#some point instead and maybe just keep using it as a worldbuilding sandbox?

[physalian]

In Defense of Fanfiction (Or the perfect starting point for your original novel)

Fanfic gets a bad rap pretty much everywhere except Tumblr. It’s misunderstood and misrepresented by its average works, seen as juvenile and cringey, or a banal point of contention between a famous person or piece of media and its fans.

Outside of fanfic that writes about real people, especially smut fics of real people, I support the art wholeheartedly. Fictional characters are one thing, but personally, caricaturing a celebrity’s life for public consumption and writing or drawing them in compromising content without their consent is a little weird. You do you. Don’t like, don’t read, as they say.

Fanfic is the perfect starting point for a few reasons:

It places you in a creative box and forces you to work within those constraints

It does all the worldbuilding and character concepts for you

It lets you write way outside your comfort zone

When published and receiving feedback, it boosts your self-confidence

It's incredibly flexible

It’s practice. All practice is good practice

—

Behold your creative box

When I was little I had no idea the majority of fanfic was shipping fics. I always pictured and looked for canon-divergent alternate universes. Like, what if X happened in this episode instead of Y? What if this character never died?

Fanfic demands you work within someone else’s canon, whether it’s an OC in the canonical world, or the canonical characters in an AU. These are like little bowling bumpers saving you from the gutter, but also keeping you on a straight-ish path toward the pins.

The indecisiveness of too many choices can be too intimidating when you’re first starting out. You want to be a writer but you have no idea where to begin, what genre to pick, what characters you want to chronicle, what themes you want to explore.

Even if it sits on your computer never to see the light of day, you still got those creative juices flowing.

Pre-packaged worldbuilding

Sometimes all we want is to get to the good stuff. Maybe I want to write a story about elemental magicians but Last Airbender already exists and I just want to play in a pre-existing sandbox. So I write some OCs into that world and have a free-for-all.

I don’t have to come up with my own lore, world history, magic system rules and mechanics, politics, geography—any of it. I get to just focus on the characters.

Even if you’re writing an AU, like say a coffee shop AU, you don’t have to think about brand new characters, you can just think “What would M do?” and go from there. The trade-off is your readers will expect canonical characters to behave in-character, but I think it’s worth it.

Stretch beyond your comfort zone!

Do you hate writing action scenes? Go practice with a shonen anime fic. Need work on dialogue? Write some high-fantasy fic, or a courtroom drama. Practice a fistfight by watching fistfights and writing what you see, and do it over and over again until what you read makes you feel like you're watching what’s on screen.

But beyond that—practice genres that you aren’t super familiar with. If you’re new to fantasy, write fantasy fic. Or a mystery novel/show, thriller, comedy, satire, adventure, what have you. The nature of fanfic still gives you those “guardrails” and you can get some brutally honest feedback on how you’re doing.

And, of course, the realm of M-rated romance and smut fics. I haven’t because I think I would die of embarrassment if I tried and I never intend to include sex scenes in my works anyway, but if you do want to, use the internet as your test audience. Post it on a throwaway account if you’re nervous.

Build that self-confidence!

The fandoms I used to write for are super dead, so it’s insane how I still get email notifications that so-and-so liked my fic to this day. Comments are as elusive as ever, but random strangers on the internet telling me they liked my work is a magical reassurance that my writing isn’t actually awful.

Random strangers on the internet are, as we all know, beholden to no moral obligation to be kind to your little avatar face, or be kind to be polite. So a rando taking the time to like my work or even leave a positive comment can feel more honest than one of my friends telling me what they think I want to hear.

I tend to avoid the more present aspects of fandom like online communities, forums, social media, what have you, so I get a delayed and diluted aspect of any given fandom through completed works. Which means, in general, I get to avoid the worst and most toxic aspects of fandom and get to sift through positive feedback and critique.

Even if your fanfic isn’t written with stellar prose, it’s fanfic. We don’t expect Pulitzer-prize winning content. And if your work isn’t up to snuff, people are more likely to just ignore it than put you on blast (at least in my experience, I never got a bad comment or a “flame” in the old FFN days).

Fanfic doesn’t care about the rules of published literature

On the one hand, try not to practice bad habits, but with this point I mean that your layout, punctuation, formatting, paragraph styles, chapter length–all of it is beholden to no rules. I get as annoyed as the next reader with giant blocks of paragraphs, or the double-spacing between pages of single-sentence paragraphs, but if the story’s good enough I might ignore it.

There’s more than just straight narrative fics, though. People write “chat” fics, or long streams of text and group chat conversations. The scene breaks can come super rapidly–I’ve seen fics with a single sentence in between line breaks to show the passage of time. And without the polish of a traditionally published novel, I’ve never seen a purer distillation of author voice in any medium more than fanfic.

All practice is good practice

Even if it’s crack fiction, or a one-off one-shot, or something meant to be lighthearted and straightforward and free from complex worldbuilding and intricate plots. It really helps break writer’s block when you can shift gears and headspaces entirely and you can get relatively instant feedback to keep you motivated.

Beyond that, the “guardrails” help you stay consistent as far as character growth and personality if you struggle with designing rich characters.

The most recent fanfic I wrote was just a couple years ago, for a dead fandom I didn’t think would get any traffic whatsoever. It wasn’t my original works, but the feedback on that fic gave me the kick in the butt I needed to get back into writing more seriously.

—

In short, I support fanfic. I may not be proud of my earliest fics' prose now, but I am proud that they walked so I can now run.

[neoyi]

The Big Catch: Tackle Box demo feels like every mainline 3D Mario game if they only took the Advanced Mario Moves and made an entire platformer out of it. You're not relying on traditional run-and-jump, the game heavily expects - nay, mandates - you to wall run, leap, and use fishing hook physics to climb and zoom up towers to catch fish. When done right, it sent a rush of serotonin in my brain.

While the mechanics do have a learning curve, I loved the feeling of zipping across when I got Tackle's moves down pat. Your player character is a fast little bugger, but in that satisfying "thank god, I can reach this part of the level again after falling down for the umpteeth time" instead of it feeling frustratingly loose in that "faster-than-the-eye-can-catch-up-bullshit-3D-Sonic-games" feel. It's like the game understands that its heavy emphasis on acrobatics where falling down and getting back up is practically a guarantee, it compromises with a fast, but smoothly-controlled character.

Also I'll give double compliments for using the desert setting as a neat background to its worldbuilding. The tutorial character seem to hint that ALL their world is a desert wasteland and water is scarce, meaning fishing became a respectful, but potentially dangerous trade. What a novel use of a fisherman and build an entire game where the beloved hobby becomes a significant part of their society and environment; where finding lakes and ponds for fish is an essential and necessary part of their survival.

I'll give it triple points for setting it in largely in a desert, but keeping it interesting. I don't care about desert levels, I just think they're boring to look at. This game, however, got a lot of moments where I just stopped and took screencaps. I love the night sky aurora borealis, that weird ass cracked moon, and the numerous towers off in the distance that invites exploration. There were really just a lot of "ooh pretty" or "ooh, what's that" territory throughout. The PS1 style is graphically just nice. Superb. Probably the closest I've ever seen a modern game ape off that aesthetic well. It's the big reason I backed this on kickstarter, it's that good.

My only complaint is that while in theory, letting you loose in their sandbox (literally!) is well and good, I'm honestly not sure (so far) if every tower/ruins you can explore can be fully beaten. Maybe I just haven't found the right wall run-and-jump mechanic to reach further, but some of the level designs have me stumped on whether they were designed to be reachable in this current stage of play or they're unfinished because it's a demo. The steam page cited Tackle Box as a prologue, which implies this part of the game is complete, but also I know demos by nature either show off a small portion of a completed area (usually the beginning) or an earlier version of a game still in-progress. I'm still playing through it, so I'll see how it I feel about it as I experiment some more.

In any case, I'm having a lovely time and can't wait for the full game.

Also, the overworld theme song is infectious as hell and you all need to listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAmrucuDz4

[toytulini]

spotify playlists i made that i should post on here at some point

-☣!!!!!!!!!!TURBO!☢!NAUSEA!!!!!!!!!!☣: playlist theme is just Go Fast and sometimes when i am in A Mood i have to just blast this one and it makes me calm down. started as a collection of songs ny dad described as "nauseating".

-simply vibing: i think this is something called "nu jazz"? + caramelldansen. something about this playlist makes me feel, both insane, and like its the last thing keeping me tethered to sanity? the cover image is king julien but there no julien songs or anything

-DANCE DANCE: dance dance

-cave to the call of the sea, Shan't I?: sea shanty inspired. has some sea shanties and also just some things slightly to the left of sea shanties i think? don't question the fiat

-forest wanderer: i think i might have posted this one, its old, but i think ive updated the order since then, also, i gave it a nice cover image now.

-you got lost in the sauce, now yr roamin the foam: dedicated to last braincells. spiritual precursor to simply vibing even tho i think tehy are technically different genres.

-pottymouth: hehe bad words

-WHO'S johnny: so many songs about some dude called johnny. who is johnny/john

-wistfully visceral: decompose and rot: songs about. dead being dead rotting decomposing etc

-Halloween Ends When I Say It Does: partially was just not ready for xmas this year but also i just wanted to put spooky scary skeletons next to songs from the scooby doo spooky island soundtrack. took some effort not make just another necromancy playlist

-Jared (a really fun guy): this is an oc playlist but also a masterpiece.

-MEETCUTE DEATHMATCH: ♡♤Siikrae♤♡: oc ship playlist but its very good

-i should update the witchverse playlist. at some point i edited the order of it (i am Never Doing That Again) and its insanely long now

-LULLABIES// h a u n t: this binch LONG and mostly instrumentals. inspired by chara concepts for a uh dnd worldbuilding thing that im not sure ill ever carry out? but the concepts r cool tho.

-Lullabies To The Forgotten, Left To Anguish Alone For Eternity: the original playlist for the chars that inspired LULLABIES. its a little longer and a lot more lyrics.

-The Sailor's Heart Belongs To The Sea: oc ship playlist between a feral nasty seagull druid sailor turned chaos god oc and an ancient powerful ocean deity.

[dmsden]

Campaign Basics - Filling Up Our Sandbox

Hello, Gentle Readers. In this month’s Campaign Basics, we’re going to look at what we’ve got so far and where we go from here in fleshing out our campaign arc. We’re also going to look at some tricks for allowing player agency while making sure they won’t miss any of the important plot points we want to use to tie into our Angel of Chaos storyline.

So far, we have our setting (the Beyond the Borderlands campaign I created in the Worldbuilding articles in this blog), our homebase town of Oathford, a major adversary (Adziel, the Angel of Chaos), and some themes and adventure seeds. But even before we sit down and have a Session Zero, I want to put together some more ideas for adventures to tempt the PCs.

You see, I love the idea of a Sandbox campaign, where the players just have a huge world to explore, but, since we have a story to tell, we want to make sure that the PCs are rewarded for their choices, but also that they don’t miss the underlying story. To ensure this, I’ve recently been a fan of what I call the “Sandbox with Benefits” approach to adventure creation.

Basically, I create plot elements I want the PCs to encounter. Once I know what the PCs are off to do, I figure out a way to incorporate those story elements into whatever they’re doing. In my current campaign, I knew I wanted the PCs to encounter a rogue Psion named Tarkantus very early, as he was the first layer of things. He would reference the White Lady, a figure who would have a lot of meaning for the campaign later on. But I didn’t want to railroad the PCs into Tarkantus’ lair. Instead, I dangled several plots at them - a caravan-guarding job, a missing farmhand, and a chance to collect rare roots for a local alchemist.

I had a basic link to Tarkantus for each of these plots. If they’d taken the caravan job, they would’ve been attacked by bandits in Tarkantus’ employ, and following their trail would’ve led them to him. If they looked into the missing farmhand, he had been kidnapped by Tarkantus’ minions, and looking for him would’ve led to the encounter. If they had sought out the roots, they would’ve found themselves in competition with Takantus’ minions, who were also trying to collect the rare resource. You get the idea. Each adventure hook would’ve ultimately led to the possibility of a confrontation with Tarkantus, but the PCs had no way of knowing that.

In the third article, we had an adventure involving a harpy named Jetharia who, upon dying, would’ve said something like, “The Angel will avenge me”, thus letting the players know that there was something up. In going back and reading the older articles, I realize that my intention had been to give them a hook to Shieldwell Keep through a plot against the Castellan’s life in the first adventure. I also wanted to create a bit of a mini-boss, since I like to look ahead to later adventures. Sure, it could be the Evil Cleric in Caves of Chaos, but he’s only Challenge Rating 2. Since I think of levels 1-4 as the first tier of adventuring, I want an adversary around challenge rating 4. I also want the PCs to get their first taste of “Oh, hey, there’s something very odd going on here.” To this end, I begin to put together a new NPC to be the mini-boss at the end of level 4 - Mehethrass, a Couatl.

Given that couatls are generally lawful good, most PCs probably haven’t fought one. They’re also pretty formidable foes, given that they are immune to damage from non-magical weapons. Mehethrass is going to be confusing but also really give the PCs a run for their money. He won’t be alone, since he’s not a legendary critter and therefore not really up for soloing a party of adventurers, but he’ll be memorable. He also won’t likely fight to the death, making it possible for him to fail his Master and show up later on as a lieutenant to a more powerful foe.

In order to begin to foreshadow this early in the campaign, and to tie back the idea of a plot against the Castellan, in Jetharia’s lair, I would likely put a letter from Mehethrass talking about the plot in somewhat veiled terms, perhaps referencing “our friend in the Keep”, “the impediment from the Keep shouldn’t be around much longer”, and advising her to send a report to “the Master of the Caves”. This ties a bunch of plot threads together and gives the PCs some solid leads. If they’re a good party, they will likely go to the Keep to try and aid the Castellan, but his guards are unlikely to let this unknown party too close to their lord. They might find themselves exploring the Caves of Chaos in order to find this “Master” and try and reveal more about his plans.

Now, maybe the PCs won’t take you up on the harpy plot when you dangle it in front of them. Maybe they’ll head to Quasqueton first, or the Caves of Chaos. In this case, you simply adapt similar elements to the new location. Maybe in Quasqueton, the PCs encounter some goblins. Among their effects are a letter from Mehethrass telling the goblins to determine if there’s anything there that can aid their Angel and advising them to report to Master of the Caves whatever they find. Or maybe they go to the Caves first, in which case they might find a letter from Mehethrass in the evil priest’s effects. The point is to let the PCs know by the end of the first adventure that there’s an Angel, a plot against the Castellan, an enemy in the Keep, and someone named Mehethrass who seems to be coordinating local forces of Chaos.

Next time, we’re going to take a look at some allies and rewards that the PCs might get in the first few levels to help them against the forces they face. Until then, may the dice fall ever in your favor.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form: I can't find all your masterposts on basic world building. But so far the ones I've tracked down don't mention health issues. I'm involving dozens of planets, at least once a week gatherings of at least 3 million people and several transport hubs that carry 20 million passengers a day, etc. It's end of Jan 2020. Oops. I think I inadvertently created an ideal situation that mimics China's virus epidemic x1000 if that ever were to happen! Even if I'm not writing such a situation no world ever gets built and planned without considering such emergencies which I admit, I haven't given a single little thought to, until reality faces me to think about it. In fact, I've given 0 thought to building my world with any emergencies in mind because so far I'm not writing in emergencies.

Constablewrites: Planners in the real world frequently don’t give much thought to emergencies, either. Or there will be a few people who understand emergency planning but they answer to bosses who don’t see the profit in it.

Digging into the underlying logistics of a society is more about telling you how they think and what they value than realistically mapping out scenarios that don’t actually come up in your story. Would they invest a huge amount of resources into decontamination systems? Would they shoot anyone who sneezes funny out an airlock without a second thought? Those suggest two very different philosophies of rulership. Building plausible worlds is about depicting those philosophies consistently when it does come up, rather than trying to work out every possible manifestation of them.

So if you wanted to consider emergencies, it’s more important to think about the types of governments you’ve created and how they run things in general, than to work out the specific details of how they’d respond to a given crisis. (And there’s nothing that says they need to respond well. Ignoring the problem until it blows up spectacularly in their faces is a 100% plausible setup.)

Feral: “I've given 0 thought to building my world with any emergencies in mind because so far I'm not writing in emergencies.” Do you plan on writing this kind of emergency? I have a personal preference against spending time worldbuilding something that will never come up in the stories that I’m writing. Of course, if you’re worldbuilding for the hell of it or with the intention to use this universe as a life-long sandbox for who knows what kinds of stories, that’s a different matter. But if you are worldbuilding for a concrete story idea or ideas, then worrying about this might take your attention away from aspects of your worldbuilding that you do need to focus on to make your story work or, even worse, be a way of procrastinating actually writing your story.

As Constable has pointed out, the real world doesn’t have a terrific track record of preventing or managing health crises like the Coronavirus (or H1N1, Ebola, SARS, MERS, the effing flu…); if we did, these epidemics and pandemics would not keep happening.

Now, with your advanced, space-faring technology, maybe your universe does have great biorisk management in place. Maybe there are advanced scanners that everyone has to pass through to get on public transit that can immediately determine if they are carrying dangerous contagions. Maybe there is a special gas that can be added to the air supply that kills all airborne pathogens without harming the people breathing it in. You have as many ways as your imagination can think of to make outbreaks just not possible. And these are minor things that you can mention briefly to handwave away any concerns your audience could have to the effect of “what if one of these guys has a cold?”

And then, if you decide to come back to this universe with another story that is about a terrible outbreak, well, then one little, itty-bitty flaw in the system is enough to destroy it. WHO is going to be a great resource for you as you explore this topic. An article I found particularly relevant: How the 4 biggest outbreaks since the start of this century shattered some long-standing myths

You should also check out the CDC’s website; you’ll find the most relevant articles on their Emergency Preparedness and Response page.

Tex: Constable and Feral have hit the nail on the head with this. I think part of the reason why health issues are overlooked - both IRL and in worldbuilding - is the comparative incredulity of it. You can see an earthquake, you can see a forest fire, but how do you see a disease? By the visibly ill and the dead, but by that time the cat’s usually out of the bag, and the situation becomes “management” instead of “prevention”.

As someone in the engineering field, I know that the technologies Feral mentions would be incredibly difficult to create - this difficulty would exponentially increase if you’re adding in factors like multiple species, space travel, and travel between sufficiently different environments (e.g. tropical to desert).

Advanced scanners are a wonderful idea, and I think one of the paths of least resistance. Pocket-sized MRIs are currently being developed (Medica Magazine), and the issue with motion artifacts - necessary if you don’t want to overtly impede the flow of traffic - is also being tackled (Radiology Business). I can definitely see these ideas intersecting for the purposes of airport/starport check-ins, as well as any other significant nexus of transportation.

Theoretically, the wait period for a medical scan of inbound traffic would be reduced to a manageable rate, and could be incorporated into the things people need to do upon arrival. Whether this can be tweaked to scan for viruses/etc, I… don’t really know, but it could be a package deal in combination with a cheek swab test (PCR techniques + applicable programs are way easier to accomplish right now).

I don’t think we would see any society plan for strict precautions and screening unless there’s a sufficiently catastrophic disease that guts their population, because social memory is frankly quite short, and correspondingly requires widespread support for STEM fields to develop solutions to these problems.

Ultimately, the biggest vulnerability to disease tracking is that science is always two steps behind nature - anything we currently have catalogued could have a random mutation that we can’t predict, and we probably won’t figure that out until we see the ill and the dead of it.

[zaxal]

3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 23, 33, 50 (sry I got carried away they are good questions feel free to skip some if u don't feel like talking that much)

under a cut, sorry if that doesn’t work on mobile ;u;

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

ash and blood which i link every time i talk about it bc i spent three fuckin years working on it. it’s the first time i’ve really felt that my plot, worldbuilding, and characters were all cohesive, and there’s not much fat i would trim off or things i would heavily edit at this point. the stuff i’ve written since then has been good (imo) but it doesn’t fill me with the same sense of accomplishment.

5. Is there any fic that makes you super happy to reread and remember you wrote that?

almost all of my psychtober fics, undertow, ash and blood, we could be reborn. i’m a huge fan of my own work bc i tend to work with tropes i either like or want to unravel in a specific way. i cater to my own tastes lmao.

10. Have you ever written for a fandom without reading other fanfic for it?

sort of. back when i was a teenager and an asshole, i looked down on fanfiction despite writing some myself (i told myself it was different. it wasn’t.) but since i’ve like... participated in fandom, no. bc usually the first thing i do when i get through a piece of media i want to write for, i head out to read.

12. Have you ever written a fic and decided never to publish it? Why?

yeah bc it was bbclock and doctor who and those fandoms specifically were like... i liked them at the time, but i think i wanted to be involved in a big fandom and carve out my own space. my heart wasn’t in it the same way it was with psych which is when i like. really started writing. there’s some of that old stuff i like rereading, but i still don’t care for the source material the same way i do my true obsessions.

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

i’m not afraid to say dick, cock, cunt, pussy, etc. like maybe that’s not that big of a thing to other people but i Could Not do it when i first started writing bc i was a delicate flower. i got over that. like writing porn isn’t everything but it helps if you can use like actual words for fucking.

non-smut related, i think i’m leagues better when it comes to keeping the pace moving forward. idk if it shows in my oldest published shit (there’s a certain point i won’t go back and read bc i will be Compelled to update the fic to something better and i don’t have time to do that) but my momentum used to stall out a lot because i’d either get stuck in a scene i didn’t care about writing or i’d be too into something and get obsessed with what i was writing instead of thinking about the story from any outsider standpoint re: whether it was actually readable.

23. What’s the nicest review you’ve ever gotten?

honestly, any comment i’ve gotten that’s like, gone into detail about how i made someone feel a thing is in the ‘best’ tier, i can’t narrow it down further than that. anyone who has made me feel like my writing touched them, that they got into it -- that’s my reason for living.

33. Is there any particular character whose scenes always wind up being longer/more frequent than you expected? Does the quality hold up?

mmmm probably carlton j. lassiter. i’m compelled by him. i ID with him in a lot of ways, and i feel like i understand what he thinks, feels, what motivates him the most. that understanding ironically gives me more flexibility bc once you have a solid foundation, you know when you’re doing something wildly out of character. you can trust your gut a lot more.

so scenes with him usually end up running long especially if i have a character to play him off of that’s fun to write. i think it’s easy to get stuck in a banter loop especially when it’s him and shawn, and while it can be fun to write, you gotta know when to stop and get back to what the story’s about. that’s where the quality would lag behind.

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

it’s had a huge impact on my life. i went to college for writing, and while i got advice that helped me from that, fanfiction is where i can explore, tweak, see what works and what doesn’t in an environment that’s solely for fun and for free. i’ve been telling stories my entire life, but fanfiction is where i honed it into something usable. thanks to fanfiction, i’ve completed my first project that took years of on/off working to do, i’ve been able to learn how to maintain a tone and a style for a work for the years it’s taken to complete (s/o to my WIPs, i know they’re out there and need tending to). i’ve learned how to introduce side characters and how much the audience needs to know them w/o my obsession with them overtaking the main story.

there’s a lot i’ve learned that had to come through practice, and fanfiction is a great field to use.

i wouldn’t say it’s been entirely positive, if only because i’m super anxious about making the leap from fic to original work. because i’ve gotten comfortable using other people’s characters and interpreting events through their eyes, i worry that my own OCs won’t hold up or that i’ll fail at worldbuilding because i’m used to playing in sandboxes where so much is already built for me.

but that’s just a bump in the road i have to get over.

[benjaminreevesart]

WHY DOES FORTUNA DISAPPOINT ME SO?

In November of 2018 DE released its latest OpenWorldTM Fortuna, an update I had been waiting for with bated breath from the edge of my seat since its announcement last year. At the time of launch I was logging in every day just for the chance to be one of the first to experience it.

Now over a month later, I sit here struggling to convince myself to go back. Yes, even after the heist update. A sentiment seemingly shared among many others in the community. So as with all things in life we must ask ourselves… why?

-Aesthetic: they decided to drop this thing in November, so I guess instead of going outside to play in the snow users could stay inside log on to warframe and play… in the snow. Yay.

I find myself missing the familiar exotica of not-africa and its kind-of-alive-but-not-really-except-its-made of-flesh-and-you-can-eat-it-wtf-DE? tower. (that bothers me). Just standing in these updates’ respective hub-areas and listening to the ambiance of the environment speaks volumes. The plains has haggling traders, merchants announcing their wares, wind rustling through the many canopies and tent flaps of hand hade fabric, it feels alive where fortuna feels like a cold mechanical day job. If you say that’s intentional… well, I hardly think boredom is anything to aspire to.

I get that they’re going for a sci-fi-punk feel, but it just comes off as monotonous, hopeless, and impersonal.

-Personal connection: Sure Saya’s Vigil was stupid romantic melodrama, sure onko’s decision is lame, sure it was kinda dumb to give newby players a warframe blueprint they couldn’t build until after reaching the mid-game, but ya know what? It worked.

I know who saya and konzu are, i have been with them on their story, every time I see konzu standing there with his girl I know that is because of me. My journey, my struggle, my effort brought these people together. Its simple its small, its human.

I mean who the hell is eudico anyway, why does she fight? Why caste shade on biz’s origins, and are we just going to gloss over an innocent person getting their head chopped off and their organs harvested in the open fucking street???????? There are constant references to people being “brain-shelved” which I can only assume means they get their brain put in a jar and thrown in someone’s freezer, and we get ZERO resolution for that! I mean sure there are fragments to find and scan, but they don’t really tell us anything that couldn’t already have been inferred. With exception to the relationship between biz and little-duck, not that it seems to play into any of their interactions at all. The business does have his conservation thing, which is a part of his character, an old war veteran understand the fragility of life and working to preserve it through peaceful means. But the spirit of it is robbed when they give the same shtick to the random bird guy from cetus. Why? while I could buy Nef Anyo hunting whole species to extinction for profit, nothing about the setting of the plains suggests the animals are in any kind of danger from the grineer. Its just pointless. I mean you could’ve just used the business for both, maybe he’s building a zoo for critters from all over the system, I wouldn’t have questioned it. Heck, it could even have been a nice little unlock to see the place once you catch one of every animal.

Weirdly enough the one character I think is kind of done right here is ticker. Yeah, the kiosk guy above biz’s shop whose only purpose is to sell you debt bonds so you can increase your standing. Maybe its just a dumb stereotype but I like tickers flair for the theatrical, I find it charming. Plus, his first fragment is so terribly depressingly human it just makes me want to give the poor dude a hug.

But at least there’s plenty of snow in the sandbox… er…

-The sandbox is full: I may not be in the console market these days but there have been a lot of sandbox games as of late, like… ALOT! Its basically the only game Ubisoft makes anymore. A wide-open area filled to burst with pointless shallow time wasting minigames of no real importance. OpenWorldTM. The announcement said Orb Vallis would be twice the size of Eidolon and good god does it feel like it! The very construction of the map itself restricts you from moving around it. With its massive board blocking Tim Burton mountains, and how those same mountains prevent you from utilizing the full freedom of the hoverboard, a new vehicle introduced with the update. Sure, there’s a new pet and new guns, but we already had fishing, we had mining, we had a new faction of peaceful traders and merchants to interact with. Outside of new shooty-tubes and endo dumps I don’t really see what’s so special here, especially when the terrain itself renders the races more chore than a challenge without delivering on any significant or memorable locations. Which is weird since there are interesting set pieces in the Vallis that are just never used. Of all the bounties I did getting to “old mate” rank the only location used was a data vault spy mission. You know, the building with the profit taker on it, yeah, you know the one the worst part of the map. Its built like a maze, is too easy to get lost in, has too many BIG rooms going into tiny vents you need an eagle eye to find, and its just an unenjoyable mess. This is especially infuriating as there are numerous more interesting locals around the map, they could use for practically any of the bounties. But no, its never the big Nef Anyo statue we’re fighting under it’s that damn farm thing again. Its never that cool cavernous road through the mountains, its that same damn bridge right in front of Fortuna. Its never a big base filled with enemies and tons of vertical platforms, its always that one generic outpost just down the road.

-Environmental Story: what’s even worse for the environment is its total lack of connection to the rest of the universe. The Plains weren’t just some vaguely African safari area, it was a battlefield. Haunted with the remains of shattered sentient contained within a massive forcefield that also happened to protect it from the deadly radiation and poisons of the outside world. The strange rocks which dot the landscape are the remains of alien spacecraft and its soils are stuffed with all manner of deadly armaments and tools. So, it makes perfect sense that the grineer or other factions would covet this area for its agricultural and military resources. The vallis just looks like a giant sink of effort and resources that could be put to more productive use elsewhere, doubly so considering it’s the corpus funding the whole operation. Which is even more sad given that environmental stories are the one story telling mechanic exclusive to video games. There is no other medium which allows a reader or a viewer to experience its world at their own pace to seek information in their own ways. Making this literary opportunity not only a waste of warframes universe but of the medium itself.

This is naturally only compounded upon with how the resources of the vallis seem even more restricted to fortuna than the plains did to cetus. The toroids are the worst offence in this, but I think I’ll save my thoughts on this growing problem in warframe for when I get around to covering the jovian concord as the issue of resource gating is more blatant there.

-The warframes: so garuda and baruuk, while I find it strange that DE released two frames around the same time that where functionally immortal, I just find their acquisition boring. Garuda’s main blueprint is just handed to you after finishing the introduction mission, and baruuk is straight up just another item you buy. The only difference between buying baruuk for real money and buying him for in game currency is time, and a lot of it given how rare the resource to get him is. Now I know garas main was given at the end of sayas vigil too but there it was built up as an ancient relic of mystical origin. A man left his wife and home to keep this powerful artifact out of enemy hands, sacrificing his whole life and happiness to keep them safe. You weren’t building just another tank with tits; you were reviving a warrior of legend who slew giants and protected the innocent. Revenant as well, had a deific entity granting visions to a child guiding you to the grave of an ancient warrior who fought and eventually fell to the control of his hated enemy. This might sound like a re-tred of inaros for most of you but at least gara and revenent look their parts, rather than just a mish mash of infested gunk slapped onto a skeleton. Point is worldbuilding matters, especially for the warframes. Being the name-sake of the game they deserve some kind of gravitas behind them. Treating a new warframe like another commodity to be bought off a shelf or passed out like a gold star from kindergarden is just… condescending. At least hyldryn got a boss fight out of her release, which is more of a backhanded compliment when you realize almost every other warframe gets a boss fight by default. Soooo… yeah.

 Conclusion:

Maybe I’m jaded, just sick of snow, or maybe I’m projecting my exhaustion with the OpenWorldTM genre, I don’t know. There are a lot of reasons I find fortuna unfulfilling, but ultimately, I think its this; fortuna and the vallis were supposed to be an extension to the warframe universe, a playground to explore new perspectives and build on its mythos. It didn’t do that. We went from space travelling assassins trying to fight a war on many fronts to make the galaxy a better place, to a plucky resistance force against an evil conglomerate. It just doesn’t fit with the world we’ve already seen. everything “new” that was introduced here may be new to warframe but has been done much better within any title from the cyberpunk genre.

Its really a shame too as just looking a around can be breathtaking at times, some caves and structures are genuinely beautiful to look at. A lot of work was clearly put into this update, just not in the right places. Gameplay has a few upgrades, the environments are pretty if frustrating to traverse, but the story just comes up short. Sure, we can tolerate illogical grinds and only semi-complete mythologies for our new areas, but without a good story to keep us coming back, to tie everything together, its just disappointing.

-END OF LINE.