You’re getting downvoted but I agree, to an extent. If it’s an RPG telling a grand story, and not an individual piece dedicated to a unique individual, then yes.
Every game feels a bit broad. Even if just for the sake of development, I’m okay with story-focused games having pre-built characters. Especially if we’re not actually meant to like or agree with the character we’re playing as, such as Martin Walker in Spec-Ops: The Line.
Give me one good reason I shouldn’t be able to have a customizable PC in Tetris.
Seriously: I think narratives in games should be based on player choice. To me, that’s the difference between a game and a book or movie. To choose your own path instead of passively following one.
But clearly I am a minority here. Some of the biggest games are linear set-piece things with no choice in the narrative structure. Even open-world games tend to be linear narratively.
To use your example of Spec Ops: The Line: there is significant player choice that the main dude did not have to be a rigid character. They could have been as customizable as V from Cyberpunk 2077, and the effect would still land.
So did I, but I mean, given the current game development climate, Ciri was an extremely predictable pick.
Not only is Ciri a woman, which modern games seem to be making super majority of main protagonists these days, but she also has market familiarity. Her character is recognizable and therefore has a builtin audience, where a new character does not.
Besides, they’ve already established some of her signature abilities and had people play as her in some of the previous game, kicking the familiarity up an extra notch.
Yep. Ciri isnt the worst choice in the world, I just was hoping I could have played as my own character instead. It will be interesting to see what they do with the story.
Yeah, I’d have preferred making my own character too but, failing that, a great character that’s already established in the series and has been a lot of fun playing as so far ain’t bad either!
I really hope they don’t stick with Ciri gameplay from TW3, I never liked when I was forced to play as Ciri, her abilities was less fun than Geralt signs.
Judging by the video, she’ll be behaving more like a witcher, with the two swords, the signs, and the potion quaffing. If they hold to that and also let her keep her “short teleport” move from TW3, I’m looking forward to it 🙂
If they changed the double dodge = roll to double dodge = short teleport, but not as crazy as in TW3 that would be cool, they could also make the whole gameplay more agile than TW3, seems like a good fit for Ciri.
I think that wanting equality over men/women % of MC is not something you would want to focus on I would rather have a quality story and universe whatever of the gender of the MC.
( I will clarify my point , I am an human therefore I am for gender equality obviously but I don’t think that this metric is the most interesting )
I completely agree that the quality of the story is kinda the whole point, but I am tired of seeing comments like the one RightHand made; complaining that she is a woman just because she is a woman.
I mean, I agree. But, based on that argument, it's totally fine if 100% of pre-created MCs are women then, since it's only the story and universe that are important (and I would be 100% a-ok with that happening).
It makes perfect sense with two of the three endings, and could even work with the third depending on how much CDPR wants to explain the cosmology behind the white frost.
Is it really that hard to imagine she eventually undertook the Trial? Yeah Kaer Morhen lost the ability to administer the Trial, but there’s like 10 different Witcher “schools.” Maybe we’ll see Ciri working with the School of the Crane or w/e.
As far as we know it has never been done on a woman or an adult. Also, she already has super powers. Why risk a procedure that only 3 in 10 young boys used to survive?
This is just wrong, School of the Cat managed to successfully get to a point where 1/10 women survived. School of Crane is the later iteration of the School of Cat, which is why I mentioned them specifically. It’s reasonable to assume they kept iterating on the original formula for the trial, so maybe they’ve gotten to a survival rate of 3/10 for women as well by the time of the game?
As for why, it’s because Ciri wants to be a proper Witcher like Geralt. She was raised in Kaer Morhen, one of the ending of Witcher 3 is Geralt handing her a Witcher sword. You really can’t think why she would take the Trial, even knowing the risk?
Ciri can’t be a proper Witcher. She can’t do Signs because she is a Source, as Triss discovered. That was at least half the reason her Witcher training was cut short and Triss took over her training before they sent her to Yennifer. The other half being the herbs and mushrooms they were giving her were interfering with her development. She never got the Witcher mutagens at all. Ciri’s abilities are completely different from those of a Witcher due to her Elder blood.
School of the Cat managed to successfully get to a point where 1/10 women survived. School of Crane is the later iteration of the School of Cat, which is why I mentioned them specifically.
Where is this info from? I could only find fan fiction so far.
As for why, it’s because Ciri wants to be a proper Witcher like Geralt.
Too thin for a 70% death rate when you already have most of what it takes for other reasons.
I guess it depends on what you call fanfiction? It’s from Opowieści ze świata Wiedźmin, which is a collection of short stories written by authors other than Andrzej Sapkowski in the Witcher universe. The authors have other published works, so I’d argue it’s a bit more official than pure fanfiction, but I can’t confirm how canon it’s considered. Certainly something CD Projekt Red could rip-off for their non-canon story set like 20 years later though.
Also Ciri has been well established to be a headstrong idiot, so I’m not sure why you’re trying to examine her decision through rational logic. I’d bet she’d accept the Trial even with a 0% survival rate if she felt it made her a “proper Witcher.”
It’s almost definitely a break with the series in that you likely won’t be able to import your save file, which always was a core feature of the series. There are also other lore details that don’t add up here, which have already been explained. There could’ve been many ways to progress the story but I don’t see how that is possible here. It’s most likely a soft reboot.
Some games do allow you to import saves from older games that have swapped the MC. They just take the choices you made in the story arc and use that to create conditions for the world you’re now in. But it’s a rare occasion from what I know.
It could work the same way as the three origin stories in CP77: each ending from The Witcher 3 leading to a separate intro story with a time skip before the main game begins.
I guess that could be possible though I doubt it. The 3 origin stories in Cyberpunk were extremely shallow and didn’t add anything to the story. I don’t see why they would go for it again when it didn’t work out last time.
SpoilerHow so? One of the endings literally has geralt gift a witcher sword to Ciri. The only thing I’m confused about is how she now seems to have the witcher mutations
:::spoiler Witcher books spoiler One of the early Witcher books mentioned that Ciri was given some witcher drugs while she was training at Kaer Morhen, but didn’t undergo the trial of the grasses at Triss’ request. :::
Continuation of the book spoilersWacky books tbh. I don’t remember thinking it was for her to undergo trail they gave it to her, but mostly because that’s all they really knew to do
I did. The games already completely shit on the ciri book lore. I was hoping for a fresh slate with new characters, perhaps during a different time period entirely.
I don’t know how it would’ve tied into the “Witcher” arc… because I don’t think they were around yet? But I would have loved to had a game set during the “Conjunction of the Spheres”.
Huh? What do you mean? I’m saying i would have liked to play as the first witcher, which would have taken place 400 years or so prior to the first game.
Edit: apologies i misunderstood your comment. See my below response. A game based on the conjunction would have been awesome. Too bad.
They meant they wanted a game set during the conjunction of the spheres but didn’t know if witchers were a thing yet at that timeframe in the lore. The wording made it seem like they were talking about your first witcher idea but they were talking about a different alternate timeframe setting they’d like to see.
I think you’re both asking for the same thing. IIRC my lore correctly, Witcher clans were founded after the Conjunction to deal with the sudden influx of monsters. A game about the first Witcher could be set mere months after the event.
I sound like a huge nerd here but i believe witchers were created 500 years prior when the humans first got to the continent and encountered monsters. Both humans and monsters came from the conjunction. It is never explained what humans were doing for the first 1000 years after the conjunction (conjunction was 1500 years ago) prior to arriving on the continent. I assume they also had to deal with monsters or maybe the monsters were dropped only on the continent? No idea. The author was unfortunately not very consistent or clear on historic lore. Perhaps it was intended. I’m not sure.
Source: I spent way too much time looking at lore explanations and engaging on forums.
I mean yeah, no shit. The steam forums could be removed at no loss to the human race, in fact it’d remove a non-negligible percentage of all really shitty talk on the internet if they deleted everything entirely.
The steam forums are fucking cancer. I was looking for info about a bug I was having with a newly released game. I instead saw an entire thread about how the game is woke and you shouldn’t buy it. The game has an implied lesbian character. Who gives a fuck? The game was pretty good btw.
I’ve seen whole threads in game forums dedicated to Nazism, and I myself have been called a “groomer” and the t-slur because people knew be as a boy before I transitioned. Legitimately horrible place, they absolutely need to take more action against this.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Are the forums moderated at all? All I see is people being terrible to each other. I also saw someone requesting a Brazilian Portuguese translation for a game and people calling them a fucking idiot and telling them to learn english.
There’s almost no moderation on Steam at all. Sometimes threads advocating violence get removed, or threads with a lot of hate get locked but it’s almost always long after the damage has been done and often times the ones doing nasty shit don’t end up getting banned.
I don’t use steam forums. But I have questions. Do the steam forums have any moderation at all? Is there a report button? Can you report comments or forum threads?
I want to know because I feel like a lot of social media has the same problem as steam forums and these tools exist on the majority of those. They rely on the moderation of fellow users.
I also question whether or not steam actually has an automod or anything like that. Or human moderators.
Please keep in mind that I don’t use the forums so I really have no idea. This is the first time I’m hearing about this, and I’m interested in knowing more.
While I agree with you that some people are too thin skinned to handle some conversation online… Steam forums or YouTube comment sections are really the very worst of the worst.
If all you read is trash tier content on a platform even if you understand it, it still sucks and remain quite infuriating.
Basically, steam forums are mostly trolling so at this point it’s not about the sensitivity of people but rather that these platform are particularly bad.
I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.
I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.
I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.
The biggest thing companies want to do with AI is infinite cheap content. They want generate a movie or other entertainment for a 10th or even 20th of the cost while burning a state’s worth of energy. They’re going to try and generate a successful movie from models that are trained on previously successful movies. And, they’ll get it.
At least at first. Eventually, even we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment. And, I’m not talking just once a year. More like once a month. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, they’ll learn that the attention economy is not infinite. There is a limit of people, time, and money. They’re putting most of their eggs in the this basket and I hope it smashes to pieces.
AI isn’t here to improve anything. It’s here to open a path to infinite growth. Infinite entertainment, infinite weaponizing, infinite whatever. More predictable, infinite growth. Problem with that is that we’re slowing as a race and sooner or later it will start shrinking. The more they try to take, the quicker this is going to happen.
I am waiting for an AI model and corresponding tools to generate my own anime and manga. No more stupid open endings, no more infinite story they stop producing because who knows, no more “I was in the same room as a girl, OH NO! Someone might have seen me, I’m so embarrassed!”.
I almost wish I could take existing anime, put it in a machine and make it better. That should actually become a thing, use AI to make your favorite TV shower more to your liking. Someone needs to create this. Bad ending? Fix that. Bad dialog? Fix that. Change gender on all characters? Fix that as well. Foul langage? Easy.
we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment
We aren’t already doing that? Even without AI, most of today’s writers suck ass, and corporate meddling has stomped out risk taking. Writers have no chance to build experience with good shows with longevity. With no risk, there is no creativity.
All of the good series were ones from cable TV. Breaking Bad, Sopranos, old Star Trek, Mr. Robot, Babylon 5, House, Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones (even if it ended badly), Better Call Saul, The Expanse (which died immediately after it switched to Amazon), Gravity Falls. About the only streaming series I really enjoyed was Loki, and that only lasted two seasons. Anything else might have a good first season, but they chop out any sense of character development by making these season 6-8 episodes long. No episodic content. No character development. Just go go go towards the seasonal end goal. And then get cancelled, because they didn’t get a chance to shake out the mediocre ideas and improve their direction. Can you imagine Star Trek:TNG being represented by only their first season, and then cancelled as a result of that?
All of the recent good movies were from directors that had a chance to take risks back in the 2000s, and are now given full creative control to do what they are good at. Dune was a great movie, but it simply adapted the source material, and was given enough budget and resources and creative control to Denis to produce what it needed to be. How many good directors will be left when the old guard retires?
All of the good games are from indie series now. Concord is being getting review-wrecked and shat on, while people focus more of their attention on an fucking asset-flip game about a squirrel with a gun. All of the good bigger studios are gone, fully absorbed into the Microsoft/ZeniMax/WB/EA empire. Only the first or second-time indie game developers are the ones producing good games.
Hell, at this point, maybe AI would do a better job than the shit that’s out there. I doubt it, though. It’s too half-baked right now.
The difference is the police will arrest people who steal cars and will prosecute them but they won’t do the same for the uber wealthy exos of these companies.
I mean, 90 percent of the time, the police can’t do jack about a car theft besides keep their eyes peeled. By the time you even realize it’s gone, it’s usually in pieces or in a shipping crate on its way to another country.
I admit the analogy wasn’t perfect but i think it gets the point across
Okay, but where’s that money coming from? Someone has to upfront pay for things. Larian are lucky, they have a majory investor that was not looking for any control, they released in early access and had runway money from previous projects to go with. They are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately.
Publishers no longer publish third parties for the most part, so everyone who isn’t a subsidiary of a large company has to find funding somewhere.
It’s worth noting the vast gulf we are talking about here between the “self funded” indie studios and even A games, not even AA, just A.
The self funded indie game made by one person in their spare time that 200 people play (and occasionally a standout hit that 8 million people play) really isn’t under contention here. We’re talking about the responsibilities when starting a business.
We are not talking about making an AAA game, an equivalent of an MCU film (as those are limited to the deep pockets of large companies).
Most companies that aren’t making AAA games, are also taking funding because people have to make rent, and workers deserve to get paid a wage.
From me for example. I follow this studio and team since many years and i’ve participated to the funding of Divinity: Original Sin (DOS) more than a decade ago…
They got money from several sources but mainly because (or i should say thanks to) they delivered good products, they have being able to survive and work on BG3. Luck is not the reason, they’ve worked hard to achieve that…
They have, I’ve been playing their games from their first divine divinity game. But they are still in a lucky situation, privileged from the reality that everyone else has to go through.
They worked hard for decades. They’ve been betrayed and hampered by editors in the past until kick-started. It’s not a lucky situation, they built this luck.
they worked hard, they are in a lucky and privileged situation unlike almost every other company.
Consider an amazing actor or director that you respect. They worked hard, they made amazing things, and they got super lucky. Talent and hard work guarantees nothing.
If the implication is that they should be negotiating better terms. Well, good luck with that. I’ve been a part of many teams involved with investor negotiations. You need their money a hell of a lot more than they need your teams risk.
I don’t say it’s easy. But if you want to make a good creative product you have to be able to keep the creative control, that is part of your job and what makes realization of creative ideas, especially on big scale, more difficult. It’s the same with other creative media like movies.
Spending well over a decade pushing out moderately successful shovelware on consoles before crowdfunding D:OS and its sequel, which provided enough of a portfolio to attract the CCP’s money and allow for the development of BG3.
Depends, some people do other jobs to fund their projects. Some just do low budget stuff. Some are good at negotiating or find funding programs. Sure it’s an effort but people out there are doing it in all kind of ways.
My only complaint is how horny everyone is. I act nice to people and they wanna jump on my dick. Literally had a mind flayer try to smash my pelvis and I’m like DUDE MELLOW OUT
Absolutely agreed. I asked one person if they wanted to share a drink at a celebration (that’s just social decorum, right?) and have done no flirting before or after that and now that person talks to me like they’ve been in love with me their whole life.
And I get the idea that you want to let everyone sleep with their favorite NPC regardless of who they’re playing as but it just feels weird to me that everyone is so both pansexual and horny. It makes me feel like nobody has any preferences and just falls in love with you because you’re the main character.
And in general it also lessens the sense of camaraderie a bit for me when it comes down to sex so much. I wish some companions had other interests and had no desire to get in your pants.
I think it’s great for people to have representation but I’m hoping that someone makes a mod to turn it all off. I also really just want an adventure without having to deal with horny party members.
I think there is already a mod that turns off all approval gains, but beware that I think this also blocks off several companions’ personal quests, since they’re related to the relationship. At least that’s what I heard.
The mod I’m using tweaks approval so the gains are smaller for little stuff, losses are bigger and important story decisions etc become more significant (in both directions). I unfortunately didn’t find it until I was already near-max with several companions but it should in theory make it more difficult to end up with everyone being in love with you before the third long rest.
To be fair it almost feels like a homage to early bioware. I remember a few bioware games that had this issue. I remember the forums being full of complaints about surprise romances in mass effect or dragon age.
I do think the issue is more prevalent I’m BG3 though.
It’s made worse by Larians decision to absolutely juice the approval gains when going from Early Access to Full Release, apparently. Makes everything move way too fast and really exacerbates the issue.
working where exactly? working on a farm that will pay you minimum wage, if that? oh OH I know working in the tech sector where it’s now and has been for the past couple years an absolute nightmare to find a job in.
There are NO jobs out there that will pay for the current cost of living and the ones that COULD aren’t hiring, and if anything, are laying people off. And yeah, these unemployed young men are TOTALLY playing videogames that now cost $80 a pop paid via a job they don’t have.
Btw is $80 actually up from the oughts and 10s? I’ve had $80 as the price for the latest AAA game in my head forever and am continually surprised it hasn’t changed.
Would a federated discovery frontend work? Peertube’s back end of the service would probably work great as a starting point since it uses torrents to ease up on traffic for individual servers
Might finally open the doors for viable alternatives. If Spacebar (former fosscord) garners tractions for example due to mismanagement by discord they might make the transition over from discord to an open source, decentralized alternative for the everyday discord user viable. Although I haven’t tried Matrix in a while… But convincing users to switch to a completely separate service is way more difficult.
I honestly don’t know how a company that’s supposed to know the industry took this long to figure it out. They’ve been giving people fortnite skins for a long time, they know the bar is super low for people to get super excited about changes instead of antagonizing them.
Unfortunately there’s not really anything I’m really good at in CK3, despite like 300 hours of gameplay. Perhaps open warfare, but that has other consequences that I’m not great at dealing with.
Worth mentioning that the main US senator supporting this, Mark Warner, received substantial donations from Disney, which also poured 1.5 billion (with a B) dollars into Epic Games.
Wouldn’t be surprised if some bigwig at Disney pushed for this investigation, too, especially given how fucking flimsy the results were (55% of all hate symbols were fucking pepe the frog).
I feel like the kinds of people who assume every pepe is a symbol of hate are very similar to the kinds of people who assume that all metalheads are satanic. Some are, and some aren’t. It’s an overly reductionist view.
Man, I love frogs. The alt-right can’t take Pepe away from us.
Not only that, even the ADL try as they might can’t really make that claim with their chests. They qualify that pepe edits exist that have antisemitic connotations, which is true of literally any of the 4chan template meme characters.
There’s nazi trollfaces, nazi wojacks, nazi chads, you can’t use that as a reason to call pepe an antisemitic dogwhistle.
It is bullshit tho. I feel like for how massive these libraries are, I should be able to do that. Even if it requires a death certificate to make the transfer.
This is what steam is: a lesser form of ownership in exchange for the perks of the platform. I’ve come to prefer physical media first, DRM free second, and steam third. It’s just not as good of a value proposition to me compared to outright ownership (of the license to use the software, I know we don’t own “the game”).
Physical media today isn’t really much better though, increasingly frequently all a disk gets you is a license to activate a digital copy anyways, with a “must be online for first play” requirement.
I’m curious what recent games you’ve been able to purchase physical copies of that ran without updating or validating using the internet. I didn’t know any publishers still did that, at least not on PC.
I admittedly don’t buy many games lately, especially not from the big budget crowd. BG3 seems to run fine without internet, as do Sea of Stars and Noita.
Add it to the list of ethical circumstances for piracy.
In fact, for the titles I cared about, I would contact the studio/publisher themselves, explain the situation, send a death cert and a steam account, and see if they would allow a transfer or grant a new key. If not…they’re part of the problem.
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