#Max was murdering them with that goddamn rocket

[scrumptiousartisanheart]

2 fucking AM (pun not intended) FOR THIS?

I'm lucky that I'll be drunk during the race because watching Charles battle those 5 will be something to forget.

Good luck sweet boy...

[human-south-of-north-pole]

Obligatory Cyberpunk 2077 rant

(Spoilers, duh; also I'm an absolute noob)

Somehow I didn't enjoy the game, and I think I may have figured out why.

I guess I approached the game with the wrong expectations.

I expected there to be more gang politics. You had a goddamn trailer about gangs. I expected to make allies and enemies. To fight in battles between them. Turn the streets of night city into a warzone. I didn't expect all gangs to still exist once I finished the game. Or at least make interacting with them in any way more meaningful than changing the voice lines of your enemies/friends. Change the items shops have to offer. I didn't notice a diffence in combat styles, but I may just be inattentive. You changed the cars, why not the rest?

I expected to not only see the skyscrapers from the outside (with a few exceptions). I expected to have firefights on rooftops and apartments, to jump across skybridges. Maybe fly from rooftop to rooftop in a helicopter?

I expected the corporations to not be distant entities which do... Something? I expected to be involved in their actions. To work for various employees. To hack the cameras of boardrooms, steal files, to manipulate, persuade or blackmail my opponents. (Don't get me wrong, there are "steal file" type missions, except they don't matter at all)

Perhaps I even hoped to be able to play my enemies against another. Frame a rival gang for the murder of a corpo.

This is the big one:

And I guess I didn't expect the world to be so horrible, the story so unsatifyingly sad. I was under no illusion that I would be playing in a dystopia. But I was also expecting that I would be playing as an overpowered protagonist killing machine (and in combat, you do). From this I concluded that I would be able to "fix" the world. After all, noone can stop me. Except the plot, apparently. In cp2077, "mission completed" has a good chance of meaning either "nothing I cared about happened" or "someone I cared about died, and there was nothing I could do". And I'm not talking about a dramatic death; I'm talking about pointless deaths ofscreen, without me even beeing there. All important choices are between bad and worse (and of course the npcs will blame me for it). (Or maybe these are just the parts that I remember).

I expected to win. Or at least to be able to. To save my life. "Oh no, your body started rejecting you because the relic overwrote it with johnny. We only have an AI a that can swap engrams at will and the relic still stuck in my head. It was even designed to work on dead bodies. There is definitely nothing we can do. /s". And why? I get that raising the stakes last moments is a plot device or something, but not after I did all the things, shot all the npcs, made my way to the big glowing monolith and pressed the button labeled "you win". Not with zero foreshadowing. At this point I expect to have the credits roll, wake up and continue playing side missions (properly after the mission, none of that "reload last save" bs)

The last two paragraphs were major story complaints. People sometimes use the term "emotional rollercoaster", but rollercoaster engineers are artists. Every bend is just wide enough to not actually hurt you, every acceleration is just low enough to still be fun, and once you get off it, you enjoyed it. Cp2077 is a pair of rocket boosters and infinite 90° angles. The game can't decide if it wants to be a lighthearted power trip or whether you should experience total helplessness, leading me to enjoy neither. I do not care about floating items, t-posing enemies or what must be worst car AI since forever (even though I do appreciate the "drives to side of lane to let you pass easier" part), if you just make sure your game doesn't feel like it was designed to make you feel bad. I guess I expected the "game of the decade" to be happy. (Also, does anyone else find it weird that the ending clearly labeled "none of your friends die" is considered the bad ending?)

I am actually quite happy that you almost didn't do the whole "Skillchecks for better endings" and diplomacy skill bs, because it would have turned the game into "how must I invest my skill points to pass the next check", which I consider extremely boring. Slipped up in the last Delamain mission though.

There are a couple of small letdowns like that actually, for example, why is a 90k €$ motorbike worse than Jackie's arch, which you get for free long before you get 90k €$?

On the topic of €$, I actually quite like the 2077 slang.

Another note: what tf is the deal with max tac? They get their own special introduction in the into-car-trip and an ominous loading screen tip, and then just don't show up for the entire game???

I guess I also expected more diversity in items, especially Cyberware. The current one is fine, but I exped more than fine. There is still a bit of stuff locked for me, but my point still stands. You could have done something more with eyes and legs at least. Increase movement speed? Reduce fall damage? Increase max-tagged enemies count? Detect enemies though walls short range? Display camera fov? Honestly, I'd pay just to make the enemy highlight less obnoxious so that I can see if they are standing before or behind cover.

I expected crafting to be less boring. You have a whole skill tree for that! But it's installing generic mods, creating items, and a generic "upgrade" option that just adds a bit of damage. I expected to take my guns apart, build or configure scopes, firering-patterns, magazines, barrels, stocks, ammo types,... But I do absolutely love the "turn any weapon non-lethal" option.

And I expected this game to have a descent UI. Ignoring the glitchy HUD (actually, don't ignore it, pleaaaase make the minimap zoom out while driving), what's up with that inventory menu? How am I supposed to navigate that? Find aything? I get that you have to optimize for controllers, but seriously? Is there any real structure? You have your main page, which is nice, but then you have all the subpages, form which you can navigate to some others. Sometimes there are random elements dotted about? The Messages and shards menu are almost unusable. Have you never heard of "sort by new"? And the grouping is off anyway. Also, why tf do car advertisements not include the car's ps / curb weight?

Worst part is, I will come back to the game. I can just leave a broken world. I enjoy the combat. I even started to like driving with a keyboard. The scenery looks beautiful. But for some reason they need to keep telling me how terrible the world is and don't allow me to do anything about it. Maybe realistic, but if I wanted realistic, I wouldn't play a videogame. Overall it's not fun, at least for me.

Does anyone feel about the story like I do? The reviews mostly praised it iirc, but it just make me feel bad, and not in the enjoyable melancholy way.

</rant>

Sorry you had to read that.

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

So Attilan has less than 2,000 people living in it?  Like when Black Bolt and Max Bolt are teenagers, it’s 1,400 people, so this is being generous.  This is a lot of people having babies and no old people dying generous. 

This is so tiny!  So unbelievably tiny.  Like, this makes it so much more egregious that Medusa didn’t realize Auran could just regenerate?  How do you not know that?  She’s one of forty people in the entire fucking dome in your age cohort, you’ve known each other since you were kids, and she’s been your bodyguard for years.

Also, how do you wind up with downtrodden masses when you’re the size of a high school?  What the fuck are they even mining?  I just went with it before, but now that they’ve established that the twenty or thirty royal guards who staged the coup with Max represent something like 2% of the population, I suddenly have so many questions about what the fuck the underclass could possibly be mining that’s of enough value to Attilan that it’s a continuous activity.  I mean, you can’t mine for food?  I think NASA would have noticed a lot of offgassing if they were mining fuel?  It kind of looks like a coal mine, but that would require a natural history of the MCU’s moon to be so radically different from anything sane that I don’t even know how to begin addressing it.

Speaking of which, the guys helping Gorgon because he’s fighting for his king, and they had a king until Congress declared them a state?  Dear writers: There has actually been a recent goddamned film about this.  The Hawai’ian monarch deposed after we sent in the Marines was a queen.  It would have taken ten seconds to look it up and fix the line.  Also, I think those guys are pot farmers, which means that two separate Inhumans have gotten lost and blundered into two separate pot farms full of twitchy guys with guns willing to adopt weird strangers for no apparent reason.  I mean, Hawaii could give a shit about pot, but Oahu’s 600 square miles.  This seems statistically unlikely.

Though the teeny tiny size of the Inhuman homeland/city-state/postage stamp does cut them a little slack in terms of being ineffective.

“You’ve never seen anything like these elite warriors coming to fight me,” says Gorgon, to a bunch of guys who live in the same world as Ghost Rider, watched aliens fall out of a wormhole and fly around New York City on live tv, and ignored C-SPAN when a Congressman yelled at a dude with a super-public drinking problem for not letting the military also play with his robot rocket-armor.

The elite warriors coming to fight Gorgon: get distracted by the very existence of a forest. 

The most effective members of the elite squad--which Gorgon trained himself, he’s quick to say--turn out to be Auran, because she seems to actually like hitting people or at least to really not like Gorgon personally, and Mordis, who’s basically Cyclops in a gimp suit instead of glasses and who doesn’t want to be on this stupid mission.

Also, I’d like to take a fucking second and talk about how Inhumans really doesn’t feel like part of the shared universe?  And I mean that way beyond the basic problems of a lot of other stand-alone shows/movies, where you get awkward references to “the Incident” or the Avengers but you know Robert Downey Jr.’s never going to fucking fly in and blow up the bad guy with a cigar-sized rocket fired from his wrist launcher.  Daredevil’s never going to turn around and find himself face to face with Loki, the Punisher’s not going to try to kill Spider-Man, Agents of SHIELD aren’t going to arrest Robert Redford.  But they all go out of their way to assure us, the viewer, that they’re aware of these things, these people, these events.  However clunkily they’re handled, there are ripples from one property into the next. 

The closest we get here is a native Hawaiian with Inhuman ancestry and now-active powers asking if Black Bolt got bit by a radioactive bug, which sounds more like Deadpool making a Batman joke than universe texture, because it’s not like Spider-Man’s origin story is public knowledge.  The guy makes it clear he was just some dude before his transformation, so it’s not like a government agent cracking jokes about how super-beings get their powers.

Basically, Inhumans shows us the royal family watching the news on their little in-pool monitor.  Medusa knows what cars are, what traffic sounds like, in spite of never having been to earth.  Black Bolt’s been sending special ops missions to rescue earth-bound Inhumans whose transformations have put them in danger from human governments.  Everything seems to be taking place now--people are running around with smartphones and modern cars--meaning the royal family should all be aware that superpowered jackasses and weird science-magic gods and helicarriers are things. 

But when Gorgon spouts off about the soldiers he’s with having no idea what’s coming, it doesn’t feel like arrogance--it feels like he’s talking about a world where he hasn’t watched the Hulk trash a skyscraper live on CNN, where he didn’t see replay after replay after replay of a flying dude with a magic hammer fight a levitating space-grub the size of a whale on the news, where an army of repulsor-powered malevolent super-robots didn’t fly off with an entire fucking city.  It feels like the show’s taking place on a version of earth where Inhumans are more or less the weirdest things going on.  Given how careful showrunners have otherwise been about keeping properties tangibly within the bounds of the shared universe, and the fact that Marvel gave the first two eps a theatrical release, it’s weird and vaguely offputting.

Bonus round: Karnak is captured by pot farmers, one of whom wants to kill him to keep from being discovered, and he ineffectively kicks a table over.  The guy who wants to kill him looks at him and goes “What the fuck, dude, why’d you do that?” and one of the other pot farmers looks at the dude and goes “I don’t know, Chad, maybe he’s mad you just decided to murder him?” and there is nothing you can say to convince me that line wasn’t ad-libbed.

For those of you keeping score at home, the show’s three episodes in and has featured one of the three prominent female characters getting depowered, and both Asian actors’ characters being either killed or depowered.  So, you know, not great, Bob.

So far the most realistic thing in the whole 2.5 hours of show has been the cops not fucking bothering to hand the guy who can’t speak a notepad and a pencil instead of carrying on like him not telling them his name is a goddamned affront to their authority.  Like, it’s stupid, but also completely believable.