Rob Zacny

Episode 213: On Campaign

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I'm pretty sure that strategy game designers have found that people will skip tutorials for the campaign, then quit the game forever when the campaign doesn't tutorialize. At least, that's how my non-strategy-game friends behave.

 

i guess it depends on how much if feels like a tutorial but if i'm like 5 missions into the game and it still feels like a tutorial i would just skip the campaign and play skirmishes so i can actually play the full game

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I'm pretty sure that strategy game designers have found that people will skip tutorials for the campaign, then quit the game forever when the campaign doesn't tutorialize. At least, that's how my non-strategy-game friends behave.

 

Most people see "tutorial" in the menu and read it as "boredom simulator".  IIRC the term Mr. Zacny used was "Strategy Tee-Ball", which is fairly apropos.  When the assumption is that the player may not ever have sat in front of a computer before, the tutorial turns into an awful grinding experience for anyone who actually knows how a mouse works.  Especially when some bright spark inevitably decides that the tutorial should be Part Of The Story, and run by Gruff Drill Instructor or Emotionless British Computer Lady.

 

I think an answer is to have a standalone "total newb" tutorial that almost everyone will ignore, but which is there if you've really never touched one of these games before.  Something that's a combination of a textbook, a checklist and a sandbox, where you can look things up, have some small directed "quests" you can ignore, cancel or replay, and just play with the units and controls.

 

At the campaign level I think you should only teach things that are unique to your game.  To take an example, Metal Fatigue was a mostly standard RTS, but it had 3 levels of map (underground, ground, air) that interacted, and also had giant robots built of interchangeable parts that were salvageable and researchable.  As a third uniqueish thing, it had a shield around your base that you could extend over the map with repeaters, and when your units were inside your shield they took less damage.  For that game, I'd have been inclined to have the campaign walk the player through the robots, and I probably would have introduced the map layers one at a time, but everything else goes in the standalone newb tutorial; if you'd played any other RTS (and let's face it, if you bought Metal Fatigue, you probably had), you already knew the rest.  The shield is sort of unique, but it's such an easy concept to grasp that it doesn't require much more than hints.

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I have always loved RTSs for being great big toy boxes, filled with powerful and interesting toys that do exactly what I tell them and make things explode. The campaign is typically a varied way of making my pretty toys explode some other pretty toys.

 

That said, once I started playing some competitive multiplayer the campaigns lost a lot of their shine. When you're playing against a person, and each of you is constrained by certain rules, every sighting of the enemy forces is potentially laden with meaning. If I play Company of Heroes, and I see American Riflemen sporting BARs early in the game, I understand that my infantry are going to be on the back foot for a while, but I don't have to fear an early vehicle because of the resources invested in the upgrade. Perhaps I can get defensive around the fuel points and hold out for a fast vehicle of my own, and I can put off anti-tank guns. My opponent may be caught off guard by my defensive artillery, but it'll tell him he doesn't have to fear camouflaged Stormtroopers or Tiger tanks. There's this whole chain of mental activity which is very satisfying to navigate successfully, and there's a little thrilling 'Aha! That's what they're up to.' moment.

 

In a campaign, when I see a unit it means the level designers put that unit there, and it typically tells me little or nothing about which options I should plan for in the future. All I have to do is have a plan to deal with that unit. Then I'll find another one and deal with that. And so on. All that delicious meaning is sorely diluted or entirely absent. 

 

I guess (and I wonder if this is some of what Tom was getting at when he was talking about core RTS values) that for a good multiplayer RTS a match is about navigating a complex space of different possibilities along with your opponent. Each of you picks different, branching paths, both to execute a pre-conceived plan and in response to that of your opponent's. As you navigate some branches are closed off and others open up. This navigation is hugely interesting and satisfying to perform successfully.

 

The other thing I found is that I actually valued my toys more if I felt that I had to work to get them, and I wasn't guaranteed to succeed. If I could surprise my enemy with an Ork Battlewagon late in a Dawn of War 2 match I would get such a thrill from flattening their best units; more so because fielding the super-units required careful play and couldn't (and shouldn't!) happen every game.

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Human opponents are always going to be the most fun.  If an AI is weak, it feels cheesy when the scenario designer handicaps you to compensate.  If an AI is strong, it's frustrating to be taken apart methodically by a machine.  And the AI never has to play by the same rules as you do.

 

I know the 3MA crew like Sacrifice, but it's a game where I found the problem was particularly noticeable; you, the player are restricted to a nearly first-person point of view, and take actions through a pie menu.  The AI can see and command the entire map, and has no interface lag when doing things like casting spells.  I stalled out in the later levels of Sacrifice because I just couldn't knock the enemy wizard down fast enough; he'd never beat me, but when I got close enough to his base he got up as fast as I knocked him down, and he could fire off four spells for every spell I could manage.  I generally had a monopoly on souls on the map by that point, so my forces and I could keep knocking him down, but I could never quite slog all the way up to his spawn point for long enough to finish him.

 

There's a similar problem with AI skirmish in any RTS.  You, the player, are stuck going through a (probably) keyboard and mouse-driven map interface, and if something isn't on the screen or a hotkey you need to get it on the screen to refer to it.  The AI has no such limitation; in a single frame update the AI can assign unique orders to every single one of its units, and it can do it again next frame, and the frame after.  In essence, the AI can micromanage everything at an effectively infinite "actions per minute" rate.

 

A human opponent has the same interface limitations you do.  They make mistakes, and they make leaps of genius, and everything in between.  Until we solve the strong AI problem (ie: an AI human enough that you can legitimately be friends with them -- don't hold your breath for this) and put those strong AIs behind simulations of the same limits the human players have, human opponents are always going to be the most satisfying.

 

That's not to say you couldn't make an AI experience that seems somewhat reminiscent of a multiplayer online game with strangers; if you hacked ELIZA to curse and hurl sexual and racial epithets you'd be pretty close to passing the Turing test in some online game communities. :)

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i generally like AI in an RTS if it sort of acts like a tower defence game, as in they build a base just like you and occasionally send waves of attacks at you with increasing difficulty and if you don't keep up or aren't able to hinder their progression at all by damaging their base you loose, i am what you might call a turtle player of RTS games i like base building and defence building, so i guess that is why i like tower defence games because they are a more refined version of an RTS gameplay that i like to play

 

and hexgrid OMG i have been trying to remember the name of Metal fatigue for years since i played a demo and forgot about it, you wouldn't believe the amount of times i have tried to search for "RTS, robot, multilevel" etc. on google to find out what that game was called, thank you for reminding me, i will have to get a version somewhere now :)

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i generally like AI in an RTS if it sort of acts like a tower defence game, as in they build a base just like you and occasionally send waves of attacks at you with increasing difficulty and if you don't keep up or aren't able to hinder their progression at all by damaging their base you loose, i am what you might call a turtle player of RTS games i like base building and defence building, so i guess that is why i like tower defence games because they are a more refined version of an RTS gameplay that i like to play

 

I find in RTSs I generally tower my way to victory if it's an option.  It's partly because towers are typically fairly sturdy things; I don't usually enjoy sending hordes of fungible popcorn at the enemy.

 

and hexgrid OMG i have been trying to remember the name of Metal fatigue for years since i played a demo and forgot about it, you wouldn't believe the amount of times i have tried to search for "RTS, robot, multilevel" etc. on google to find out what that game was called, thank you for reminding me, i will have to get a version somewhere now :)

 

The copy I have here says it was developed by Zono, and published by Psygnosis and Take 2.  The copyright date is 2000, if that helps you hunt it down.

 

Edit: there's a wishlist for it up on GOG.

 

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/metal_fatigue

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This is sort of anecdotal, and in no way meant to disparage or even to reflect on the right honourable posters here, but players inexperienced in RTS, and multiplayer in particular, seem to gravitate to turtle style defensive strategies. It's logical thinking- RTS battlefields are messy, hard to predict places, so it makes sense that before you try and win you make sure you can't lose, not to mention the fun of building impenetrable, layered defenses for your foe to batter themselves off fruitlessly. 

 

It can be problematic when moving into the multiplayer space, however, where such tactics surrender the initiative and map control to your opponent. Even in the Supreme Commander games, where, like Total Annihilation before it, fantastic arrays of turrets and barriers can be built to your heart's content, you risk giving up access to the vital metal harvesting points on the map.

 

Relic RTSs Company of Heroes and Dawn of War (2, in my case) are good for getting you out of your base and skirmishing right from the start of the game, since your resource flow depends entirely on your ability to hold territory. The game becomes a series of escalating conflicts, which may not be decisive by themselves, allowing for the possibility of a comeback. Good therapy for those held back by excessive turtling.  

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This is sort of anecdotal, and in no way meant to disparage or even to reflect on the right honourable posters here, but players inexperienced in RTS, and multiplayer in particular, seem to gravitate to turtle style defensive strategies. It's logical thinking- RTS battlefields are messy, hard to predict places, so it makes sense that before you try and win you make sure you can't lose, not to mention the fun of building impenetrable, layered defenses for your foe to batter themselves off fruitlessly. 

 

Agreed; it's really easy to pick up bad habits fighting the computer, since it's usually perfectly content to throw waves of things at your strongest defenses.  I remember in the original Dune 2, when an enemy unit spotted one of your units for the first time, the game would take the paths the two units had followed and treat that as the path to your base.  So, you could build a giant line of rocket towers and then have your scout march back and forth in front of them clearing back one line of fog at a time, and then send him off to die finding the enemy base.  The enemy forces would follow the same path back like ants, and then march back and forth in front of your turrets.  It was like Space Invaders: Alien Massacre.

 

That was also a game where the combined unit limit was 64, so you if you built a light infantry guy every time an enemy unit died, eventually you had 64 guys and they had none and couldn't build any.

 

What we used to do "back in the day" to break out of that mindset was play Total Annihilation with the unit limit cranked down to 4 per player.  You couldn't build static defenses because you were wasting your precious unit cap with something that the enemy could just avoid.  It's a completely different game at that point.  You've got the commander, and then 3 unit slots.  Want combat units?  Well, the factory is going to count towards your unit limit as well, so you'll probably want to reclaim it once the unit is built.  And if one commander dies on the same screen as another, BOOM, it's a draw.

 

I have memories of a friend's commander running around the map looking for me while being nicked to death by a fighter I'd built.  He couldn't hit it and it was gradually picking away at him, so he was trying to find me to force a draw.  IIRC he caught me trying to get a second fighter in the air and got his draw in the end.

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Human opponents are always going to be the most fun

A vast majority of players disagree, as far as I'm aware. Hence the skew in most RTS games towards people who don't do PvP.

 

I know that for me, I mind being inferior (ie. losing) to a human a lot more than vs. a machine.

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Hexgrid, those are really interesting tricks in Dune 2. I'd love to boot up the game to try that, it sounds awesome.

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A vast majority of players disagree, as far as I'm aware. Hence the skew in most RTS games towards people who don't do PvP.

 

I know that for me, I mind being inferior (ie. losing) to a human a lot more than vs. a machine.

 

That's fair.  I think a lot of the reasons people go for the single player experience comes down to three things, though:

 

- inertia -- you probably bought it as a single player game, previous games you played are single player, "campaign" is probably the top item in the menu...

 

- lack of hassle -- single player has no waiting for the server, no looking for a match, no lag, no internet connectivity problems, no account setup, no dealing with badly socialized strangers who make you question your faith in humanity

 

- performance anxiety -- when you're first getting in to a game, chances are everyone is going to mop the floor with you for a while

 

If you can get past all that, human opponents will give you consistently the best and most interesting challenges, and you'll learn things playing against human opponents that an AI will never be able to teach you.  For most people in most games, though, one of those hurdles winds up being too high.

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Hexgrid, those are really interesting tricks in Dune 2. I'd love to boot up the game to try that, it sounds awesome.

 

Caveat: you may need to dig out the original box release on floppies to see these; I have no idea whether they changed anything in the re-release.

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human opponents will give you consistently the best and most interesting challenges

That's true of course - but is that what most people look for in a game? A challenge? Maybe not of this type at least.

 

Put another way: Of my friends who play computer games (most of us in our 30s) practically nobody plays anything except campaigns and coop vs. AI. Up to and including Lords Management games. This makes for a relaxing, unsurprising game where the challenge is one you know intimately beforehand, and there is zero risk of getting stomped or yelled at. Smooth out the peaks and valleys for a stolen hour or so.

 

This goes a bit beyond the original subject of campaigns of course.

 

One of the main reasons I expect campaigns tend to get such short shrift despite them being the majority of what the actual audience tends to play is that the designers of strategy games tend to be passionate players who love the PvP challenges that humans supply. There is little overlap between the interests and tastes of the players and the designers.

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That's true of course - but is that what most people look for in a game? A challenge? Maybe not of this type at least.

 

That's why I mentioned the hurdles; perhaps my metaphor was wrong.  My point was that you have to be willing to deal with all that stuff to get into multiplayer, and a lot of people won't, for a variety of reasons.  "Can't be bothered." is a legitimate reason, as is "Don't have time.".  This is stuff we do for fun, after all.

 

One of the main reasons I expect campaigns tend to get such short shrift despite them being the majority of what the actual audience tends to play is that the designers of strategy games tend to be passionate players who love the PvP challenges that humans supply. There is little overlap between the interests and tastes of the players and the designers.

 

I don't think it's that, so much.  I've actually worked on these things, and in my experience the problem with campaigns is... well, imagine you'd just designed chess.  You have this system you've built full of simple interlocking rules that have lots of interesting interplay.  When you were designing it, you were picturing how everything would work together, how the different movement rules could be used tactically, and so forth.  The result is a (hopefully) finely tuned machine.  You build it, it works.

 

Now, you need to add a campaign.  Are you going to have 30 games of straight chess?  There's no challenge ramp there, and the player will barely be able to tell the 26th scenario from the 14th.  The campaign is expected to be the tutorial as well, so you've probably got to make the first few scenarios expository, but chess gets less interesting very quickly if you start yanking pieces from the opening lineup.  On the other hand, if you introduce all the units at once you've got nothing interesting to show the player during the long slog through the scenarios.

 

Ignoring external pressure to wedge characters and plot into the campaign, that's the problem; these things are designed as complete games, and the campaign design all but demands that you deliver that game to the player in various stages of evisceration before eventually letting them actually play this brilliant thing you built as it was intended.  They won't see the game as it was designed to be played until they've fought through most of the campaign, and they may not even see glimmerings of it until a significant amount of play time has been invested.

 

To the designer, (speaking for myself, at least), the appeal of PVP is:

 

- the AI can never play the game as well as you'd like it to, unless you've managed to design something brilliant like Unity of Command where the AI has clear, machine-solvable tasks

 

- skirmish is the whole toybox, the entire system as it was designed to play

 

- skirmish doesn't get weighted down with cheese; there are no bait-and-switch objectives, no trigger boxes causing cutscenes or enemy forces to spawn, no escort missions

 

Of those, only the AI really makes PVP interesting.  Skirmish vs. the AI answers the other two.

 

The answer to this, arguably, is to design the game system in a more modular fashion so that it's more amenable to being split into bite sized systems that can be fed to the player in a campaign setting.  That's not a trivial design challenge, though, and it may not even be feasible for a relatively simple design; imagine that instead of chess, above, you had checkers.  How are you going to split that up?

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My copy of Dune 2 came in the Westwood Anthology*, probably one of the best value-for-money releases ever, including Valve's Orange Box. Perhaps that's an early enough release for it not to be tampered with. You know, when I started reading Dune, I was constantly waiting for the 'insidious Ordos' to make their appearance, only to learn they were a complete fabrication to give the game another faction.

 

* The Westwood Anthology featured all three Kyrandia adventures, Lands of Lore 1 and Dune 2. Ho-lee shit.

 

Addendum: the reason I rarely play multiplayer strategy is the pure stress of being on edge for 20 minutes. Even when I knew I was the superior player, the sheer weight put on performing made me shake the entire evening after. It was a (zergling) rush, to be sure, but it's not something I'd want to do to my blood pressure. Better to go with a smooth sailing campaign where the challenge is manageable and the shame of losing not social.

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I think most peoples' preference goes like this:

 

getting beaten by a buddy > getting beaten by AI > getting beaten by someone I don't know 

 

I love playing multiplayer, but it's always a lot more pleasant playing with friends. I don't have that many friends who play RTS games sadly, and so I often play against the AI.

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This week's Unlimited Hyperbole podcast is somewhat relevant to this discussion as well:

 

http://joemartinwords.com/2013/04/24/unlimited-hyperbole-20/

 

I don't agree with all of it, but that doesn't make it any less interesting.

 

If you haven't listened to UH, it's a pretty good series.  The "seasons" are short, and the episodes are perhaps 15 minutes apiece, but they are well put together.  The format is an interview with commentary, with the questions edited out so all you hear is the interviewee talking with occasional context supplied in a voiceover.

 

The whole series is worth listening to; 20 episodes of about 15 minutes each, each with a different interviewee.  Each season has a theme, and there are five episodes per season, so you could think of a season of UH being about as long as an episode of 3MA.  Which means you'll burn through them pretty fast; I can get through a season (or an episode of 3MA) on my train ride to/from the office, so I could get through the entirety of UH in two days of commuting, currently.

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Man, that last segment of the podcast really casually talked down to those of us who do focus mostly on campaigns in strategy games over multiplayer. Wasn't intentionally insulting, but maaan was it casual in its backhandedness.

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As a developer of a non-basebuilding RTS (its a tactical card game) I can say we had to deal with many of these issues. 

 

At first, the single player campaign was created to replace the awful tutorial we made. It ended up turning into a really cool story that influences the battles. The campaign is totally different from the multiplayer. The designer had lots of fun throwing a bunch of stuff at the player that is unbalanced either for or against the player and it enhances the story telling in some cases. It also has a cool system where your main character can buy new skills after each mission and swap them out, which can really change your strategy from mission to mission.

 

Luckily for us, the multiplayer and skirmish is identical. I had to write the AI for that... well its still a work in progress. It plays the game fine but I have to code instructions for using over hundred unique abilities and also how to counter an opponent using them. I put in things like user-adjustable reaction time as well as an APM cap so you can limit the AI's micro advantage over you and play more of a strategic game. 

We also have plans for a puzzle mode where you solve literal puzzles that are turn based and all about using your brain. Then there is challenge mode, where you have to try and find the perfect combination of cards and strategy so you can defeat a scripted scenario.

 

So yeah, I am glad that we managed to get the right balance for our game. The campaign is not revolutionary or anything but its well constructed in my opinion, I find it pretty addictive, and because its all 2D graphics the in-battle cut scenes are identical to the out of game cut scenes, making it immersive and seamless.


In general I buy RTS games to play single player, about 50/50 between campaign and skirmish. I like campaigns because of interesting mission design... not because of the story. I would prefer if there was no story and there was just a sequence of missions and the only thing tying it together was progression in the form of a tech tree, RPG mechanics, especially veteran units. I loved Warlords Battlecry 2... that game is awesome! I also like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. 

 

Oh yeah... and my favorite part about RTS's is modding. C&C games were super easy and fun to mod... in Generals I created several units that were very similar to those added in the expansion pack Zero Hour. 

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    Have you played the Dune board game?  It's pretty awesome if you can get 6 people together.  Six sides, and fairly assymetric sides.  For example, at the beginning of the game, the Bene Geserit player writes down the name of a player and a turn, and puts that face down on the table.  If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Geserit player wins instead.  The Guild put their troops on the planet at half price, and when anyone else puts troops on the planet they pay the Guild player; if the game goes 12 turns with no winner, the Guild wins.  It's a very good game that plays very quickly.

 

No, I haven't. The game sounds awesome though. I don't have a board gaming group, but have noticed flyers posted around where I work lately advertising board gaming events. I think this is where I could get 6 people playing something. I may have to get ahold of that and bring it in to work sometime. Thanks for the suggestion.

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i generally like AI in an RTS if it sort of acts like a tower defence game

 

Have you played the game Oil Rush? From what I've read it's basically a naval tower defense / RTS game. I've been thinking of getting it as a simpler game that I might not mind playing on laptop when away from home.

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The copy I have here says it was developed by Zono, and published by Psygnosis and Take 2. The copyright date is 2000, if that helps you hunt it down.

Edit: there's a wishlist for it up on GOG.

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/metal_fatigue

I once saw it available on an abandonware site, though I don't know that it is abandware. I wouldn't get it that way myself. As far as RTS games, I've been collecting boxed copies with manuals. Love the manuals. I often work on manuals.

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i think the biggest difference between multiplayer and single player in an RTS is that in a multiplayer you are forced to try and be 100% efficient while min/maxing all opportunities, whereas a single player is more a test of creativity and just an opportunity to try new things like winning with only air units or just using the cheapest unit etc. 

 

i don't want to have to play a particular way else i will definitely lose, i don't want to have to learn specific build orders and counter build orders to even have a chance that the match will last more than 10 minutes, i just want to play and win the way i feel like winning at that particular time and that is why i don't play multiplayer, because it seems to me that while playing a multiplayer rts game having fun is at the end of the priority list while min/maxing and efficiency is the biggest priority, obviously playing single player requires a certain amount of efficiency and it is boring to totally overwhelm the AI without even trying but AI just gives you more room for variety  

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At that point, the campaign starts being built.  The campaign has a bunch of requirements; must be X hours of "gameplay", must have at least Y missions, must tell a story, must be a tutorial for the game...

 

Some poor bastard or set of bastards has to fill that giant pit.

 

If they need (say) a 30 mission campaign, they can't just give you the full unit complement for all 30 missions, or you'll barely be able to remember which was which.  So they wind up having to take this swiss watch of a game an say "Ok, in the first mission the player just gets the crown gear."  And you have the mission about moving the camera and shooting a water tower with a tank.  On to mission 2, "crown gear and spring"!

 

Then someone leans in and says "The producer isn't sure that modern FPS players will be familiar with the concept of grouping, we need there to be a grouping tutorial in some mission before the sixth one."  And someone else will decide that the girl with the improbable physique driving the combat motorcycle needs to be in more cutscenes where we're looking at her from low and behind, so we need more "story".

 

Somewhere between mission 18 and 25, the people doing the scenarios will have utterly lost their will to live, or will be slipping easter eggs into the missions in the subconscious hope that they'll be fired and thus be able to escape with honour.  That will be just before the producer decides that the maps aren't "dynamic" enough and need to "play better".  When quizzed about what "better" means, the producer will explain "it needs to pop more, you know, be more fun, and better looking".

 

I've never worked that trench myself; I've been in the next trench over, writing code.  But I can still sympathize.

 

Haha. Great, hilarious post that also sounds so true.

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