They take any presence of minorities as part of an agenda to, uh, I don’t know what exactly. They always screech about an agenda but I don’t think even they know what the agenda is supposed to be about.
The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it’s such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it’s fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it
Cloudpunk is nice, although it’s more of a “walking simulator” than a fully-fledged RPG. It’s a cyberpunk-ish indie game in which you’re a delivery driver, although with a flying car and a sentient dog.
The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”
It’s sort of how I try to view my past fuckups: I can’t change the past by feeling like an idiot for making some mistake, but I can try to learn to not make the same mistakes again (and instead make new and exciting mistakes) and learn to “forgive myself” in a sense.
Fuckups are inevitable parts of life, and beating myself up over mistakes won’t stop me from making new ones. I do need to learn from them when I make them, so I might as well do it in a way that’s less unpleasant and doesn’t require carrying around an ever-growing pile of memories labeled “I’m an idiot for doing […]”
Oh yeah I took it to just be wordplay, interpreting wordplay is still sometimes stupid hard for me, even despite the fact that I speak English at a near-native level and can understand each word individually.
It’s a good question how “whale” ended up having this particular meaning. I was in the games industry for way too long and first saw it used in the context of big spenders in freemium mobile games, but I have a vague memory that it’s used in the same way in the gambling / casino world. Your guess for the history sounds pretty believable, and it seems like the ginormous size of whales could play a part? Big spenders stand out from the “small fish”
Unfortunately I have no friends because I’m a bit of a twat, and while I get your point about the journey – it’s pretty much what I enjoyed for that 100h – it didn’t manage to carry me too far.
Notably for the vast majority of that 100h (probably closer to 200–300h tbh, since I also played on PS4 when that was a thing) I explored; I absolutely loved the “magnificent desolation” of being out in the Black, and the slowness of explorer gameplay compared to the pew pew “careers.” I just wished there’d been more variation to the planets and the life you could find on them, more variation to Guardian ruins, and so on, and so it started feeling like I’m just seeing the same half-dozen planets and plants over and over, and it started feeling like a grind in itself. Tried my hand at some of the other career options but nothing really did it for me as much as exploration had, and I eventually sort of drifted away from the game. Never did much engineering to speak either beyond some easy to get FSD things and grind discoveries for a while so I could get a better ship (a lot of this was before the huge bump in exploration payouts so it really was a grind 😅).
SC – or more likely their single player game, Squadron whatever – seems like I’d enjoy it, at least conceptually. Lessee if they manage to release Squadron, I might give it a whirl if it’ll run even passably on a Steam Deck (my only gaming device for the foreseeable future, although that might not be a relevant horizon when it comes to that game getting released).
Yeah Frontier really dropped the ball with game design for E:D, the ratio of grind to content is just ridiculous.
I mean it’s definitely a fun game for a while and it gives space a sense of scale like nothing else, but everybody I personally know who’s tried it has ended up exactly where you and I did. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep, and sooner or later folks realize they’re just doing the same mission, seeing the same planets, visiting the same Guardian ruins, seeing the same spaceports, again and again.
The planetary procedural generation is somehow especially disappointing. While, yes, they’re all unique in a mathematical sense and the fact that it’s a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy based on real astrophysics is extremely cool, once you’ve seen one icy lump you’ve seen them all; the variety of planets you can actually land on is very small, they’re all barren and have no weather, no oceans or anything like that, just rock or ice. And if you’re playing as an explorer the “alien life” you can scan is limited to a handful of plants that all look identical except for some minor color variation. So the fact that the topography of this particular icy lump is different from that other icy lump is lost when that’s the only thing that distinguishes them
I wouldn’t put too much stock in pre-release gameplay videos. Remember what the pre-release hype videos for Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky looked like, and what the end results actually looked like?