Ninety-Three

You know how the forums do weird stuff like censor "pineаpple" to "*********" and auto-insert a space in "video gаmes"? How do people get around that? I've seen people manage to bypass the automatic filter, but I've never figured out how. Personally I use homoglyphs, but whenever I see someone bypass the filter I check for those and they're not present, so I have no idea what people are doing. Please, tell me your secrets!

It was a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. It wasn't the first stupidly deep chain of dependencies, it wasn't the first time the game asked me to engage in the horribly dull act of "walk around a large area until you hit the right hotspot", it wasn't the first time I spent way longer than is reasonable on a chain of Fedex quests, it was the fifth hour the combat felt bland and button mashy, and it was the seventh out of seven hours that the writing durdled around advancing nothing and establishing little instead of grabbing me.

That is the correct fancut. ME1 told a story that was a perfect rendition of Lovecraft in space, and as soon as you get to ME2 it shifts from "We may have saved the day, but the Old Ones are far greater than us and one day when the stars are right, the Old Ones will return and we shall surely perish" to "YEAH! Let's go punch Cthulhu IN THE FACE!" Even if they had handled the ending of ME3 better, there's the unavoidable thematic problem that any sequel to ME 1 will undermine the original because a sequel will necessarily say that we can defeat the incomprehensible aliens who represent our cosmic insignificance. And the main instrument of our triumph isn't even something thematically functional, it's one Shepard who is particularly good at cover-based shooting.

There are a few examples I can think of, although none are as extensive as a movie recut. KOTOR 2 has a mod that restores a lot of cut content, sort of a deleted scenes feature. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines has a mod that rejiggers a lot of existing content and even adds new quests, but it's more of a remaster than a recut. Finally, there's some ME3 ending mods which technically qualify as a proper recut, but for the most part they're just cutting things rather than editing or reordering things, and their scope is limited to the ending despite that game having a lot of problems beyond the ending. I suppose the ending update that Bioware themselves put out after the ME3 ending scandal is probably the closest thing to a recut we've ever gotten.

I don't care. I have gone from a bit bored with the game to angry with it, because this goddamn lost goat is stupid padding. At this point I don't care if somewhere in the Witcher 3 is buried the best story ever written by human hand, it's clearly not respecting my time, so I'm going to go play a game where I don't have to wait for it to get good.

It seems that everyone here is content with the explanation "GG is an organization of evil trolls who have set out to maximize the amount of trolling in the world and enjoy the misery of innocents", but no matter how shitty GG is, cartoon villains don't exist in real life. If you want to gain actual insight into their motivations, you need to approach things in less impassioned way, free of demonization. It's difficult, because Gaters act like demons, but they're all actual human beings who have motivations and beliefs. Dismissing them as unreachable lunatics won't accomplish anything. A few months ago I saw a Twitter conversation in which someone sat down and tried to have a serious one-on-one discussion with a Gater, and it became apparent the Gater sincerely believed that those evil feminists are coming to take away our videogаmes. After several hours of empathetic discussion (not "here's why you're wrong" internet debate), the Gater changed their mind and admitted they had been wrong. You can't have that kind of conversation with someone you've labeled as a "for the lulz" troll, which is why I find their demonization so frustrating.

I felt like Valiant Hearts maintained a decent tone throughout the first half, and then it descended into mustache-twirling supervillains with steampunk megatanks. My imagination of it is that they wrote the first half as a labour of love, then they realized their videogаme was half as long as a videogаme of that type ought to be if you want to sell it, so they churned out some padding, which led to things like re-using the excellent "dodge obstacles on your way to the front line of the war" driving sequence in a new context where it has zero emotional value.

I can't do it. I'm on the Bloody Baron quest and I'm already five layers deep in another goddamn chain of dependencies. I have to find Ciri but I don't know where she is so I talk to the Baron. The Baron knows where Ciri is but won't tell me so I have to find his wife. I don't know where the wife is so I talk to the Pellar. The Pellar has a lead on the wife but he won't tell me until I find his fucking goat. I don't know where his goat is so I have to walk around ringing a bell in the forest. No. I refuse. No more, I am not walking around a forest ringing a fucking bell until I find the right hotspot to advance the quest. This is bullshit filler, I hate this and I quit. At least when Legend of Zelda had a chain of dependencies that deep they had the decency to give you the Master Sword at the end of it.

When does this game get good? I am six hours in (killed the griffon and did all the sidequests and question marks in the first area, just got to the second), and it has yet to click for me. I mean I don't hate it, it's okay I guess, but, well, it's okay. I have yet to find a quest with more depth than "go here and either kill or examine this", and eugh, the combat. I don't know if the combat's bad or if I've settled into a rut without strategic depth, but boy is it really button-mashy and bland. Put up the shield spell, mash fast attack, try to jump back if a strike's coming, if I'm taking too much damage retreat until I have enough stamina to put up Shield again. Sometimes I use the slowing spell, but it's like herding cats trying to keep enemies inside it to get the benefit.

"Going ape" is a reference to the fact that Warren's going to the Planet of the Ape movies. I think it might be an outright slogan of the showing event, though I don't recall. I didn't think whales showed up more than once (although it happens repeatedly, time travel being what it is). The deer in particular I'm convinced is a dropped plot thread that they meant to do something with (the final episode was a bit rushed in terms of production so they probably didn't get in everything they wanted).

Same. Although I once had a hilariously easy encounter in which I two shotted him with a point-blank Great Crossbow (the one that shoots a five bolt spread). The biggest thing I seem to be able to control is going full auto with my weapons to clear as much of the area as I can before he spawns (and clear out more enemies whenever he flies somewhere off screen, without line-of-fire to me).

I've gotten extremely fond of playing Robot with Crown of Guns. Aside from being an obviously powerful synergy, the Crown of Guns just makes the game more fun as it makes it easier to find your favorite weapons, and encourages you to vary your weapon use. Going for Heavy Heart (see spoiler) adds a lot of reward for the weapon variety as well. Here is a list of a bunch of the useful obscure/hidden mechanics I've found. I encourage you to click the spoiler, each of them has made my game more fun for knowing it.

Personally I have been imagining him fighting off enemies with his sword-hand, while his left hand is used to simultaneously eat a drumstick and cast Signs.

Is food a meaningful resource that I should be worried about, or is this one of those games where I can buy infinite food for next to nothing? I haven't exactly got a sense for the economy yet, and I don't want to get to level 5 to discover that I ought to have spent 1000 gold on better gear when instead every cent went to food. Speaking of alchemy, am I supposed to be looting every one of the I-honestly-estimate-millions of herbs strewn throughout the game world? It seems like an insane time sink that I really, really don't want to engage with.

After playing for an hour and a half, I have several important questions. Is there a combat tutorial I missed? I took the tutorial in the castle area, but all it taught me was "Press button X to do Y". The game doesn't seem to be interested in teaching me how to fight well, so I'm going through food by the truckload. I'm running into problems like "Enemy attacks are faster than my fast attacks and interrupt my fast attacks" and I assume there's something I can do about that, but the game sure isn't helping me out. Is there a lore tutorial I missed? The very first random sidequest I picked up wants me to choose between helping the Temerian resistance and Nilfgaardian forces, and literally all I know about either of them is that the Nilfgaardians have Russian accents. Now the game's thrown me right to a "Choose! Right now! Don't ask for any clarification, just pick one!" dialogue menu. Is there a mod that makes your dialogue choices display what will actually come out of your mouth when you select it? It's only been ninety minutes and I'm already tired of selecting a four word dialogue option only to have four different words get spoken.

Some people are insensitive bigots who enjoy hurting people, and trigger warnings are designed to help people keep from hurting each other. So, if they want to be able to hurt people, they've got to be against trigger warnings. One way to do this is to turn them into a huge joke, which other people are happy to go along with because they're willing to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, which is just human nature generally. Since #GamerGate and gamer culture generally is one huge knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, #GamerGate and gamer culture hates trigger warnings. My impression, and the more charitable explanation, is that GamerGate has decided that the craziest corner of Tumblr is an accurate representation of all feminism and social justice, and they like to make a punching bag of that straw-man, hence the focus on trigger warning and safe space mockery. GamerGate's bad enough that even the best light still makes them look terrible, there's no need to paint them as puppy-kicking cartoon villains.

Apparently Direct2Drive has been getting real Gamergatey. After they posted a link to Breitbart: It's hard to believe that last one isn't a troll hijacking their Twitter account, but they've acted Gatey in more than the past few days.

It's totally fine. And I too am holding back on Fallout 4, on the assumption that it'll take about six months to iron out the major bugs and mod the UI into something vaguely usable. After watching a fascinating Let's Play of it, I have started my own YOLO run of New Vegas, a super-permadeath run with the special restriction of "No healing, like, at all, from anything ever". You're pretty much forced to play a sniper, and in the interest of not just playing a two-hour speedrun, I'm trying to engage with a lot of the sidequests. The resource I prize more than anything else is mines, because they equate to risk-free kills, and even though I've always been good at picking up mines, knowing I'm playing no-healing makes it incredibly stressful to disarm them. Given the goal of "Don't just rush the main quest", I'm not sure how to define winning for this run. Trying to do all the sidequests seems like it will surely result in me dying before I finish, but I can't think of an end-goal other than "Main quest" or "Every sidequest".

So on a scale from Morrowind to Oblivion, how heavily does this game level-scale its encounters? In games with no scaling, I always feel weird about doing all the sidequests, because it leads to you experiencing the main quest as over-leveled as possible.

I think there's an issue with a lack of trust, or familiarity or both. We all know the internet is full of trolls and smug jerks and so on, so as soon as we get enough disagreement from someone, we take a shortcut. It's easy to assume the other person is a troll or a smug jerk and write them off as unreasonable, and it's harder to accept that a reasonable person could sincerely disagree with us, because our position naturally seems so right to us. As soon as we take that shortcut, we start arguing against an archetype instead of the person in front of us (which seems to have happened a lot in the last few pages), and the quality of the discussion plummets. Of course the above is my entirely baseless speculation and personal observation, am I way off-base here or does it make sense to others?

I finally got a new computer capable of running Witcher 3 with decent settings, so I've picked up the game. When you talk about Dragon Age 3, everyone will tell you "The starting area is miserable, get out of it as quickly as possible", is there any similarly important advice for this open-world fantasy hack'n'slash? Stuff to avoid, stuff to pick up as quickly as possible?

And here I thought the entire premise of social justice was about common humanity and a right to equitable treatment, not "white people need to check their privilege". While you have avoided saying it directly, the point you're clearly dancing around is "I'd like you to go away if you disagree about this", and I resent being told to go away. You are not the King of Social Justice (or even the creator of this thread) who gets to set a definition, then suggest people leave if they don't like it.

In defense of that idea, most of the links aren't dubious. It goes like this: St. Elsewhere did a crossover with Show X, therefore Show X is in the same continuity. Show X did a crossover with Show Y and Z, therefore they all share a continuity. Shows Y and Z did crossovers with Show A, B, C and D, therefore they all share a continuity. Repeat above steps until you have created a web of crossovers that spans half of television (crossovers were really popular back then). St. Elsewhere ended on the reveal that the whole show took place inside the mind of an autistic boy. Therefore all the shows in the above web of crossovers did too. I mean obviously it's not true in the sense that any show-maker accepts it, it's just a funny consequence of some unplanned weird TV stuff. Now if you want a crazy conspiracy theory that some people actually believe, Google the Jar-Jar Sith theory.