waaaaayyyyy less grindy/waity than graveyard keeper

i don’t know when or how it happened but once i realised FOMO was being used against players regularly and aggressively i just- stopped caring. Oh a limited time special one week offer especially for me now and never again? Too bad i just launched the game and have no intention of buying your “newbie pack”. Oh my event limited time items? Dang, those look expensive, anyway i’m happy with my normal looking armour and normal looking tools/guns cheers

& i only ever buy cheap cosmetics. If your game is bad and grindy when i play it without throwing money at the screen then your game is bad and grindy & i will tell all my friends about that experience

wow my dyslexia had a field day with that title. I was very curious what “Senior Citizens Develop Could Emporium” meant

because they run on everything and are free

yes sure it could’ve been a bug, but can we really believe them that it was?

companies are on a quest to pollute our lives with ads, it’s not a stretch to think it’s bullshit when another attempt to do that is being denied with “whoopsie the new guy wrote the code wrong nothing to worry about here!”

ahhh, companies copying homework from bigots’ dogwhistling tactics? what a brave new world we live in

says something bigoted

receives backlash

“haha guys can’t you take a joke? everyone’s so sensitive nowadays”

you can permanently prettify it and sell all your stuff at the uh, forgot the name, but the one stand trader that accepts everything and has its own deck to make the booty transfer faster! (though idk if it’s still exclusive to captained ships? i haven’t played in a while)

RIP ship captain’s pockets

(unless you’re long past playing for the gold or you’re sailing an uncaptained one)

Jan 1st

scroll scroll 1956! perfect!

enter

it’s absolutely fantastic, my friends and i joined a steam family and they finally have 0 excuses to not play the games i’ve been recommending them for year (and neither do i)

not to psychoanalise someone’s accidental journal/art project but perhaps the daily showcase of what they’re doing is pushing them to add more variety to their game choices?

I sure know if I were to decide to post a screenshot a day I probably would have more varied game choices than normal. Even if it’s a funny thing you do online the mere act of showing it to others adds a layer of performance, and it’d be a very boring performance to show myself playing picross touch or sudokucube 7 days in a row

modded eh? One of my must have mods is Uncle Sheo’s loading screens. There’re also versions for all DLCs

“Shops are open 24/7! half the time you don’t even need to pay”

exactly! in Skyrim helping a little kid get revenge on a person who abused him gets you drafted into the murder guild, in Fallout:NV you follow a trail of a missing scientist and discover sentient plant life!

i remember so many little quests from those games because they turned out to be much bigger than i could ever imagine. But it takes courage to hide a chunk of your game behind a quest somebody could miss or even fail, courage that bethesda fucking misplaced somewhere and i doubt they’re even bothering to look for it

it honestly feels refreshing to be able to miss content in games, playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and then watching a gameplay of someone else playing it is thrilling, because look at all the things i never knew you could do, look at all the quests, npcs, items, i never saw. There’s a whole full fledged companion character that if you’re playing as the good guy, which is most player’s first choice, you yeet off the cliff the first time you see her and that’s it, she’s gone! Recently I asked my friend who’s been playing that game since launch “are there any other mimics in the game? I only discovered one spot with them” and he replied with “there are mimics in this game?”

argh and in Starfield all that mystery and wonder of discovery is stripped down for “convenience” of walking through a location and picking up 10 quests in a row titled “Help Bob, Help Sam, Help Biggus Dickus”. Why would I bother playing that quest if you didn’t bother to spend a whole 5 seconds to give it a unique name? Honestly it wouldn’t even be an issue if there was enough meaningful quests to play through, but there’s one quest that has any work put into it per faction so i guess i’ll go do that

I’m a huge fan of bethesda games (well, mainly TES and Fallout) and bloody hell did the hype die fast as i was playing that game. Normally bethesda games keep me playing for months, i take my time discover the fun little quests and hidden areas with lore. But Starfield? there’s what, 2 decent quest lines, little to no meaningful lore (repainting death claws doesn’t count, and you somehow managed to make space cowboys boring? impressive). And the only actually interesting faction is just straight up missing from the game, and not in a fun “Dwemer are all gone what happened to them” way, no, they’re cultists who fucked off to do cultist shit and have no involvement in the story spare for that one guy who just goes “yea here’s the thing you need bye”. And then you go on to solve the big mystery of the universe with some half assed floating debri excuse for an important item.

And i know making NPCs is hard but why did you stop at 20? you picked space for your RPG game setting and then forgot to put people that are capable of a conversation in it?? i want to hear the stories a settler on a distant world has to say! but noooo because they have to be randomly generated and meeting the same person on multiple planets would ruin the “immersion” they failed to establish

sorry rant over

This would could’ve been so much more interesting, and so much more lived in if they hired more writers to write the goddamn lore so we can care about anything that happens in that world. Bethesda reheating the good ideas they had without understanding what made them good is just, infuriating. I wanted to love that game, but now it just makes me mad by how bland it is

it’s not supposed to be a relaxing open world game though?

it’s the mystery of the entire game, why is this happening? how do i stop it? It’s also the basis of all main mechanics in the game, the entire world is on the clock, some things aren’t available at the start or become unavailable as the clock ticks. It’s not a pointless gimmick, it serves both a narrative and a mechanical purpose

in my experience as a impatient person you simply need to make peace with the timer, it stings at first but then- i think thanks to Outer Wilds i can play souls likes now ::: spoiler because it shows clearly how death is simply a part of the learning experience, it’s not a failure :::

i have no idea if this spoiler is working

one of my top favourite games of all time! And one of the two narrative experiences on that list that I can’t talk about with the “uninitiated” (other is Inscryption)

if you like space, and you like thinking - don’t look up anything about this game. Watch maybe 5 minutes of some gameplay if you’re hesitant.

Though a word of warning, this is a game that’ll take all of your focus, it’s very hard to play it with a YouTube video or a movie in playing the background. And yes the ship movement can feel clunky at first, you’ll get used to it don’t worry - the story is worth it

to be honest, if they modelled an IKEA store, and arranged 3D models of their furniture in it like in real world that be amazing. If you could move them around for easier comparison it’d be even better! Nothing feels more awkward than walking back and forth between two similar pieces of furniture for the 5th time wondering if you like this style better or the other one

i’m perfectly happy with my pre-built machines. I like tech and love learning about it but- I don’t really find value in putting a huge amount of time into building my PC from scratch when someone else can do it, and that person knows way more than me already!