I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.
Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.
But…
spoilerYou can also parry their attack, and then just kill them. Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.
I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.
There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)
There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.
There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.
And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.
Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.
Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.
It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.
But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.
Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.
Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!
I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.
Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.
Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.
My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.
I think guild wars 1 you didn’t just pop on any clothing you found. One of the NPCs was even like “you think you can just pick up a jacket after you set the poor bastard on fire and stab him, and it’ll fit nice and snug? No. It won’t. Bring me materials and I’ll make armor that fits you”
Then gw2 was like "fuck it people like when items with cool colors pop out of monsters "
Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.
Last game I finished was Veilguard. Pretty close to EoY. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, and the difficulty falls off a cliff as a mage when you get life steal, but it wasn’t bad. The romance with Neve was entirely too… unromantic, and PG-13 though. Very disappointing. No intimacy.
Then I started CrossCode and it’s been good. Feels like a mix of old snes games (Zelda, lufia2) and MMO, without the annoying parts like other players. The puzzles also aren’t very hand holdy, which is nice. I feel like a lot of games are too aggressive with their “HEY IT LOOKS LIKE YOU CAN SLIDE THAT BRICK. HEY I BET FIRE MELTS ICE.”
I like that they did turn based but I didn’t actually like it that much. There are too many trash fights. I think one of the developers suggested a mod to cut HP so they go faster.
I also don’t really like the “one action per turn” model (as in DND) and kind of would have preferred action points (as in divinity).
But overall I’m a big fan of Deadfire, and I’m bummed they’re not making a third one.
I think the most fun I had was with chanter. Just hang out and summon dudes that wreck shit. Slap on the heaviest armor you want and just scream at people until they’re dead.
I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.
I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.
But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.
It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.
There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?
There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.