#but choosing mean dialogue options is sooo hard for me like

[area420]

smiles at you evilly

[girlfromthecrypt]

I finally got to read the update!! Don't mind me rambling a bit about everything I loved about it...

I really enjoyed the beginning of this chapter.  Being playful with Basil in the van is super cute. It was interesting to see Reem and Basil not getting along a little bit, it makes me intrigued about if there will be any cracks in our little friend group's foundation that might start to show. And if so what that might mean when things start going bad.

Also, Anita is adorable!! It had me giggling when she called everyone attractive--I loved getting to tease her about it afterwards. I chose to room with her and the siblings--though the thought of Basil sleeping alone makes me nervous for the future...

Definitely Looking at Anita's comment about how your sanity starts slipping when you go without sleep. I'm SO eager to reach the horror. Though the slightly slower, cheerful beginning is so great. I love getting to know everyone and seeing them happy and bonding, knowing that there's horror on the horizon...

Javier talking about his mom marrying his dad straight up made me snort laugh. I work with kids and they truly do say the most out of pocket things. It's very true to life. And ooooh, Basil and Gabriel just...staring at the woods got me so hyped. Reading that scene gave me a proper thrill, that little 'heart-pounding-faster' feeling that makes me love horror so so much.

Hell yes at getting to tell the kids a scary story!! I remember being a kid and hearing classics like Don't Turn on the Light and being scared out of my socks. It's sooo fun to be able to play at passing that on to a whole new generation!! I'm 100% in to romance Basil, but this update makes me want to do a run where I romance Anita. She's so so cute. And the siblings both are great in their own ways... I'm sensing that I'll end up doing runs for each of the ROs, you've made such fun and sweet characters!

Aaah that ending!!!! Genuinely terrifying, and made me so anxious about the kids!! I KNOW my MC is going to be hard-pressed to keep them all safe. I can't wait to see what comes next!! I love how you write characters, they're all so likable and distinct!! This was such a good update, it makes me really eager for more.

HI (omg it's that cool person) HIIII <3

Thank you so much for this. I'll have you know I reread this ask like three times and I'm probably gonna read it all over again tomorrow bc it gives me life. I can't express how happy I am that you cared to write such a long ask bc of my IF if all things. Thank you, it made my day.

Basil and Anita's on-the-road scenes in the van were my favorite to write!! And yes, there's certainly a bit of tension in the group. MCs with high sociability or perception will be able to pick up on this, also on George's fondness for a certain colleague--- but don't worry, no one's at each other's throats. Yet.

And yay, some Anita appreciation!! Cut her some slack, she's not used to being around hot people and between a possibly cute MC and the FUCKING MALAKS of all people... yeah. It's not easy for her.

Ok so you know that you can also sleep in the van with Basil if your relationship stat/his approval of you is strong enough? I hope that was clear from the dialogue options and you just chose the cabin despite of it, bc if not, I might have to rewrite the choice. Furthermore, while I can see why you'd be worried for him, I'd be more concerned for an MC who chooses to sleep alone ;) [yes, this is me hinting at a future horror scenario possibly unique to that route].

Ah yes, Javier, my son <3 lol. Nahhh I don't favor any of the campers. Though, if I had to pick which one I liked to write the most, it'd probably be him.

Now I feel bad haha. Ok but srsly, kids can be VERY outspoken, and Javier especially has noooo social filter. You might notice that some of the campers' traits specifically correspond to some of the ROs' characteristics... Looking at Gabriel and Basil here.

Both campfire stories are also really close to my own heart, so I jumped at the chance to include them. As for the ROs, I do hope you'll do a run for each of them! I'm trying quite hard to make it difficult to choose between them ;)

I love that the ending hit the way it was supposed to. If you want to know what's up next, I have one word for you: confusion. Lots of confusion.

See, I need to give this story a slow, slice-of-life start, bc purely from a narrative standpoint, it wouldn't make sense for the horror to come out guns blazing. That's why the MC will at first be the only one to experience the horrors and for the horrors to (seemingly) originate from one of the kids, bc if it was more dramatic and the threat was to come from an exterior source, everyone would just pack up and flee and then the story would be over. That's what I figure.

Anyhow, I'm so glad I still got you hooked with this project. Thanks so much for this super long message.

[arainaizevran]

ok so i'm going to ask: is pwotr worth playing? i'm asking as a huge bg3/da fan - what's the character creation like (if any), how is the story and are the npcs good? is the battle system comparable at all?

hello ^_^ if you like CRPGs, it's likely you'll enjoy pwotr too! the game often goes on sale on steam so i'd advise you to wait or perhaps visit fitgirl if you wanna try it out first. i wrote a spoiler free Gamer Review™ here but i'll also answer your specific questions:

compared to da and bg3, the character creation in pwotr is massive. there's sooo many choices from the class selection alone! that might be overwhelming, but there's also indicators for which classes are beginner friendly and there are pre-generated builds/characters you can use so you don't have to think about all that.

pwotr is isometric in graphics, like hades and disco elysium, so your character's appearance is more simplified than bg3/da. you'll also choose one of the provided art portraits to represent your character or you can use your own.

the game is text heavy with minimal voice acting so there's definitely a lot of reading. the story itself is compelling to me. the main premise is: you gain mysterious powers and become in charge of an army to close an interplanar rift called the worldwound. you don't need to know much about pathfinder lore to understand what's happening, and there's also a feature where you can hover over certain terms in dialogue and it'll give context as to what it means.

there's 5 acts and a prologue. act 4 has a tonal shift which i personally like. act 5 kiiiinda falls off in terms of pacing, but it's still not as egregious as bg3's act 3 lol.

the companions and NPCs are great! i like most of the companions, they're all complex to me. i might not care for maybe one or two of them but there's also like 12 companions so that's still 10 out of 12. the companion quests are done well imo (except for nenio's, but that's a problem with puzzle design and not her story), and your choices and actions actually matter and have consequences throughout the game. decisions made in earlier acts can and will impact later acts as well as companions' endings :-)

as for the combat -- it's a mix of real-time with pause (dragon age) and turn-based (bg3). you can switch between the two modes with the press of a button, so if the battle is going too slow, just go real-time, and if a fight is too hard, go turn-based for better strategizing. pwotr is based on the pathfinder system, and it has some similarities with dnd so certain terms may already be familiar to you if you played bg3. it's still worth reading what the spells do because they can be different at times.

the enemy encounter/level/puzzle designs leave much to be desired though, and that might be my biggest criticism of the game. there's quite a lot of random encounters that don't really matter. some encounters are way too strong for the current party level so i got into the habit of saving before entering a room just in case my party gets fucked by some optional boss mob 😭 i played on normal difficulty and i fared well up until the end of act 3 where there's a difficulty spike and i turned it down to casual. it might also be helpful to look up guides on youtube so you don't end up like me lol.

this got long so uhh i'll wrap it up by saying i enjoyed pwotr and like i said, if you like CRPGs you'll probably like this one too! :-)

[chidoroki]

Head empty, pre-TPN season 2 thoughts only.

Normally I don’t even bother with hiding spoilers but since the new season is so close I’ll put everything below a cut (if tumblr cooperates) because I do want anime-onlys to enjoy the season with as little knowledge to what madness is about to happen as possible. This is just a bunch of notes that filled my head over the past couple days.. weeks? A long time.. and if I didn’t write them all down somewhere I wouldn’t stop thinking about them.. so if you understand this whole mess, then kudos to you.

So, here’s your post-season 1/ch37+ spoiler warning.

Demon language:

With Mujika and Sonju making their grand first appearances, I hope actually implement the demon language this time?

The only word spoken in the language in season 1 was the demon god’s name, which was just changed to “Him” (sub) or “The One” (dub), so ignoring it there was fine.

Granted, our demon friends don’t say much in their language during the upcoming arc, aside from this moment in ch48, but I can see the anime passing it off as a mere whisper between the two of them just so they don’t have to worry about it.

I don’t recall any of the GP poachers using the language though.. right? Pretty sure they don’t..

Anyways, all I’m saying is that they better figure something out by the Ayshe shows up way later in future seasons.

Episode count? 24?

Short answer: I don’t think so? Did once, but stuff happened. Anyways..

Season 1 ended in March 2019, which is also when we learned we were getting a second season and once we found later on that S2 was originally going to air in October 2020, I immediately thought we were getting about 24 eps.

I thought with all that time between seasons, 24 eps would be reasonable and that S2 would end at ch101. S1 managed to adapt 37 chapters, so 64 chapters in a season twice as long sound decent enough, right?

By the time we reach ch101, it would give us the demon forest, shelter B06-32, Goldy Pond and the short trip to Cuvitidala. (all of which would make this long wait for s2 sooo worth it btw.)

By this point we learn a bunch about the outside world, Norman being alive, what happened to Phil, and the demon bastard himself.

I bring up ch101 as a stopping point because it’s the last chapter before the two year time skip and.. I honestly can’t see them doing a time skip mid-season?

I mean, they could if they wanted to, I guess? Having everyone age up suddenly between episodes via a montage, a quick summary or even flashbacks of what we missed.. but maybe at the start of a season? Not in the middle.

Right now we know anime original scenes are going to be included into season 2 so I’m kinda hoping that once we do eventually reach the time skip we learn more about the search Emma’s group went on for T7W/golden water/temples.

I counted. If S2 does indeed get this many episodes, ep23 (or 22, if there’s a break in between somewhere or whatever) will land on my birthday and you can bet I’ll be beyond happy

HOWEVER! all the hope I once had about a 24ep season vanished due to the clusterfuck that was 2020. Thanks to the worldwide pandemic, many anime were put on hold and pushed back several months, with TPN airing this month rather than the original October date.

It was a bummer hearing about the delay at first but I never complained about it. I much rather have the studios prioritize their employee’s health over production.

Even if S2 did reach ch101, or even Goldy Pond, they would need to find a ton of new voice actors, and with how the world is working now.. eh, I have some doubts.

Cloverworks also has two other series airing this month aside from TPN so needless to say they’ll be a bit busy, especially if employees are still working from home, social distancing, or however they’re managing to produce these anime.

So, episode count.. 12?

The main reason I have a hard time grasping the idea of another 12ep season at all is because.. I don’t know where it’ll be a decent place for it to stop?

S1 ending at ch37 with the kids escaping? Perfect. You can’t question that decision. But now? When a whole bunch of craziness is about happen? How do you choose another perfect moment to end a season with?

No matter how many anime original scenes they have planned for the demon forest, I believe we’ll at least reach B06-32, which will get us to ch52.

Could they go farther? Sure. Perhaps ending at ch59-60? It would leave us off with Emma & Ray leaving the comfort of the shelter to follow Yuugo into yet another demon infested forest, much like how S1 left off, as the escapees left their once safe, comfortable life into the unknown world.

Or end at ch64? After Emma gets snatched by the poachers? It could work. It would certainly leave everyone wanting more, especially us manga readers because goddamn the GP arc would be SO close!

Perhaps ch74 after seeing Norman alive? Just so it’s not a big darn secret anymore to those who are going into this season blind? (how do people manage to stay anime only? i’m not trying to make anyone feel bad.. i’m just impressed? i caught up to the manga right after s1 because i didn’t have the self control to wait!)

Ending on that chapter would be so bittersweet to me.. because you know what appears in ch75 and it’s literally one of the only things I care about.

S2 preview trailers already teased some of the demon forest scenes I’m most excited about, so the only things left that will truly excite me are Yuugo and that darn outfit. (seriously, whenever we do get to see emma in her gp outfit for the first time, someone better scream at me so i can die from happiness.)

Okay, and all the GP kids too.. especially their trio!

Could they fit the Goldy Pond arc into a 12 episode season along with every other event that came before it? I.. seriously hope not? 

Compared to s1, which was very dialogue heavy, GP is about as action packed as we’re gonna get in the near future, and those scenes are going to fly by once they get put into motion.

Quick example (because it was recent and i can’t think of something else atm): the Overhaul arc from My Hero Academia. Off the top my head it was about 40 total ch? That arc took up half of the show’s S4, which was a total 25 eps.

So with the GP ending at ch96, it’ll give us about 20-30 chapters (depending on where you personally see the start of this arc I guess? once yuugo leads the duo through the forest, when emma gets snatched or when the battle actually starts)

If GP were to happen in s2 where there’s 12 episodes.. literally everything would be so fast paced and I don’t want them to rush anything or leave stuff out?

Other options?

It’s very wishful thinking and I would be getting my hopes up for nothing, because I know it won’t happen, but I could possibly see them fitting GP arc if S2 was made up of 18eps?

6 eps for the demon forest, 6 for Goldy pPond, the remaining 6 to accommodate B06-32, Cuvitidala and any other anime original scenes as they wish.

Although fitting about 64 chapters into 12-18 episodes sounds a bit much.. but not really? I seriously have no idea at this point how much story we’re going to cover this season.

Could I perhaps place all my hopes towards a second cour later this year? Like for the summer.. or would I be expecting too much?

This all could’ve been avoided if they just tell us! Seriously, I’ve been thinking about episode count since last year.. and now you have to deal with this mindless chatter of mine.

I’d honestly be okay with another 12ep season though. We waited this long that I’ll just be excited to see all the children again.

Anime-only scenes:

Those 3 days the children spent learning from our demon friends? Yes please! Did you know Emma not only learned how to use a bow and arrow but a freakin’ harpoon as well? Like.. hello?? I must see this!

Perhaps they’ll even adopt some of the extra pages from some of the chapters, like they did in S1 with the flashback of Norman being sick in ep10.

I know this will be such a high hope, but I remember in ch177 how Emma claims that after they escaped, they all remembered how kind Isabella really was, so if they decide to adapt the extras from ch41-42 & ch45, I’ll cry.

And these pages? Cloverworks, please..

I’m literally begging here..

Especially these two! Even though I still doubt we’ll reach Goldy Pond if we get 12eps.. but in the future! Please!

Other random nonsense:

I may or may not get emotional upon seeing Isabella at the very start when she goes to confront Grandma Sarah. If her hair is kept down as it was at the end of S1 then I’ll give the anime staff my sincere thanks.

We only heard 15 seconds of “Identity” and yet it has been living in my head rent free ever since that trailer dropped. I need to hear the full song sooo damn badly, y’all have no idea.

Here’s hoping they don’t cut out the inner monologues again. At this moment I don’t remember any specific ones from the demon forest I want to see but I’m sure they’re present.

I’m ready to die at every cute Chris moment they give us.. and this entire scene where the kids scold Ray. 

Literally every scene with Emma & Ray. They’re my top 2 favorites from this series okay? Of course I’m going to fangirl over them. (they already showed the hug in one of the trailers and i damn near cried)

If we see him, (which i’m sure we will, but i still have tiny some doubts) I hope they give Yuugo a fantastic voice actor.

Also, his nicknames for everyone!! Literally everything about that man I’m hyped for.

Again, very doubtful we’ll get GP in a 12ep season, but whenever that arc decides to grace us with its presence, “63194” better play on full blast when ch92-93 gets animated.

Speaking of music, while I’m completely excited to hear the new OST that Obata has in store for us (thank god he’s doing this season again btw!), I hope we hear some of those unused tracks from the first season, specifically “Their Own Thoughts.”

Every time Emma mentions their future, their goals or how her family will always be together, I’ll cry. (thanks demon god and your stupid reward)

Yes I’ll be doing those reaction posts (if you follow me i’m sure you’ve seen them by now) after every new episode as I do with other series I watch.. once I survive the usual long day at work, avoiding anything TPN related so I can watch in peace and quiet when I finally get home.. damn it, im already so anxious, help.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

My friend shared with me this reddit thread where someone outlined a list of features they claim are “missing” from CP2077, and because I’m me and like to rant, I wanted to go through it and agree/disagree based on what I think should or shouldn’t be in the game.

So probably spoilers below, at least for gameplay.

- Walk toggle for keyboard.

Agree.

- Key re-mapping for certain elements.

Agree. The game has some rebinding functions, but not enough to be honest.

- Accessibility features missing (ie: text scaling for menus).

Agree.

- In-game benchmark feature.

Personally, I think this is somewhat extraneous and I wouldn’t knock a game for not having it since most games don’t, but sure if they add it I wouldn’t complain.

- Dash should be a separate key and not a double press of walking key.

HARD agree. It’s beyond me that they thought it was okay to have that as-is, honestly. It makes moving around while sneaking a huge pain because you accidentally dodge which puts you into a standing position which can reveal you easily. At the absolute least, they should disable dodging when crouched, but ideally allow it to be rebound to something else.

- Crouch and skip dialogue should not share the same key.

Again, HARD agree. It’s possible to rebind the key (I certainly did) but something I noticed is that, while the dialogue no longer skips when I press crouch, it doesn’t seem to register the crouch button at all while in dialogue, meaning you can’t uncrouch if in dialogue.

- The minimap is too zoomed in to be helpful in many cases.

I only noticed this as an issue while driving, personally. You’ll be going 90mph down the freeway and not know that your turn is coming up until you’re already 90 miles beyond it. Outside of that, I’m not sure why you’d need the minimap zoomed out but hey if it fixes it while driving, I’m for it. Agree.

- Missing a toggle aim feature.

Quality of life, sure. I won’t use it, but agree.

- Ability to respec attributes (Note: Existing item respecs perks only)

Personally, I disagree with this. I think respeccing perks is fine because some of the perks are kinda lame so I can understand wanting to undo that, but I feel like respeccing attributes would sort of negate the purpose of developing a character a certain way. It makes multiple playthroughs more valid, forcing you to develop your different characters different ways. Sooo disagree.

- Ability to disable objective marker.

Agree. Mild nuisance to be sure, but still a nuisance never the less.

- Ability to lower ADS sensitivity.

Quality of life, sure. Agree.

- Add proper ultrawide (21:9, 32:9) support.

Quality of life, sure. Agree.

- Add loot by area or/and autoloot feature.

Eh... I don’t know. I think there should be a “scrap item” button when looting added but I’m unsure about a loot all or autoloot feature. It’s a change that I personally think falls under “optimizing the play out of the game”. Disagree.

- Add “stash all” feature.

And then some. Inventory management is atrocious in this game, it’s actually unreal how they thought it was okay to ship it like that. You can only manage one item at a time, and the UI needs to completely reload each time you do. It’s obscene. Hard agree.

- Add transparency option for HUD elements.

Quality of life, sure. Agree.

- Add way to remove mods from unequipped weapons.

This was actually sort of news to me. I’ve just been scrapping weapons I unequip with the mods still attached, assuming the mods were just going back to my inventory. Evidently that’s not been the case, but I haven’t actually noticed it as an issue because mods are so frequently found. A bit arguable, to be sure, but I don’t see why guns couldn’t return their mods automatically when dismantled. So agree, I guess.

- Add toggle mouse acceleration.

Quality of life, sure. Agree.

- Driving markers and onscreen trajectory (alternative GPS).

I don’t actually know what this means. Does this mean have the line leading to your objective be in-world as opposed to the minimap? I can maybe see that being a thing, I guess. If that’s the case, agree.

- Body slider customization (height, weight, muscle mass).

Eh...I’m ambivalent on this one. It seems extraneous in that it’s unnecessary and just something someone wants rather than something the game strongly needs, but at the same time, with as much marketing that went into how customizable your character is in this game, it’s sort of depressing how poor the character customization really is. Because of that, part of me wants to agree with this, on the grounds that the game was sort of sold to us this way. So I’ll say I tentatively agree.

- Very few options for some of the character creation features (hair colour, tattoos, skin complexion, scars, etc).

See above.

- Animations for eating and drinking (excluding scripted ones).

The problem with adding animations to consumables is that not only would you need one for each type of consumable but that the animation would then need to completely play out each time, which can give players burnout. Going to have to disagree with this one.

- Unable to remove underwear outside of inventory.

I assume this means giving the player the ability to run around stark naked as opposed to in your underwear, and weirdly enough I have to agree. Much like the character customization, a significant amount of attention was paid to the fact that this game has nudity, and yet nothing is done with it. Even in the areas where you’d expect nudity to play a part (I.e. having sex, showering, etc.) it doesn’t, so it begs the question why even implement it?

- Vehicle customization.

This is going to maybe sound odd given my next answer but I kind of agree with this one to an extent. You can buy a fair amount of vehicles in the game, but you can’t customize any of them. At the very least, changing it’s colour and/or design I think is warranted.

- Apartment customization.

This I disagree with, again, to an extent. This isn’t Fallout 4 or the Sims, I don’t think there needs to be a fleshed-out feature to decorate your apartment. I do however think that some changes to it would be nice, even if they’re just preset changes. Like maybe the layout of misc. objects in your apartment changes as time goes on. Shit moves around, I don’t know. Or maybe you can pay for preset additions, like buying a lamp or poster or something that always goes in the same spot, but lets you feel like you live there I guess. Ultimately though, this is completely extra and unnecessary. Disagree.

- Cosmetic slots or transmog feature.

Hard agree. Again, customization of your character was made out to be a big deal, so let us wear the clothes we want to wear. The number of times I’ve had to run out in a skirt that says “Bitch” on it and a bra as a man simply because they’re my best clothes is unreal.

- Very few actual merchant stores in quantity and variety.

Quantity, I somewhat agree. The map could do with a few more of each type of merchant, although the map does sometimes already feel cluttered so perhaps not. Variety however, I disagree. I think there’s plenty variety in terms of merchants, I’m not sure what else you’d need. There’s merchants for guns, clothes, hacks, cyberware, resources, and consumables. What else is there.

- No garages or parking lots.

I assume this is related to owning multiple vehicles which I don’t yet so I’m not sure I understand where this argument is coming from. There is a parking garage at your apartment, so I don’t see why that couldn’t be a garage you can use, but ultimately I can’t weigh in on this without more information.

- Crowds have low level of reactivity and awareness to the game world.

This one bugs me because it’s like how much reactivity do non-interactable NPCs need? They run away from cars and violence. They say “oh shit” lines when you’re driving into them or shooting near them or they see a body, etc. What more do you need? Gonna have to disagree.

- Very few interactive NPCs outside of missions with meaningful dialogue.

See above and literally every open world game ever.

- Very few options to meaningfully construct a personality to V. You get to choose mission endings, but not an actual persona.

I disagree, I think you can pretty comfortably pick a persona for V. I mean it’s not the most advanced system in the world, no, but every game is going to limit your options. You can choose to be an asshole, a scumbag, a nice guy, honest, a liar, competent, incompetent, etc. It all depends on your attributes and what dialogue options you pick really.

- Lack of non-action oriented stories and quests about meaningful themes of cyberpunk dystopia.

This one I sort of agree with, but then again I’m a huge philosophy nerd so I generally can’t get enough philosophy in my games. I want every game to be as deep as Bioshock. I still have a long way to go in CP2077, so perhaps the quests get better, but many of them I’ve not found super interesting. Some have been memorable, sure, but very few, and of those not many are memorable for fitting the Cyberpunk theme explicitly.

- Player cannot smoke.

This one is just funny to me because, yeah in an RPG it’s not ideal to railroad the player, but because of the way the story goes, V doesn’t smoke. All so they can have a few funny lines of dialogue in the story, but w/e I’m okay without smoking.

- Weapon mods and skill trees largely irrelevant outside of marginal and mostly numerical improvements to combat.

I kind of agree with this. To be honest, I don’t even look at any of the stats outside of DPS and I get along just fine. I am playing on normal, so perhaps at a higher difficult these things matter more, but I can’t imagine how much more. So sure, I agree.

- Lack of emergent gameplay events in the game world (ie: dynamic and random triggers).

This falls under “how much is enough”, similar to the bit about the NPC interactions. From what I’ve seen so far, the only in-world ‘events’ that transpire are shootouts between cops and gangs that aren’t marked on your map as predetermined events. Could there be more? Sure, I guess. Does there need to be more? Eh, not really.

- Unable to alter character’s appearance (barbershop, tattoo parlors, plastic surgeon).

Agree. One mission I did, one of the rewards I received was a tattoo which made me think I was going to frequently unlock new customization aspects like that, but it ended up being a piece of cyberware for some odd reason. I think it would be neat if you didn’t have every bit of customization unlocked from the start and could change your appearance as you go unlocking more things.

- Lack of character reflection outside of the few mirrors available. This furthers the disconnection between the player and the character.

This was something I was thinking about genuinely, when standing in front of a mirror. A mirror has to be ‘activated’ in order to start showing your reflection, which I thought was odd, but I assumed it was because of performance issues which makes sense. At one point, even though my PC can’t run the game at ultra graphics, I switched over to it to see if mirrors would reflect all the time but they do not. I don’t however think we need to see our character all the time but more would certainly be better.

- No ownership of items (you can rob NPCs under their nose).

Yeeeeah, this bit I find kinda odd to be honest, especially because the UI for looting items is red which is commonly the colour used to denote “this item is owned and picking it up constitutes as theft”. Part of me thinks that the reason items don’t have ownership though is because of how clunky the stealth system is. There’s no way of knowing if an NPC can ‘see’ you or not. I feel like this is also why when you break a glass bottle or something, it doesn’t alert enemies because that would be so broken in this game because things explode all the time for no reason at all, you’d never be able to steal period. So I feel like no item ownership is because the developers know their game wouldn’t be fun with it.

- No prison or lasting crime system.

The lack of a prison is sort of explained (very briefly) in-game. The prisons are just way too overcrowded, and the police are basically a paramilitary organization who shoot on sight anyways, so there’s really no need for prisons. That said, committing a crime doesn’t have lasting consequences but again I think this is because the game knows that it’s too clunky to punish players for that. Driving is so wonky in this game, imagine if running over an NPC punished you beyond the small threat of police intervention? It would be unbearable.

- Wanted system is largely underdeveloped, with cops spawning out of nowhere and disappearing shortly after.

Yeah it is a little scuffed how cops just appear, that I will agree with.

- Cybernetics lack variety in meaningful choices that alter gameplay (except for limb weapons). Deus Ex has far more impactful mods that actually change the way you approach combat.

While I do sort of agree with there being a lack of variety, I feel the comparison to Deus Ex is a bit unfair. Deus Ex used cybernetics as it’s skill tree/progression system. When you leveled up in Deus Ex, you installed new cybernetics. That’s not the case in CP2077 though. I do however believe that outside of the legs, arms, and hands, not much really changes. I’m not sure what else they could do, but more would certainly be nice.

- The lifepaths are frustratingly brief and have little impact other than dialogue choices. V is essentially the same character regardless of path.

I can’t speak much to this because I haven’t even finished my first playthrough yet, but I will admit that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that comes from your lifepath. I’m playing as a Street Kid, and as someone who supposedly grew up on the streets, running with gangs, getting to know everyone, etc., it seems like there should be a bit more maybe. Like maybe Street Kids start with more gang rep because everyone knows who you are because you grew up together. The game tries to explain this away with “you went away for two years and have just recently come back” but right off the bat you meet one of the fixers who you knew and worked for before you left as if you were old friends, and two measly years is not enough for everyone to just forget who you are.

The traffic AI is lackluster and there are too few cars driving around for a large metropolis.

Disagree. There are plenty of cars for a reasonable driving experience. I don’t know if this guy was expecting bumper-to-bumper LA traffic or what, but there are plenty of cars to make the world feel alive and full while not being obnoxious and make driving impossible.

- Trains were obviously cut, even though the whole infrastructure is visible.

I genuinely don’t even know what this is referring to so I won’t comment on it.

- The world interaction is quite minimal. Among items that should be interactive: chairs, benches, toilets, stools, sinks, gym equipment, light fixtures, restaurant menus, smartphones, taxi, trash bins and dumpsters, most merchant stalls, microwaves, dancing floors, gaming tables, arcards.

This is a lot but some of it I agree with. You should be able to sit down on a lot more chairs, but at the same time I kinda understand why you can’t. The world is littered with places to sit, so much so that “Press F to Sit” would be on your screen 99% of the time. Taxis I was actually extremely disappointed were not in the game. The game literally sets up from the beginning that being a passenger in a car is a thing which gives you the impression that it’s a thing that can happen often, and that you’re able to either sit through the car ride or skip it altogether. I thought for sure that fast travel was going to constitute you hailing  cab and it taking you to wherever you’ve marked on your map, with the option to sit through the ride or skip it at-will. It’s actually a huge disappointment that that’s not the case (I even had my friend who is playing as a Corpo test whether Delamaine was specific to Corpos-only but alas, it didn’t work).

- You cannot preview wardrobe and weapon purchases.

I’ve not actually bought any guns or clothes so I can’t comment on this.

- There is no reliable cover system.

This one is odd because there is a cover system, but it’s only a weird hint of one. If you’re crouched by a low wall and you aim your weapon, you will peak around the wall, but it’s very finicky and poor. I think the game could do without one altogether, but the fact that there’s a hint at one already implies it’s intended, so it needs reworking.

- Loot system is overdone, invasive and distracting. You are constantly showered with redundant and marginally better items and have no attachment whatsoever with your fashion and weapon choices. (Dear god, I hate this one).

Hard agree. This seems like somewhat of a repeat to an earlier one about not being able to really customize your character out of necessity to wear whatever is best. Loot is prevalent, but hardly ever relevant.

- Enemies are too spongy and level design forces frontal assault way too often.

This one is interesting because I almost agreed with it until I played the game a bit more. In fact, I might’ve made a post about this before, I can’t recall, where I said that it didn’t feel like stealth was always an option. In many cases, I stand by that statement. The stealth gameplay specifically isn’t always an option, which is frustrating. If you’re like me, and you’re using stealth with quickhacking, then it becomes way more relevant. Being able to breach into a camera network and kill everyone with quickhacks is amazing. However, the game seems to somewhat punish this style of gameplay for some odd reason. I will go through and systematically kill everyone via cameras from outside the building, but the moment I step into the building, more enemies will show up out of nowhere. It’s not just that they’re hiding in areas outside of the cameras view, no they literally spawn into existence the moment you go inside. It’s really jarring, odd, and kind of unfortunate. Oh and as for sponginess...eh, yes and no sometimes. Weirdly my quickhacks sometimes one-shot enemies, and other times it takes like 8 quickhacks to kill one enemy. It’s seemingly random, or a bug, or something. I’m not sure.

- Robotics and drone control largely absent (outside of scripted missions).

Hard agree. I was genuinely shocked to find out I couldn’t control turrets when they started popping up more frequently. Drones I can let pass because they’re mobile and therefor a bit more complex to code properly I guess, but turrets are child’s play to code. They’re literally the same as cameras but with guns. It’s really odd that you aren’t even given a perk that’ll let you control them.

[threeletterslife]

hi! I'm a small writer on wattpad and I was just wondering if you had any useful writing tips for me and other writers? I love your works and I would really love to know how you write so well! ♡

hello!!

i’d love to give writing tips! thank you so much for your kind words! but i’d say most of my writing skills come from trial and error and experience LOL but here’s what i really have to say:

GRAMMAR

i’m a huge grammar freak when it comes to writing and nothing’s a bigger turn off than reading a supposed emotional scene and spotting a huge ass grammar error lol

i’d suggest (if you aren’t already familiar with grammar) to study up on it

OR you can use sites such as grammarly and hemingway to catch mistakes for you (but they’re not always 100% accurate)

i feel like grammar is over-looked a lot in writing or maybe i’m just sensitive

even the simple wrong usage of the em dash triggers me these days lol (remember, it’s not ‘--’ it’s ‘—’ THERE’S A DIFFERENCE)

immaculate grammar means there’s one less thing that you have to worry about when putting your thoughts on-screen (or paper)

i studied grammar by buying an ACT test prep book LOL but you can probably learn it for free online

INSPIRATION

i think inspiration is really, REALLY important when it comes to writing

it’s always a struggle to come up with an original idea and to flesh it out is even harder at times

world-building is particularly a challenge (especially if that world is set in a futuristic dystopian world)

so i suggest you take time to get inspired (listen to music, get some fresh air, spend time with your loved ones, watch a movie, read a book etc)

writing always comes easier when you feel like doing it

once inspiration hits, don’t hesitate, DON’T DOUBT YOURSELF, just write

write first, edit later (that’s the #1 rule tbh)

gaining confidence through your inspiration is just as important as your writing itself

the writer is only as good as she thinks she is

if you get an idea, DO NOT WAIT TO FIND A NOTEBOOK TO WRITE IT DOWN. 85% of the time, you’ll forget the idea and that is the WORST MF feeling in the world. so please, write it on your phone, piece of scratch paper, on your hand—literally anything

CHARACTERS

my FAVORITE part!! i absolutely love coming up with characters

my biggest rule of thumb is to make a character that would actually fucking exist in the world LOL

well, i guess it depends on the plot or your story, but most times, your story will work better when the characters are realistic

remember, people want to connect to your characters (why else would they want to read about them??)

your characters should be balanced. there is no such thing as a perfect person. (also no such thing as an evil person,,, unless they’re psychologically damaged.) good traits come with bad traits. in fact, their good traits may even BE their bad traits!!

i.e. diligence. let’s say your character is diligent. it’s a good thing, perhaps. they may have a stable job and high income because they work very hard. but, in the end, their diligence turns them into a workaholic and that may cause problems with their relationships with loved ones

i always tell people who are starting off as writers to try to base characters off of the people around them (without making it insanely obvious, of course)—it’s more like picking and choosing traits from a personality pool LOL

if you’re writing romance, the character chemistry should be the plot of the story, which means you’ll have to make sure their personalities don’t exactly clash too much

here’s a character template i made that you can use (i actually use this character template for EVERY story)

PLOT

if you’re starting off as a writer, i can’t emphasize enough how important it is to PLOT

your story will literally flop if you don’t plot (cough cough that one wp ff after)

filler chapters or scenes are ALL RIGHT!! (that’s a common misconception) but they’re only okay IF they offer some insight about the characters’ personalities OR if they deepen the relationship between two characters (probably the future romantic couple)

i personally bullet plot (which means i just sit down and just word-vomit the contents of the story in a bullet-point form)

but the way people plot really differs, so i’ll leave it up to you

here’s a plot template i made that you can use (i don’t use this template very often anymore—only for longer stories, but it helps for beginners!)

sometimes, it works to leave the ending of your story unplotted (but only if you haven’t yet a single clue on how to end your story)

i find that once you write your characters a bit, it becomes easier to figure out what they would do in the future (and thus configure the ending)

A VERY IMPORTANT PART IN PLOT ACTUALLY INVOLVES THE CHARACTERS

your characters MAKE the plot

their choices will DEFINE the plot

if you had different characters, your story would turn out very differently

so always make sure your characters are CONSISTENT (unless they have subtle character development)

i.e. say you have a character who is sort of a curmudgeon lol and they’re living as a recluse and they hate people and romance. you can’t suddenly have them fall in love with the hot neighbor next door. you have to shape the plot so that the story is about the main character learning to understand others and willing to love someone who’s not herself

i.e. but say that you have a character who is a romantic-freak and idealizes romance. when the hot neighbor next door moves in, she’d be all over him (and planning the wedding the moment she sees him lol). the story would probably be about her learning how to be level-headed and lose just a few of her unrealistic ideals. the story would be about maturity, overall. there is such a huge difference in the plot just by switching ONE character

DIALOGUE

i just felt like dialogue had to be addressed because i think it’s SOOO important

dialogue makes up the relationship between two characters. you can REALLY tell where they lie on the line of friendship/relationship just by reading the way they talk to each other

a rule of thumb is to READ the dialogue out loud as you type it out

if you can read it out loud without thinking ‘well that’s not fucking realistic’ or ‘that sounds like a robot not a human’ then you’re usually good

there’s nothing wrong with repeating the word ‘said’ or ‘say(s)’

i’d actually say use other descriptions such as ‘yells,’ ‘whispers,’ ‘sighs’ sparingly. because no one on planet earth sighs 47 times in one conversation

i.e. “you’re not dead yet,” she says.

this is simple. it works. but you can make it better

i.e. “you’re not dead yet, huh?” she scoffs.

even better

i.e. “you’re not dead yet, huh?” she scoffs, shooting him a disdainful look before turning the other way in disgust

great!

try to split up long quotes!!

i.e. “it was always blue outside where i’m from. sometimes we had scheduled rainy days for the private gardens and stuff. you know, at least the food there was good. way better than the crap we're forced to eat here,” he says

it’s just a huge quote block right now

the words blend in with each other

and honestly, if you skim through it, you probably forgot what he’s even talking about lol

but we can fix that

i.e. “it was always blue outside where i’m from,” he says, gazing up rather sadly at the darkened gray skies of the run-down city. “sometimes we had scheduled rainy days for the private gardens and stuff.” he shakes his head in disbelief as if he can’t accept how desolate his home had deteriorated into over the past few years. “you know, at least the food there was good. way better than the crap we’re forced to eat here.” he glares at the muddy bowl of mystery soup he had neglected to touch since it was served

the paragraph is significantly longer, but you’re able to visualize what is happening in this scene much better!!

dialogue is my favorite part of any story LOL so i’m always open to giving more advice if you need it! 

NARRATION

oh god this is so fucking important

i write in 2nd pov PRESENT tense and i’ve been consistent with this for over a year now

it’s important to probably choose a tense to write in; you typically have two options: present or past tense

i personally prefer present tense because it gives the feel of the story unfolding right before your eyes in a very linear way

past tense kind of means things have ALREADY happened, so you have more leeway to jump around on the timeline of your story

i recommend writing present tense if you’re writing action, especially, but otherwise, it’s completely up to you

just STICK to one tense. nothing is more confusing than reading a sentence with two different tenses lol

i.e. he sighed as he looks over at the fireplace with deep sorrow in his eyes. “now i’ll never fucking qualify for the championships,” he gripes as he rubbed his hand frustratingly over his forehead

like... what?? pick one and GO WITH IT

i.e. he sighed as he looked over at the fireplace with deep sorrow in his eyes. “now i’ll never fucking qualify for the championships,” he griped as he rubbed his hand frustratingly over his forehead

OR

i.e. he sighs as he looks over at the fireplace with deep sorrow in his eyes. “now i’ll never fucking qualify for the championships,” he gripes as he rubs his hand frustratingly over his forehead

READ

i cannot emphasize this enough

READ. like literally if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write periodt

reading is so SO important when you write

if you haven’t yet found your writing style, reading will SAVE you

you need to read your favorite works, analyze why you love them so much and try to emulate that writing style

after you’ve tried emulating the writing style, try to tweak things to YOUR taste until you’ve developed your very own style

it’s not easy developing your writing style. i’ve been writing for a decade give or take and i refound my writing style like two years ago LOL

the process takes patience and diligence

you don’t even always have to read good books, either

literally sometimes pick up a bad book just to see why it’s so bad and make sure you don’t make that mistake in YOUR writing lol

also, you get better at writing when you begin to edit others’ writings—it makes you self aware of the mistakes that YOU might make

RESEARCH

if you’re writing about territory you’re unfamiliar with, RESEARCH IS GOING TO BE YOUR BEST FRIEND

please don’t write about heavy concepts involving mental health, gang violence etc. without either researching it or experiencing it

your job as a writer is NOT to relay false, unrealistic information to your readers

sure, your story is FICTIONAL, but that gives you no right to romanticize something dark/serious for your pure enjoyment

it doesn’t matter if it’s fictional or not. some things are not meant to be written about in a light-hearted, romanticized way

there’s no such thing as enough research

i’ve underresearched a lot of topics that i’ve written, and i actually regret it looking back because i know for sure that if i wrote it with a little bit more knowledge, it’d become better and more realistic and OVERALL MORE READABLE

there is always more research available online. it’s fucking 2020. use your resources online lol 

CONFIDENCE

it takes time to become a good writer

no one fucking wakes up one day and can write like a god

so you can always be in peace when you’re not satisfied with your writing

because 1) there is someone who is worse than you out there lol 2) you will IMPROVE (only if you put in the effort) 3) you may not be in the mood to write today, so take a break!! (it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t write; you just need time and inspo)

confidence comes with experience

experience comes with perseverance

keep that in mind

you will become a great writer one day, and when that day comes, you will know it. you’ll feel it

the day will come when you’ll be able to sit down and write advice for others. if you can teach it, that’s when you know you know it (:

so keep writing and you’ll get there!

idk if this rambling even helped, but my shorter writing advice post is here! wish you a good time on wp!

[kendrixtermina]

The Holy Tomb decision being more from the heart than the mind comes from a few things. The heartbeat sound effect, the reveal that El is the Flame Emperor and the FM has been shown in a really bad light, being connected to the atrocities in Remire, working with the Death Knight, working with Jeralt’s killer. To trust El seems to go against logic as her being the FM is seen as a betrayal. A lot of players think that there’s no reason for Byleth to choose El at that point.

Well at lot of this is opinion stuff which is why I’m not gonna argue that my opinion is better than yours, but how things are “seen” is inherently subjective. 

And i mean the heartbeat sound effect is just “waarning, this dialogue choice is important”. You get the same one when you’re asked to go to the coronation and there’s no immediate implication of a loyalty conflict there.

Many other players me included never trusted Rhea one bit (Jeralt doesn’t either, and though this didn’t end up being the case, it easily looked like he suspected foul play in his wife’s death) and practically jumped at the chance to turn against them when it came up. Or, like, agreed with Edelgard’s speeches. 

Also Edelgard makes a point to show up post Remire, saying she would’ve stopped it if she’d known about it and practically begs Jeralt and Byleth to join her so that she’ll be in a better position to stop them in the future; And then she rats out Solon’s position and nearly blows her cover to eliminate them (if you have her engage Solon and/or Kronya you get a “wait, this isn’t what we agreed!” sort of reaction) - and her disgusted reaction in Remire was very much real. She sounds like she’s about to lose her breakfast and you lose support points if you pick the wrong dialogue option there. 

It’s made pretty clear that she hates them and has little control about them (at least if you go high enough in the supports), they consider her their tool that they’ll dispose of if she gets too hasty in defying them. 

That might not be convincing to some, fair enough, but that’s it precisely - it’s subjective, it’s about wether you’re convinced. 

That’s one of Claude’s main criticisms of Edelgard, “Your PR sucks that’s hard for people to get behind”, and he’s not without a point, she ends up antagonizing many ppl who would not even have disagreed with her that much, and that’s how you get Dimitri essentially misunderstanding everything about her - on the other hand Claude himself uses a lot of deception and only reveals his true intentions at the very end, and the people who follow Edelgard follow her because they know about and agree with her goals, (see Randolph and Ladislava, or that paralogue where you fight Hanneman and Manuela if you don’t recruit them) so… both of them have their strong points and their blind spots. 

At the very worst it’s a choice between two shady ass options as neither Edelgard not Rhea look particularly innocent at that moment, and you gotta pick who you like less… and afterward she explains everything. 

Showing up with the creepy murdery troupe on several occasions certainly looks bad (which is why most of the other characters quite understandably assume that they’re in cahoots-   ) but that’s because you don’t know the full story. 

That’s kind of a recurring motif in the game that in every route you find out some things that you don’t know in any of the others, and that none of the character’s really understand each other’s motivations because they’re unaware of the information the others are acting on. 

Edelgard knows all about the Church’s coverups because her family is complicit, but she doesn’t know Rhea’s backstory, the full story on the relics, all that disturbing business with her mother, or that Seteth and Flayn are perfectly innocent and don’t know of Rhea’s bullshit. No one but Claude knows what Claude’s even doing. Dimitri doesn’t know Edelgard was essentially a captive when they met as kids. Edelgard doesn’t know he regards them as siblings. So even in the academy days he feels she’s coldly snubbing him while he probably comes off off-puttingly fixated to her. Everyone views Claude as a lot more untrustworthy than he actually is. Seteth and Flayn don’t know about Rhea’s shady dealings so in the church route they act reasonable enough, assuming she would’ve done the same. And while Dimitri and Edelgard were already onto Arundel on account of his having killed their families, Claude had no clue the slitherers existed for most of part one - He comes the closest to finding out everything (including that the Church was shady and that Edelgard isn’t evil; To the point that he ends up saying he understands why the empire allied with the slithers and blames the dogmas of the seiros religion for all the xenophobia around)  but he only does so at the very end, after many scenes where he’s frustrated and sooo close to the truth but missing crucial pieces. 

[jinglyjangly]

You: Dimitri is unlikable because he has 3 charisma. Me, an intellect who hasn't made a character with a charisma score above the minimum ever, and instead just tagged speech and barter: ok

Hah well im just following a character build? There arent a lot of charisma checks and i think they made the speech skill a little too OP, but speech just means you can get what you want through talking. There was plenty of times where gabriel had speech options i didnt choose, because it didnt fit his character! He has high speech, high charisma, and he isnt mean so things like threatening grecks into taking off his clothes wasnt really in character. The charisma check i do remember was with the kids, so i just imagine low charisma means being hard to approach, whatever reason it may be. Sooo while gabriel is more of a charming con man type who knows how to sweet talk to get what he wants, dimitri more or less just gets what he wants through being like…bossy, annoying, and threatening. Caeso has a high charisma/low speech, so while hes enjoyable to be around and has a calm demeanor hes also pretty much selectively mute!Ofc though the game cant really discern any of this. I was thinking actually how neat it would be if the skills, perks, stats, and traits bounced off each other and changed dialogue options, kinda like how a low intelligence does. Could you imagine having a low charisma and confirmed bachelor perk, just going up to arcade and blurting “youre hot! Please come with me” or something along those lines? I mean, it is a rpg. I like having fun thinking about roles to play!

[sasspotatodoesthings]

Ranking of the Assassin’s Creed main games

A personal ranking of the main story games of the Assassin’s Creed series. I will be putting ten eleven twelve spots, as there are ten eleven twelve games (one being released soon), and I will just leave the spots open and move them around as I play the games. Please note that I strive to get 100% synchronization so any optional stuff that isn’t necessary does affect my opinion.

Updated: 12/25/2020

Warning: There is spoilers, cursing and opinions below.

12 - Assassin’s Creed: Unity - This game took the longest for me to complete. Literal years to finish. I can’t even remember when I started playing this game (I’m guessing somewhere around late 2017 or early 2018, since I finished III in 2017 and finished Rogue not too long after that) but I had about 70% already done when I picked it back up these last couple weeks and powered through it as much as possible. What really ruined the game experience was the co op missions. I’m shite at the games, so I’m not going to actually try to play with other people. Soloing each of those three times to get all the armor was a nightmare. I’d much rather play the first game again because at least its shorter than this one. The controls are a bit buggy and because the free run system changed, I definitely had a hard time adjusting to it. I didn’t have many opinions about the clothes and weapons, and I never even took much of a look at the color options. Overall game time: I actually don’t know. It doesn’t record the time in game like it has in previous games, but it records it through the Ubisoft site, and mine didn’t sync up I guess. I’m assuming it has a similar game time at Black Flag, so maybe around 60-70 hours? It’s hard to tell because I’ve been playing it off and on for like 2-ish years with loooong breaks in between.

11 - Assassin’s Creed - Fuck this game and its monotonous game play. Fuck its collectibles and not being able to ride horses ANYWHERE. Couldn’t ride my horse in the open fuckin fields or I’d get chased by guards. God dammit I hate this game so much. I hated it so much, I had to take a year break halfway through the game. I hated it that much. Altair is the blandest character in this series and yet they don’t let go of him until Revelations. Even then, there’s still some stuff about him in later games. Altair was a boring character and I didn’t want to hear about him after this game. Overall game time: I don’t fucking know because I can’t find where it would be listed but this game sucks anyway so fuck it. Who cares?

10 - Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey - (This is gonna be long, sorry not sorry.) I played as Kassandra! This game is just a complete monster all on it’s own. I actually made a bullet point list about the things to mention here and I haven’t done that for any of the other games. Major talking points about this game. It’s just too big. The map is too big; there are too many weird, small locations to visit; there are too many tiny fetch quests, too many kill quests. I miss when there was a map with like, maybe 20-40 extra places to visit and some side quests. Most of this game is filler, if you’re trying to 100%. And because the world is just so large, the fast travel points don’t actually help. I could have a quest point that is a minimum of 500m from any kind of fast travel point. That’s not really any help. Along with the large map, some exploratory areas are just too big. The forts are a regularly occurring type of location in the game. These tend to be huge with something like 20-40 bad guys in them. Every time I happened to come upon these, I would groan, save, and then slug through it. Of course, when you have that many baddies, you think it should be easy. But no, it’s just another tedious task because instant assassination is no more! If you happen to do enough damage or the baddie is a low enough level, you can instant assassinate. But if they’re an elite or brute, you’re out of luck. Another major downer for people is the general rpg-like feel of this game. Origins, I think anyway, handled the rpg element much better than Odyssey. Origins gave you an established character, Bayek, and you did not get to change his character in any way. You play as Bayek. Odyssey, however, gives you dialogue and moral choices. They try to give you a half established character and then you take over from there. So you can either try to make decisions you think would align with Kassandra/Alexios, or you can make decisions on your usual play through of an rpg. This was definitely a bad way to handle this game. I think it would’ve been much better if they had given us little to no dialogue/moral choices. Like, for example, for one of the Tales from Greece DLC quests, you help find Barnabas’ daughter. You try to convince her to leave her mother’s farm to join you on your ship with Barnabas. She declines, which is reasonable as she wants to care for her family farm. Weeelllll, with out any kind of input from me, Kassandra burns down the farm and tries to play it off as helping the daughter in the end. I was horrified that the game just did that for me without at least giving me the choice. And these aren’t the only kind of choices that suck. The romance options! They are all basically one time flings that you seduce with a few flirty sentences (what is this, the Sims?) and then they most likely will join your ship. Now it was amusing at first to bang anyone who would let me, but then it got a bit frustrating. Why couldn’t I have a solid relationship? I just wanted to pick someone and date them the whole time and have cute scenes together. Why are they so many women romance options and little men options? I mean, I am a straight woman, but I will romance who I want in games because fuck it, am I right? And the one male romance option I did genuinely enjoy was a bit of a let down, cause it was between two brothers. See, I helped two brothers and I noticed a could romance them both. Now, dummy me I guess, romanced them both and then hoped maybe a little menage a trois would happen. Nooooooo, I couldn’t have both at once, and because I had slept with both of them before at separate times, I couldn’t even get to choose one later! Let me have the threesome cowards. You put statues with dicks everywhere and let me sleep with almost anyone. Give me the threesome. Also, about romancing anyone, did you know you can romance the leader of the big bad at the end of the game?? I sure didn’t until I got to that point. I did it for the shits and giggles but really what reasoning is there behind it? She’s someone who you previously trusted and was previously betrayed by. You never show ANY romantic interest in her before the very end of the game. Like it doesn’t make any sense for them to smooch. Talking about the cult, why are they sooo boring? Except for the few that are integral to the main story line, all the side cult member are boring looking and don’t have interesting reasons for being in the cult. The Order members from Origins were 100x more interesting. They had reasons for being part of The Order. They had interesting character designs. I just wish the cult members had been more like the members in Origins. Uh let’s see more points to hate on the game. I have no idea if this was a problem for other people, but fairly often, characters dialogue would overlap. It didn’t bother me much, as around 100 hrs I started skimming and skipping dialogue. I know this was definitely a problem for others: my game kept freezing and crashing. Comparing my last save time and my time on the Uplay site, I lost about 2 hrs and 20-ish minutes from freezing and crashing. The armor is this game is either subpar or down right ugly. I liked the armor upgrade system in Origins because the armor naturally fit with Bayek and his setting. Where as Kassandra could be running around in Athens wearing Spartan armor because the was made me the most powerful at the time. Now, I realized super late into the game that you could basically change the outlook of your armor to look like any piece you had looted to that point. But, like, why even have the ugly armor to begin with? Ships are a thing. Almost like Black Flag ships, but not quite as good. I’m not sure why they didn’t just recycle the ship system from Black Flag, but they didn’t. The ships feel so much slower and clunkier, and the upgrades start feeling like they do nothing when you get into the higher ones. And in certain parts of the sea, it’s crawling with pirates that aggro you almost immediately. I just wanted to get to that island that was like 1000m away, but I guess I have to battle some pirate ships now. And to finish off for the main game: Layla sucks major ass and I hate her as the modern day protagonist. So, my parents happened to have bought the seasons pass version of Odyssey when they got it for me for Christmas, so that means I got the play some AC DLC for the first time ever! Wooooooo.... yeah I wish this wasn’t the first game I played the DLC for. I’m gonna talk about the Fate of Atlantis DLC first. I didn’t really enjoy this DLC. It starts off with a disturbing scene of Alexios/Kassandra/Deimos torturing a man for information. It made me uncomfortable. I can handle most stuff that make people squeamish, but this one got me, boys. Elysium, which is basically heaven, is very pretty realm and pleases my aesthetic. But, the Isu guards there drain my adrenaline and I am a very heavy user the the adrenaline. About the prettiness of Elysium, Odyssey can be very beautiful. I never did take pictures in Origins, but I did once for funsies in Odyssey, and then I just kept taking more when I thought the scenery was pretty enough. I am pretty proud of some of the photos I took. It’s not much, but one of my pictures got 27 likes! Now back to the Isu! I absolutely adore that fact that all the Isu are taller than Kassandra. Most often, Kassndra is taller than everyone, excepting elites and brutes. But all the Isu were taller than Kassandra and that made me want to fuck them. Ubisoft, stop being cowards and let me fuck the gods, especially Hades because he gives me big MCU Loki vibes and I wanted that, so bad. To get away from fucking Isu gods, Ros, a dog later to be revealed as Cerberus, is Persephone’s dog that wanders around Elysium and I was always delighted to find him hanging out somewhere. I’m pretty sure I even took  a “selfie” with him, as much as you can take a selfie in this game. Persephone gave me a real hard moral choice that I did not enjoy making. She made me choose between my grandfather, or a spy I previously helped infiltrate her own army. I did not like making any choice at all. If I could have, I would’ve just booked it and never looked back. I don’t really have much to say about the Underworld. It’s hell. I wanted to fuck Hades bad. That’s about it. I don’t have much to say about Atlantis either exCEPT HOLY SHIT THE FINAL BOSS IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE I WAS FREAKING OUT THE WHOLE TIME HOLY SHIT. Ahem- anyway the boss was scary and I was having a mental crisis trying to beat it without actually dying in real life from fright. Fate of Atlantis DLC done, woohoo! I don’t have much thought for The Hidden Blade DLC. It was short and sweet. I didn’t mind getting locked into a straight romance and having a child. I’m a straight woman and if a game gives me the choice to marry, have a child, and still be an adventurer, I’m gonna do it. Finished basically all of it in a day and that finished off the whole game. Boy was it a relief to finally beat everything. Overall game time: 133 hours and 45 minutes to beat the main game with one part of The Hidden Blade DLC done, and 167 hours and 55 minutes to beat the DLC, excluding the one part from The Hidden Blade DLC. Now if you count all the time I lost from crashing, it’s 170 hours and 16 minutes.

9 - Assassin’s Creed: Revelations - By this point, I’ve played three of the games in a row and I was very tired of playing Ezio. It doesn’t help that this game is basically II and Brotherhood but with smaller features added. Also, the colors you could dye your clothes SUCKED. Overall game time: 22 hours and 25 minutes. It felt longer than that and I was surprised to see this was the shortest time so far. Thank god though because I did not like this game.

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7 - Assassin’s Creed III - Writing this as the credits role. So, heads up, I’ve played this game before so I knew some things that were going to happen, but I forgot most of the game. I’ve read that a lot of people hate this game and I can see why, especially if it’s the first game you play of this series. The game changes quite a bit from the previous games. It has a new free run system, the running is a little more fluid, new weapons, new side missions, etc. I’m giving III a huge bonus for changing the old system in the hopes of something better... it’s not completely better, but better none the less. The downside to all these new things is that they are buggy as hell. The running can be amusing sometimes, but it is a horrible experience if you need to catch someone or stay within a certain distance. The side missions are also super buggy. Many times the icons do not appear on the map (and they tend to be in the areas that the viewpoints do not open up) and just seem not to work entirely right. Currently for one of the delivery requests, I have all the items and I can find the guy I need to turn them into, but can not talk to him for whatever reason. (If you know how to fix this, please tell me because every method I’ve tried hasn’t worked). This may be fixed after the credits, but I think I’m going to have to live with 99% synch and move on to Rogue. To bring up the viewpoint thing again, the viewpoints do not cover the whole map and you manually have to clear up parts of the map, which sucks. Thank god they didn’t do that again. Moving on from game play points, I’ve seen a lot of hate for Connor, which I personally don’t understand. I don’t love Connor, but I like his stoic character who showed moments of true kindness and sadness with friends and family. This review is getting to long now so I’ll just stop here and add more once I complete the game as much as I can. Also, fuck any of the naval stuff. Complete bullshit. Overall game time: First time (2013?) 41 hours and 55 minutes. Second time (2017) 38 hours and 33 minutes.

6 - Assassin’s Creed: Rogue - Well. It took me forever to finish this game, mostly because you can only play so much of the same game. So this game was nice. All of it’s little connections to III, IV and Unity is fun to see and connect the dots. Seeing Shay ultimately shaping what Unity will be was such a great thing to me. This game was such a breath of fresh air. I was sort of dreading having to do anything with ships since III is a disaster and IV had its mistakes, but I was pleasantly surprised. Except for a few ship related missions, you can almost completely avoid sailing. Of course I didn’t because I need to 100% this game. Still pissed I technically didn’t 100% III because of a god damn glitch. Naval related stuff overall was much easier than previous games, including the legendary battles. I took out the first three legendary ships in one try and took down the fourth one on my second try. I had actually planned to use a whole day to beat the legendary ships but I very happy I didn’t have to do that. The game itself is very short, with only six sequences that hold anywhere between two to five memories. That’s the shortest a game has ever been in this series. But they pad the game with millions of locations to explore and millions of collectibles to get. Even though over half of my time spent playing this game was getting collectibles, it was fun. One thing I really enjoyed was Shay’s outfits. This is the first game where I like almost all of the main character’s outfit options. I particularly enjoyed the arctic explorer outfit. I also really liked the Templar outfit you got after defeating the epic legendary ship. This was a good game and in the future, I could consider playing it again, along with II. Overall game time: 31 hours and 55 minutes.

5 - Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - It wasn’t a super bad game, but it was basically II with some new things and now you’re only stuck in one place. Also guild challenges. Fuck those guild challenges. ALSO. There’s that mission where you get the apple and can lay waste to the guards in your way, but it uses your health to harm them... and the optional objective is don’t lose any health. Fuck you Ubisoft. Or the mission where you destroy Leonardo’s war machines. Those sucked. The only good thing about this game is the colors you can dye your clothes. Those. Those are good. Overall game time: 35 hours and 3 minutes.

4 - Assassin’s Creed: Origins - Took me about a month and a half to complete this game. It’s very different from the previous game titles and I can definitely see why some people wouldn’t like it. I went into it knowing it would be different and I genuinely enjoyed the game. Just as a heads up, I’ve only got 97% synchronization and I’m not totally sure what will get me to 100%. There’s no definitive list of what to do to 100% the game. I’ve read from some people that you need to do all the hippodrome races and arena fights, and I’ve read from others that you don’t. I’m not going to do the races because they’re garbage and not fun. I’ve finished one of the arena’s fights and I just don’t really want to do the other so I think I’m fine sitting at 97%. Now, this game is very different from previous games. Origins is more like an rpg, but not really. There is like, a bunch more exploration areas. Maybe somewhere between 150-300? I’m bad at estimating but it is a lot. There are side quests too. There wasn’t many side quests in previous games, but including the main quests with the side quests, I did a total of 129 quests. There is a lot of gameplay and exploration. Not much of a challenge, though. If you don’t select the auto-level enemies to your level, you reach a point where you’re about 5-10 levels above the area you’re in because all the landmarks and side quests give you xp. At that point, many enemies are 1-3 shots depending on your weapon loadout. There are a couple of locations early in the game that for some reason have higher level enemies than the area calls for. For example, in Alexandria, you should be around level 12-16. Enemies will be around that same level range. Except, there is one location in the middle of Alexandria that has about 5-6 enemies that are above level 20. Now, it’s easy enough to just come back later when you are also that level, but when I was exploring the area, I had no idea they’d be that level and immediately got killed because my weapons did nothing to them. So that wasn’t fun. The game has couple more “challenging” locations if you do them at the right level. Similar to Black Flag and Rogue, Origins has some legendary battles. This time it’s elephants. The are four different elephants, and one them is actually two, like the ship battles from Black Flag and Rogue. The first couple were a bit of a challenge for me because I wasn’t the cap level and I didn’t have a strategy figured out yet. I saved the double elephants for last because I thought they’d be super hard like the double ship battle from Black Flag. However, before I fought them, I reached the level cap, upgraded my best legendary weapons, had a strategy, and also got multiple level points in skills that would boost my bow and arrow and sword damage. The double elephants actually ended up being the easiest at that point. One thing, though, was around 40-ish hours in, my game randomly lost about 7-8 hours of progress. I lost about 3 large map areas of exploration, 6 levels and 10-20 quests. It made me pretty angry and it took me a few extra days to get back to where I was before lost the progress. Aaannyyywaaayy, enough about that. Bayek is a nice character to play as. He is a serious, dedicated, loving man who can have moments of humor. I loved his relationship with his wife Aya, and I was sad to see them mutually decide to break up at the end of the game. They clearly still cared for each other even after deciding that their paths were not going the same way. Sometimes I would have a very similar mind set as Bayek and it would be pretty funny when I would make a comment and then a couple moments later he’d say something along the same line. And, of course, it was interesting to see the origin stories of The Creed of the Assassin’s. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually play this game again but I enjoyed my experience with it. Overall game time: 82 hours and 22 minutes counting the extra time that I had to make up for lost progress and 75 hours not counting the hours I got from making up the lost progress.

3 - Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate - So it’s been about five months since I finished Unity, and I actually beat this game like maybe a week before updating this. I think it’s because the game didn’t have any credits for me? I don’t know why I didn’t have credits, but I just didn’t. Anyway, wow, what a breath of fresh air, after the nightmare that was Unity. This game takes some elements I wasn’t too fond of in the previous game and improves them greatly. The fighting style of wailing on enemies until you get upgrades to one shot is easier to handle. It also looks way more fun. Evie and Jacob just move so fast when they’re throwing punches and shooting people, it doesn’t feel like I’m taking all that long to kill the baddies. The associate quests were fun and simple, they didn’t require much thought or effort. The main game was also on the simpler side compared to previous installments of this game series. Jacob and Evie were fun characters, I never really got tired of them. The main sequence memories were mostly on the short side, so the game felt like it passed in no time. The only long part was getting all the collectibles, which is unavoidable to 100% the game. All the upgrades and weapon choices were fun to choose from, and it was always cool to get a new weapon that drastically did more damage. Having a gang that slowly got better as I upgraded them, and that would back me up in fights was also super fun. There really isn’t anything that should change from this game. If I changed something, it’d probably be the romance between Evie and Henry Green, also named Jayadeep Mir. It felt kind of forced, and really, romances are always boring in Assassin’s Creed. Anyway, fun game, might play again one day. Overall game time: 37 hours and 37 minutes.

2 - Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - It’s been a couple years since I’ve played this game, so it’s very possible this will bounce around in my list as I play the later games, but I remember enjoying a good part of the game. It was nice to have some variety, especially in the form of PIRATES. Some of my favorite parts were sailing to no where specific and singing shanties with my crew in my suped-up ship. Which brings me to the bad parts of the game; the ship missions. Honestly hated any story/side mission that involved my ship, especially if I had to be sneaky. I’m in a giant ass ship trying to remain in this circle filled with other giant ass ships looking for me. So yeah, fuck that part of the game. But even though it’s been awhile, I remember enjoying this game. Overall game time: 66 hours and 50 minutes.

1 - Assassin’s Creed II - Thank the gods for this game. This is a good goddamn game. Ezio is a fresh breath of air after Altair and being in Italy is honestly great. Upgrading the villa he lives in is great. Leonardo is great. Venice and it’s carnival is great. Only thing that sucked was the Ezio didn’t kill the goddamn Spaniard and then has to chase after him and his offspring in the next game. All in all, my favorite game so far. Overall game time: 28 hours and 37 minutes.

So the game(s) I need to play:

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla