#who doesn't love a good game?

[nicawlette]

What's this? She's just heard something that's caught her attention...

[v-arbellanaris]

i think the funniest part about people going 'well i love that there's no racism in veilguard actually' is that they're actually stupid because the godawful overtly aggressively racist, islamophobic and orientalist representation of the qunari is right there the ENTIRE TIME completely bald-faced and unapologetic but i guess it doesn't count as racism because... what? this portrayal fits in with your world view of the real life analogues?

[ali3nboyfriend]

Destiny 2 is a story about love and hope and resilience in the face of adversity, fighting against fascism and all-consuming entropy by building community and locking hands w people you once called your enemies because you find out you were fighting the same thing all along. it's a beautiful story full of charming characters and this tolkienesque fantastic hopefulness set in a post-apocalyptic backdrop, an ostensibly sci-fi world written with fantasy tropes and conventions. however it is trapped inside of a game that, while i genuinely think it is a really good game, does not attract the sort of playerbase that would actually appreciate the story it's telling.

[marypsue]

Man, it's cool and all if you see a metaphor for marginalisation in the monstrous, and if you want the power fantasy of 'what if you could just eat anybody who threatened you/pissed you off'. Me too.

However, as soon as you start saying 'no, these monsters are a 1:1 on Specific Marginalised Group, and you have to treat them in the fiction like they are directly representative of real human members of the marginalised group', BUT you also, in the fiction, make them hurt/kill/eat humans? And then try to shame me, your audience, for noticing or engaging with the bit where they kill people, because you made them directly representative of a real-world marginalised group? You have lost me, and also, I think, the plot.

[daily-beau]

Day 16: My saviour

[boatem-probler]

been chewing on this conversation between pearl and gem this week:

Gem: I know you didn't kill me!

Pearl: So what are you cranky about?

...

Gem: I'm just- you know, I wanted some drama! So, this is the drama, you're welcome.

Pearl: "This is the drama". You're telling me we could've been friends this whole time but you're just like "yoohoohoohoohoohoohoo... I hate you!"

Gem: Yeah, I mean, why not!

and i'm connecting it to gem in empires season 2, where like. in the context of the fiction everyone else had been living in that world their whole lives and that's their reality, like, it's real to them.

and meanwhile gem is just roleplaying. like, she was a being from another world who just came there because she wanted to play at being a human princess for a while. and then when she's called away she's just like. anyway i was never actually a princess or a mortal being from this dimension and we're never gonna see each other again, sorry for the existential crisis, bye!

and anyway i think she has a similar deal in the life series. like, everyone else is there because they're trapped in the Torment Nexus, gem is there because she wants to be.

[katabay]

original thief series basso & garrett :)

ngl, it's about quality over quantity for me. an npc can have a total of three minutes of screen time, but if they have a cool name, they can live rent free in my head and I'll spend several hours trying to decipher drawable features from a blurry screenshot of pixels

there is a vague hint of a story here, and that's because every time I try to play thi4f, I get incredibly frustrated with how Not Fun the game play is. like, is the story good? well. but it has a PLAGUE. that should've given it instant 'I'll replay this once a year' status in my heart, but the game play sucks so bad that I've never finished it. I can't believe Not Fun gameplay beat out my obsession with narrative plagues.

anyway, the idea is basically if the original era had a game with a plague centric narrative and some other stuff I liked out of thi4f thrown into a narrative blender, with a heavy dash of horror thrown in because some parts of the thief games were scarier to me than entire dedicated horror genre games.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[ai-the-broccoli]

enemies to lovers / but you'll never own my heart

@luzon-dove happy birthday, Quinn!! As a present, I decided to draw a piece fanart of your "blood in the walls of the yagami house" AU fic series, since I found it very well-written and full of super interesting ideas and concepts. I hope you like it!

[fogsblue]

One of my 3 favourite shots of Kotallo, a little bit of shippiness, the best battle grandma and a peaceful moment...

April April May May

VP 2024

[moonlightflower-queen]

Send me 15 dollars with a pigeon and i'll draw one for Thanatos.

My adress: Middle east. City with horrible infrastructure. Hilly street, tall asf white apartment building, first floor. Good luck. You have 15 days.

[noperopesaredope]

Being a Curly fan (especially pre-crash) is so complicated because I want to give him a hug and pat him on the head and ogle his chest and tell him he deserves a better friend than Jambiree but I also want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him back and forth while screaming at him for being a USELESS FUCKING DUMBASS-

[froschli96]

Assassin's Creed Revelations be like

[eta-volantis]

There has been quite a lot of conversations (and discourse but we're ignoring that) around whether Neve/Lucanis ship was well done/well implemented/etc. and I think my conclusion is yes. It is, in fact, a good ship. The problem isn't them.

What I suspect happened is that Neve/Lucanis ship was the intention, but what came later than city choice is the romance blocker. As we have now found, the previous intention is that both Lucanis and Neve is meant to have hardened romance routes through existing (and fully rendered and voiced) game files. I can't remember the source, but there was also dev talks around city choice being a late addition and from the fact that Lucanis hardened romance has cutscenes I'd say the blocker came even later. I'd be surprised if they rendered and voiced them and have them in game if the block was the original intention. And what I also suspect is that when Neve/Lucanis ship was written, Rook and Neve like every other companion/NPC ship were very much on equal grounds of reconciliation if the relationship were to continued to be pursued. Neither are better for him, they were simply different people that can forge a relationship with him in different ways.

When the city choice and blocker was introduced, it causes a lot of problems with existing content that was not written with that in mind. Which is a lot, actually, Neve/Lucanis ship included. Quite a few things were probably rewritten and added, but many things were also missed because as much as people keep saying there are not enough choices, the effect around just what we have on the game narrative is vast in practice. Especially with Rook having 6 possible backgrounds that all affect in game dialogues quite massively, not even including racial and mage additional dialogues. It's why it feels so jarring on Shadow Dragons Rook choosing Minrathous and why parts of his route feels inconsistent. (Hearing Ivenci talk at Shadow Dragons Rook who saved Minrathous at the final Treviso quests almost actually made me laugh tbh guilt-tripping someone loyal and dedicated to their home by telling them how loyal and dedicated they themself are to their home and how dare Rook isn't loyal to Treviso is... something.) I think they had ideas and intentions around the blocker and it's not just something they added because [insert ridiculous reasons here]. Essentially, the emotional turmoil and conflict with Rook that comes out of that is actually an interesting idea to explore but because dev hell and time, it is likely left as it is, which is unfinished in terms of the dev's vision and what they want to do with it.

The Neve/Lucanis ship isn't bad and/or preferred. It's everything around it being changed without going through the rest with a fine tooth comb to iron out kinks like Shadow Dragons Rook having their background entirely ignored so many times when the city choice comes up despite the place they saved is their home and not just some random place that causes the issues. The writers didn't prefer Neve/Lucanis because when it was originally written, it is likely that Rook and Neve were on equal grounds. Stuff like this just goes to show how difficult choice based RPGs are to make imo, any changes that you think are small and little things that you may think are negligible can end up affecting things that are narratively important or player experience. And with EA constantly trying to gut Bioware and firing people mid-production while the studio is developing 2 new games for their biggest IPs, it's a miracle the game is as good as it is.

[sporadicspores]

just some damp, sweaty boys because i was compelled by homosexuality as well as this post by @astarionformayor ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

[bitchfitch]

I've started playing Potion Permit, and so far it's one of my favorite games I've messed around with, but the most big brained move the devs made was giving you a dog on day 1, and then making that dog able to track NPCs and lead you directly to them no matter where they are in the town.

[front-facing-pokemon]