#shadowrun posting in main my dudes

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

POV: you finally manage to get in a hit on the annoying elf, and you're about to learn the reason she was just dodging and not throwing a punch back is cause she's a Shark adept who would be like half a second away from beating you into a reddish smear on the pavement

[rationalisms]

sorry to whack a wasp's nest, and i am prefacing all of this by saying that i enjoyed the game and think there are a lot of good aspects to it, but!

i am genuinely so sick of the way people talk about baldur's gate 3

i don't think it should have won game of the year

it's so, so irritating to see people claim over and over that bg3 is somehow groundbreaking for the genre or some sort of trailblazing star in a charred wasteland that has seen no good release since dragon age: origins. and like, it's not just idiots in the steam reviews and on reddit who are talking like this (though they are fucking everywhere on both. one of the highest rated posts on the bg3 sub for months was some dude literally going "i've never played a ttrpg or crpg and i believe bg3 is a game changer" fucking lol). it's also like. professional video game journalists and reviewers. a lot of them!

and like. dragon age: origins is really not a particularly good game compared to many of its contemporaries and i seriously do not understand the chokehold it has on people but that aside, since it was released we've had so many incredible and amazing crpgs that featured outstanding writing, game design, art direction, music, voice acting, etc. the pillars of eternity duology, underrail, the wasteland series, tyranny, atom, the shadowrun trilogy, the pathfinder duology, even the fucking games larian made before this, the divinity: original sin duology are all doing what bg3 did, and often better than bg3 does it. and that's not even getting into the many, many games that came out before either that still hold up as masterpieces that leave both bg3 and da:o in the dust like planescape: torment or fallout 1 and 2!

in fact, it's really easy to compare larian's previous game, divinity: original sin 2, to baldur's gate 3 because they are incredibly similar in many ways down to the inciting incident being almost a 1 to 1 copy (you wake up captured on a ship and realize you've been shackled in a way thay suppresses your powers and harms you and the first act is dedicated to finding others who this has happened to and getting rid of it). except that dos2 handles a lot of the things bg3 also contains a lot better, like e.g. companion story progression. (it's absolutely baffling to have story progression tied to rests especially when the game goes out of its way to instill fake urgency in the player that can very easily lead to them avoiding rests and makes especially many early game moments permanently missable if you don't happen to rest enough times at the right time. my karlach romance got bricked in my first playthrough for this reason. also compounding this is the fact that even on tactician the game is so easy that you can go ages without needing to rest organically.)

dos2 also unquestionably has the better combat experience because the system was designed specifically for the game and around the games capabilities and limitations, whereas bg3 had to contend with trying to make d&d 5e work in a video game format when that's patently not what it was designed for. the amount of changes larian had to make to the ruleset to make 5e work for a video game should have been a sign that using 5e was probably just not a good choice. (and ftr i felt the same about the game solasta which also uses 5e.) and even with the rule changes and the way larian went out of its way to buff the extremely underwhelming and underperforming 5e martials, character building and progression is still nowhere near as versatile and exciting as it was in dos2 or other crpgs and you still have a lot of empty level ups or repetitive gameplay because you can only put so many rhine stones on a turd.

let me be clear: i don't think bg3 is a bad game. again, i liked it! i think it has some instances of really good writing (mainly in companion narratives and side stories imo, the main story is underwhelming as whole). the voice acting performances are fantastic. larian tried their best to make non-linear problem solving possible in a lot of places which is neat (but also makes the lack of them in other places really obvious and more annoying than it otherwise would have been tbh lol.)

i just hate the way that bg3 is treated like some sort of gold standard when it stands on the shoulders of predecessors who are just as good, if not better, but who get ignored because they don't have fully mocapped and voice acted character models or a 3D camera. there seems to be this complete reticence from so many people to play games that still utilize things like an isometric pov, despite the fact that the games which do so are designed around this. e.g. pillars of eternity and the shadowrun games are some of the most beautiful, artistically impressive rpgs i have ever played and make full use of the isometric perspective in its fullest to create absolutely stunning environmental design which wouldn't have been possible with a rotating camera. just because a technology is older doesn't mean it is worse! people absolutely should get out of their comfort zone more because they are missing out on so many gems otherwise.

also re: bg3 winning game of the year specifically: look, here's why this gets me so tilted. on release? vast swathes of the game were legitimately unplayable. act 1 was mostly alright because it had 5 years to cook in early release with constant community feedback and bug reporting. this was absolutely not true for act 2 and 3. act 3 in particular was legitimately just not working for me (and multiple of my friends). i have a soupy gaming PC that can play other contemporary games on ultra settings just fine, and yet i got as few as 2 FPS and frankly ludicrous amount of stuttering and lag on even the lowest settings while my poor CPU sounded like she was preparing for space flight. it's clear that they just did not optimize later acts at all. they did eventually fix the memory leak issue somewhat in later patches, but the performance in act 3 is still markedly much worse than the rest of the game. (also why the fuck is it like 200GB good fucking g-d learn to compress your shit larian!) and that's not even getting into how many quests were bugged and as a result not able to be completed.

in summary: i paid 60 bucks for something that released in an unfinished state that put my hardware at risk. i spent a lot of money on a game i was unable to complete in the state that i bought it in and that took several months to get to an actually playable state for many people. that is not fucking acceptable.

i am willing to cut larian a lot more slack than i would say, e.g. bethesda, on releasing buggy and poorly optimized games. which is why i was willing to patiently wait for a performance patch to replay it. i am not, however, willing to accept handing something that was patently not finished and did not give customers the product they paid for an award for game of the year.

that's a symptom of an industry that has gotten too fucking comfortable releasing unfinished games and putting the onus of bug detection and quality testing on its paying userbase. that's not my job! i paid for this because i expect a product that has already successfully underwent this process! but apparently games these days don't need to bother with that anymore because it doesn't matter if it's playable on release or not, they can still get a coveted industry award for it anyway.

tl;dr: bg3 is literally fine but i am begging everyone on my hands and knees to broaden their horizons and also the things we deem to be acceptable from gaming companies nowadays are shocking. ok. i'm done. sorry.

[voidwingsprime]

OOC

This is a multimuse blog.

Skywarp is the main dude but since Warp is second in command of a whole-ass seeker flock, shi flock members will also answer questions. This a rp/ask blog for my au fic, Rogue Seeker so I use this to develop characters/rb my fic stuff/rb my friends aus and/robot inspiration.

I am not the most active blog and I sparingly take magic anons

Other flock members I need to write short bios for

Slipstream and her siblings Shadowrun and Nightstrike - parents are Skywarp, TC and Starscream

Misfire, who is adopted sibling to the above

William Lennox, it makes sense in context, companion animal

Hexbolt, OC with multi drone body, adopted by Soundwave

Howlback and Squawktalk - Soundwave's youngest, cared for by Skywarp and TC

Sundor, Wingthing, Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, Frenzy, Rumble, Ravage, rest of Soundwave's brood

KO - ambassador medic from Velocitron, conjunxed to Breakdown, amica to Blurr who is the weird twink datemate in their trine and acts as an annoying Steve Irwin to the Aegis flock

Starscream - mad scientist trine member to Skywarp and TC, will often spark incubate and spawn all manner of cybertronian gremlin wildlife like honkbiners (geese cybertronians with necks that split into shredders and grinders and voltron into even bigger geese mecha)

Since this is dysfunctional family dynamics with post war seeker refugees, I often do discord rps with two or three characters, they often switch in or out. (one or two parent figures with a kid, or a gaggle of siblings)

[swampgallows]

Final thoughts on Bright under cut (contains spoilers)

As far as a mainstream film I can imagine a lot of people not being on board with it. Urban fantasy as a genre is pretty niche as it is which is essentially why more urban fantasy probably hasn’t been made. It’s hard to balance the concept of magic with the reality of technology. In my opinion Bright had a bit of The Dark Knight syndrome, I guess; I personally thought The Dark Knight was insufferable and hokey as hell, saved solely by Heath Ledger’s Joker which, I think if it were a less-than-stellar performance, would have shown the film’s true colors. I can’t go too dark in the realm of superheroes or fantasy because it’s ultimately a very lighthearted thing, and it has to take root in reality for it to pull off darkness well. So, to me, The Dark Knight felt like just an everyday crime drama/action film a la James Bond or Bourne Identity but with two technicolor off-the-wall characters thrown in. Solely Two-Face could have kept it in the realm of being believable (something like American Psycho, a man going off the rails), but having the Joker and Christian Bale’s hilarious throaty Batman just swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Like, it’s dudes in spandex and literal clown makeup; Ledger’s portrayal of such a concept as disturbing rather than admirable (as we tend to view costumed vigilantes within the superhero genre) is what saved the film. 

So I’m getting a bit of that with Bright. Telling a story of discrimination with fantasy races as if we live in a post-racist society is clumsy at best and violent at worst. Jakoby’s story is essentially that of the “whitewashed” POC straddled between worlds: not orc enough for other orcs (not “blooded”, clan-less, round-toothed) but not human enough to fit in with humans. I’m watching this as a white woman, so while I might identify with orcs in fantasy as their being outcasts, how a person of color relates to this story can vastly differ. Orcs as a construction of white fantasy (Western, European, however you want to phrase it) are riddled with racist undertones (and sometimes overtones) as it is, so in the context of the real world you can end up with some echo chamber racism in a setting like Bright’s. Orcs predominantly portrayed as gangsters living in the hood, shown as existing only in seedy or “ghetto” type environments with almost clownish stereotypical baggy clothing, jerseys, and chains, was heinously tone deaf. And the “cuerpo” jeers of the Altamira gangsters just felt like the writing of someone who believes in “trickle down racism”, that oppressed groups can be “racist” against one another rather than all subject to the ruling class. Additionally, it seemed like a shoddy way for the writer to absolve himself by saying “see, orcs are even LOWER than humans. Even dark-skinned humans! Because Will Smith is black and he’s a successful cop and also here is a latino and an asian cop...who is a WOMAN, and also he has a WHITE WIFE RACISM IS OVER”

I’m still reeling from just watching the film so I’m still in a bit of the afterglow of just having a movie MADE in this genre. And with an orc as a MAIN character, not off to the side or played for laughs as a dopey peon, etc., it made me very happy. But “positive orcish representation” only puts points in the fun meter and has no actual validity or importance; the real world representation lodged quite a wedge in my suspension of disbelief. It was hard to go along for the ride seeing actual places in L.A. that I visit in reality (like... was that rolling shot of all the tents on San Julian Street necessary?) being treated like props for “orcish oppression”. It’s hard to summarize my feelings on this particular subject, but ultimately this is not the time or era to be making a buddy cop film, truly, and the trope of the cookie cutter thug is tiresome. But that’s probably why I don’t watch these kinds of movies to begin with: the expectations are low, the story is the same, and it’s just a vehicle for shoot-outs, car chases, and combat scenes. 

Women in this movie were nonexistent. Just accessories or one-dimensional plot devices. And that incestuous “sister” shit always gets to me; I dunno about you, but I’ve never stroked my sister’s face and hair and given her nose kisses while straddling her. Who the fuck is that for? Tikka was rolling around like a damn e-tard half the time, completely nonverbal and helpless, fridged-but-not-really, and pretty much just inconsequential. Did not pass the Bechdel test.

I wish more of a backstory had been fleshed out. We heard a lot about the Shield of Light but we never saw them in action. We were told stories about “what happened 2,000 years ago” but there weren’t even flashbacks or any residual effect of those except the existence of the wand. And where is the wand now? How do we know it’s safe? How do we actually know the steel-blue-haired elf man who apparently had no name except that he was the “Magic Fed” elf can keep it safe and that he doesn’t want to bring about the Darklord? How do we know the Darklord was real? There were apparently “fanatics” but if it was that influential of an event, would there not be more evidence? We have human artifacts that are tens of thousands of years old; 2,000 years is nothing in comparison to Niaux cave paintings or Sumerian cuneiform. 

If this movie was trying to be Shadowrun in terms of urban fantasy, then it failed to understand what even I, with only passing exposure to it, know: it’s for nerds, and nerds love knowing shit. That means the more background information and minutiae, the better. Having a superficial story driven by tropes or special effects rather than by fantasy means it will ultimately flop. We live in the here and now; so focus on what we don’t have! There were little things: elves like shopping, orcs have great sense of smell and remote understanding of human facial expressions, and fairies are apparently... pests? But beyond that, the story was just about a bunch of people. The point was supposed to be “orcs are people too”, which is a shit benchmark, really, when the people going in to a movie about urban fantasy have already accepted this tacitly. The whole point is that they are “people too”, but they’re different. Nobody is interested in aliens because they’re gung-ho about meeting tunicates from another atmosphere; we want to meet people: conscious, sentient beings who think like us but are not us, who have their own culture and behaviors and mannerisms and so on. That is part of the huge appeal of orcs, to me. They’re everything I’m not, but of course I see them as sentient people; not better or worse, but different.

So, really, the “message” of this movie is lost on everyone: its stereotypes are insensitive to actual oppressed groups and its bullying of the humanoids we came to see is disheartening, insulting, and annoying for those who are already initiated with the genre. They should be working side by side because that’s what we came to see, not spending two solid hours treating the fantasy races like shit just for a shitty “human after all” sentiment. Where’s Bright 2 so I can watch a human and orc getting taco cart burritos together, elves and orcs and humans all moshing at an underground metal show, and Ward and Jakoby actually solving some real shit together instead of Ward making his partner a punching bag?

Bright missed a lot of very major opportunities to bring urban fantasy to life. Hellboy II’s single scene in the troll marketplace provided more magical backdrop than Bright’s entire running time (a statement I am unintentionally echoing from a film critic on rottentomatoes; but let it be known that Hellboy II is one of my favorite films purely for the perfect urban fantasy themes, a genre I felt at home in before I even knew there was such a thing). That being said, it was still a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth a watch if you’re even vaguely into orcs or the urban fantasy genre, and also I will protect Nicholas Jakoby with my life. 

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

I'm pretending I'm going to do a Thing with all the SR OCs I've made up which necessitates a villain which means it's time to mash up 701 different character scraps into something resembling a coherent character! Her name is "Sixty-four willow, Branches grown in the sun's eye, Feeding the syntax" (or Willow for short), and she's a Dissonant technomancer and former Shiawase MIFD agent who went too deep into Resonance and came back with some very uhhhhh curious ideas about how to fix all of the mistakes and errors her eyes were opened to.

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Surprise Off Day From Work means Art Time, apparently?? Also apparently the theme is Weird Resonance Shit, this time ft. The Great Firewall??

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Watch out, little hacker, for the IC Man cometh. . .

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Me, crying while sketching out exactly one (1) page with two (2) panels and no dialogue: WOW WHY DIDN'T I TRY THIS BEFORE ITS SO EASY

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Boop beep boop!

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Ignore the everything about this because I'm learning how to draw again!

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Me @ Mentor Spirits: ZZZZzzzzzz..... Me @ Paragons, which are essentially the same thing: OH OKAY??

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Trying to figure out the face of this Hypothetical Face + scribble of a Phish

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Troll proportions are so fun??

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

Redrawing an old thing, now ft The New Members of the Crew (and by that I mean eventually, for now it's just one of them because the sirens call of going the fuck to sleep for work tomorrow has reared its hideous head)

[gravedirtandbriarthorns]

I found the oldest Phish Art ever (the v first one, from like. 2017 (or 2018)), and since I'm taking Phish back to his original conception some (he's back to being an elf and a technomancer) I figured I'd at least rough out a redraw. (The original is (assuming I did it correctly) below the Read More b/c its so atrocious but I am including it for posterity because Whoo Boy 've gotten so much less awful in the intervening 5/6 years)