#i hate that i actually enjoy their longer gameplays

[amid-fandoms]

in a mere month it will be 1 year since dnp played it takes two and i will be reliving the same kind of devastation i went through with little nightmares

(i am still very hopeful that they will pick up little nightmares 3 since it's co-op or reanimal cause i need to see them shit their pants pls)

[dalishious]

(I can’t believe I finished this so fast… I basically blacked out and then it was done lol… Anyway, please remember that this is all just my personal opinion, and if you feel differently, that’s fine!)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review

Objectively speaking, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a fun game that the average player is going to enjoy, especially if that average player is coming in without any prior knowledge to the Dragon Age franchise. I believe this is a good jumping-in spot for people who are curious about the world of Thedas. But in contrast, I have seen a lot of criticism from other hard-core fans that I largely agree with. However, it just so happens that most of the criticism I have is not enough to prevent me from overall enjoying the game. That is to say, for pretty much everything I did not like, there was also something I thought was great… Unfortunately, that makes it a little difficult to give a review. So, I’m going to do my best to keep things as clear and concise as possible by splitting up the “good” and the “bad” aspects of DATV.

The Positive

The best thing to come out of DATV is the new cast of characters that make up your companions and supporting associates. While I do think that some of them could have benefitted from more development time to flesh things out further, just judging what we ended up with, is mostly great. I especially found Emmrich and Bellara to be stand-out examples of strong personalities to grasp onto, whose personal stories really touched me in an emotional way.

DATV also has fun with some returning characters. For example, now that Solas is no longer hiding his identity, we get to see a character that both believably honours his part in Inquisition, while also providing a new, refreshing side to him. There are also a number of characters introduced in Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights that appear in the game, like my personal favourites Teia and Viago, who are an absolute delight to interact with!

I think the three act structure is good, albeit with act three being quite short. There are a few sequences that are an absolutely phenomenal mixture of storytelling and engaging gameplay, like all of Weisshaupt! I also really enjoyed stepping out of the main story every once and a while, and into Solas’s backstory through the Crossroads memories – what ended up being extra special about these is how they mirror Rook’s struggle so well, by the end. They are a nice touch.

The locations are beautifully constructed with smooth interactions of climbing, zip-lining, and essentially parkouring your way around, making them fun to explore! They also came with such distinct flavours and character in themselves that influenced a sense of truly experiencing different parts of Thedas, with different cultures.

The mechanic of building up strength with the different factions, and that actually having a huge impact with the ultimate showdown in the end of the game, makes side quests feel far less inconsequential than in Dragon Age: Inquisition by comparison. That, and they number far less.

I like that the story mode actually feels like a story mode; there were only a couple instances where I really had to worry about death, and even then, I was able to just toggle off the death with the customizable gameplay mechanics and continue on.

Finally, it would be remiss not to say that the character creator for DATV is the best BioWare has ever put out. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of the best in any RPG I’ve ever personally experienced. From the flexibility in morphing a character’s head and body between custom shapes, to the little details like sclera colour, vitiligo, and top surgery scars, makes it a shining example of what RPG’s should strive for. (My only critique here is that it would have been nice to have more skin colours.)

The Neutral

I hated the combat for pretty much the entire first act of the game. I found it too hard to keep up with, and too much like Mass Effect bullshit. I can’t say that it’s completely grown on me yet, but I don’t hate it anymore. It’s fine. So, I’m giving this a special little spot before I get into what I didn’t like all the way to the end.

The Negative

As mentioned above, I do think that there is more that could be done with some of the characters to really achieve their full potential. Davrin and Lucanis—while to be clear I still really enjoy as they are—come to mind first, in terms of those who would have benefited from more development time. Most of Davrin’s screen time just revolves around Assan rather than Davrin himself, and Lucanis is so restrained that it takes a while to really crack him open. Both of these characters have intentional personalities that make them harder to get to know, I understand that, but I feel that it would have been all the more rewarding to have more time dedicated to their company after earning their trust and possibly endearment. Instead, it feels like their romance and friendship with Rook are only half-complete, and then rushed to finish.

There are some companion interactions that are just… cringe. There is no other word for it. Now, this is nothing new for BioWare games, but I feel like the “pulling a Bharv” scene for example, was hitting an entirely new low. (If someone misgendered me and then just started doing push-ups instead of just saying “hey sorry about that, I’ll try to do better” I’d be annoyed, not satisfied.) I also felt like most of the temporary rivalries between companions were artificial in nature, rather than organically part of their characters that actually served a purpose. We already knew Emmrich likes books and Harding likes nature; we did not need a whole cutscene with them bickering about camping. (The exception to this is Davrin and Lucanis, who genuinely had room to grow as people out of their multiple confrontations, not just a one-off scene.)

The music in DATV is, for the most part, forgettable and bland. There is one piece that really stands out, and that’s “Where the Dead Must Go”, which is a real banger. I am not a fan of Hans Zimmer’s OST otherwise; I think it is phoned in, just like most of his work. I deeply wish BioWare would have just stuck with Trevor Morris. The best parts musically in this game are just Morris’s work re-used from Dragon Age: Inquisition.

There are certain parts of disjointedness that separates DATV from the past games that are just… bizarre. This is especially the case when it comes to elven lore. For example, Bellara saying she is afraid that elves will be harshly judged for the Evanrus, or Harding saying that elves are “thriving”… as if modern elves are not deeply persecuted across most of Thedas. It made me question more than once if there just was not time in development to do a proper canon-compliancy check with everything, perhaps?

I want finish this part by bringing up again that the biggest flaw in DATV is that it feels very corporate. To repeat what I said in this post: It is as if a computer ran through the game’s script and got rid of anything with “too much” political substance, in an overcorrection to be “safe”. But now that the edges have been so smoothed down to make a block into a ball, it can no longer support anything.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see a lot of creativity went into the creation of this game… but it is also easy to make assumptions on how that creativity was constrained by development hell and corporate oversight. In the end though, Dragon Age: The Veilguard succeeded in being an overall good time, one that I will no doubt be putting just as many countless hours into as the previous installments in the franchise. 7/10.

[thankssteveditko]

Sony's PlayStation 5 Presents Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (the third game in the series)

I beat the main story and have enjoyed my time with the game overall! I want to talk about spoilers and things that I liked and disliked in the story, so here's a post with some scattered thoughts.

(Hello! I haven't forgotten that this blog exists! Like I said, no update schedule, I will read more of the Lee/Ditko comics whenever I make time for it. I've actually been sitting on a mostly-complete version of this post since I beat the game in October, thinking that I'd finish the rest of the side quests so I could throw in thoughts on those. But... eh, I'll do that whenever the inevitable DLC rolls around. I just wanna get these thoughts posted.)

Spider-Cop No More

First off: they downplayed the cop shit!!! This was the first thing that really struck me about the game, and I'm stunned that they actually listened to criticism on this. I thought we'd just be stuck with it forever.

It'll never be completely gone, of course. Spider-Man is always going to leave criminals webbed up for the police to take to prison, hoping that they'll do their time and come out the other side as Productive Members of Society. That's just a thing I begrudgingly accept as part of the genre that will probably never go away. But Spider-Man is no longer repairing police surveillance networks. You're no longer beating the shit out of random drug dealers. Gangs of escaped convicts still wearing their orange jumpsuits are no longer terrorizing the streets of New York.

Instead, Peter and Miles are played more as firefighters. Sometimes very literally! They work with firefighters, they rescue people from collapsing buildings, they rush injured people to the hospital. In general there's a huge increase in the number of random onlookers present during the big action setpieces, and the Spider-Men frequently have to save them from harm. One of the major side quest lines is even literally about a cult of arsonists, and you'll routinely find burning fuel tanker trucks you have to extinguish with your webs. It's great! Love this for them.

I also generally liked the side missions in this. There's a lot of good stuff with the Spider-Men being neighborhood heroes willing to help out anyone in need, no matter the problem. Some of them can get corny, sure, but that street level stuff has always been the real heart of Spider-Man to me.

Gameplay

The gameplay's as fun as ever. That probably goes without saying. I will not be spending a thousand words explaining that swinging is fun.

In particular, I really liked the changes to the Focus mechanic. I never loved the way Miles' game made you choose between healing and doing your special attacks, but here your four specials have their own cooldowns, and the Focus meter is spent on either healing or finishers. It still offers that risk/reward element, but those vicious cycles where you can't do any real damage because you keep needing to heal aren't nearly as bad as they were before.

Personally I didn't turn off the swing assist or turn on fall damage, because the streamlined swinging never bothered me in these games, but I'm glad the options are there for people who want them.

Kraven

I liked Kraven in this! I liked the way they leaned into his Hunters being this weird death cult, and him wanting to go down in a blaze of glory against a worthy foe, to the point that he's actually disappointed anytime a foe can't kill him. It riffs on things people liked in Kraven's Last Hunt without being the exact same story. I like that Kraven's gang is renting out this manor or whatever and just being a complete terror to the wait staff. I liked the way Kraven hunting Peter's rogues' gallery clashed with Peter's belief in giving his villains second chances. I liked that they were willing to have Kraven kill off a couple of the minor villains from the first game to sell how dangerous he is. (I know some people hated this, but like, come on. We already fought the Sinister Six. They don't need to do that again.) I like the way Kraven pushed Peter to the absolute brink, turning him more and more aggressive with the Black Suit. Good stuff all around, even if the Hunter enemy types did wear out their welcome a little bit by the end.

The Black Suit arc

I think I liked the way Insomniac handled Peter's Black Suit arc overall, but there's a tradeoff here.

They REALLY lean into the body horror tentacle stuff, with Black Suit Peter basically just being a skinny Venom by the end. The sequence where you play as Mary Jane while the symbiote puppets an unconscious Peter's body around and goes on a rampage against the Hunters was REALLY great at selling how scary Peter is becoming, and it made me completely change my tune on the inclusion of the MJ stealth missions in the sequel. Having to beat an out-of-control Peter as Miles immediately after Peter beats Kraven was also really good. This is all cool!

BUT, the thing is... with the symbiote powers being so freaky from the start, it really pushes my suspension of disbelief when Peter and co. take so long to become wary of it. I guess when you've been bitten by a radioactive spider and given superpowers, and when you live in the same universe as the Avengers and the X-Men, your perception of what's "normal" is going to be pretty warped. But they buy the whole "organic exosuit created to treat Harry's illness" story WAY too easily lmao. How do the self-aware slime tentacles help with his illness, exactly?

And I'm not sure how I feel about giving Peter Anti-Venom powers in the last act. It feels like it's primarily a concession so that they can give players that branch of their skill tree back, but honestly, the designer in me thinks it would be really cool (if risky) to just permanently lock players out of Peter's most powerful skills past a certain point. Yeah, it'd definitely piss people off, but it drives home the idea that Peter's given up greater power because it's the right thing to do. It'd put you in his shoes! Instead he just gets the symbiote powers back, but it's fine because the Venom voice in his head is gone and also the slime tendrils that explode out of his body are white now, which means they're good.

I have to say it. I'm sorry. The glistening white goo... they turned Peter into the Amazing Cum-Man. I changed back to the Classic Suit after rolling the credits and forgot I still had the Anti-Venom skills equipped, so I just saw regular old Spider-Man exploding his white goo everywhere. Terrible.

Assuming Peter is just stepping into more of a supporting role to Miles and not fully retiring after the events of this game, I really hope the Anti-Venom stuff is gone. I get that he needed it to counter Venom, but that's not what I want for Peter Parker.

Miles

Miles is good in this, and I really like his arc where he struggles with whether or not he should avenge his dad by killing Martin Li. I like how all that plays out. Unfortunately, they don't quite stick the landing when it comes to making him and Peter feel like equals in terms of narrative focus. His arc is definitely the B-plot to Peter's for the middle chunk of the story, which I guess was kind of inevitable since they decided to do the Black Suit arc. But Miles does at least get a lot of moments to shine, and by the end he's very much taking the lead as the main Spider-Man.

Becoming the main Spider-Man also gets Miles a new, wholly original suit that ended up being super controversial, and honestly... I kinda like it? Or at least I like what it's going for, even if the actual design could still use some work. It's something totally unique for Miles, and I like spandex/streetwear combo suits like what the Spider-Verse movies have popularized. But showing his hair is really pushing the limits of his secret identity. He hangs around Brooklyn Visions WAY too much for his classmates to not recognize his voice and haircut. And I understand why people would be wary about it becoming his "canon" look moving forward. But I think it's got potential.

On the subject of Miles, though, I will say that while I liked Miles' side missions, it feels like he's often saddled with the game's broad, kinda touristy, kinda token attempts at Showcasing The Diversity Of New York, in a way that Peter isn't.

I like that Miles has a deaf graffiti artist girlfriend that he and Ganke sign with, and I like that there's a series of side missions that explore some local jazz history, and I like that there's a mission where Miles helps a gay classmate ask his crush to prom. I like all these things! I like Spider-Man being involved with his community, and that said community includes such a wide variety of people! I like that this game slows down to savor these types of moments instead of just being all action all the time! But when I step back, I notice some patterns.

Hailey doesn't have a big role in the main plot, especially when compared to MJ, but Miles gets a side mission where you briefly play as her with muffled audio to teach you what being deaf is like. There are no major queer characters in the story - unless you count Felicia showing up for exactly one mission to mention she has an unseen, unnamed girlfriend in Paris now - but you get a side mission where Miles helps out a gay couple at his school, who then never come up again. To put it very uncharitably, they can feel like Very Special Episode missions. It's like the devs going: we're going to give Miles a Gay Mission, and an Impaired Hearing Mission, and a Cultural History Mission, so that we can say we touched on these things, but we're gonna make them all optional and keep them far away from the full-blown Superhero Stuff like fighting costumed villains. Those flavors cannot mix. Meanwhile, Peter gets to have a whole elaborate subplot about teaming up with Wraith to track down fucking Cletus Kasady. There's an imbalance here, and I think it's part of the reason why Peter still feels like the "main" Spider-Man for so much of the story.

I think this was all written with admirable intentions, but as others have pointed out, you can kinda tell that this game was mainly written by some white guys based in California. These attempts at depicting various marginalized groups can feel kind of detached in the same way that Insomniac's map of New York doesn't quite line up with the real thing. But I dunno. I'm not really the one to dig deep into some of this stuff as a white woman from Florida. I would be curious to read others' takes on this.

Maybe I'm just being overly cynical about the writers' well-meaning but corny and kinda out of touch liberal politics because of the podcasts.

The podcasters

I wish Jameson was in this more! They psyched us out by giving him a full character model for, like, two scenes. I like him being MJ's boss, but I wish we saw inside the Daily Bugle offices to get more Jameson.

At least his podcasts are better than the ones in the Miles game, though. Him completely trusting in Roxxon was just too much for me. Here he condemns Oscorp for the symbiote shit, and he also gets some moments where he takes the ongoing crises seriously and isn't just ranting about the Spider-Men. He isn't just a conspiracy theorist crackpot here. Shit like his "fuck Spider-Man, we have a justice system for a reason" speech makes him feel more like a human being with a point of view, rather than just a caricature. Definitely an improvement.

Unfortunately, I still find The Danikast grating. I'm sorry, Ashly Burch. It's not your fault. The quirky heckin' wholesome millennial podcaster lady who catches you up on current events and then reminds you to drink 64 ounces of water a day in the same breath is just too much for me. At least she doesn't have any lines as bad as her throwing in a "damn" and then going (direct quote here) "That's right - no censoring! That's how REAL I'm being right now!" like in Miles' game. Instead they give her this, like, almost psychic insight into the main plot to try and make her the angel on Peter's shoulder. The second Peter gets the symbiote she's like "Wow, y'all. Have you seen Spider-Man's new black suit? Something's different about him. He's been giving me such bad vibes lately. #NotMySpiderMan" Also she's supposed to be this, like, underdog independent podcaster who started her show on a whim and has become the voice of the people... but she's got billboards plastered all over the fucking city. Which makes her feel like an industry plant lmao

Again, there's a detachment with the writing. This is, like, some middle aged white liberal game dev guys' idea of what a modern leftist teenager would think is a Cool Activism Podcast. Unfortunately, because Insomniac thinks Danika's a hero, Mary Jane's triumphant ending is that she quits her job at the Bugle to become a podcaster, too, delivering a thinly veiled monologue about the pandemic to kick off her new podcast literally titled "The New Normal." She's going to save the world with podcasting, because that's the highest form of activism, I guess.

Venom

So! Venom! Venom was... okay.

Surprising no one, Harry Osborn is Venom. Harry's okay both as himself and as Venom, but I'm not sure his arc is a smooth one. He starts out as Peter's comically perfect best friend who returns to reminisce about the good ol' days and hand him his dream job on a silver platter, and then later he becomes a little ball of rage over the fact that Peter gets his symbiote and can't/won't give it back. I'm not sure that pivot is handled the most convincingly. You kind of have to write it off as the symbiote messing with their heads, I guess.

When he actually becomes Venom, I'm... mixed on the execution. On the one hand, the cool factor is absolutely there. He's a very cool big monster, and Tony Todd is great in the role. But he also wants to take over the world and make everyone a symbiote, and aside from any lingering resentment towards Peter, that's really all there is to him. It makes for a good video game to have a bunch of symbiote enemies and creepy symbiote nests and symbiote tentacles climbing up the sides of buildings in the last act... but is that really what I want out of Venom? Probably not. But he sure does look cool as a big monster guy to fight, and I was happy he was briefly playable.

Suits

Part of me feels like there's something lacking about the suit selection here, but almost every suit I liked in the previous games is back, and also I'm the type of person to give Peter the Classic Suit the second I unlock it and use that for most of the game. So does it really matter for me?

Peter's selection feels dominated by the various live action movie suits, but I get that those are going to be some of the suits people want to wear the most. I wish he had the Peter B. Parker skin to go with Miles' Spider-Verse alts, though. No idea why it's missing. Really I think I mainly just want more of the Spider-Verse designs.

Also I've complained about how most of the original suits designed for these games make Peter and Miles look like they were bitten by radioactive Alienware products, but I can just, you know. Wear other suits.

Misc thoughts

Everyone's already made this joke, but it's extremely funny that the Avengers didn't help with the symbiote invasion. Took one look at that and decided it wasn't their problem

On the subject of other superheroes, I do wish these games would acknowledge the Fantastic Four more. Peter's close relationship with that team feels woefully underutilized in his various adaptations

I like the trope of a boss fight that's a heightened version of a personal conflict between two people who are close, where throughout the fight the boss is airing out their grievances while the hero tries to get through to them emotionally. That especially works for Spider-Man! But WOW has Insomniac played that card a lot of times by the end of Spider-Man 2 lol

They're teasing the addition of Silk, I guess? I'm gonna be honest, I don't know shit about Silk, but I guess it was inevitable that they'd give us some form of Spider-Woman at some point. Gotta work all those costumes in somehow, and they're not brave enough to let one of the boys cosplay as Spider-Gwen.

They WERE, however, brave enough to let Harry say he loves Peter. I liked that little moment. They presumably meant it platonically, but clearly ol' Yaoi Lowenthal knows what's up

Post-leak addendum

So, obviously, by the time I got around to finishing this post the big Insomniac leak happened. I wish the game industry wasn't so secretive that it took a massive, dangerous data breach just to get our hands on some very basic info that would be public knowledge if Insomniac was a film studio, but here we are.

We now know that Insomniac spent somewhere around $315 million making Spider-Man 2 - triple what the first Spider-Man game cost to make. A quote about this from a leaked presentation has been stuck in my head ever since I first saw it on Twitter. “Is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”

To be honest, I'm not sure it is.

I liked Spider-Man 2, but I'd probably say that overall I liked it about as much as the first game. It's certainly a somewhat bigger game, with marginally more realistic looking graphics thanks to the power of the PS5. But I think I could do without ray tracing and more realistic hair rendering and whatnot if it meant that these games didn't take like five years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make. I could not give less of a shit if the swinging animations were recycled between games. I'd be fine with them being shorter, too.

I like these games, but as we look at that leaked project lineup and realize that Insomniac is turning into The Marvel Game Studio, I think about how many smaller, more original games that those resources could go towards if they scaled back the Marvel stuff just a bit. How many Ape Escapes or Patapons or Gravity Rushes could get made for the budget of just one of these massive AAA tentpole games of Sony's, which are apparently barely even breaking even? How many could be made for the budget of the "smaller, cheaper" Miles Morales game, which somehow cost $156 million to make despite using an updated version of the same Manhattan map from the first game? Hell, how many smaller games could have been made with the $39 million that went into remastering the first Spider-Man game for PS5 a mere two years after launch? How many people will lose their jobs if any one of Insomniac's upcoming Marvel games underperforms - which, in this case, could mean selling "only" 5 million copies? And would hardcore PlayStation fans even accept those smaller games at this point, now that they've been trained to only appreciate mega-budget Prestige Games with cutting edge graphics and treat everything else with disdain? How much worse will this get as the graphical arms race continues?

I think I just miss Japan Studio. Fuck Sony. Uhh but anyway the Spider-Man game this post was supposed to be about was good, some writing complaints aside. 8/10

[therichantsim]

Y'all, when I say I am growing very fond of this gameplay/minimal cc life…

Also, can I be honest below the cut with y’all for a minute...

The Blackburns have lived rent-free in my head for the last six years. They live their lives in my imagination in all of their cinematic glory. If I had an animation/film degree I’d just do mini-movies on YouTube or something, but I have zero knowledge or patience when it comes to this game's mechanics or posing. I’ve often thought about illustrating them but I love the semi-realistic look the game gives especially with cc and G-shade presets. In my head, they’re much older and further along in their personal lives than they are in the current story. I love them so much and they all feel very real to me. However... As some of you know I am a full-time visual artist. There is something about the painting process that is very different from writing/storytelling. The canvas is like magic. It does something to me and for me when I paint. I get so much more out of it even if no one ever sees the work. I can’t speak for anyone else but it’s a lot of work trying to convey what you see in your head into an actual visual representation. However, when I put that work into the story I don’t get that same magical feeling. Don’t get me wrong the imagining part I can do all day every day AND I DO. The effort to try to convey what I see using this game, and capture it for you to see, is not as much fun as it once was. The dopamine high I used to get is gone. I miss it though. It is so intoxicating and exciting when you see the tangible benefits of your efforts. When readers are invested and locked in. When they love or hate your characters and discuss them amongst themselves as though they're real. That high gets you excited to push through the process to do the work it takes to find poses, wait an eternity for your game to load, set the stage, dress the sims, gather decos, cars, cc builds, etc. Gameplay is so much easier. Cute pics, and a good preset. Boom you're done. Not to mention I can get in and out of the game so quick and still do ALL the other things I enjoy doing throughout my day as well. I'm saying all this to say. The free time I get to open this sandbox game, I'm probably going to post gameplay. However, when I'm done updating and playtesting mods/cc I will eventually update the story for those who care to be invested. I just can no longer adhere to a schedule. I will post Let It Burn when I feel inspired to do so.

[october-faye]

85 hours and eleven minutes. 😤

I've finished Veilguard. Spoilers and whinging under the cut.

Outcome as follows:

💗 Davrin (romanced)

💀 Harding (dead :( )

🤡 Solas (tricked, because fuck that guy)

*Sigh*

The ending was decent, delivering on spectacle and scale. I enjoy the combat, especially zipping around as a rogue and scoring headshots with precision aiming. That never got old. Elgern'an was hyped up all game, but he was the easiest boss fight by a mile.

However, the more I played the ending, the more I realised I was essentially replaying the final mission of Mass Effect 3, this time in Minrathous and starring Temu Commander Shepard.

And I say that as someone who doesn't even hate Rook. I've just never played an RPG that has fought this damn hard to keep its protagonist from being the slightest bit interesting.

Even their relationship with Varric, something the ending hypes up as being so important, happened almost entirely off-screen before the game begins. I just can't deal with their grief being given focus while characters who actually knew Varric for far longer (the Inquisitor, Harding, Dorian) have nothing to say about his death.

On a more positive note, I did develop a fondness for the companions. I'd like to do a replay as a mage and to take another romance out for a spin.

After that, I think I'm done with Bioware.

I say this completely without malice, but between the devaluing of their writing staff and their established lore, I can't say the direction of this series (or of Mass Effect) is anything I want to invest time and energy thinking about. I'll replay the old games as often as I ever had, but the writing in this game (plot, dialogue, tone, vocabulary, characterisation, relationships, all of it) was so disappointing. But I couldn't even laugh at it because it felt like I was laughing at myself for ever giving a shit when Bioware's remaining leadership clearly doesn't.

Some have speculated Bioware are trying to softly reboot the series and attract new players, but I don't think they'll bring in enough to make up for the portion of the long-term fanbase they've alienated.

This game was technically solid, and it had okay combat, level design and mechanics. But it excels at nothing. The writing, characters, lore and role playing was always the unique selling point of Bioware's games. Without that, you've got a mid-tier God of War clone that shines brightest while it lazily retreads the company's glory days.

Final score for Veilguard:

Gameplay: 7 out of ten.

Story: 3 out of ten.

On balance: 5 out of ten. Would play again, but only once more out of curiosity.

[tsunochizu]

Hiii I’ve never done an ask game before (new to tumblr) so idk how these work but what about 11? What would you change about the source material if you could?

I would definitely change gameplay itself to include a better ecosystem lmao

Like rn it technically works for gameplay but I would definitely edit it a LOT if I had the power

There's many small things that irritate me just a little, which are mostly:

The massive amount of predators with very little prey when it comes to the Rainworld ecosystem

Random lizards everywhere, even in places without much food at all or in places where they fall off platforms on their own without any help every. Single. Time. Why do they keep coming back there? Like I get that the cycle brings them back, but if I kept dying in an area, I would move out, idk

There's always like 20 lizards in the area, but usually like 3 or 4 squidcadas and maybe 2 centipedes. What are those lizards eating? How is there still so many of them?

Usually there's little carnivores and plenty of herbivores, with only exceptions being when it's a pack of carnivores that take down massive prey and then feed off of that for a while, but still

Also it just doesn't feel good to play in plenty of places tbh

Like the longer you play, the more you realize that in most campaigns other than survivor (survivor actually feels like how surviving in a hostile ecosystem is meant to work. Spearmaster feels like "let me throw 5000 lizards at you for difficulty lol") the lizards are put there just to add additional fake difficulty and make stuff just annoying

Monk and Survivor don't suffer from that issue. Other slugcats however, mostly the downpour ones? ....a little bit yeah.

Also I hate how the approach of "most things likely want to eat you so stab everything you come across" is correct most of the time

So if I could, I would add plenty of neutral creatures to the game, to force you to actually learn what is neutral and not a threat and interact with things with cautious curiosity from the start rather than being hostile and only getting in trouble for doing so when it comes to scavengers and noodleflies and nothing else

But idk its a small thing that has been annoying me for a long while already, and the game is still great! It has wonderful art and messages and feels really good to play in most places, and I enjoy the story a whole lot!

I just wish more creatures were neutral.

I have so many ideas for fun interactions with neutral creatures (large beetles you can hide under, parrots that are neutral until you hurt them and then scream if you attack them, luring in predators, seals with glowing orbs on heads that are neutral but you can try to take the lantern if you don't mind being hunted, stinkbugs that let out clouds of chemicals if you hit them, etc.) And its a shame that it's not used more in rw

Squidcadas are fun, scavengers are fun, give me more of that please. Not everrything needs to be hostile every time.

Of course it is only my opinion, and the game is still one of my absolute favourites, it's just that one thing that I woud change if I could. I hope to learn modding to one day bring my creature ideas to life (or commission someone else to code them) so that I could experience the ecosystem I wish I could

And ofc if you disagree, good for you, there's many reasons why I can see you could disagree, that's just my personal opinion on what would be fun for the game. (人 •��ᴗ•͈) nothing more than random thoughts

[raguna-blade]

Struck with the very real, and very strange, revelation that I actually for real would be down with a fully paid gacha game. With the stamina, with the daily whatever, with the rotating banners, all of that.

But Very Specifically, Under the Conditions that there are no additional payments for anything at all, except for, functionally, Expansion packs. I could say DLC and that'd be Technically correct, but I mean Expansion Packs in the old sense of the term of what amounts to effectively a whole ass game that interfaces with the base game.

Yeah man we're just adding a whole ass game mode you could lose yourself in. Here's an extra 30 Characters Banners that'll be fitted into your rotation, and a set of rebalances for everyone to keep them in line. You can turn this off in the menu if you like, no big.

Because i sit here and think about it and like...I like the general vibe of gacha games actually, but actively hate the monetization. And while there's definitely space to say that yeah man if you took out the gacha bullshit a lot of these games would be better and I won't even argue with you because like Yes. I don't think i've encountered one that I think would be made WORSE by the removal of such bullshit, at the same time like...I am unironically enjoying myself?

Which feels weird to admit the more I think about it. I like the limited playtime saying "Hey you can play as much as you want within this period but then you gotta put it down" especially when the gameplay is actually pretty good and interesting? I like the Hey tick these boxes stuff dailies.

Which...Actually no, that's not weird in the fucking least is it? People do that shit all the time with animal crossing and company, stardew and all those, and while those allow for MUCH longer play sessions, the sentiment I think isn't so far removed as be unreasonable. I just wanna do a thing real quick and dip out, done.

Like there's an obvious thing here, I think, that if you DO do a game like this (and i'll be honest I want to kind of do it) you probably should just add a free play mode or something. Bring back cheat codes or whatever, but hey if the core game is good and people wanna play it why not right?

hm...

[skaruresonic]

I like how people act like only SA2 and 06 are good portrayal

Y'all are sleeping on him and Metal in Rivals 2

But seriously, it's clear they don't think much of Shadow other than "SA2 nostalgia" and "Team Dark". His individual aspect is ignored, same for aggression and stoicness

Shadow's char arc also can't be understated

Heroes he wakes up, amnesiac. Only midway he starts questioning the doctor given the Shadow Androids seen at Bullet Station, but the priority for Omega and Neo Metal were huge. He's super quiet most of the game in terms of cutscenes

Shadow 05 his disassociation with the world was so big, he legit wasn't gonna save the people from Black Arms initially. Only cuz Black Doom told him he knew him and memories flashing back he shifts course to discover himself. Canon course he's mostly just getting Ems amongst the war effort. Fans hate it cuz the concept of noncanon endings being individually determined + gameplay fucking up how you can't restart mid path immediately, but Shadow's individualism is very strong. In the end he learns enough to realize he needs to move on, become a new person of himself

With that experience Battle GBA he sees himself but potentially worse in Emerl, and that scares him. He brashedly tries to stop it, but learns from Sonic, Rouge, and Emerl to accept himself, and other aspects of humanity. In the end he grows, to accept himself, and the betterment of humanity regardless how stupid they can be

With all that by 06 he's complete. He's no longer self doubting, and despite aggression and some ego, generally doesn't fuck around. His begruding comradery is own that is earned, but he'll still be civil at minimum. He calls out Meph for trying to trick him, he grew wise from when Black Doom tried that shit.

06, Rivals, and R2 shows that he's still closed off if it's distracting, but he's self invested in saving the world. Not for Maria (incidentally it and 06 show he has minimal personal qualms with Eggman, unlike Sonic if the priority is elsewhere, which given 05's gaslighting is interesting)

His interactions with Metal are great, a notable level of respect rising over the course of the game. He can respect Rouge, but isn't afraid to fight her if she's harming a mission. Interactions with Sonic and Knuckles are civil, though similarly if they distract, they'll be pushed out with fisticuffs

Colors DS he even accredits Sonic's abilities, of which Omega has trouble comprehending

Forces he says 1 thing to Infinite attempting to assasinate him that fans randomly act like he's an asshole cuz???, then spends the game helping in the war effort, trying to find Omega, and being civil to Sonic, 6 month oddity plot hole aside

Really the only bad canon to lore game rep of him is Free Riders, and that's mostly due to him having no real reason being there. If it's to show him actually enjoying his life something Knux tries after SA2 that fans don't like it kinda failed with how he very much doesn't want to be there

But overall fans can't accept him not being woobie, not slapped in a trio, not Maria angsty, or being individualistic. Or realize the entire arc he went through

I see people acting like he needs a mediator every appearance, and that's super insulting to his char dev and intelligence

06, Rivals, and R2 shows that he's still closed off if it's distracting, but he's self invested in saving the world. Not for Maria (incidentally it and 06 show he has minimal personal qualms with Eggman, unlike Sonic if the priority is elsewhere, which given 05's gaslighting is interesting)

Yeah. Which you'd think would suggest that Shadow is a naturally reticent person, but I guess that's not good enough for a certain number of folks.

---

Forces he says 1 thing to Infinite attempting to assasinate him that fans randomly act like he's an asshole cuz???, then spends the game helping in the war effort, trying to find Omega, and being civil to Sonic, 6 month oddity plot hole aside Because Shadow bullied poor tormented Infinite uwu. Never mind that Finny-boy didn't give a single shit that his squad got killed, and in fact seemed annoyed by it. You can tell no one in this Chili's finished Forces because nobody really talks about how he stuck around HQ at the end of Forces, an unusual departure from his typical habit of peacing out at the end of the game.

--- His interactions with Metal are great, a notable level of respect rising over the course of the game. He can respect Rouge, but isn't afraid to fight her if she's harming a mission. Interactions with Sonic and Knuckles are civil, though similarly if they distract, they'll be pushed out with fisticuffs Yeah, didn't Metal rip the Emerald out of his chest and Shadow was like "Don't do that, you'll destroy yourself?" Very interesting interaction. I also remember Shadow noting that Metal didn't receive a radio signal in the jungle. The fact that that tidbit takes place at the beginning of the game implies he began the game thinking of Metal as just a device and slowly came to view him as a partner through working with him.

Conversely, Shadow once threatened to knock Sonic out in Rivals 2 for nothing more than simply being in his way; it's not automatically OOC for him to be aggressive on occasion. It's actually pretty funny when people are like "Sonic and Shadow are besties" because Shadow threatens to beat Sonic's ass almost every time he claps eyes on the guy. xP

--- While I can't precisely vouch for or against '06!Shadow, it's more than a little illogical to clamor for more SA2!Shadow-esque characterization when A.) the guy is all about moving on and B.) he was essentially brainwashed for most of that game.

---

But overall fans can't accept him not being woobie, not slapped in a trio, not Maria angsty, or being individualistic. Or realize the entire arc he went through

Which is ironic, because most of the games practically smack you upside the head with the idea that Shadow acts of his own accord. You'd almost have to ignore the games in order to claim he has friends and is besties with Team Dark, because despite his bonds with them, he's not attached to them at the hip.

---

Personally speaking, Battle!Shadow is my favorite portrayal for a number of reasons. Shadow is still grappling with existential issues from past games, sure, but the game doesn't confine his personality to just that. The other characters treat him with respect even when he's being something of a dick. He's allowed to move on from his past in a much more organic and coherent way than in ShTH. He's given closure, and instead of simply discarding the past entirely as if it didn't matter, he manages to process and integrate it. He finally understands Gerald's wishes for him and his place in the world. He's able to give Emerl the last Chaos Emerald without the need to hang onto it in memory of Maria. And yet - I say this with nothing but the utmost affection - despite this character progression, he's still something of a petty little bitch. He barges in on Sonic and demands he hand over Emerl - no words bandied, as he's not a conversationalist. Rouge has to twist his arm for a thank you for dragging him home so he, you know, didn't die from being all "I can take them" (gets knocked out). He's every bit of "macho" that folks complain about in 2010-era Shadow, and all of this is presented in a largely neutral manner by the narrative. Shadow challenges you to fight everyone else before you throw down with him, because of course he does, he's the ultimate life form. When Emerl activates the Final Egg Blaster, his attitude is so gloom and doom that Rouge yells at him to brighten up. xP Even at the end of his story, when Emerl is waxing poetic about his Real Boy Emotions(tm), Shadow manages to remain prickly. His last words before bouncing? "This is ridiculous! I am leaving!"

I love how Shadow is allowed to have flaws that make him legitimately dislikable and off-putting on some level. And the sense I get from the "'06 and SA2 are Peak Shadow" crowd is that these flaws wouldn't be present if we received the kind of characterization folks wanted. We'd have Shadow, but a sanitized version. (To be clear, it's not that I think '06!Shadow is bad, per se; he just seems to lack those rough edges that make Battle!Shadow so endearing to me.) We can't have Shadow flexing on his strength, otherwise he'd be too macho and arrogant. We can't have him boast about his superior abilities without it actually being overcompensation stemming from some sort of personal insecurity. We can't have him be misanthropic because that's mean and what about Maria, huh. (Yeah: what about Maria?) We can't have him be aggressive towards Sonic for even understandable reasons; we can't have him being a party pooper. Let him hug his friends, Sega. Let him crack jokes. At some point, you're just like "So do you even like Shadow, or...?"

[chaosmagetwin]

Random thoughts for a project inspired by Diane Duane's Omnitopia

Book one has sat around in my head for forever, and book two doesn't seem to be coming out ever y.y

Maybe this'll be fanfiction, maybe not, idk.

The most basic premise of omnitopia is that there is a technology that allows people to jack in to a virtual world, and explore it as if they were in their own body. There is also a software run by a Totally Normal Video Game Company that definitely takes some hints from Blizzard / Bethesda pre-enshittification where mods and custom maps were easy and encouraged to to be made, and there was some level of developer involvement in a positive sense; in universe, this was a set of tools that allowed people to make their own worlds, their own games, their own everything using their engine / software. People could log into what had been a bog standard MMO, and then travel through portals to other universes.

Mostly, I've been disenfranchised with a lot of that, but at the time of the books release, the future was pretty bright, the big video game companies weren't as obviously evil (looking back, knowing what I know now.... look, I was in high school, leave me alone, I wasn't even a leftist then), and the idea of an MMO that allowed infinite variance and infinite future stories put in the hands of the common person was really cool.

Regardless, a lot of it has rattled around in my head over the years, and I keep coming back to a core concept that took root; the idea of a technology that allows people to jack into a virtual world and explore it as if they were in their own body, for the explicit purpose of MMORPG's, BUT instead of playing it in real time, they instead upload their personality and memories, and upload it into the game. There is no logging out, because the idea is that your body (the original you) unplugs, and goes about their day. They go to work. They go and do things. You essentially clone yourself to go and have activity. At a later point, you then download the experiences of the avatar, and enjoy the in-detail memories.

I've played around with it in a few ways in my head; time dilation was one I kept coming back to, but ultimately decided was a bad idea; you leave your avatar in there for 1 minute, you get 60 minutes of gameplay back. One day, 60 days. One month, five years. How long does it take before the memories of the person you put in no longer feel like you? Those memories aren't contextless; your avatar is living them, your avatar has thoughts about them, maybe even the Avatar isn't having a good time about it. How many of us have tried a game out, only to go "wow I hate this actually", only now you can't back out? It's great for a philosophical "Don't create the torment nexus", but I'm not really interested in writing that kind of book.

Another one I kept coming back to was the idea of a team of developers, and A.I., who are in charge of story telling within the game. They're constantly watching for errors and odd things. Mostly, I just felt that they were interesting but purposeless within a narrative sense, except to explain certain sudden changes, or bug fixes.... but why tell that at all? If I'm writing a story, I want it to be about the characters living it, not the gods above trying to figure out ways to "fix" things.

I've also messed around with the idea of how this ultimately allows a company to have free access to your mind and soul. The freemium MMO's of today, and what they would do with your mind if they could; intellectual slavery (Just cordon off a copy in a datafarm, have them work on bullshit, who would ever know?), advertisement via direct implantation (you're downloading memories already. It's not that difficult to imagine the nauseating level of "Your avatar ate LOTS of MCDONALDS and ENJOYS IT, here are 6 months of ENJOYMENT from BURGER".), but this, too, ultimately is just more of philosophical "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" stuff that isn't really interesting to me. Someone else can write that. Enjoy. I'm sure cyberpunk will love being rehashed again.

So, what exactly does interest me in this? I think I like the idea of characters who are Functionally Modern, who are playing a game, and getting enjoyment out of it. The game itself is an MMO with a hyper-realistic setting; mechanics of the game don't really "exist", so much as there are physics. The game itself isn't complex, just "What if World War 1, but there's magic?" "What if you were part of a community of farmers?" "What if it's a complex world that you are encouraged to explore, but there aren't any NPCs, so everything has to be done by players, so make sure to encourage players who are different from you and enjoy the game differently than you do, so you can still access the kind of things they do like crafting!" "What if Mega-dungeon Dungeon Meshi MMO?"

I like the community aspect. I like the idea of people interacting with and exploring the world, and the idea of exploring the systems within them. I like the idea of it being exceptionally violent and terrifying and gory, but it's okay because none of it is permanent, you can opt out, there are limits and lines.

I think my favorite is probably still the WW1 version. A slow burn of a war, filled to the brim with magic that only makes it worse. I'm pretty sure the game itself would be called "The Forever War" or something similar. The main character creates their character, deciding at the start to go against the meta, not because they think it's actually good but, because they just wanted to RP as that character. The war is already entrenched. They arrive by train to the battlefield, and they already have to deal with trench foot. They spend a lot of the book just chatting with other players, caring for the equipment, doing minor enchantment work, recovering fallen player's so they can be revived, and eventually dying before they even shoot their gun for the first time because they stuck their head out and got sniped. There isn't even a waiting period, they just wake up later, revived and go "Woops haha".

I think the main character would be a silly clumsy failgirl transgirl, both because that's the way she is, and also because that's the way she's RPing. She's a dummy who enjoys the tedium of this war, the bursts of combat and adrenaline, and the feeling of camaraderie that she doesn't get in real life. She enjoys hanging out with all these folk, who are also all going to be just as queer as she is, she enjoys how terrible it is, she enjoys exploring the way the system and mechanics can be broken in subtle ways. I think she'd be autistic. She knows too much about this game, but she's never played it. She's read all the wiki's and guides, and doesn't know that last week a player discovered how to teleport using a glitch, and now hypermobility is out in the meta because it can be replicated with heavier builds using the glitch. She knows about how players value a quality of life enchantment more than a damage spell, but she doesn't know that the average player is more than happy to cuddle at the end of the shift in the trench because they're just as touch starved as she is.

I think the game has set it up so that every country is in fleeting alliances with one another, constantly shifting in diplomacy and technology, and they fight over resources between each other, each one trying to get just enough of an advantage to push on another one, to hold just long enough to build one more tank. Pockets of resistance, holding out against hope, and completely cut off, hoping that an armored car might come to get them and the resources they were protecting and make it worth it. The country the main character is in is a minor one; they have one or two resources left, and they're making pushes out, but it's probably doomed. Half the players are already talking about which country they'll join after, the other half about waiting for the global reset. There's a feeling of gallows humor, but also stubborn joy; they chose this.

anyways, that was a lot of thoughts, and maybe I'll do something with this later. But probably not <3

[dlamp-dictator]

Quick Thoughts on Canto 5

Okay, just finished up Canto 5's latest stage and I've gotta' say this is probably gonna' be one of the better chapters if it keeps going the way it's going. On the tierlist I'd put it between the beginning of Sinclair's chapter and Gregor's in terms of introductions. Now whether this is going to drag as much as Yi Sang's chapter in terms of battles is it something yet known.

Anyway, wanted to condense my thoughts real quick before moving onto other things.

Gameplay

Boy, the eventually Negative Coin Ishmael ID is gonna' kick ass in this chapter whenever they reveal it.

No seriously, the fact that Ish has this crippling of a debuff makes me fume almost as much as Sinclair's story debuff in his chapter. Starting at -35 sanity when all of Ishmael's current IDs are positive coin IDs is just hell on earth. I usually make it a rule to have the starring sinner in all their chapter stages and be in their base ID for thematic effect, but this debuff made me 180 on that rule and at least give myself the ability to pick her IDs. Extra attack power is useless on a character who needs to be at high sanity to function, and Ish has no low sanity IDs yet, so this is either a massive tease to the eventually 3-star ID that'll put Nclair to shame, or just an asshole move by the game developers.

On that note,

Allen X, Before Canto 5 Dropped: "Oh boy, a new Canto, hopefully they'll change up the weakness to finally kill the blunt meta an-" *pirates are weak to blunt*

... ... ...

Seriously, this actually pissed me off a little until the mermaids were weak to Pride, Wrath, and Pierce... just in time for me to spend all my resources buff my blunt IDs to level 40. At least we'll have some time until the next portion of the chapter opens up to start grinding materials for the pierce IDs we got since it seems Mermaids are gonna' be the next big enemy this time around. Still, it's a bit annoying to have a new chapter with the same tired meta IDs putting in the work, at least in terms of damage type.

Also, these fights take a little longer than the other chapters. Maybe that's because I haven't truly maxed out my teams yet, but I just barely got the EX conditions for 5-19, and I had to spam EGO to make that happen. Outis and Yi Sang were a godsend this time around.

Story

I'll save the majority of my thoughts for when I finish reading the full chapter, but so far I've been enjoying the story.

I think this does a better job at giving all the sinners some screentime than others. Already we've got some good development from Rodion, Meursault, Sinclair, Outis, Yi Sang who already had his chapter/spotlight, and even Dante of all people. This has been a real nice treat and gives me hope that more characters than Ishmael will come out of this with some new perspectives and peace of mind.

Speaking of, Ishmael's slow descent into madness is interesting to watch, and unlike most times this happens in other stories it feels like there's some purpose to Ish losing her grip on things aside from the need of story tension and angst. I'm surprised how little I'm annoyed by it all, since this type of arc tends to be really poorly written and only serves to make me hate the character. Maybe it's because characters like Outis and Rodion are actively annoyed and quietly reprimanding Ish respectively, maybe it's Dante actually stepping up as a manager and having some semblance of control over his employees in terms of authority and understanding them. Or maybe I'm just a bit of an Ishmael apologist and I'm willing to let Women's Wrongs™ happen when it's one of my favorite characters, who can really say.

I'm going to keep my deeper thoughts on the plot to myself since the story isn't finished yet, but in terms of my more basic thoughts I looking forward to things.

[yanderefairyangel]

Tbh I think some of the “No one’s talking about Engage anymore” claims boil down to people not looking outside their bubbles. I’m one of the few who loves both 3H and Engage so I look into both their communities a lot and I will say you see little talk of Engage in 3H circles unless to criticize it so if you only hang out in those circles of course you’ll get the “No one talks about Engage” impression. And while Engage does overall get less fan works every day than 3H, it still receives a lot more daily than the “Engage Fell Off” crowd would have you believe (they make it sound like its tags only get filled monthly). If you look at the accounts who make these claims, you’ll notice they primarily follow people who dislike or don’t care for Engage. I’ve seen dead fandoms and Engage isn’t one of them. So for some the answer to “Why is no one talking about Engage anymore?” is “because you only interact with people who don’t care for Engage”.

Hello anon ! I am glad you enjoyed both games !

And honestly I think you pretty much well explained the situation. As to whether ot not Engage receives more fancontent then 3H every day, I can't really tell since I don't try to compare the two but I agree Engage's fandom isn't a dead one at all, and if people searched for Engage related content, then they would see that for a game this short it does received more fancontent they believe it does.

What is actually weird about this is that... why does it matter whether or not Engage is being talked less then 3 H ? That's not really an indicator of it's quality.

Just to give an example, I am in 2 fandom : Vanitas no Carte and Fire emblem. Vanitas no carte is by miles better written then Engage or any Fire emblem game story and it receives little fan content. I just checked. It received like 2 fan content this day, while Engage already had 8 of them. What I am saying is that it doesn't matter if Engage isn't as popular as 3H because it's not an indicator of it's quality and if the people who keeps saying no one talked about it tried just for a second to look, they would actually see the fandom is still active. But of course if some people didn't like it, why would they want to talk about it ?

what's more is that everytime someone bring that topic up it turns into a Engage hating thing where people will trash on the story, the characters even the GAMEPLAY and GRAPHICS and FREAKING MUSIC to say "Yeah look 3H is better at those", just to remove the game of any redeeming quality... you think that's not going to make fans not want to look at Engage ? or not discourage fans ? It is, it will obviously depress fans to see people trashing a thing they love, so they'll move on to another plateform where they can see some Engage appreciation, which obviously to the people who stay in their own bubble will give them the impression those fans don't talk about Engage anymore when in reality they still do, just elsewhere.

Another argument I saw was that people return to play other FE games... which is the point ? Engage was suppose to encourage player to give a look to previous game or replay previous game... if anything you are proving Engage worked !! But let's not kid ourselves, 3H is much longer to complete then Engage and when I finished it, I never picked it up again and replayed Awakening instead. Like of course once you finished a game, you might not replay it right away let alone replay it at all. And it's not like everyone stop playing Engage.

BigKlingy replayed it recently and made comments on how it feels different to replay the game while already knowing the story, that's how you feel that there were some though put into the writing.

Anyway I would'nt think too much about that weird discourse because I don't even understand what they are trying to infer. I remember that in January -March there was so much Engage content I though no one was talking again about 3H and even saw some 3H fans complain about that ! It's really just a question of perspective at this point.

[dangan-kagura]

Games I No Longer Play Due to Bad Fanbases

So this is a short list (yet long blog) of games that I used to like but no longer play or have any interest in due to issues like bad fanbases. Let me just say that, knowing about just how toxic the Danganronpa fandom can be sometimes, I don’t want to lose my love for that series knowing that some people in the fandom can be untrustworthy or just have different opinions from my own. I’m gonna try my best and explain why I stopped playing these games that I’ll mention.

UPDATE: So a lot of stuff mentioned here isn't really about toxicity in these fandoms, it's more like expression my opinions about these games since I've always had a minority opinion about them, and the fact that no one ever understood how I felt is what caused me to lose interest in them. I hope I didn't confuse anyone.

Devil May Cry and Resident Evil

So the reason I’m mentioning two games first is because this actually regards Capcom. Out of the two games mentioned, one of them is a game that doesn’t really have a bad fanbase, and that’s Devil May Cry. Resident Evil on the other hand has some issues, things like the live-action film series, Resident Evil 6, and a bunch of spinoffs.

The only games in that series I ever did enjoy looking back on them are Resident Evil 4 & 5. However, I stopped playing them since I’ve become fed up with the series popularity and the fact that people were oblivious to things like the badness of the live-action film series. I actually stopped playing Resident Evil right around the time I learned about Resident Evil 6 when it was still being made and could tell just from the trailer that the game didn’t look that good. I’ve been told that there is a lot of hate surrounding that game, but I still don’t have a clear picture as to what it is people hate about it. I just hate it because I remember reading somewhere that Resident Evil 5 was gonna be the series finale and was perfectly fine with it and found it pointless for Capcom to make Resident Evil 6.

Devil May Cry on the other hand, was the series that got me into the beat ‘em up/hack ‘n slash genres in gaming. Despite the very few titles, I still tried to enjoy it while ignoring the toxicity from some of Capcom’s other games. But unfortunately, that toxicity became worse when I started to suspect that Capcom was selling out. It’s hard to try and look back on it, but basically in the last decade, I didn’t like any of the new games Capcom was releasing, and I was becoming fed up with some of the crossover games they were releasing. Examples include:

The crossover with Tekken and Street Fighter

Mega Man’s appearance in Super Smash Bros.

Akuma’s appearance in Tekken 7

The crossover with Ace Attorney and Professor Layton

The appearance of Street Fighter’s Ryu in Super Smash Bros. became the final straw for me as I was dissatisfied with Street Fighter 4 and thought that it was a piece of shit game. Looking back on it, I still didn’t get what the hype was about Street Fighter and thought that compared to my favorite fighting games like Tekken, KOF, and Soul Calibur, everything about Street Fighter 4, from gameplay to opening theme song, just didn’t make me think it was a game worth obsessing, and the upcoming releases for the updated versions (i.e. SSF4 and UST4) just didn’t feel right for me. Basically, since Ryu’s appearance in Smash Bros, I decided to stop playing Devil May Cry because it didn’t feel right to still enjoy it if I wasn’t going to like the other Capcom games the majority was obsessing over, and to this day, I still haven’t played Tekken 7 because I knew that the appearance of Akuma was gonna ruin it for me.

Getting back to Resident Evil, there’s a lot of hate surrounding the film series and although the series is over, it’s unfortunate that the Resident Evil movies don’t have Razzie nominees. I’m of course talking about the Golden Raspberry Awards, that award ceremony that gives awards to the worst movies of the year, pretty much the opposite of the Academy Awards. More to the point, the Resident Evil movies don’t have Razzie nominees, not even for worst sequel. The badness of that film series is somewhere in between the badness of Uwe Boll and Michael Bay movies, and at least their movies get Razzies nominees. So at the time, I found it unfair that Hollywood kept making more Resident Evil movies and the Razzies were more interested in nominating mixed-received movies for categories like worst picture.

Likewise, the popularity and toxicity for Capcom games like Street Fighter and Resident Evil was just too obnoxious for me to handle and it was enough to make me lose interest in Devil May Cry, as well as not play games that have Capcom characters as guest characters (e.g. Tekken 7, Super Smash Bros.). In fact, there’s times where I’m annoyed by the toxicity of memes related to Ace Attorney and the Capcom Vs series. Knowing that my opinion about Street Fighter is negative, these memes are just pretty stupid, because my opinion about Street Fighter 4 is bound to come back to mind.

Guilty Gear

So Guilty Gear used to be one of my favorite anime games and one of my favorite fighting games. There are two big reasons as to why I stopped playing it, one of them has to do with the popularity of some of Arc System Works’ other games, while the other does kinda have to do with the series’ fanbase.

First off, it was bothering me that there were times that Guilty Gear was being treated as underrated compared to not only Blazblue, but also compared to other kinds of popular anime games like Danganronpa. I’m gonna admit that I’m in the minority that prefers Guilty Gear over Blazblue, and it was bothering me that Blazblue was getting all the things games like Danganronpa were getting but Guilty Gear wasn’t, an obvious example is an anime adaptation. Danganronpa aside, other great anime games like Senran Kagura, Neptunia, Persona 5, and Disgaea all have anime adaptations, but Guilty Gear doesn’t and yet Blazblue got one. Let me just say that I didn’t think Blazblue was as cool looking or as interesting compared to Guilty Gear, and it was bothering me that things like Guilty Gear having a lack of an anime adaptation made me think that people saw Guilty Gear as underrated even though it came out before Blazblue.

Here’s something else that makes Guilty Gear look underrated. There’s a Round 1 arcade at a mall I like to go to that has a lineup of 2D Japanese fighting games. Out of the games they have, they have all the Blazblue games, but they don’t have the Guilty Gear Xrd games. In fact, compared to how the arcade also came with games like KOF, Street Fighter, and Persona 4 Arena, I found it unfair that they included Blazblue but they didn’t include Guilty Gear. It almost made me feel sorry for Guilty Gear.

Moreover, the popularity of Granblue Fantasy only made it worse for me. That game also made Guilty Gear look underrated and it too got an anime adaptation, and the fact that it’s an RPG/gacha game and not a fighting game only made it worse for me to hate the game. In truth, I didn’t see anything special about that game and not only thought it was uninteresting, but the title didn’t sound original enough to convince me. Literally, it felt like they put no effort into coming up with a good or original title, Granblue Fantasy fell flat for me. Of course, I stopped playing Guilty Gear years before Granblue Fantasy came out, so I was more upset about Guilty Gear being underrated compared to Blazblue, and the popularity for Granblue Fantasy was enough to actually make me feel sorry for Guilty Gear.

But another thing that got me to stop playing Guilty Gear has to do with fan favorite characters. Not Dizzy, but that cross-dressing nun Bridget. Not only is Bridget overrated, but his popularity just feels really toxic. It was like, whenever I tried searching for Guilty Gear stuff in the fandom, Bridget was a character fans would reference for the majority. It felt like there were times where Bridget fans would ruin the things that Guilty Gear is really all about, things like awesome rock music, awesome stage designs, references to classic rock music, and some of the other more interesting character designs. To me, it felt like Bridget fans were trying to get people to think that he’s what Guilty Gear is all about, and it was just so annoying because not only did I find Bridget uninteresting, but it was more like everyone was obsessing him all because of the fact that he’s a fucking cross-dresser.

You’re free to call me a hypocrite for saying that about Bridget. I will admit that I do like the Danganronpa character Chihiro Fujisaki. I’d rather not admit that I fell for his trap since I found Chihiro to be cute, especially when he blushes, but at the time I got into Danganronpa, I did my best to avoid Chihiro out of concern that he had the same kind of obnoxious fans as Bridget due to being a cross-dressing male. But unlike Bridget, I’m actually over the whole Chihiro gender debate. His reason for dressing like a girl is more emotional since bullying is involved, compared to Bridget’s reason which is more idiotic, not to mention that Chihiro isn’t as overrated compared to characters like Nagito, Ibuki, and Kokichi who have some toxic fans that are almost as toxic as Bridget fans. In fact, Bridget’s popularity is more on par with Astolfo from the Fate series and his fans are equally as annoying.

A minor thing, but it was also bothering me that when it came to seeing Guilty Gear Xrd content, everyone was playing the game in Japanese. No one ever bothered to play the game with the English dub. It bothered me because it gave me the impression that people could think the game doesn’t have an English dub or the game does have an English dub but with terrible voice actors. I will admit that at the time Xrd SIGN came out, I did play the game in Japanese out of concern that the game’s English dub didn’t include professional voice actors, like the ones in Danganronpa. At the time, what came to mind was the spinoff KOF game, KOF: Maximum Impact. That game has a really bad English dub to the point that no one would be familiar with their names. Let me just say that there is some positive reception to that game, but the game's bad English dub and the lack of an option to use the Japanese dub (especially in the PS2 version) makes it almost impossible to play (the Xbox version fixes this by including the option to use the Japanese dub). If I remember right, in IGN’s review of the game, they thought that the game’s English dub was “piss poor”. When I realized that the English dub for Guilty Gear Xrd has professional voice actors, I did try to take more notice of it, but felt left out because everyone played the game in Japanese almost as if they thought the game had a bad English dub.

So to summarize, these are the reasons why I stopped playing Guilty Gear. I thought that Bridget had toxic fans, there were times where Guilty Gear felt underrated compared to Blazblue, and no one played the Xrd games in English. There are actually times where I do miss playing this series, especially with how even more underrated Granblue Fantasy made it, making me feel almost sorry for Guilty Gear. The only thing about Guilty Gear I can’t let go of is it’s awesome music. I think out of the character themes from the Xrd games, the themes for Sol, Millia, and Poketim (I forget how to spell his name) are my favorites and still like to rock out to them. But the other issues here make it impossible for me to try and go back and play the series.

Super Smash Bros.

I have some little info from people who’ve admitted that the Smash Bros fandom is toxic, but let me tell you what got me to stop playing this series. Plain simple, I got fed up with having to see third-party characters take the spotlight. Not only the official ones, but the memes for the unofficial ones made it more annoying for me to handle. The fact that the latest Smash Bros games are focussing more on third-party and not first-party characters felt toxic for me for two reasons. One, they were characters from games I didn’t enjoy, and two, it felt like Smash Bros wasn’t what it used to be back when the series was exclusive to Nintendo only games.

At the time SSB4 came out on the 3DS and Wii U, I did in fact play the game on the 3DS but only for like a week. I stopped due to suspicion that Capcom character Mega Man suddenly became the overrated fan favorite. Let me just say that Mega Man is a Capcom series I’m not into, and out of the SSB4 newcomers when the game came out in 2014, I was more hype about Pac-Man being playable, especially knowing that Namco had some involvement with the game’s development, so I wanted to believe that Pac-Man would make a great guest character. The fact that Capcom games like Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Ace Attorney have toxic fanbases didn’t really give me any hype or interest for Mega Man, and the announcement of Street Fighter’s Ryu as a DLC character only made me want to hate Capcom for selling ou. Worst of all, the announcement of that Cloud guy from Final Fantasy was the last thing I needed to throw my copy of SSB4 in the trash and flame the game. Not only did I not enjoy Final Fantasy 7, but it didn’t feel right for Smash Bros to include that game partly because it came out on the PlayStation, so I’m on the side that believes that Smash Bros should only be limited to characters from games that have an importance to Nintendo’s history. Final Fantasy 7 had no importance with Nintendo’s history, and frankly, I failed to see what made the game so great, and the games popularity especially in online journalism made it so annoying for me to try to ignore it. Seriously, journalists never shut up about that game and the Final Fantasy series in general. I’ve played better.

Even with the release of Super Smash Bros on the Switch, the third-party characters from that game were enough to convince me to delete my save data for the other games in the series because these characters and their fans have destroyed Super Smash Bros for me. Some of them actually are characters from games that I thought were good choices because I admit that I actually like those games better. I would’ve loved to play Super Smash Bros as characters from Castlevania, heck, I wouldn’t mind at all playing Smash Bros with Terry Bogard from KOF. But having to deal with characters from games that I don’t enjoy such as Mega Man, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest is enough to convince me to not play the game at all. And unfortunately, I’ve never met anyone who’s admitted that they’ve done the same thing as me, that they’ve stopped playing Super Smash Bros all because they didn’t like the choice of third-party characters and their popularity in both the fandom and the memes.

Assassin’s Creed

It’s not really the Assassin’s Creed fandom that got me to stop playing this, but it’s the Assassin’s Creed series in general. I’m on the side that says the Assassin’s Creed series just isn’t the same as it was ever since AC Unity came out and yet everyone still enjoys the series. It’s like this, Assassin’s Creed games after Unity just don’t feel like they’re gonna bring back certain things from the Desmond Miles saga. There’s obviously a lot of things about Assassin’s Creed from things like story and gameplay that get me thinking that it’s not the best series to introduce to someone who loves gaming.

It’s hard to put into words really. There’s lots of things about Assassin’s Creed that don’t make it perfect, things like broken gameplay and unexplained story stuff. Yet, everyone loves the series and are just oblivious to all the big flaws. One thing that has been bothering me about this series is that to this day, Ubisoft has yet to announce a game entitled “Assassin’s Creed 5”. The fact that games since Unity don’t have numbers in the title and the lack of references to characters from the Desmond Miles saga gives me the impression that they aren’t official games but are more like spinoffs. I know that the series does have some spinoffs, it just bothers me that Ubisoft isn’t gonna make a game called “Assassin’s Creed 5”.

And don’t even get me started on the Assassin’s Creed movie. I knew just from the trailer that it was gonna be a bad movie and the fact that the film is rated PG-13, as opposed to the series being rated M, only made it worse. Just because Assassin’s Creed has things like open-world gameplay, historical figures as supporting characters, and is a game where you kill people doesn’t mean it’s the best game series. There’s lots of things about this series I feel like people often overlook such as the ancient human race and its moments of broken gameplay. I don’t think the movie mentioned anything about the ancient humans, almost as if they were unimportant.

I’m gonna admit that I actually think that Far Cry is the better series. One other thing about Assassin’s Creed that bothers me is that Ubisoft tries to sell it as if it were a stealth-action game. Compared to the stealth gameplay in Far Cry, as well as Metal Gear Solid, or even Sly Cooper, the stealth gameplay in Assassin’s Creed is sometimes unfair, especially when you’re doing a mission that requires you to not get caught or it’s game over. At least Far Cry makes things fair by letting you play the game as a regular first-person shooter, so stealth is totally optional. Not to mention, Far Cry sequels stay true by including numbers in the titles. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that they’re gonna make Far Cry 7, just as I wouldn't be surprised that they're not gonna make Assassin's Creed 5.

Overall, the fact that I accepted Far Cry as being better than Assassin’s Creed was the last thing I needed to say to myself that Assassin’s Creed is not the best series ever and is not as good as it used to be. Even if I played the latest installment, I’ll probably think that it’s not as good as the Ezio trilogy, which I’ve already lost interest in. It just bothers me to go online and see sites promoting the next installment in Assassin’s Creed even though I’m gonna be thinking that AC is not the best game series and the new games aren’t gonna be that good and I have no reason to play them. And did I mention that Assassin’s Creed sometimes feels like a broken mess?

In Conclusion

So to go over almost everything:

I stopped playing Devil May Cry because I was fed up with the popularity of Capcom’s other games that I didn’t like

I stopped playing Guilty Gear because people were treating it as underrated, everyone loves Bridget, and people barely played the games in English

I stopped playing Super Smash Bros because third-party characters and their memes ruined the series

I stopped playing Assassin’s Creed because the new games don’t look good to me, I prefer Far Cry, and no one else feels the same as i do

There are times where I’ll admit that I do miss playing them, but because of all of these flaws they have, there’s no point in going back to play them. As a Danganronpa fan, I honestly don’t want something similar to happen with my love for it, even after getting a better understanding just how toxic the fandom can be sometimes. Maybe I’ll blog about what got me into Danganronpa some other time.

[icebrooding]

Honestly even though I didn’t have the same negative reaction that much of the online gw2 community did, I do kinda appreciate some of the learnings for story they outlined in the retrospective 😅

I agree completely. I personally loved Secrets of the Obscure, I rate it very highly while acknowledging that it definitely had flaws. Handling as many new characters and lore topics was going to be difficult, and I understand the frustration of people who felt that things felt a bit underwhelming or glossed over, I really do. I feel it myself.

Personally, however, I think those things affected me less because I've always been rather focused towards story, and digging as much out of it as I can in a rather aggressive way, in almost everything I enjoy, and that allows me a different (not necessarily deeper) level of enjoyment. Sometimes I may come to conclusions or thoughts that may not be there actually, or may not have been the intent, but the enjoyable thing is that art is subjective, and if nothing comes out to specifically say 'this reading is wrong', I can satisfy myself with those interpretations.

Why else do you think I can sit here and write essays on 'here's why X character makes me think they're like Y based on one throwaway line or an implication in a piece of lore in a book I found on the overworld' :P

This is definitely how SotO appealed to me, because there was a lot there that I could dig into personally and get my mental cogs ticking. But on the same note, I get why people want more concrete answers, more time spent on developing new threads. I would have loved SotO to be longer, myself, because I truly enjoyed the world and characters it brought to the table. That's what Wildflowers will be for--

Gameplay, I think could have definitely been improved. While I wasn't particularly fussed with the first or last Nayos release, the middle one is where I felt the impact hardest. But I do enjoy things like Rift Hunting, Convergences, etc, I just pace my time. I know that's easier for me though since I only started playing in '22.

I appreciate the transparency on this front, in all honesty. I've only dabbled into game dev myself in times long past (I feel old, but I'm really not), and can understand the need to push out an excuse for why x or y didn't turn out as expected, but I can respect flat-out saying 'we tried to do too much, and we failed to achieve what we set out to'.

And with the certain extreme-level volatile reactions in other sections of this player base, I think recognising that treating the places where SotO tripped over itself as something not done maliciously is important. Not saying that criticism isn't deserved, but I have seen some genuinely horrific things said that make me feel ashamed to be part of this community.

All in all, I'm going to hold my faith in the next expansion and am greatly looking forward to it, and seeing how these lessons take. I've stuck through way worse in other MMOs, so one expac that struggled to handle everything it set out to do is barely a blip on my radar.

And I feel this is the best moment to bring up my general blog's attitude: it's no secret how horribly negative this playerbase can be, to the point I've had to turn off map chat a number of times because the negativity is so constant it is genuinely bad for my mental health. I have fairly severe depression, I do not need to sit here and wallow in even more negativity. I think too much of the world as it is right now thrives off of negativity and hating things and not being happy, so when I talk about story beats or characters, etc, I always try to do so in a positive way. I'm just here to enjoy something that's come to mean a lot to me, not to sit here and hear for the eightieth time about why X is a shit character or Y is the worst thing that ever happened or Z blah blah blah.

[divineerdrick]

Grinding Gear Games Live Stream for March 21, 2024

So I wasn't the biggest fan of the Adepticon live stream from last night. I'm hoping Grinding Gear Games can make up for that a bit with new details on Path of Exile 2 and Necropolis. While not the first time I've reacted to a League announcement (I think that was Synthesis?) this will be my first live reaction on this blog.

I absolutely love Path of Exile. When I was trying to do the YouTube thing, I tried my hand at making some PoE content. Unfortunately I hate editing, especially sound editing (does not go well with migraines). So that put an end to that. This is one of the reasons I've tried to move to a blog format, despite the fact that blogs get far less attention. But somehow, it never occurred to me to do blog posts about Path of Exile!

I might also try putting some content on here about Last Epoch, since I'm falling in love with that game as well. Don't know if it will replace PoE as my favorite ARPG, but it's definitely a ton of fun!

With that preamble out of the way, let's do some predictions!

Predictions

For Path of Exile 2, we know they're probably going to be giving us some Ranger gameplay. Johnathan has also talked about the Witch, but I'm gonna guess she's not ready based on things he said in a recent interview. So, for my prediction, I'm going to say we'll also finally see a reveal of one of the itemization systems.

As for Necropolis, that sounds so much like it would be a dungeon League. But we just had one, so I'm thinking this will mostly be a map mechanic. Judging from the preview, I'm betting we're going to have to dig up relics, as in bones and possessions, of heroes of The Eternal Empire. We'll then probably have to earn the respect and favor of these heroes through combat. But that still seems like easy predictions, so I'm gonna go a step further. We will be fighting alongside these heroes in special, juiced, boss encounters.

This League is also turning out to be quite the QoL patch too. Though, if you've been following the teasers and reveals, not all of the changes are actually beneficial. There have been some pretty heavy nerfs revealed, probably to bring the game more in line with design intent. The big one is that we can no longer bind skills on click to move. Instead, we will have to use the new support gems to automate those skills for us. This not only takes away a popular feature, but also takes away some of the control that click to move auto-casting gave us while also increasing socket pressure. My guess is that there will be some more grinding of teeth after the patch notes as well.

I'm gonna guess we're not done with new features yet though. The reveal of a separate PoE2 means that many of the announced features are now up in the air for PoE1. I'm guessing we'll hear some more about features coming back to PoE, even if we don't get them this patch.

I'm also gonna guess we're not gonna get any new transfigured gems, despite how popular that feature is. I'm thinking a great deal of the patch notes will be dedicated to balance changes on these gems.

And I think that's where I'm gonna stand for my predictions!

Announcement Stream

Oh nice! Simultaneous expansion release! While this doesn't affect me as I don't enjoy trying to play PoE on console, it's nice that development and developer tools seem to have caught up to the point where they can release the expansion on all platforms at once.

Oo! I heard deep crafting system~

Jumping right into Path of Exile 2! Here we go with that Ranger preview! We're really focusing on the bow it seems for this preview. For those of you not familiar, your class in Path of Exile does not come with a fixed playstyle, just things the class might be better at. So, for example, melee and grenade rangers are a thing. But for these previews they've been trying to focus on specific things to demonstrate.

Oh! Mounted combat! Diablo 4 eat your heart out!

We have some NPC villain reveals too! They're slowly giving us teasers for the story and setting of this new campaign.

Rangers are getting that move and shoot like the Mercenary. This is huge! One current problem with PoE is that you almost always have to plant your feet to use your skills. This means the difference between being a bow build or spellcaster is whether you're scaling attack damage or spell damage. And the less said about melee the better. Giving bow users the ability to move and shoot helps make the playstyle feel different, instead of just casting AoE spells from a bow.

Speaking of, it's smart to have the finisher have a bit of AoE. Melee already has a little bit of built in AoE, but arrows are still just pure hit or miss. Especially with that wind up on Sniper Shot, hitting multiple enemies and making sure you hit your target will be important.

Johnathan then starts going through the skill system for all the new people who have become interested in PoE2. Thanks again, Blizzard! All you sweet summer children, waiting for the sequel to play PoE for the first time, will never understand just the incredible upgrade this is. I love it so much!

You'll also be starting with such a better looking game! These new lightning effects are so good!

Interesting . . . Barrage has been changed to a cooldown skill. This support skill currently just greatly reduces your damage while rapidly firing our 4 shots. Now they want you to set it up a bit first. It feels a little like another support that exists called Unleash that lets you build up repeated castings over time. So this does feel to me like cooldown finishers will be a thing, but maybe you'll have to choose to opt into them by using a support gem.

But man! Sitting here watching this I just love all the skill and combo interactions in this game! Path of Exile 2 is going to become a theory crafter's dream! I mean detonating gas clouds! That's awesome!

Of course we end the preview with an epic looking boss fight. This boss appears to have a few bullet hell mechanics. I wonder how rolling interacts with these sections.

Wait! Not the end of the preview! Here's that mount, and it's a Roa! I wonder how much of the game you get to use it for.

Oh man! Beta delay . . . Oh well, I prefer they delay and make the game as polished as they can. Even if this does mean we have to wait till the end of the year. But hey! Now it won't be competing with Shadow of the Erdtree!

With that, we're onto Necropolis!

Oh! This does look like a dungeon League! Possibly more Rogue-lite mechanics too! I honestly didn't think they'd do two in a row.

Woah! New Tier of Maps and new bosses. I though we weren't going to see endgame reworks of this nature yet. I guess PoE2 is getting to the point they can divert more resources back to the original.

Yes! There's one I'm glad to be wrong about! New transfigured gems! Can't wait to see what we get!

Oh! No it's not a dungeon League or a Rogue-lite! This is definitely an in map mechanic. I like these modification manipulations, though it might slow things down a bit. I also really like that this is much more control over difficulty than last League.

This is a lot of information we're getting here too! New players can potentially use this to make more informed decisions on how to move through the game.

Oh wow! Cool rewards here! Though this is a weird collection mechanic. But hey! I knew bodies were involved somehow. And talk about a wonderfully morbid form of deterministic crafting. I love it! They keep revealing more and more you can do too! The reveals don't stop keep happening! You can even use these to craft and get better rolls on Uniques!

Oh that's an awesome jewel!

And the corpses are tradeable! I love this league so far!

What! There's even more to the mechanic! You can modify the monsters in the maps! That's so cool! This can help get rid of problem monsters!

And Tattoos are back! This is insane!

Oh interesting! We're getting direct Atlas Tree support during the league! Pretty good, since I'm betting this mechanic isn't going core.

Okay, this is an interesting way to get to Ubers. Now the value of these maps won't be determined by your Atlas Passives. You unlock the original bosses the same way you always did. But then, you move onto a new Tier of maps. You farm those for shards to make your attempts on the pinnacle bosses. These maps also make good intermediate content to gear up on before the attempts.

Oh wow! Nice way to rework some Uniques that have fallen behind. Instead of just improving some and making them rarer, they're going to some of the new bosses.

Looks like they're adding almost all the optional content to Scarabs. Not sure how I feel about this, though it does give a lot of control if you can get the Scarabs you need.

Oh! I love that Divination Scarab! I hate farming the same maps over and over! See this is one of things I love about this game. They're always trying to find ways to allow you to progress the content you want to progress. And to that end, they're also increasing our ability to get content into our maps.

Oh wow! They easily saved the best QoL change for this reveal. We now get three Atlas Trees we can swap between! Again, this gives us more control what content we experience.

Oh! New campaign improvements, huh? Nice! I think that settles it. I'll be playing this League.

Here's the note again on the new and reworked transfigured gems, plus our two most controversial inclusions, Automation and Call to Arms. We're also getting a new support gem for wanders.

Okay! I wasn't sure if I was going to comment on the supporter packs, but I really like the turtle hideout. And wow most of these are still just fun and silly, between that and the mimic pet I might have to see if I can find some money for PoE this League.

All and all, a very impressive live stream!

Interview Stream

I'm gonna follow right on over to the interview with ZiggyD. The amount of extra detail and discussion this always gives us is so worth it. I'm wondering why we're not getting more of Chris this time though.

Interesting. We won't be getting a new monsters or bosses for this the League mechanic. They focused on the new maps instead. This League will instead be all about augmenting our existing content and getting these new crafting mechanics.

Hmm. Not sure I like the fact that you can't sustain T17s. Still because the drops are tradeable, they need to gate them somehow.

And here's some of that conversation I mentioned. I noticed right away that this was probably gonna slow things down a little, as you'll want to try and optimize your monsters in each area. While Mark does suggest that some people might just ignore the mechanic and select whatever they get dealt, and we're even getting a Atlas Passive for mapping that way, they definitely want us to slow down and think it over.

Interesting! They've also made it so that you only get the best modifiers the first time you clear an area in the campaign. And the more of the campaign you do, the better your potential rewards. Combined with campaign improvements and new secrets to find, this is another reason I'll want to play this League.

And while I was impressed with all the information we're getting in game now, it looks like they're not done. They're going to try and add more information to the UI on release. So we'll potentially be able to prepare or min/max a lot.

Okay! Looks like we're going into binding click to move.

It looks like they're making changes to this. The bad news is, they're not ready to revert yet. The good news is that it seems that when they changed this, they suddenly discovered everything the community has been using it to fix. This means that even if they revert, I hope they continue to address these things and make the game better. At the end of the day, this is a lot of annoying stuff that, as Ziggy puts it, we've been using left mouse button as a band-aid for.

Okay! That's not a bad fix for mines. But I'm not sure about the passive changes. We'll need to see the changes directly to see if they're any good.

"Oh, he's doing it again!" Thank you, Ziggy! Pausing coming to PoE1! Doo eet!

They're definitely still trying to come up with systems so you don't have to trust people with your items. Again, in their world we wouldn't use trade for clears or bossing either. But anything they can do to provide tools to keep us safe from scammers is good.

For more on the economy, it feels like they're moving a bit away from the idea of how drops should feel or the economy should feel, and just paying attention to the community and how the game feels. This is obviously the correct choice. First, you won't be able to please everyone. I know plenty of people who hated how easy it was to get gear last League, especially those who enjoy juicing maps. But I know builders like Ziggy loved it.

Bye bye rucksack. F's in chat . . .

But hello Town Portal button!

Moving onto Path of Exile 2!

Woot! Active block! Can't wait to see the new Souls comparisons that will come from that! I love the sound of it personally. Being able to walk forward with your shield raised might be a huge boon to melee.

Oh no! More monsters with tracking! That's going to be fun! Again, Elden Ring says "Hi!" But still, this will be much more engaging than running around in circles.

Still, I wonder if they ramped difficulty for the people they invited to test the game again. I think a lot of people are still very curious as to how difficult this game is going to be.

Oh nice! Multistory dungeons! Wonder if we'll get some scene transition boss fights? Get some Mortal Kombat style beatdowns going.

Sounds like they're trying to make the Beta the entire game, though we might not get all the classes or the full endgame. They definitely want to know if the campaign is good to go before release. If possible, it sounds like they want changes in the beta to be just bug fixes and balance changes. So we'll be getting all the content they can give us.

Finally, we get a little mention on the life globe changing color. I'm surprised they'd never thought to put poison on the life globe before. It's a classic ARPG mechanic.

I honestly feel this was a great interview. I know some people are insisting on being salty about "LMB" right now, and I'm already seeing people take Mark's "deal with it" out of context. Again, I do think this has revealed some real mechanical flaws that need to be addressed. If it comes back, it should be because it's a feature players like and not because we need it for our builds.

Patch Notes

I'm following along with Zizaran for the patch notes on this. I'm a huge fan of his content and He'll catch way more than I ever could.

It's RAW!

Ziz thought this was going to be a Vampire Survivors League! Oh man! A bullet heaven league would be great! I do hope we get something like that in the future. Bet they're already trying something out along the lines of Blight.

"Added a new Intelligence Support Gem - Sacred Wisps:"

Definitely need to see how those wisps play out. I've always enjoyed Wanders and have been wanting to try one again. I'm also curious about Elemental Hit and Tornado transfigured gems.

"The following currency items now have a stack size of 20:"

Woot! QOL stacks!

"Added a myriad of small improvements and surprises to the Campaign."

Again, the campaign changes demand I come back.

"Alternate-art Unique Items can now be converted to account-bound microtransactions . . ."

Oh wow! Very nice! You can now make account bound alternate art items! This . . . probably doesn't affect me? I don't think I have any alternate art items. Nearly all of them have been from races, and I don't think I ever did well enough to get one. You'd think I'd remember if I had, but migraines often make things fuzzy.

"The Dark Seer Unique Sceptre now has +2 to Level of All Spell Skill Gems . . ."

Dark Seer is +2 to Level of All Spell Skill Gems! Wow! That's gonna be a chase item.

But I'm with Ziz here. Not sure that's a good enough change on Malachai's Endurance.

"The Manastorm Unique Shield now has 1-100% increased Mana Recovery from . . ."

This sounds like a blast!

"The Wraithlord Unique Helmet now has 4 Abyssal Sockets . . ."

And this just seems completely amazing! To be fair, minion builds often have to deal with a lot of a socket pressure, and this kills a full 4 of your sockets. But this is so powerful and they're taking steps to bring some needed QoL to minions too.

"The Yoke of Suffering Unique Amulet now has Enemies take 5-10% increased Damage . . ."

Yoke of Suffering seems fail at first, as the buff has only increased by up to 5%, and nothing else. But that extra 5% can stack up pretty quick with all the ailments you can inflict in this game.

"The fifth slot in the Map Device is now unlocked upon completing a non-Valdo's Tier 17 Map."

Oh nice! We no longer have to do Legion for this. Again, we get to do the content we want.

"You can no longer earn Einhar, Alva, Jun or Niko Master Missions . . ."

Yeah, I'm not sure on the Master Missions. But if you can target farm the Scarabs properly, this should be an improvement.

"Added a new Atlas Keystone Passive to the Necropolis Atlas Tree . . ."

As Ziz points out, we can't know how good the Necropolis keystones will be. They all depend on how good the mechanic turns out. If the mechanic is garbage all around, no one will care about these. If the rewards from the maps are good, but not the crafting, then all we'll care about is improving those and vice versa.

"Added a new Atlas Keystone Passive, Thorough Exploration . . ."

If you like clearing your maps the way I do, this will be great. If you just run to bosses you'll pass on this. Again, helping you to play the way you want.

But there's a lot of changes here. I mean, a lot of changes! Like many of the passives around the League content really change a lot!

"The Amplified Energies Atlas Notable Passive now causes . . ."

Looks like a bit of an Essence nerf here. To be fair, Essences are a powerful mechanic for both farming and gearing. But they're so useful for when you're trying to get your build going, especially in SSF. I kind think this first change is okay, but the second one seems pretty bad.

"Essence Monoliths in White Maps can now spawn up to a maximum tier of Screaming . . ."

Okay, that's a better change for Essences. I never liked White Map Essence farming.

"Vorici's Research Safehouse reward is now a stash of Harvest Scarabs."

RIP white sockets.

"The Unique Cortex Synthesised Map can no longer drop from Atlas Map Bosses . . ."

Did we just lose Cortex? Okay, there it is.

Here's the part of the Patch Notes where we get the map changes for the League. And I agree with Ziz that these are mostly good map changes. There's a few we've gotten that I'm really not fond of (Cells and Dungeon), and a few we lost I really like (City Square, Mesa, and Racecourse). But overall this seems like a pretty good pool.

And wow! They took away Seventh Gate and just gave us all the map options! That's a totally worth while trade! Again, it's about letting us pick how we want to play the end game.

And now for the big list of gem changes! I'm honestly seeing a lot of buffs here. There were only a handful of gems that seemed really over tuned, so it seems like they're happy to bring up more options in power while only nerfing a few.

"Essence Drain of Desperation: Now deals 50% more Damage over Time at all gem levels."

Hee! GGG's gonna force Ziz to run ED again . . .

"Sniper's Mark: Now causes Cursed Enemies to take 10% increased Damage from Projectile Hits at gem level 1 (unchanged), scaling up to 29% at gem level 20 (previously 35%) . . ."

Big nerf on Sniper's Mark! That will affect a lot of builds.

"Summon Raging Spirit: The Raging Spirit's melee attack no longer naturally gains 0-38% more Damage as it levels."

RIP vanilla SRS. But as Ziz points out, minion instability will still be very good.

"The Ralakesh's Impatience Unique Boots no longer provide 30% increased Movement Speed."

Ralakesh no longer that impatient.

"The Void is now considered a Boss-exclusive Divination Card."

That's an interesting change to The Void. Ziz is wondering if that means Void can grab boss exclusives.

"Scrolls of Wisdom can now be used on items that are Corrupted. As a result of this, most items that previously dropped identified now drop unidentified."

As Ziz, says, "Oh no!" And yeah, I'm just gonna hide any non-six link corrupted items. The only advantage these had was you knew what they were when you saw them.

"The Veiled modifier that provides reduced Mana Cost of Skills during Effect can no longer be unveiled or crafted on Flasks."

Massive nerf to Pathfinder!

"The Jewel Suffix modifier that grants 3-5% reduced Mana Cost can no longer roll."

Yeah, I'm with Ziz on this. Not sure why they killed the Jewel Mana Cost mod.

Wow! This is a lot of changes for Tattoos and many of them are really good! It's great to have these back!

"Rare Monster item bonus mechanics are now rarer, and the following item bonus mechanics have been removed: Items dropped are converted to Gems, Items dropped are converted to Scarabs, Items dropped have all White Sockets . . ."

RIP white sockets! Why are they reducing them like this? How were they a bad socket fixing mechanic? The whole of PoE2's skill rework is socket fixing! Why does PoE need to have vanilla socket fixing?

Also, I really don't like the changes to Rares. The drop mechanics made Rares feel so much better. They made me want to engage with the Rares in my maps instead of just boss. And they definitely didn't feel overly generous to me. They do remember this was offsetting a drop in loot, right?

Well that was not the best way to end the patch notes section. There are definitely some bitter pills in all of this. But as Ziz keeps pointing out, we're getting so much! But that is GGG for you. They're not afraid to take harsh measures to fix things, but they do fix things. The click to move binding is probably still the harshest thing, but I'm willing to give them a league or two to fix the mechanics it was propping up. At the very least, they've got as long as it took them to realize Archnemesis was a bad idea.

Final Thoughts

That was definitely a nasty way to end the patch notes, but it's not souring me on this. This League looks like it's going to be a ton of fun! Obviously, click to move casting is going to continue to be contentious until they either fix everything or end up reverting. Other than that here are my primary concerns.

1. Scarabs are doing a lot of work.

They've shoved a ton of mechanics that were all previously separated onto Scarabs. Want sextant modifiers? Scarabs. League content? Scarabs. Master missions? Scarabs! Plus they're even adding new and interesting modifiers to them to top it off. If getting the Scarabs we want is too inconsistent or we just can't get enough from drops, then we're just vanilla mapping.

2. Pressure to Run Tier 17

Right now it often feels like you need to get to the point you can run Tier 16s as soon as you can, and there isn't any point running anything less. This often causes newer players to wait to do certain content until they've geared up to running those maps, making progressing their gear harder. I even catch myself doing it! I'm hoping the way they drop will incentivize players to engage with content instead holding off until they can do the highest tier maps.

3. Drops

This has been a concern for a while now, with some not being happy about it since Expedition. It didn't help that Leagues had gotten way wealthier previously, with many players forgetting how lean drops could be originally. But especially given how wealthy Affliction was, players might be feel poorer this League. And now they've made Rare drop mods, um, rarer. Even though this is a crafting League, that could cause some problems.

However, even with those bad things let's look at what we're getting.

1. More control over the endgame than ever before!

They just keep knocking down barriers to experiencing the end game the way we want to experience it. Well, except maybe if you're playing SSF. But if you're playing any form of trade league, you can probably make money farming the content you want and trading for anything you need.

2. So much QoL!

Just so much! So many little things we've been asking for or that are sources of friction are gone!

3. More build diversity than ever before!

Transfigured gems really did cause a ton of new builds to pop up. Yeah, some have gotten nerfs. But for the most part, it's all broken stuff. And some of that looks like it survived pretty much intact. Add in new gems and buffs to older ones, and hopefully theory crafters like myself will have content to chew on for months!

4. An honestly awesome looking League!

I'm still a little concerned with fiddling with monsters between maps, but I think many builds will eventually get to the point where you just grab random enhancement for increased rewards. The changes to the campaign seem really interesting though. And the potential crafting power might lead to some awesome items. We obviously won't know until next week, but I'm honestly really excited to log in!

[theggning]

Hello! I was the anon who asked Sapphire-Weapon about how RE6 was originally recieved. You offered to tell me about your own opinions on the subject, if you remember. If you like, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I rewatched some scenes and I still... hate it. The script and overall story were awful imo. It's cringey but without the RE charm, lol. And I'm still mad about how watered down and silly they've made Ada in that game. It was cool to play as her, but the whole "everyone important is just in love with her or wants to be her" was so blaringly stupid and lazy. I felt it really took away from her character, tbh. She should've zipped up and thrown a bomb down. Just explode the lot of 'em and go home to a girlfriend. Would've highfived her for that. (All jokes, lol!!). And Jake... his arc really lacked effort and it's a pity because I really enjoyed him as a character. He could've had a great opportunity with his development but... nah. A little insight as an OG fan about what you loved and hated would be great!

/rolls up sleeves

I consider RE6 one of (no longer #1 but one of) the greatest disappointments I've ever had in a video game that I was otherwise really, really hype for. So BOY am I down to unload talk about it.

Honestly the thing I hated the most about RE6 is the level design. It's really a shame, because the gameplay/controls are actually really fun. I love the increased focus on melee. Mercenaries mode in that game is a blast. But unfortunately, the campaign design is so fucking miserable and such a slog you could not pay me to play through the whole thing again.

The average level design in RE6 goes like this:

Hallway full of enemies

Telegraphed set piece w/ QTEs

Hallway full of enemies

Explosion

Hallway full of enemies

Telegraphed set piece w/ QTEs

The boss monster you defeated 7 times already STILL ISN'T DEAD and pops out to chase you some more

Explosion, launching our heroes into:

a hallway full of enemies!!!!!

I remember this being particularly bad in Chris' campaign, but it's a problem in ALL of them. There's no atmosphere, very few moments of quiet, no interesting rooms or details to look at. You know how in REmake/RE0 and the more recent remakes and especially in RE4R you can look around the environment and see fun little details, objects? How the rooms look lived in and like this was a real place once? There's almost none of this in RE6. The places you walk through don't look real. That marketplace doesn't look like anyone's ever done business in it. The spa level doesn't look like a real spa. It's a hallway full of enemies that leads you to your next explosion.

To add to the problem here, the chapters are goddamn ALMOST AN HOUR LONG EACH. Unlike RE5, where the subchapters were around 10-30 minutes if you knew what you were doing, when you sit down to play a chapter in RE6 it's gonna take you an entire hour. Even if there were some little fun moments in the levels, I can't remember them and I'm not gonna go back to play them when that fun moment is sandwiched by 45 minutes of awful bullshit.

The story also does absolutely suck. I have never before played a game plot that felt more like two 12-year-olds hopped up on Mountain Dew enthusiastically spitballing fanfic ideas and jamming every single one of them into a story. What's frustrating is that there are glimmers of good ideas all over the place, but they end up falling flat or getting stupid.

I could probably rant and rave about the plot of RE6 for another 4000 words, but since it's been a literal decade since I played the game and I'm fuzzy on the details, I don't want to go too in depth. So I think I'll just throw out some things I liked and disliked for each campaign. That I remember. From when the game came out.

It is also worth mentioning that my friend and I, foolishly, played the campaigns in reverse order because that was shown to be chronologically correct. This was a very bad idea. By the time I got to what most people consider the "best" campaign, I was 80% of the way to my sinking realization that I hated the game.

Jake's Campaign:

THE GOOD:

Sherry! I love grownup Sherry. I like her silly G-virus healing factor. I like the bit where she tells Jake to stop fucking whining about the evil daddy he never met, because Sherry fucking Birkin doesn't need to hear your "woe is me"ing about your evil parents fucking up your life.

The snow level was kind of unique and interesting-looking.

The spa level was kind of unique and interesting-looking.

THE BAD:

Ustanak. I realize we're trying to recapture the magic of Nemesis for the 4th or 5th time here, but when every other goddamn boss in this fucking game comes back 50 times before you kill it, it kind of takes away from the one enemy whose entire gimmick is that exactly. I cannot remember what he looks like at all. Nemesis is iconic, this guy is just big and ugly. The fact that Jake punches him to death with his bare hands is really silly but in kind of the good stupid RE way that I enjoy. It's what this loser deserves.

I'm honestly not a huge fan of Jake in general? He has a good character arc, which is more than I can say for basically anybody else in this game, but he slots right into this godawful edgelord teenage boy catnip character archetype that was absolutely everywhere in the early 2010s in gaming.

The idea of Wesker having a son could be really interesting (even if it makes me think about Wesker fucking, which. ugh) but it's integrated in a really strange way. I frankly do not believe Jake's mother when he says she genuinely loved Wesker and that he was a "good man," a thing that has literally never been demonstrated, ever, in the entire history of this canon. It's really incongruous given everything we know about Wesker, so I'm not sure why they went with that instead of the, honestly, more sensible idea of having Jake be an unauthorized experiment using Wesker's sperm or something.

The bit where Jake, who vocally despises his absent father the entire length of time we know him, suddenly decides to get pissy with Chris for killing him, is incredibly contrived. It feels like it's in there just because they felt like they needed an excuse for Jake to be in conflict with Chris, even when it makes no sense with what we know of Jake's personality.

Chris' Campaign

THE GOOD:

Piers is the best character in this game. He's charming, he's appealing, we can sympathize with him, he and Chris have wonderful chemistry together (platonically or not- I do love me some Nivanfield.) I love what they do with him as a "successor" to Chris, and how he helps Chris through his spiral. I will never stop being furious that they killed him off. Piers deserved better.

I like the broad strokes of Chris' character arc here. Chris becoming an alcoholic and suffering real, visible PTSD from the deaths of his men is both appropriate and a sensible step for his character at this point in the series.

Carla is definitely the best villain in this game. I have some beef with her that I'll discuss in the Ada section but in terms of campaign-specific antagonists, she's both the most compelling and the most dangerous.

THE BAD:

The execution of Chris' arc is possibly the stupidest fucking writing in this entire game. So you're telling me that Chris Redfield, Superstar BSAA Founder and Golden Boy, is somehow able to just disappear from the hospital where he's laid up with head trauma and amnesia? He just, wanders the fuck away and nobody notices? Chris is gone for SIX FUCKING MONTHS and nobody is able to find him in that length of time? Where the hell are Claire or Jill in this scenario? Claire spends 2/3 of her starring games moving heaven and earth to search for her brother. In Revelations, Jill disobeys orders and goes looking for him when he's missing for 12 hours. And neither of them bother looking for him when he goes missing for half a year? If you have ever wondered why Jill or Claire aren't in this game, it's because there's no fucking way to make this stupid plot work if either of them have anything to say about it. So they're apparently just blipped out of existence for the duration of RE6. Oh hey, we found Chris. In Edonia. The same place he went missing six months ago. Guess we were too busy to really look for him that hard. Hey Piers, go drag him kicking and screaming out of the bar. There's some shit going down in China and we need our top guy on the job. What's that? He's still suffering the effects of massive head trauma? He can't remember who the fuck he is? He has no idea who we are or what he's doing? Ehhhhhhhhhhh don't worry about it, stick a uniform on him and throw him into the thick, that oughta jog his memory a bit. This bit is so stupid and irresponsible that I will never again respect the BSAA as anything but cartoonishly incompetent. Head Trauma Amnesiac Chris gets his memory jogged midway through proceedings, and flies off into a frothing, mindless vengeance rage against Ada. In the process he personally gets an entire team of BSAA operatives killed. Again. Two in one game! That's pretty bad even for Chris! It's only via being screamed at by Piers that Chris snaps out of it and goes back to being the respected leader that he's supposed to be just in time to save the world. Chris decides, then and there, that maybe he's no longer in a position to keep doing this. That he should step aside and give a new generation of fighters a chance to fight for what's right. That Piers, who's been levelheaded and focused and brave through all of this turmoil, deserves to be Chris' successor and that he's the hero the world needs now. And then Piers dies horribly, tragically, traumatically, so uh. Never mind that I guess. Making Chris an alcoholic and forcing him to reckon with the deaths of his men is a great idea for a story arc for him. But this contrived-ass prolonged soap opera amnesia drama ain't it, chief. EDIT: Tumblr, in its infinite wisdom, just linked me to a blog post I made in 2013 COMPLETE WITH PICTURES I DREW making fun of this plot point. Please enjoy!

Everybody says this is the campaign with the worst, grindiest, bullet spongiest, Gears of Wariest gameplay and they are correct.

I think we are supposed to take the ending of the campaign as inspirational. Chris goes back to the BSAA with renewed determination, and we're supposed to find this as noble or heroic. I actually find this ending incredibly fucking sad and tragic. Piers' death is haunting Chris, and he's now taking Piers' faith in him as a mandate. Piers' hero worship and respect for Chris is now being interpreted as "you can't give up-- ever." Chris has resigned himself to fighting this battle for the rest of his life. He can never hand off the reins to a younger generation. He can never retire. He can never heal. He can never stop, and he's now doomed to do this until he dies/Capcom stops dragging his now 50-year-old ass out to star in every single game.

Leon's Campaign

THE GOOD:

The first 20 minutes or so of Leon's campaign is genuinely the best part of the entire game. By the time I got to this point I was already heavily fatigued from the above horseshit so I don't think it hit me like it should have, but the Tall Oaks University section is pretty great.

I like Leon being a mentor of sorts for Helena. It's a role we haven't seen him in before and it's interesting.

THE BAD:

I find the exploitation of Deborah Harper to be really gross. Helena gets blackmailed into starting an outbreak that kills the president for the sake of her sister. By the time we reach Deborah she's already been infected. Which is FINE... but making her a moaning, writhing, voluptuous monster vamping nude around the boss arena in a clear attempt to be sexually appealing to the (presumed male) player feels really icky to me. She could have just been a regular monster? Helena would still have every reason to want revenge on Simmons?

Due to the shitty pacing and structure, Leon and Helena both come off as super incompetent. Helena won't say shit about what's going on, leading us blindly into situation after situation and promising to explain "later." Leon's inability to drive reaches parody status as he crashes like 6 different vehicles in the course of this campaign. Leon and Helena's mere presence is a deathknell for every single person in the vicinity-- every time they encounter a group of civilians, every single one of them dies horribly. If this all happened once or twice then it wouldn't be so egregious, but this whole campaign feels like these two bumblefucks fucking up and getting innocents killed.

What in the FUCK was with the underground Skyrim dungeon section? Why is this area here? Aren't we in fucking Massachusetts???

Derek Simmons is Diet Wesker and he's terrible at it. He's not scary, he's not sinister, he's not even campy fun like Wesker was. He's supposed to be this grand evil mastermind, but he's doing all of this because Ada broke up with him or put in her two weeks notice or whatever? What a fucking loser.

The whole "oh no, a secret illuminati is running the world behind the scenes" plotline. I've been calling these guys the "Failluminati' for so long I can't even remember their real name. Having an omg secret evil organization running everything in your plot is not a plot twist, it's a fucking copout. This is so stupid Capcom has never again mentioned it, with good reason.

Ada's Campaign

THE GOOD:

The one and only actually scary part of the game, the Carla boss fight. Oh my god, is that some psychological horror? In THIS shitshow?

This is my favorite Ada character design. That open jacket is really stylish.

For about 2/3 of the previous campaigns, it looks like they have finally, actually done something interesting with Ada. Oh my god, is Ada an outright villain this time? What's her motivation? Are we finally going to learn who Ada works for and what her goals are? Why is she doing this? Chris has very good reason to be angry at Ada, but Leon's going to defend her just going by his gut? That's juicy! Wow! The boys are fighting!

I think it's extremely funny that Leon never technically finds out about the existence of Carla, so he watches a video of "Ada" hatching out of a fucking egg and assumes that's really her. He never gets corrected on this notion. As far as we know, OG Leon still thinks Ada hatched out of an egg. That's hilarious.

THE BAD;

They didn't do anything with Ada at all actually! The Ada/Carla switcheroo is really obvious once you realize it's happening, and would have been a cool opportunity to actually define something about Ada. Oh no, this evil scientist releasing the C virus on the world is claiming to be Ada? We all know the real Ada would never... um.... well... To me, the frustrating thing about OG Ada is that she isn't really a character. She shows up from time to time to save Leon or be mysterious or be a pair of boobs to look at, but she has no goals. No motivation. We don't know what she's really thinking or why she does things. She's taking orders from... SOMEONE? But we never find out who, and even when we think we know who, it turns out she's betraying them. Ada deals in bioweapons for cash, while also having an apparent soft spot for Leon. She's morally gray, but to no actual end. We can't say that she would or wouldn't do this or that, because nobody knows who Ada is or what she's trying to accomplish, and the script just has her coyly alluding to her alleged "goals" without ever explaining what those are. So yeah, imagine my disappointment when it finally looked like we were going to really get a look at Ada, only to find out that everything she does in this game isn't really her, it's an angry evil scientist who's been cloned to look like her. They have this whole fucking plot set up to do something, ANYTHING with Ada, and she ends exactly where she starts because none of it was her at all. The bit at the end where Ada winks at the camera about her "true employer" and her "real goals" made me literally fucking scream at my TV.

Hey sorry Capcom, I don't actually feel sorry for Carla at all. When you fuck around with bioweapons and cruelly torture people for the sake of your experiments, I don't really shed a tear for you when you get fed into the proverbial woodchipper of your own hubris. Carla is a great villain but I don't feel any sympathy for her whatsoever, and I really don't see why Ada ought to, either. If anything I'd think Ada should be more grossed out and offended that Simmons is THAT obsessed with her.

Okay so my last complaint is actually something that ONLY could have happened in the weeks immediately following the game. You know how AGENT is just, a stupid blank slate character who feels really out of place? That's because he didn't originally exist. He was patched into the game a few weeks after release, I think about the same time they added the ability to play Ada's campaign without finishing the other three first. Originally, you played Ada's campaign solo, as ONLY Ada. It made the psychological horror-y segments around the Carla boss fight a lot scarier and more impactful. There was, however, a slight problem in that RE6 was designed to be co-op from the ground up. Which means the very mechanics of the game are not designed for a solo character. Because recovering from near-death requires a second character to revive you. So for the first few weeks after release, when you played as Ada and got badly injured, you were forced to just sit there and watch her limp around for 20 seconds and die. Get hit by an enemy? Limp around and die. Injured by a trap? Limp around and die. Fail a QTE? Limp around and die. No recourse. No revival. Fall into the red and Ada suffers a slow, prolonged, unskippable death that you cannot escape from. At this point I had spent 40something hours playing the rest of the game, getting increasingly angry at the bad pacing and the worse story, so the extra frustration of Ada's literally broken gameplay in her campaign absolutely drove me over the edge. I managed to beat her campaign before the Agent patch that would have fixed this problem, but by that point I had come to terms with the fact that I absolutely hated RE6 and was deep in my mourning period for my prior anticipation.

Anyway, that's my tragic beef with RE6. Is it as bad as people say? Oh yeah. I think so. Is it as bad as I remember? Probably.... maybe? Does it deserve a second look from my initial impressions at launch? Yeah, probably. But the sting of that first playthrough still haunts me and I don't know that I'm ever going to sit through it again. I'd rather just take the lore notes and the little plot details that I did enjoy and run with those than force myself through the rest of the slog again.

I like how I said I was gonna be brief but then I ended up probably typing 4000 words about the plot anyway. AH WELL.

[mylordshesacactus]

I imagine it's never too late for these, so-- COURAGE, EYES, and WRATH from that writing meme!

It's not! (askmeme here)

What's the last word you had to google the definition of? Oh damn, I don't know actually!

How many planning documents do you have? You'll never fucking take me alive. I'm not sure what the total number is across every project, but for longer/more intricate writing projects I will often have 1 or 2 separate planning docs. I have 3 for my major original fiction project at the moment and that will likely increase to 4 when I revisit it properly and can hopefully get it organized enough to start fucking around with spreadsheets.

Do you prefer writing endings or beginnings? yes! I'm interpreting this as like. in terms of "actually enjoying the writing process" and less as a philosophical question. I LOVE the act of landing with two feet down in a story and being able to instantly set the scene, tone, character and/or narrative voice, etc--just like how in game design the first 15 minutes are make-or-break, the first three paragraphs tell your reader what this entire story is going to feel like.

Not that there can't be tonal or thematic shifts, of course. But just like that first 15 minutes of gameplay--it doesn't tell you the entire plot and all the mechanical challenges that will eventually occur, of course, but in a well-crafted game opening it does tell you what the game will feel like to play. You don't instantly know the plot or character progression from the opening lines, but you certainly can and should get a very good idea of what the story will feel like to read.

But I also like writing endings! There's an amazing feeling when everything slides into place and you just know that you've found the right way to close out a story--there are, in fact, countless projects that I put on the back burner for months or even years because I just didn't know where they were going, or couldn't visualize a satisfying endpoint--and the endpoint is everything.

Like--the framing device and basic outline of Phoenix had been in my head for fucking years before I was able to write it, because I couldn't figure out where I wanted it to end; that last scene took a while to percolate and without a strong closer, I couldn't write any of it. I had the idea for Nightwind basically since the first time I learned about Lesuss, but couldn't start it until I had the brainwave of the Team Normandy framing device, and thus a place to leave the story off that wasn't just Incomprehensible Levels Of Depression. 257 Years basically wrote itself because I knew INSTANTLY that I was going to use Miranda's commentary as a framing device, and it didn't take me long at all to realize the two words I had to close the entire story on.

Those are the defining moments of a story! You need both, and in my purely personal opinion, if you're stressing or complaining about hating either of those parts of writing, you have a fundamental problem with the project and need to spend less time "getting words on paper" and more time turning it over in your head and letting it breathe, because if you don't know where it begins or ends, the real problem you're experiencing is not knowing the point of the story. Of course that makes it impossible to tell!