I’ve lived in NYC for 15 years, moving here out of high school. All the things you seem to be longing for are here, especially for queer folks, but they do not come to you. This is not Night City or any other video game setting, worlds that are explicitly designed to dump opportunities and relationships in your lap…

Bethesda puts in so many minor things to do in their games- quests that are effectively just chores or fetching, fiddly side diversions like outposts and whatever. It’s all relatively irrelevant, but it’s a lot of stuff to do. For folks who have the completionist inclination, or just find that sort of task completion…

It does make it easier by bringing everybody closer (and you can start conversations with most of the party from a further distance), but it’s still a weirdly inefficient way of doing such a vital function.

I’m glad Larian is so responsive and proactive with these. The last patch greatly stabilized Act 3 for me.

This is a ludicrously optimistic argument that seems to assume Microsoft will simply largely just let Nintendo do whatever it wants. It won’t. We’ll see layoffs, we’ll see more deadline pressure followed by delays when those deadlines can’t be met, we’ll see fewer risks taken. Your argument is massively overstating…

I can’t really imagine what a Dishonored 3 would be, but the series has one of the most compelling and richly drawn worlds in video games and we’ve only seen a small part of it.

This at best only really applies to the very early game. Otherwise, the game gives you more scrolls than you’ll know what to do with. Also Gale only needs to consume like... 3 magical objects in act 1 before plot-mandated changes kick in and eliminate that mechanic entirely.

Yeah, definitely agree... particularly since the first stop down the evil road in BG3 is killing largely non-combative refugees. Being chaotic and violent shuts doors to you, just as it should in real life.

A major recurring theme of the game is that prioritizing power above everything else will cause you to lose everything worthwhile, so I don’t really have a problem with this ending being so concise. Even in a game that’s pretty open like BG3, there are still constraints that have to be in place to ensure a narrative…

I haven’t encountered any real bugs in Act 3, but the game slows down substantially due to the sheer number of NPCs in the Baldur’s Gate area and the number of accessible buildings that are all on the same map. 

I mean, a 7/10 and 75/100 is basically a C: passing, but without distinction. I think both those reviews convey that. 

I’d be more willing to accept the reflection of this unarguable reality in modern Star Wars if it didn’t so often just manifest as clumsy idiot ball handoff in order to build to a pre-existing outcome (ie- the First Order). 

I agree. I particularly don’t understand the depiction of the New Republic in these post-RotJ series. It’s somehow more corrupt and ineffectual than the old Republic- sometimes even actively antagonistic- and we never really get a clear sense of why. I know we need to work toward the stupid return of rebel v. empire…

The First Order was so ill-defined in the sequel trilogy that I would be happy to see basically any sort of revised, coherent take on a post-Imperial movement.

Considering Imperial interest in cloning has been pretty consistently teased throughout Mandalorian as well, at some point they’re going to need to pull the trigger on it. I had always assumed it was leading up to an attempt at making Palpatine’s return somewhat coherent.

The obvious errors in the art aside, I’m more surprised at how boring the image itself is and how little it communicates much of anything about the show. Fallout has such a strong visual identity in its use of midcentury advertising aesthetics and juxtaposing it with imagery or nuclear war, jingoism, and consumerism.…

Yeah- Stephen Stills coming out is actually a pretty minor event. Nearly all the supporting characters who had pretty well-defined character arcs got reduced to just bit work or one-scene wonders in the movie.

I actually think AI-assisted assets would be a great use of the technology- for instance, if you were making a game set in a big city, you could fill that city with as many hundreds or thousands of ads, posters, graffiti tags, etc. as exist in real places. But I think you would need to be very careful with it and…

The executives are absolutely the ones who need to be answering for an industry that in recent years has been defined by the repeated release of broken or unfinished products that had no business being put up for sale, blatant cash grabs, and documented instances of workplace abuses. But until people stop giving these…

...what else are you supposed to do with a book you don’t have the ability to read, exactly? And FWIW, if you’re referencing the Necromancy book, you DO get the opportunity to bring it to somebody to translate it for you later in the game.