes have their in-game accessable home in (They have other places). There you find necromancy happening, and that this was sanctioned. The big problem is that the Gnome responsible, and allegedly sanctioning this, was opposed to necromancy and got a coworker sentenced to hang for it (That coworker was saved, secretly, by a higher up and is involved in the main story). On that topic, as the DLC story progresses, you eventually get told that you were, all along, a tool for those who made you, which somehow includes basically all your friends and allies from the main story, even those who clearly demonstrated no knowledge of your fateless nature and the capabilities of it when first encountered (One goes so far as to initially suggest that it is horrifying, noting you are absorbing the fate of those slain, until you later avert his fate by ganking the thing fated to eat him as he watches). Now, one might go "Sure, that is fine, even if it sucks", but the fact is that the player characters previous personality pre-resurrection is described. They were, to put it mildly, very much not a nice person. To quote a gnome who had the misfortune to work with them: quote:You never talked about yourself, but you were... you were terrifying, okay? You were the coldest, most terrifying thing I've ever met! You wouldn't have threatened me like this -- you would have just stabbed me to death and looted my corpse. Seriously, I saw you do that to people! Often! It is also a completely un-needed thing, and directly contradicts the main story. This part will be entirely spoilered since it happens at the very end of the game. In the caverns beneath what is left of the Winter Fae city of Bhaile, you are repeatedly spoken to by Tirnoch, who welcomes the player back, as she was the one who killed them in your previous life. She draws the fates they have taken by killing people out of you into alternate-you enemies you need to fight as you progress, demonstrating control over that type of power. She reveals that she had made a deal with the player character: The player was fated to die there, she would ensure their resurrection through the Well of Souls encountered and destroyed at the start of the game, and the player character would return and most likely try to kill her. She believed, as a colossal dragon, that she would easily slay them just like before. Her goal in doing this, having sundered the player from fate, was that all the power they had amassed from carving your bloody path through fate would allow her to free herself and then murder everyone in delightful revenge for being sealed away. Anyway, the developers were spoiling for the old Order versus Chaos story. And they decided that Fate was important and order related, and attributed it to the god of Order (Mitharu). There is a big problem with that: There is a goddess of Fate, Magic, and Luck (Lyria). They ignored this entirely. The concept of the DLC is that Fate's weave is weakened (Instead of smashed in the main story) and the villain, the Chaos God Telogrus, wants to break it entirely. He has a cunning plan to do this: Step 1: His followers grab important people. Step 2: His followers murder important people. Step 3: This destroys fate. Now, if you recall earlier what I described of how Fate works in the setting as opposed to how it is usually done in other setting, you will see a slight problem with this plan. Yes, his followers are fated to grab those important people, who are in turn fated to be murdered by those cultists, and by following the plan of Fate unerringly they... hurt fate? And this works despite the fact that important people have been murdered for millenia previously? And wars have resulted in mass bloodshed previously? And Enormously powerful demon lords have been summoned and slain previously? Now it works this way? It is, to put simply, stupid. The villain also encounters you part way through and declares boldly that he will kill you before you can meddle with his plan. You then attack him in futility because he cannot be hurt without special weapon bullshit as he does... nothing. He then... leaves? The whole thing occurs when the player is lured into a battle with a single big chaos demon to kill them off and... it is of a kind that they have already killed a dozen of through the game if they have done all sidequests. They also killed an even larger, nastier demon in the main story. One that was of the "I can sit down and crush a district of a city beneath my mighty fleshy buttocks" scale in power and size. It is basically a case of "You have very publicly killed Superman in single combat, but now you will be undone by my newest minion: A crippled hobo with a plastic spatula!" I am skipping a whole bunch of extremely boring poo poo and glossing over gameplay problems with the thing despite Leperflesh saying: quote:don't worry about what is on or off topic You reach the end of the game, kill the bad guy, victory. Happiness, treasure, cats for everyone, right? No. You then get told that you are the problem, and the problem can only be solved by... you going a long way away, as though geographical proximity means anything. Somehow this magically works due to bad writers saying it does despite it making no sense. Remember how I took pains to point out how the player character was once a monstrous arsehole psychopath? It is entirely possible for you to play as a monstrous arsehole psychopath too, and yet for some reason you accept exile to the frozen horrible empty uninhabited lands anyway, self sacrificing despite the fact it makes no sense, and also despite the fact that you'd really rather not and are strong enough to kill a loving incarnated god so they can't make you. I could go on about the smaller side quest problems, where they ignored the lore surrounding how side factions worked in the main game (They ignored basically all the lore), but I am expecting a pizza delivery sometime soon so I am going stop here. Oh wait, one last thing, less of a plot gripe and more of a laziness one. They brought back characters from the base game, but did not get the same voice actors for them. They are very noticeably different, which you could get used to, maybe, but they left the original combat dialogue lines in place, so they'll be shouting in their old voice in battle, and then suddenly have a new one in talky scenes. Also, access to the old dialogue trees regarding lore is still there, and that uses the original voice actor too. If you cannot get the same VA to do a character, don't have them reappear, especially when they don't really matter. Just write a new character to do it. This has the added benefit of avoiding massive lore problems that can arise from reusing established characters. Even if that was the only problem with the game I would still want to kick the project's management in the balls. Fake edit: Woo. I got all the tags right while working in notepad to draft this.
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Apr 2, 2024 03:37
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...well! This does make me glad I never picked up the rerelease, god drat. Because that stuff about the new DLC does in fact poo poo directly on a bunch of stuff I thought was genuinely neat about the story and world. If I ever go back to the game, it'll probably be just the original version instead. What a story of people coming later to pick up something they apparently barely understood, to the point that I really wonder why they bothered with Amalur in particular. Thanks for the effortpost!
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Apr 2, 2024 03:57
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I'm suddenly glad that I decided to abandon the new DLC after a bug made it so my reagent pouches no longer worked, turning navigating the games hideously bad inventory system from "Terrible" to "An actual nightmare" e: Also i'm pretty sure the games cutscenes are still encoded in BINK codecs meaning that the audio just does not work on most modern computers.
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Apr 2, 2024 04:01
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Amalur Re-Recknoning's been sitting in my Steam library for ages from some sale, and the original is there too which I stopped playing because I got frustrated that the level scaling locks to when you first entered a zone (I'm the type to push deep into areas exploring so everything was very low when I tried to come back to places). I know Re-Reckoning fixed that in particular so it's been on my "one of these days" list. Do the issues with the DLC affect any of the original game portion of it?
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Apr 2, 2024 06:07
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Bruceski posted:Amalur Re-Recknoning's been sitting in my Steam library for ages from some sale, and the original is there too which I stopped playing because I got frustrated that the level scaling locks to when you first entered a zone (I'm the type to push deep into areas exploring so everything was very low when I tried to come back to places). I know Re-Reckoning fixed that in particular so it's been on my "one of these days" list. Do the issues with the DLC affect any of the original game portion of it? I remember when testing to get all the achievements you had to rush really early to get to a zone where you could kill an enemy way above your level, becaus ethe way the scaling worked made it basically impossible if you were doing a completionists playthrough. Which we were doing, since we were testing achievements.
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Apr 2, 2024 06:16
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Just do not buy or play the Fatesworn DLC if you have it already. Everything else works, though there are some dangerous breaking bugs that haven't been fixed. There is one with the Prismere Chantries that is game breaking and hasn't been fixed. Lure enemies well away from them before killing them and save before you do each.Kurieg posted:e: Also i'm pretty sure the games cutscenes are still encoded in BINK codecs meaning that the audio just does not work on most modern computers. MonsieurChoc posted:I remember when testing to get all the achievements you had to rush really early to get to a zone where you could kill an enemy way above your level, becaus ethe way the scaling worked made it basically impossible if you were doing a completionists playthrough. Which we were doing, since we were testing achievements. I need to reiterate: The base game and the original DLC's have a good story, the world has good lore, and the game is fun to play if you can get around the bugs that the devs couldn't be bothered fixing for the rerelease. Just avoid the Fatesworn expansion as though it were an untreated sewage elemental.
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Apr 2, 2024 06:43
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Pickled Tink posted:Fake edit: Woo. I got all the tags right while working in notepad to draft this. A lot of that stuff sounds like a thinly veiled ripoff of Planescape: Torment. People telling you how much of an rear end in a top hat you were in that lifetime you don't remember? Check. Protagonist having to be banished for the good of the cosmos in an ending? Check. Protagonist having made a deal with a dodgy lady at some point a prior life, leading to their current cosmologically unique status? Check... EDIT: Oh, and being referred to as The [THING]less One? Check! Warthur fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 14:12
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My favourite bugs in Reckoning were all related to how you could abuse buff stacking to become unkillable and deal ludicrous amount of damage. Like the Mel Senshir boss could be one-shot except QTEs were supposed to trigger at certain points so it broke the game and you jsut got stuck. Will Not Fix, most players won't deal that much damage. Or the knockback when hitting enemies was based on damage done so you could hit a deer halfway across the continent. Except when they fell into a different zone and eventually de-spawned, it would corrupt the entire zone so that the game would hard crash when entering that zone from now on. That one took a while to figure out, and they fixed it by putting an upper limit to the distance you knock back enemies.
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Apr 2, 2024 15:07
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Plot summary of a video game unconnected to a TTRPG property was not something on my bingo card for the TG industry thread, but I guess video games do have a long tradition…
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Apr 2, 2024 15:25
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Warthur posted:Congrats, and also thanks for the effortpost. Disco Elysium is also a P:T ripoff
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Apr 2, 2024 15:26
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Megazver posted:Disco Elysium is also a P:T ripoff They call him The Shameless One.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:19
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Bar Crow posted:They call him The Shameless One. Sure, but also the Copotypes. (One could argue they were inspired by the Incarnations.)
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Apr 2, 2024 16:35
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Megazver posted:Disco Elysium is also a P:T ripoff Ripoffs copy in a lazy fashion without insight into what made the original material tick.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:58
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The Drinkless One
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Apr 2, 2024 17:03
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Warthur posted:being referred to as The [THING]less One? Check! why does my high school nickname follow me so long after high school
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Apr 2, 2024 17:25
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Warthur posted:It's a homage: done out of love, and with a deep understanding of what worked about P:T and what could be happily set aside (does anyone like the combat in that game?). Combat? No. But some of the spell animations are so OTT that they're hilarious. There's a way to handle "caster supremacy" in some RPGs: you cast the spell, and then while the spell animation plays the combat continues and the spell goes off about a minute later. Pick your targets when the spell finishes.
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Apr 2, 2024 18:45
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As with the campaign setting, P:T does its best to steer around the obstacle of xD&D mechanics
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Apr 2, 2024 23:24
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And instead of an alignment system it has politics.
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Apr 3, 2024 03:52
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And instead of an alignment system it has politics. ? P:T has an alignment system. YggdrasilTM fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Apr 3, 2024 |
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Apr 3, 2024 15:16
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To tack on very slightly to the 38 Studios chucklefuckfest, there was very clearly some sort of pressure from higher-ups in the state to justify the 38 Studios loan. For obvious reasons I can’t divulge how I know this but the head of Rhode Island state Department of Revenue’s revenue analysis office called their contracted economic consultant to ask how to use certain forecasting tools to produce results showing favorable returns for the investment in 38 Studios. This might not have come off as quite so hosed if he hadn’t been calling from a supply closet on his cell phone at the time.
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Apr 3, 2024 19:57
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Every time you guys say P:T I get confused and think you mean PT, the Silent Hill playable trailer for a game that never came out.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:09
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is... that not what everyone is talking about
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Apr 4, 2024 00:04
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We talking Planescape: TormentNarsham posted:Combat? No. But some of the spell animations are so OTT that they're hilarious. One disappointing thing about BG3 compared to the earlier games and to Torment is how quickly some of the instant duration spells you cast go off. There should be some delay in the animation, so that a player can enjoy watching the spectacle of a Fireball or Chain Lightning go off, but they messed up the timing, now it’s “blink and you miss it” in a very visually unsatisfying way. Not saying we should go back to 5-minute long summoning effects like the old Final Fantasy games, but give us *something*
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Apr 4, 2024 00:09
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alignment axis of disturbed man / vomit-covered ghost / sink baby
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Apr 4, 2024 01:51
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Gatto Grigio posted:We talking Planescape: Torment The worst example of this was in *Pillars of Eternity* because it was a Real-Time with Pause game that was trying to be faithful to the old Baldur's Gate games in terms of the playstyle (though it uses its own setting and system, not DnD). And you'd set conditions for auto-pause so you didn't miss something - "party member gets downed" or "party member below HP threshold" are some good defaults to have. So you'd fight a superboss like a dragon and then suddenly your game would freeze and wtf why half your party is dead or dying. And scroll up in the combat log and finally see "Eder takes 50 damage from Dragon Breath" or something like that. And then finally as you unpause and try to fix your situation you finally visually see the dragon breathe fire and hit all your guys. Instead of, like... maybe taking advantage of the gameplay of RTwP and telegraphing the attack, so you can pause and tell all your party to clear out. There are great ways to make party-based RTwP work. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth do it great! isometric stuff with minimal AI was not it.
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Apr 4, 2024 05:52
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Very glad I quit the Fatesworn DLC after the one-two punch of bizarrely overtuned basic bandit/guard enemies annihilating my high level character that barely had to heal in base game, and a narratively minor dungeon being a sprawling labyrinth bigger than any two of the base game dungeons combined. The rerelease is sadly still essential for playing the base game because it fixes the terrible level scaling.
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Apr 4, 2024 06:02
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Because you weren't playing God's own class, the mage. You could stun lock everything that was immune to fire with ice chunks and just kill everyone else with the meteor spell that slowed down time to let you cast it unhindered.
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Apr 4, 2024 13:37
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Subjunctive posted:Plot summary of a video game unconnected to a TTRPG property was not something on my bingo card for the TG industry thread, but I guess video games do have a long tradition… Post your bingo card.
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Apr 5, 2024 07:56
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LongDarkNight posted:Is this Gamegate 2? Wasn’t that the time when people discovered content consulting firms existed and assumed big publishers would do what they said?
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Apr 5, 2024 21:11
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Subjunctive posted:Plot summary of a video game unconnected to a TTRPG property was not something on my bingo card for the TG industry thread, but I guess video games do have a long tradition… The Trump Legal Troubles thread in Debate and Discussion had a derail related to Pact of the Blade Warlocks.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:48
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