are there people in here hating on very good boy Pathfinder
hasn’t Respawn done enough to him without people having to impugn his good name
2 Likes
low profile nerf getting replaced with verbally dragged thru the mud nerf in latest patch notes
the multi was also fantastic, and it’s one of those games where the ideal experience winds up taking the campaign as just a taster, so you’re missing that angle
1 Like
finally tried the triangle strategy demo and I’m cautiously optimistic – it’s definitely taking tactics ogre as its foremost inspiration ahead of FFT or anything else, and the writing is about as leaden as most Matsuno cover acts, but I like that they’ve committed to the scripted dioramas for the storytelling, the aesthetic works better than it did for octopath (which I didn’t play), the job differentiation is actually pretty good and the pacing/danger that your units can find themselves in is fair without being boring.
I’m just afraid I’ll be feeling so charitable that I’ll wind up playing the new disgaea before this too
4 Likes
Apex Legends has the worst characters with the most dismal writing maybe I’ve ever seen? They’re almost all dull, stock stereotypes with occasional shallow tokenism applied over them. They’re constantly spouting sub-Shrek-quality quips that take them beyond boring and into actively irritating. They never stop talking, before, during, and after matches.
Here are the two I find most annoying:
This greasy cockroach of a man seems to be modeled very closely after Ted Kaczynski for some reason? His main ability is to drop handmade poison bombs around the map. He has Kaczynski’s same psuedo-intellectual self-importance and sweaty yearning to be taken seriously as an academic, and the same weird right-wing death drive. Every time he places a bomb, he calls it a variable.
“The distance between life and death is measured by suffering.”
“Without pain the body suffers in silence… omitting the entertainment.”
“Know your place… I know mine.”
“If I may be honest, I find death fascinating.”
“My thesis: the willing will survive.”
Supposedly a very accomplished astrophysicist, this lady is 1/2 Scottish stereotypes and 1/2 2006 reddit “I fucking love science” memes. There is absolutely nothing to her beyond that. She only talks about drinking tea and how much she loves the vague concept of science.
“Time for experimentation, evaluation and a wee cuppa tea.”
“Science time! Ooh, yaldi!”
“In the name of science!”
“We do this… for science!”
“Violence for science! Oh, quite the catchphrase, that!”
“Reckon I made them see stars. (laugh) See stars, because I’m an astronaut, see?”
“You’d be surprised what cosmic mysteries fall fully solved into your lap while mindlessly strollin’ with a cuppa tea. I call it the Peppermint Paradox.”
oh my god why do I play this stupid game
16 Likes
I try picking up apex about once a year thinking “surely respawn have done their usual high quality work by now” and every time I’m disgusted and put it down after about half an hour
Siege is still a miracle
1 Like
I recommend being unable to detect quality in dialog it helps a lot
5 Likes
I think of these characters as heels and faces. I hate some of them so much it actually intensifies the experience when I manage to defeat one of them.
4 Likes
or just muting character dialog. the gun and movement feel is way better than titanfall — yes, titanfall had weight, but apex has friction. i absolutely understand anybody not wanting to wade through the muck of its aesthetics but there is a very mechanically beautiful fps underneath the creative failings
3 Likes
going to do my boomer shooter post and say like, titanfall 2 owns (and i was pleasantly surprised to see it had a decent playerbase when it showed up on steam) but the movement isn’t so much good as it is ‘the least bad’ in the last 20 years
still surprised i’m enjoying genealogy of the holy war so much, might have to do a shouzou kaga deepdive
1 Like
I’ve always been beating the “that franchise was good basically up until they started localizing it” drum, glad to have you on board
1 Like
Ah, I’m sorry, I thought I’d just be self-effacing but I gotta
I don’t think the characters or aesthetic in general are failings.
First, I am 100% certain its characters are driven by prototyping mechanics and working backwards to make them read to players learning them and encountering them and then wrapping a paper thin story but mostly “lore” around them.
I looked at the “operators” in Siege here and I don’t think I could distinguish most of them at 3 meters away.
Each Apex character is legible from 50m away and there’s a lot of care put into the legibility of abilities - portals, drones, barricades, jump pads, etc.
The broad archetypes also make them readable to new players but I appreciate that they’re typically mashups with a novel combination. My brother the aspiring mechanical engineer plays as the mechanical engineer with the mini gun but she’s incidentally a Desi woman. She looks like this:
The same VA plays Symmetra in Overwatch:
It would have been so easy to make the heavy look like, well, The Heavy, or to make the Desi woman wear a pseudo-Sari. But instead, a jumpsuit with a bit of flair from chewing gum. Maybe she uses the gum to fix stuff. That would be funny!
There’s only one character that’s dressed really inappropriately in Apex and that’s Loba, who’s a sort of femme fatale I don’t find jarring in context.
Re: tokenism, I think Bloodhound may have taught more people about nonbinary identity for the first time than any other piece of media primarily because FPS players have poor media diets. But it’s nice because the game is aesthetically hostile to milspec sublimated cishet sexuality - those people go play CoD Warzone because Respawn is a studio that exists specifically to not make that.
And unlike Overwatch’s tokenism, the characters are not just Very Special Episodes. Wattson’s bad puns and situationally inappropriate enthusiasm are keen representation for “my people.”
Even when it doesn’t land I don’t mind this stuff because though FPSes are my favorite games, they’re also a cesspool of internet bigotry. I appreciate Respawn and Bungie for a “fuck em” attitude where I can have a black power fist or a rainbow on my card and the only white dude is Dr. Wario.
Maybe the quips are too much and I’m glad you can turn them off. I love camp and cheese so I may just have trash taste but it’s at least better than its most obvious forbear. I literally can’t tell what makes good dialog in anything because criticism like “that’s not how people talk!” only scans for Aaron Sorkin and Sonic Adventure 2 in my head.
The level design is impeccable top-to-bottom and I’m glad they made a game where you don’t have to speak to convey all of the information your team needs.
12 Likes
I picked up Titanfall 2 near the start of the pandemic and played about 100 hours of it w/ my friend in that timespan so I think it’s pretty good! Apex is good too!
It’s easier to play games when I just assume from the start that the writing in it isn’t for me.
2 Likes
my two posts from the apex legends thread back in 2019. game sucked.
i like when i play the game with all of you and hear the characters say stupid bullshit for two hours straight so i just say “shut the FUCK up” as though they can hear me
yeah hey respawn i got an idea for a new character that should fit right in with “edgelord douchebag,” “boring guy with gun,” “boring girl with gun,” and “guy that proves you don’t have any latinos on your development team” check this out: eugenics liker steve. he looks like jared leto’s joker, except he wears a black trenchcoat and he always drops his catchphrase, “i’m gonna kick your ass with my foot up your ass!”
5 Likes
I also think I’m fundamentally not willing to learn the pacing and the dynamic of battle royale games because even when people tell me I’m playing a good one the fundamental assumptions feel like shit
6 Likes
I’ve always had a hard time getting into Tetris because I just can’t suspend my disbelief far enough to believe any rational human being would ever purposefully make bricks in those shapes.
7 Likes
yeah it’s mostly this dynamic that’s turned me off of battle royale games in general
i just don’t feel like I’m doing anything most of the time, i’m running around collecting weapons that i won’t use for most of the round
it feels like a genre that’s much more fun to watch than it is to play and thus i only watch aka play apex
4 Likes
Nah yeah this is definitely real – it felt completely foreign and wrong to me for quite a while before I internalized the pacing and decision-making in a battle royale.
Eventually you get over that hump and it clicks, but it probably took me like 10+ hours.
i don’t disagree with a lot of what you said! and i think some of it is an issue of semantics; what you state about like, character legibility from a distance is a crucial point in which the game excels but in my mind that’s in the camp of “design” rather than “aesthetics” and lies much closer to a mechanic than anything.
i think that the way the game looks and the different visual styles they use (the comics, the cg trailers, etc) are universally boring and uninspired. i think that some of the characters have good concepts but a lot of the execution of their personalities leaves me annoyed. somebody on here once described many online interactions as “everyone trying to be more clever than eachother” and that is very much a vibe i get from respawn. still, i don’t play the game for the characters or how it looks, i play it for how good the g7 with a 3x feels! and it feels good enough that i’ll smile at what i like and ignore what i don’t and enjoy my time with the game regardless.
my biggest frustration at the game is that despite the hypermasc-hostile aesthetics, the high tiers of ranked are still full of bigoted screaming bro-nerds. i would be so much more inclined to invest myself into the game if it wasn’t so full of hostile-fragile assholes sending me hatemail after they make a bad play and get punished. i do not want to 1v1 so you can try to salvage yr ego, i just want to shoot gun and feel tasty tension. i haven’t played it in weeks bc i got fed up with that and i feel mentally better for it
13 Likes