Quick Questions XVI: Answer Time Lore

the undertaker in castlevania order of ecclesia

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To me, gravedigger in OoE also evoked Street Fighter III’s Q, with the betrenchcoated giant’s Capture and Deadly Blow command grab and roundhouse kick animations.

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On that note, Saints Row 4 had Keith David (as himself, though he voiced a character in the first two games, too) and Roddy Piper.

Saints Row 2 had some embarrassing porn star cameos for its DLC.

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Mario Wonder is fun, but I, uh, wonder if it’ll have the same longevity as Super Mario World, as replay and whatnot goes.

I finished everything but the final two challenge levels, got all the purple coins and stuff. The badge system is kinda fun to sort of tool the game to your play style. But even with all the ubiquitous Wonder Seed stuff in every level, I can’t really fondly recall many of them.

Oh and the boss fights suck. The final boss fight is just dull and incredibly easy.

I dunno! I liked it. I enjoyed it while I played it. The hindsight hasn’t been so kind, for me at least.

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NBA Jam had so many of these. Sonic Youth being in the game was the first time I ever even heard of them.

The Nolan Norh voice that just talked about how much he loved being Nolan North in one of the Saints Rows.

Does Ganbare Gorby count?

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Yeah this is the impression I got of it when i played it briefly with friends. Great fun while it lasts, but ultimately it’s just another mario…

Fred Durst in Fight Club

Imagine if they got Frank Black instead

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Can someone explain what this Season of Discovery is with World of Warcraft? I at first thought it was WoW’s answer to Old School Runescape with going back to a real old version of the game but still making more conservative updates to it. Is it actually meant to be a more short-lived seasonal thing? Alternatively a video from someone not awful explaining it would also do.

I kind of looked into this recently, and yes it’s just a moment in time experience. It is rather drawn out though, because they are increasing the level max every 11 weeks or so. Right now you can only level to 50 I think, and this was just increased from 39 a few weeks ago.

The gist is that they turned some five player dungeons into 10 player raids and added hidden or not so hidden quests or interactions throughout the world that will unlock rather dramatic new class abilities. In SoD it seems most classes can tank, if they want to find the right new “runes” in the world and gear for such a feat. It’s pretty novel but the content isn’t very new feeling, just from what I’ve seen.

It’s really fast to level through though. They have like 100% exp increase for low levels. I was flying by the first ten levels in like maybe 20 minutes. So I figure if you are curious and already have a sub, give it a try. What ultimately made me walk away from it is that it still seemed like it did nothing to make the world more lively feeling, people would still rush through the low levels and just grind raids for gear at the end. Hardcore Classic is where I chose to spend my sub time.

Edit: I assume it’s the same for retail wow but classic wow youtube is a hellhole unless it’s about datamined cut content or lore (which I don’t care about really). Tons of sweaty probably racist dudes yelling about how hype some shit is or trash it is without really saying anything at all. You were right to come here and ask, instead of searching for a vid, I think.

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Remember that real ass guy who was in Marvel vs Street Fighter

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Funnily enough this is what I had been watching lately and with more recent ones always speculating about if whatever was covered would return in SoD was what got me curious about it. The downside to this though has been actually getting all kinds of WoW videos now recommended by google which I already assumed were pretty hellholeish from their titles and thumbnails.

Or that dude who got famous impersonating Balrog

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I wish this video was higher quality & subtitled. Maybe i’ll try youtube’s auto-generated subtitles…

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No one really knows, is the answer here.

As you’ve surmised, SoD’s basic premise is what the community used to refer to, when begging Blizzard for it, as “classic+” - the original level 1-60 content as released back in 2004, but freely updated with more modern design sensibilities. The two things you get with classic that SoD maintains are, first, the nostalgia injection (not worth much imo) and, second, the continued dependence on the older foundational game systems that really make old wow different from new wow (actually quite worthwhile imo). The yearning for “classic+” is the yearning to keep those two things from classic but also add new stuff you haven’t seen before, a kind of having one’s cake and eating it too attitude - if only I could play a game that was as good as classic but wasn’t me leveling to 60 through the exact same zones and quests for like the 400th time in my life.

SoD basically does fulfill that fantasy and it’s kind of cool, and one of the reasons I think it’s cool is that it’s very focused on being a sort of throwaway and intensely live product. Where a standard flagship mmo will have like a 200+ hour leveling game and then a suite of endgame content, which then gets updated in big multi-month chunks over time, SoD takes that process and iterates it on a much shorter timeframe by chopping & screwing the pre-existing classic wow content.

So classic wow has a level cap of 60 and the first endgame, level 60, 40-player raid is called Molten Core. All the dungeons leading up to it are 5-man party dungeons with a single 10-player mini-raid at the top end, right before you head into MC. By contrast, SoD dropped with a level cap of 25 and took one of the ~25ish 5-man dungeons from classic and converted it into a mini-“endgame” 10-man raid, with redesigned encounters and a bunch of new, very powerful loot. That phase lasted like 2 or 3 months. Then they released the next phase, level cap 40, with a new level 40 “endgame” 10-man raid, also redesigned from an original 5-man dungeon. Now they’re on the level 50 cap phase, and apparently the plan is to release the level 60 cap with a newly redesigned 20-man Molten Core.

This stuff is only exciting if you are playing through live with everyone else as the content drops. Like if you were to start playing SoD right now no one would be playing the level 25 10-man raid any more, it’s basically a waste of time when you can level past it so quickly.

The other half of SoD’s resdesign is the focus on “runes”, which are powerful new class abilities you can unlock - almost universally more powerful than the old standard class abilities, but you can only equip a few of them at a time. Unlike your regular abilities, which you just gain normally as you level up, each rune involves a sort of mysterious mini-quest (which does not use the regular quest dialog) that requires you to explore and interact with bits of the world. So like one of the warrior runes you get by happening upon a wandering swordsman in weird random places in the starter zones and defeating him in a duel. Scraps of hints to find these runes are sometimes dropped by talking to random NPCs who were previously pure set dressing.

Now trying to re-inject this kind of mystery that has been stripped out of mmos by the age of the wiki is in my opinion very noble and good, but like, we are in the age of the wiki and even the runes with the wackiest unlock requirements are discovered by the psycho wow community in like three or four days after each phase unlocks. But still - those three or four days are very exciting! It is cool to stumble upon some weird thing you have never seen before, follow your natural curiosity and puzzle out how to obtain a rune!

Anyway you can see how these two halves of the SoD redesign - runes and the short phases each with its own “endgame” dungeon - really encourage ephemerality. In just a couple months what was “endgame” is no longer and all those interesting runes are boring old news, completely comprehended and parceled by the Best In Slot theorycrafters. The real juice of playing SoD is playing it live and in the now.

So the final question of where this all goes is totally open. Presumably they will have phased releases of the traditional classic level 60 endgame raids on the model of the new Molten Core, redesigned as 20-man raids (down from the original 40) with new mechanics and loot etc. What they will do after they get through that is anyone’s guess. Will they continue releasing truly brand new level 60 content, pretending the historical wow expansions never happened? Will they SoD-ize the expansions instead? Will they shut down the servers and just restart the whole thing as a new “season” with the same pacing so you can experience all the different little phased “endgames” over again? Will they just leave the servers up in their final state and otherwise stop supporting the game mode? It’s anybody’s guess. Just gotta live in the moment…

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Cuba what do you think of Classic HC. Have you tried it at all? I posted about it in the games you played thread, I’m really enjoying it and pretty disinterested in SoD.

I admire it from a distance, for many of the same reasons as SoD, but I don’t have any room for more wow in my life. I drifted away from SoD after phase 2 was released.

is F.E.A.R. available for individual purchase anywhere anymore? i can find it on steam but only as part of a $80(!) bundle.

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what the hell i literally just searched for fear on gog and it came up with nothing!!!

(cheers as)

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