HolyDuckTurtle

Keeping details minimal because I can’t for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:

In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.

I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.

Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking “Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial” then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.

I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.

I’d go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It’s where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.

Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There’s a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.

It’s not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the “omg it gets so DARK” hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise “oh, right, that’s not the kind of story and experience they want to tell”.

I worked with a startup once where we had individual company emails and had a good giggle at how different the spam is compared to personal stuff! Mostly in our case it was dubious offers of office space, furniture and other such services.

Her response during the motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTNSGu_OoQ

I think usage of that particular phrase was probably overkill or an oversight, but I agree with her that criticising the actions of Israel’s government is not Antisemitic.

It reminds me of when a trans representative was censured for condemning restrictions on gender-affirming care using the phrase “you will have blood on your hands” and opponents jumped on that to say she was out of line. It gives me a strong impression that their motivations go far beyond the language used, using excessive pedantry as an excuse.

There is no system in the world, religeous or otherwise, safe from the dangers of radicalization.

You are supporting the rape and murder of ordinary people. Nothing justifies this behaviour. Especially not with the pathetic “but what if any of these people could go on to become the new Hitler? Checkmate!” line.

I don’t know if you’re a troll who thinks this is funny, or something worse. Either way, it needs to stop.

I’ve played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I’d call it “good” though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian’s Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.

I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you’re mostly big and slow, so there’s not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I’ve not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!

There are things I’m liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I’ve played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I’ve wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction’s perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I’m generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.

The game’s opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can’t help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don’t play games this large that way.

Another thing I’ll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I’ve ever seen in a game. You’ll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It’s slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.

Otherwise, the game feels like it’s from 2016. It’s lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn’t get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don’t seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player’s perspective.

Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn’t free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I’m generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.

The point is that even a second hand high-end card will cost as much as a PS5. For a single component.

PC gaming has grown a lot, but its peak was the PS3/PS4 era when it could be noticably superior to average people. I’d say it’s going back to being a platform for entheusiasts who care about those things you mentioned, which most people don’t. At least, not enough to spend twice as much or more for a console equivilent.

This sounds very useful, I wonder to what extent federated platforms like ours can make use of it? It sounds as if apps will need to specially deisgned around it, given it presents challenges to traditional moderation of things like DMs between users.

I hope so. My fear is after seeing what the fossil fuel industries did to stop alternatives from arising, that they will embark on a new campaign to undermine this for as long as possible.

There’s also the simple social factor which gets underestimated. I used to get worked up at work when people would ask questions about stuff I had written documentation about, until I understood that some folk just want that little social connection. They want a person to communicate something to them, whether they’re concsiously aware of it or not.

It’s also fairly common for people to just not be that good at searching for things. You have to word things in specific ways and learn what kind of sources to avoid and ones to trust. So asking people who do can be a huge timesaver.