rincewitch

Danielle's vision of what No Man's Sky could have been-- all of the extremely chill and relaxing free exploration with fewer unnecessary mechanics and more space lesbians-- is so compelling to me and what I specifically want out of games that I feel really bummed that such a game does not actually exist.

wait are there people who don't say it "goeey"?????????????????

Yeah, if you want to get into EV, EV: Nova is definitely where to start. It's more polished, fancier, and bigger than the older ones, without losing their openness and feeling of a living universe to explore. Or, well, the illusion of a living universe, since I'd done enough modding to know all those ships flying around and going about their own business are just a bunch of dude, pers, and fleet resources. But it still closes the magic circle in the moment. It also actually runs on modern OSes, which is a plus. :V I do have to wonder how people develop mods for it nowadays, since ResEdit is super dead. Edit: I, of course, meant düde, përs, and flët resources. I regret this important error.

I was pretty excited to hear my reader mail about ResEdit on this episode! Hopefully it wasn't too inaccurate-- I was trying to remember stuff from when I was, like, eight years old or whatever.

FWIW I understood exactly what Danielle meant by "Sword Dad".

I love myself to know that even though most of my friends love them I should probably never play a Souls game because they're hard and I'd probably cry if I spent 14 hours trying to beat one boss and then died, but I'd totally play Dark Souls: The Walking Simulator.

I have kind of the opposite anxiety over RPG character creation, where I always happily dump points into conversation/lockpicking/etc. skills to unlock story but then feel profound anxiety over worrying if I've made the combat impossible for myself-- whether through using points frivolously or, more likely, just spending my points "wrong" or picking a bad build or optimizing poorly. Occasionally, this has actually happened-- I never did beat Shadowrun: Dragonfall because at a certain point it was just way too hard for me and I felt like my character (at my skill level-- I'm pretty bad at most games) was in an unwinnable situation, so even though I was totally into the story and setting of the game I felt like I'd hit a brick wall in difficulty and I was locked into a character build that made it insurmountable. And because things like that have happened a few times, I get hugely worried every time I play a new game with new systems to master and wonder if I'll accidentally make it impossible for me to beat. I'm kind of glad my favorite RPGs from Bioware tend to have an easy mode that's easy enough I can just pick whatever seems cool and then be reasonably confident I'll make it to the end. And I guess I'm the target audience for things like when WoW drastically simplified its spec system, or FFXIV just not having specs at all, just a single stat your job should point points into.

Mass Effect 3 was actually an example of escalating stakes I liked a lot! But I think the reason for that was because Mass Effect 2 was so low-stakes in general-- the Collectors were doing their thing out on the edge of space, so mostly you just enjoy these episodic adventures in a galactic society that's still basically functional-- which makes the Reapers arriving and blowing everything up mean a lot more in Mass Effect 3, since you've become invested in the setting by just kind of hanging out there for a while when there's no ongoing crisis.

Always excited when Myth comes up in a podcast! Jake was basically right about Myth III-- when Microsoft bought Bungie, Take Two got the Myth (and Oni!) IP, and they hired Mumbo Jumbo to make Myth III, which as far as I know literally nobody liked. I checked out as soon as I played the demo and realized the mission briefings weren't read by Geoffrey Charlton-Perrin, since why even play Myth if you don't start every level by reading an old man's diary about the hardships of war or whatever. I guess afterwards Take-Two just gave up on Myth and according to Wikipedia the whole Mumbo Jumbo Myth team was laid off. edit: why on earth did these forums parse a frown face emoticon as some kind of chomping tomato

nthing that the ad reads were incredible. Also I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by ~*~*~git gud~*~*~ discourse around difficult games!

Monster Factory is one of the most incredible things on the entire internet IMHO.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers those Myth difficulty descriptions so vividly! I was even worse at games as a kid than I am now (and I am still extremely bad at games), but the way the difficulties were characterized made me strive to better myself, and eventually I clawed my way up to normal difficulty-- probably the first game I ever finished on normal or higher. I still mostly gravitate towards easy difficulties, especially in games that are more about narrative experiences (what is it about me that I'm perfectly willing to sink like 48 hours into a Dragon Age game, but no time on top of that towards actually getting good at playing it or engaging with its systems), but somehow I managed to limp through Myth I and II. :V EDIT: Speaking of Myth, are there any games that could be seen as its spiritual successors? It's the only RTS (RTT?) game I've really loved, but there doesn't seem to be anything with the same emphasis on physics. Myth did a lot of things really well, but it's the physics that stand out for me.

Haha, yeah, I'm way too much of a scaredy cat to play Alien: Isolation I guess because of the things it does really well. I also haven't seen Alien itself. :V

The Nick Breckon Stardew Valley story should be placed in the nickbreckon.museum for future generations.

I fully endorse slam-dunking misogynists and transphobes in the esports community directly into the garbage can, where they belong.