I watched a 4 hour video and all I came away with was I now at least had a vague grasp of the factions in the game. actually I’m still not clear on one or two of them (what the hell is a scorn?). I felt like I was starting to get a hold on the story but then when the video got to the point where they went to season passes it was just one new insane scifi thing after another with not much connection to the previous thing. and just the way this game is presented as a new player makes absolutely no sense. nothing is explained in the game itself, not the basic state of the world, the people in it, or how to do anything in it or what of any of this shit you’re bombarded with matters, what the twenty different currencies are for etc. I did finally get a tutorial on how to summon your hoverbike when the new expansion came out though, so that’s good. I was wondering about that when I first started playing and everyone started bringing theirs out and immediately zooming off without me while I’m staring at menus trying to figure it out. when you talk to characters there’s all the information on the right hand side of the screen and a big empty space usually showing whatever your character your talking to on the left. anytime you do get a tutorial or quest popup it always covers up that information on the right hand side and sometimes doesn’t go away until you do what it tells you. you got like 3 different menus for different achievements to grind out but no encyclopedia explaining any of this sci fi shit.
it’s like diablo with guns and the guns do halo shooting and everything else about it is designed by people so completely out of touch with humanity it really makes you wonder what kind of human beings these are, how they got this way, what do they think of this state they’ve gotten themselves into here, are they proud of this, do they feel any shame, have any conception what a normal person must think of any of this etc. it makes me want to see how far it goes, how many more exclusive pins for twenty dollars in the bungie store can I get them to try to sell to me for in game achievements. but if this is what modern graphics cost I think we can just go back to ps2 graphics. we just need one big name to do it for their big anticipated game and the dominoes will fall.
the new expansion being a big chase for a mcguffin with the post expansion seasonal stuff being maybe an explanation for what it is why any of it was important, fine, I don’t care about that, that seems inline with everything else I’ve experienced, what does bother me is in the new expansion you come to a door that looks like any normal dead end door in the game but you have to shoot it to destroy it to continue through. when you think you’ve seen it all, right out of nowhere some of the most Illegal Game Design there is
getting to that door broke our probably solid half hour of completely solemn comms silence to be like what the fuck was that
i can’t imagine when i’d ever have a destiny longpost in me but i think it owns, think it’s one of the most completely deranged things i’ve ever engaged with and sometimes one of the most beautiful, nothing like it. every game that’s tried to be adjacent has been baby shit in comparison and at the same time i look at destiny and am completely bewildered that it could ever be “successful”
if i was lightfall-pilled before, wait til you see me now that The Gamers have begun to Hate. take me to hell baby
re: who made this, the interview I keep coming back to is this one from 2018 when the now-director had this to say about the 16 different symbols you need to communicate for the keep talking and nobody explodes bit of the 2018 raid
The Wishing Wall features 16 different symbols involving dragons, birds, snakes and fish that are also used throughout the raid for puzzle mechanics. Did you ever think: “This is going to be too much for people, they’re not going to be able to differentiate the birds”?
JB: At one point in design, we knew we weren’t making it hard enough. For our first pass at the symbols, we had these beautiful designs come back to us. The one that people now call ‘Boring Bird’, which is just a bird on the ground looking to the left, that used to have a snake under its feet. We went back and said “this is great, but we can’t have this snake. People are just going to call it ‘Snakebird’, and everyone will knows exactly what you’re talking about.”
What we were passionate about was someone saying “Dragon” and the other person being “What the fuck dragon are you talking about?” Like: “All I see are dragons!” “Dragon breathing fire!" “There are two dragons breathing fire, which one?” The first time you come into Last Wish, talking about these symbols is so hard—but by the fourth and fifth time, your group has its own language, or you’ve stolen one from Reddit, and that becomes one of the ways you become an expert at the content.
as soon as you step foot into last year’s raid there’s literally a gallery of symbols and the location on the radar has the names all picked out for you, but guess what? they’re all deliberately paired with similar symbols
There was a really depressing GDC talk last year about how Bungie has evolved their processes following the release and failure of vanilla Destiny 2, and one of their takeaways was that for GaaS, it doesn’t actually manage how good the thing you ship is, what actually matters is how quickly you can iterate on it in production
I understand what they’re getting at (and there are a bunch of other juicy quotes in there that lay out why seasonal content is as formulaic as it is now) but it’s hard not to look at what they’re shipping and not read these quotes in the most cynical way
Every single time Bungie looks like they’ve figured it out, they go out of their way to swerve into a ditch and there’s only so many times they can repeat this cycle before people stop giving a fuck
Metro 2033 Redux (PS4) - just finished this. quite good overall, though there’s a fair bit of jank to contend with. sound design is excellent. music in this is a notch better than the soundtrack for exodus. much darker tone overall than exodus, as well. the ending doesn’t hit nearly as hard, though…
theres a new ffxiv patch out in a week that introduces a new deep dungeon so if destiny is getting you down theres never been a better time to dabble in ffxiv!!!
i am still in the year of the dabble but its like, oh ill play 2 hours of agame im SUPPOSED to play and then just go back to what my heart wants most of all, chatting all day in ffxiv
Exodus had that one scene near the beginning of the game where they were partying to a song by the legendary classic group of 90s russian post punk, auktyon
But I think that was an easter egg for the sliver of the venn diagram of people who listen to russian countercultural music and play video games
edit: this track
from the 1993 album Ptitsa, which is their best album
yeah i guess i should clarify that i’m just comparing the bespoke soundtrack for each game
exodus has a lot of stuff like this:
and an extra loud horn swell every time an enemy starts detecting you on top of this. this looping alert/combat music comprises a significant amount of the music you hear in the game, and really detracts from the soundscape
whereas metro 2033 spends more time working its excellent main theme into proceedings:
I felt like the metro games got progressively less interesting as they went on especially because the third one is centered around artyom being a wife guy to a baffling degree but boy when that first one was new i tried to play it like 11 times even though the FOV made me actually vomit. 2033 is basically stalker 2 to me. I still think about this guy all the time, and uncle bourbon’s paipes.
I liked Exodus as a play experience a lot. The plot was goofy as fuck but I’m not playing these games for plot, I’m playing them to listen to the American spartan speak in broken Ukrainian (thank you Metro for having a Ukrainian dub)
I want to it’s just hard to switch the square-enix money faucet back on once it’s off. it’s also hard to switch off once it’s on I think there was like a year where I didn’t log in but I was still paying them
I had always turned off 97 GM’s Flicker Filter option immediately because I didn’t like the “frame ghosting” effect it produced, but now years later it suddenly occurred to me out of the blue that it would also mellow out the game’s numerous flashing/strobing FX, possibly allowing me to play the game without getting a migraine–and so far, so good! ^ )^
97 is by far the craziest KOF and I think I might kind of love it. It was also the apex of their flashing FX, right before that Pokemon episode gave 300 Japanese kids seizures and they gave the upcoming KOF 98 a Flash=Off option and stopped adding red flashes to every single thing they could think of. ; )
Even the story here gets downright nutty and arcade mode seems to go on really long compared to 2000, too. Was worried about that darned Orochi boss guy (I knew I hated Chris ;P) but uh well on the default difficulty 3 at least he was surprisingly not too bad.
Sort of forgot I already have the Steam version of KOF UM FE; checked and it doesn’t have a Flicker Filter option–the Steam version definitely pre-dates their PS4 SNK ports, so I guess they just hadn’t come up with that option prior to that, or at least not when they were doing FE originally; and checking videos of the much more recent PS4 version, I don’t see any frame ghosting in those, so the PS4 version probably doesn’t have the Flicker Filter option either–unlike, as far as I can tell from videos, their PS4 2002 Unlimited Match port, whose videos on YouTube DO show frame ghosting; but they never did an earlier port of 2002 so for that one they’d have had to do new code, so kinda makes sense it would get their newer options.
The Messenger has a Big Twist a few hours in that I think it’s probably worth playing to see but I quit it soon after that. I believe it has More Twists after that but their form is less interesting and easier to guess once you see the first twist.
Returnal (PS5) - this game is good. like… holy shit. this game… i still haven’t made it out of the first area because the difficulty level is punishing, but wow. just wow. i don’t want to say too much because the game sort of unfolds in your mind in a pretty spectacular way so far, but i strongly recommend it from what i’ve seen so far.
