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Well, show Dolores Dei too
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Oct 24, 2023 11:39
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| # ? May 5, 2024 13:52 |
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I posted it in the DE thread when it was fresh, here it is again. the artist is kelly rico both designs take inspiration from historic filipinas. dolores is paz marquez-benitez and our lady of the labyrinth is josefa llanes escoda. panko fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Oct 24, 2023 |
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Oct 24, 2023 15:33
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Neat!
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Oct 25, 2023 10:06
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This game is incredible. Also, whoever had the idea to incorporate text to speech for those of us with poor vision, thank you. I wouldn't have been able to play it otherwise.
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Oct 25, 2023 15:58
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Bit late to the thread but I just wanted to check that Getting most of the men and boys in the town killed, and then dying trying to save the books while the monastery burns down at the end of Act II is not exactly the optimal outcome?
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Nov 27, 2023 02:39
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I don't think there's any good outcomes, you just have to live with your choices.
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Nov 27, 2023 03:17
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Yeah it’s telling a story, not coaching a football game
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Nov 27, 2023 05:04
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Basic Chunnel posted:Yeah it’s telling a story, not coaching a football game This is a weirdly aggressive comment for an innocent question.
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Nov 27, 2023 08:22
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It’s a serious answer prompted by use of the word “optimal”. And it’s only to say that rough stuff happening in a precarious setting shouldn’t be assumed to be a punishment levied against a player who could have (read: should have) made different choices. You are meant to be invested in the story, but I don’t think you’re meant to feel responsible for it, in the greater meta sense. It’s not that kind of RPG. Pentiment, like Disco Elysium, doesn’t design its narrative as a “metagame” with choice prompts you can succeed or fail at (in the conventional sense) to get clearly better or worse outcomes. That’s important to emphasize for new players. The end of that act isn’t a Witcher-style slap on the player’s nose for not approaching a quest with the right level of guile, or an admonition to play smarter in the next act. It is simply what happens. Generally I think this wave of experimental RPGs is really engaged with storygame design that came as a response to the combat-and-numbers obsessed RPGs of the 80s and 90s. One of the central insights of the storygame movement (“”) was that conditioning players to fear bad luck and desire zero-loss crit success is actually really boring, and that what happens when things don’t go according to plan is really the entire appeal, where most RPG scenarios are concerned.
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Nov 27, 2023 09:13
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Not a criticism but yea the game is much more linear than it appears and your choices actually effect pretty little. More a visual novel than an rpg. I disagree that the game doesn't want you to feel responsible for what happens though, Andreas feeling responsible for what happens is like the crux of his characterization in the second act and third act I feel. Avalerion fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 11:48
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The game clearly wants you to feel responsible, yeah. You were nice to that kid? You thought being nice to people is good? Fine then, this kid likes you enough that he refuses to leave you, flee and save himself. Congrats you polite kind people pleaser.
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Nov 27, 2023 12:03
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:This is a weirdly aggressive comment for an innocent question. I think my use of “optimal” lost a lot of its sarcasm in writing it down, over how I’d have said it in conversation. That’s my fault though! Avalerion posted:Not a criticism but yea the game is much more linear than it appears and your choices actually effect pretty little. More a visual novel than an rpg. This makes a lot of sense now I think about it, despite the choices of background it does seem to be more of a visual novel. And again, that’s not a criticism, it’s still a fantastic game.
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Nov 27, 2023 13:28
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I love that if you choose to have Andreas show off (or even just completely innocently demonstrate) his knowledge to the visiting doctors, you are rewarded with all of them being impressed and talking about how cool it is to have such a great conversation.... but also long term the town doctor feels humiliated that some artist is apparently not only as educated and intelligent as him but more popular and well-liked, and he allows it take him into a downward spiral of alcoholism. Making a point of having Andrea admit he isn't as learned as the others in this area but he's interested in their takes on the matter means Andreas is largely sidelined in the conversation and just listens, but the long term result is it gives the doctor a bit of an ego boost to be at the center of the conversation and no longer having anything to prove actually results in him no longer having a chip on his shoulder and becoming a far more likeable, well-respected person.
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Nov 27, 2023 14:01
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I loved how everyone is just like shut the gently caress up Andreas, goddamn nerd every time you get to use the law/logic options to well, actually in a conversation.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:57
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Jerusalem posted:I love that if you choose to have Andreas show off (or even just completely innocently demonstrate) his knowledge to the visiting doctors, you are rewarded with all of them being impressed and talking about how cool it is to have such a great conversation.... but also long term the town doctor feels humiliated that some artist is apparently not only as educated and intelligent as him but more popular and well-liked, and he allows it take him into a downward spiral of alcoholism. Making a point of having Andrea admit he isn't as learned as the others in this area but he's interested in their takes on the matter means Andreas is largely sidelined in the conversation and just listens, but the long term result is it gives the doctor a bit of an ego boost to be at the center of the conversation and no longer having anything to prove actually results in him no longer having a chip on his shoulder and becoming a far more likeable, well-respected person. no matter how deferent and reverential andreas acts to him he still can’t fix magda’s daddy getting slonked silly style
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Nov 27, 2023 18:15
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Picking sassy magda was worth it just for that one slam when the reply is just a "Jesus CHRIST  "
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Nov 27, 2023 21:29
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ilitarist posted:The game clearly wants you to feel responsible, yeah. You were nice to that kid? You thought being nice to people is good? Fine then, this kid likes you enough that he refuses to leave you, flee and save himself. Congrats you polite kind people pleaser. Put in simplest terms I would say that Pentiment seeks to induce feelings of complicity and investment in the player, without making them responsible in the sense of “this story is radically different without the presence of the player’s character”. Andreas is not the protagonist in the dramatic sense that, say, Shepard is in Mass Effect — apart from the general quality of its writing, ME is a more standard universe that waits for Shepard to pass through it. His choices are momentous and, to the degree to which they can be complicated, they are complicated by other choices he’s already made. Pentiment’s Bavaria is the opposite. Andreas affects things around the Abbey, and he makes fateful decisions, but we are able to see that in the vast majority of cases, his significance is basically an accident — it’s clear (and many have noted) that he’s never formally empowered by anyone, and no one (with the notable and effective exception of Gaspar) looks to him directly in terms of their own decision-making. Andreas is a guy who happens to be there, offering perspective, while the characters are going through what they’re going through. In most cases, his opinions are just one factor, and the degree to which Andreas figures is never wholly credited by him, or by the other characters. If anything, Andreas can arguably overestimate, in retrospect, his role in events after they unfold. He has the same power and importance within other character’s lives that any actual irl person does in other people’s irl lives. It’s part of what makes the characters feel real in ways BioWare’s endless procession of “a waylaid merchant who needs a hand replacing a wagon wheel” do not. It’s only from our perspective as players — a profoundly selective view — that we see the true import of Andreas’s decisions in the events of the game. Situations in which he is actually and clearly centrally important are very rare — Caspar is the notable example, and even there, Andreas (and in all likelihood, the player) is not fully cognizant of the import in what he says and how he says it: he doesn’t seem to realize how closely Gaspar is watching him, and if the player does, they do not anticipate what their guidance will produce. When I say “the narrative is not a minigame” this is what I mean: if Gaspar runs into the fire you are not meant to read that as a thing that you / Andreas hosed up. There is no “should’ve about your choices a little harder, lol” metatext clowning out on that, of the kind you’d get for a “bad” outcome in ME or even the Witcher, even if it’s clearly not the outcome most players would want. And that’s getting past the problem of putting Gaspar’s choice as a thing that the player is making by proxy. The narrative is not a minigame: the variance of plot is a product of who Andreas is as you see him, and it is only ever that, we are only ever invited to see it as that: Andreas is a character in a story, not merely a proxy by which the player games the plot to their liking. I see that as an iteration, a deeper commitment, to the reexamination of RPG decision-making that the PoEs pursued. In this case, it helped that the PC was less of an empty shirt. I think you could credibly argue that ambivalence to power fantasy —not just in a martial / heroic sense but generally, the power an individual has in world-historical context — is a general preoccupation of Rope Kid’s approach to narrative design. It complicates RPG convention in almost the exact same way historical materialism as a perspective complicates “great man” theories of history — they’re different approaches to making sense of how things work. Concomitant to that, I think one of the reasons gamers can be so ambivalent toward these games is that (per their usual) gamers are not very articulate in what they want out of RPGs. Less charitably, you could say the way they understand and consume stories is at cross-purposes with they say / think they want. They want something less archetypal than simplest myth but more gratifying and indulgent than reality. Pentiment is a “small stakes” game comparative to a Bioware standard, but players still want to feel important in the fiction, or else they still reflexively assume they are important, such that an honest reflection of personal power in a given scenario feels like a humbling, or a punishment. But that’s not the game’s problem. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 21:46
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Now I’ve finished it I really feel that Act III dragged it down somewhat. It felt very obvious during this Act that the story was far more on rails than it had been previously. I get that, there’s obviously the need to tie everything up and perhaps in the first two acts there was a bit of sleight of hand hiding how little your choices mattered, but it was disappointing. I’m still going to play it again just to try a couple of things, but post Act III, a high 7/10 for me. The art is still fantastic though. Pork Pie Hat fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 00:33
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Anyone else read The Name of the Rose because of this game? It rules?? way more gay monks than Pentiment at least one more
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Nov 28, 2023 01:29
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I did read it because of this game and it does indeed rule. Great book.
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Nov 28, 2023 05:31
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It's certainly the only fictional work by Eco I was able to properly enjoy (not that I've seriously perused his bibliography).
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Nov 28, 2023 06:56
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It's my favorite of his, but I also think Foucault's Pendulum is superb. ropekid do a follow-up to Pentiment set in 1970s Milan about a murder mystery involving vanity publishers!
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Nov 28, 2023 06:58
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I shamefully stopped reading Foucault's Pendulum about 80% of the way through, looked up a plot synopsis of the rest (which contained no surprises), and moved on. The premise was great, I was hooked early on, and it seemed to be building to something, but it just dragged on and on and by over three quarters through it felt like the main inciting event had not even happened yet and my attention started slipping hard. Maybe having read it after the age of Pizzagate and Qanon just took some of the wind out of the story arc for me, given that it's a "post-truth" story, and it's not hard to picture a current-generation framing of the story involving the occultist antagonists self-publishing their manuscripts on Amazon and ranting about being shadowbanned on Twitter and Elon Musk getting in on it somehow. Shame though because Name of the Rose is one of my favourite books.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:54
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I think Foucault's Pendulum is a great book and it was formative for me, but I totally understand that today it reads very differently compared to times when people could entertain the idea of the end of history. The ideas of conspiracies are too mainstream nowadays. It's probably a fault of X-Files, The Matrix and even Dan Brown rather than Eco, but in any case, reading it today is probably like watching Psycho or some other genre-defining movie that got copied and parodied to death.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:07
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It's Baudolino for me, I read it as a kid and just loved it.
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Nov 28, 2023 21:13
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Heyyy the Pentiment soundtrack on vinyl is back up! Finally got it!
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Dec 1, 2023 18:16
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 Thank you Rope Kid 
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Dec 1, 2023 18:54
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for maximum teuton play this board game while listening to pentiment ost
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Dec 1, 2023 19:14
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Name of the Rose is an excellent book, though quite long. Many people would likely be displeased by its ending, not me though. I got Pentiment because of NotR. I fell off about halfway in the third act due to life, but will likely finish it. I found it to actually be quite unlike NotR except in terms of it being an obvious inspiration and similar setting. This is fine, and the story is great for what it is. I really disagree with the notion that the player is not supposed to feel like they have direct agency in what happens in the story due to the player's actions, and that these "failures" are simply how the wheel of fate turns in Andreas' (and our) world. I didn't feel like they sold this world as so real and autonomous that there was no "perfect path". Quite the opposite for me, especially with how character creation works and how many choices you do make in the game. This genre usually has a perfect path/perfect ending, as most games of this type have this so if they were trying to subvert this they did a really bad job showing it. I was even looking for it due to how NotR subverts aspects of the mystery novel. Even though it dovetails nicely with NotR it is quite frustrating that there are no confirmed answers to the various murders, and at least for act I, little credence paid to your decision for the rest of the story.. Overall an excellent game with a great story though, and many artistic flourishes that made it a joy to play through.
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Dec 1, 2023 19:20
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Did the previous batch of vinyl ship? I could have sworn I bought it but it’s been a while and hasn’t showed up…
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Dec 1, 2023 22:42
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Many were on backorder. The backorders started being filled earlier this week. Today the gear shop opened for new orders.
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Dec 1, 2023 23:12
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Oh yeah, they sent me an email about the back order that I missed somehow, even included a discount code. Shame the only thing I wanted from that store was the Pentiment vinyl!
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Dec 2, 2023 00:09
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I have nothing to play it on nor anywhere to display it so I haven't bought the vinyl. But... 
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Dec 3, 2023 00:46
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eating only apples posted:I have nothing to play it on nor anywhere to display it so I haven't bought the vinyl. But... Any interest in getting a record player or just not the time for it? Doesn't need to be super expensive!
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Dec 3, 2023 04:08
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Are there any good comparisons in sound quality of the different versions of the soundtrack? I have a record player myself that is of questionable quality and reliability. It hasnt been used in awhile, so I hope it works! Might be in the market for buying a new record player.
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Dec 3, 2023 04:17
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My copy of the vinyl soundtrack was suppose to arrive today but didn't. 
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Dec 6, 2023 05:56
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Mine arrived today. Love the packaging and the vinyl itself. Sounds amazing!
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Dec 7, 2023 20:01
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https://x.com/jesawyer/status/1736461215491338600?s=20
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Dec 17, 2023 20:02
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Hey ropekid, when is the Pentiment Ultimate Edition coming out. We're definitely getting one right? e:hoping it comes with some MS exclusive goodies like a master chief and doom guy skins for Andreas
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Dec 17, 2023 20:04
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| # ? May 5, 2024 13:52 |
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Started my first replay as a theologian occultist astronomer. Game is indeed still amazing. Gonna try and play it extremely different, having some foresight this time, and wanna check out that new area. I know it’s not like game changing, but more people to talk to is awesome.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:22
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