#there's a lot of gameplay mechanics in it so it's ended up a lot less linear than originally intended

[utilitycaster]

Daggerheart Character Build thoughts!

I am actually out at work and haven't checked the version that's since come out, but I did participate in the character build beta, and the NDA is officially lifted, so here's my thoughts from that! It's definitely limited since I just made a L1 character and didn't go through gameplay, though I surmise about some aspects of gameplay.

Overall, it clearly seems to be made by people who love a lot of things about D&D 5e but wanted both more flexibility and more simplicity, which is difficult. I think they succeed.

To that end, it takes away some of the crunchier aspects (precise positioning, exact amounts of gold) and I think for some people that will be a problem, and that's valid, but ultimately this game wants to both allow for interesting mechanics in and out of combat while also not being terribly math/map/resource management heavy. It is a hard line to walk; most systems either go hard crunch or go entirely gooey.

The dice mechanic (2d12, Hope and Fear system) is fantastic; look it up but I think it handles mixed successes more gracefully and interestingly than a lot of games.

The playtest was not super clear on armor and evasion choices (or indeed what evasion means; it seems to be sort of initiative but sort of dex save, or maybe more like the Pathfinder/old school D&D varying ACs by scenario?). It was much, MUCH clearer than D&D on weapon choices (part of why I play casters? Weapon rules in D&D are annoying and poorly explained and many people rightfully ignore them) so I'm hoping this becomes clear when there's a full guide rather than just the character creation info.

The character creation questions by class were fantastic and in general, and this is a theme, this feels like it guides people towards collaboration. FWIW I feel like D&D has that information, but the way it's presented is very much as flavor text rather than a thing you should be doing. Daggerheart makes this a much more core part of creation. The Experience mechanic is particularly clear: you better be working with your GM and really thinking about background, rather than slapping it on as a mechanic.

The other side of character creation questions is that it really encourages engagement with the class, which is something I've talked about. I think either subversion for the sake of subversion, or picking a class for the mechanics and aesthetic but not the fundamental concept, will be much harder to justify in Daggerheart, and I think that's a good thing because when people do that, their characters tend to be weaker.

The downtime is designed for you to write hurt/comfort fanfic about and this is a compliment. There are a number of mechanics that reward RP, particularly one of the healing mechanics under the Splendor track. I feel like a weakness of D&D is that when you try to reward RP it's really nebulous because there's not actually a ton of space to put that - you can give inspiration, but, for example, the empathy domain Matt homebrewed actually feels kind of off because it's based on such fuzzy concepts amid mechanics that are usually more rigid. Daggerheart comes off as much cleaner yet still RP-focused, and I'm excited to see it in action.

A judgement of Candela and I suppose Daggerheart might be that it's designed for actual play. I've mentioned before that I know people who are super into the crunch and combat and numbers of TTRPGs and are less story-oriented, and again, that's valid, but actual play is just storytelling using a ttrpg and so yes, a game that encourages RP while also having mechanics to support that and influence it is an extremely good goal. I am not an actual player, but I do like D&D games with a good plot and not just Go Kill Monsters, and I want to play this. (I also have some real salty thoughts about how if you modify an existing game for AP purposes that's staggering genius apparently, but if you make your own game how dare you but that's another post).

And now, the classes/subclasses. I am going to sort of use D&D language to describe them because that's a point of reference most people reading this will understand, but they are not one-to-one. A couple notes: everyone can use weapons and armor. HP is not totally clear to me but it seems to be threshold based - everyone has the same HP to start but people have different thresholds and armor, so the tank classes have the same amount of HP but are much harder to actually do damage to.

All classes are built on a combination of a subclass and two domains. There are 9 classes and 9 domains. This technically means that if you wanted to fuck around and homebrew you could make up to 36 classes (27 additional) by just grabbing two domains that weren't otherwise combined, which is fun to consider for the potential. Anyway I cover the classes and briefly describe domains within them. You can take any domain card within your domain, regardless of subclass.

There are six stats. Presence, Instinct, Knowledge, and Strength map roughly to Charisma, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Strength. Dex is split into Agility and Finesse; Agility covers gross motor skills (jumping, most ranged weapons, "maneuvering") and Finesse finer ones (lockpicking and tinkering, though also it does cover hiding). The really big wins are first, no CON score, so you don't need to sink stat points into something that grants no skills but keeps you alive. The second one is that the "hybrid" classes spellcast from their physical stat. This is fucking fantastic. The thing about ranger or paladin or the spellcasting subclasses of rogue and fighter in D&D is that if you don't roll pretty well you're locked into the core stats and CON and nothing else. (This also doesn't have rolling for stats: you assign +2 to one stat, presumably your main, and then distribute two +1s, two 0s, and one -1.)

Your HP, Evasion, and Thresholds are set by class, and there's a core ability; the rest is all from the cards you take for subclass and domain.

Leveling up is very much based on taking more domain cards (abilities) but has a certain degree of flexibility. It's by chunks: in leveling up anywhere levels 2-4, you can, for example, increase your proficiency by +1 once, so if you wanted to do that at level 2 but your fellow player wanted to wait until level 4 and take something else at level 2 instead, they could. It allows for more min-maxing, but also everyone has the same level up rules and differs only in the abilities on the cards, which is very cool.

Bard: Grace (enchantment spells) and Codex (learned spellcaster stuff; the spells available are definitely arcane in vibes) based, Presence is your main stat. The two subclasses map roughly to lore-style stuff and eloquence. Core class ability is sort of like inspiration but not entirely. It's a bard; I like bards a lot, and this is very similar vibes-wise to your D&D bards. If you like D&D bards you will like this.

Druid: Sage (nature spells) and Arcana (raw magical power spellcaster stuff), Instinct is your spellcasting/main stat. The two subclasses are elemental but frankly cooler than circle of the moon, and a more healing/tranquility of nature focused one. I really think Marisha probably gave feedback on this one, because the elemental version is really strong. You do get beastform; it is quite similar to a D&D druid under a different system, as the bard, but the beastform options are, frankly, better and easier to understand.

Guardian: Valor (melee tank/damager) and Blade (damage). Strength based for the most part (Valor mechanics assume strength) though you could go for like, +2 Agility +1 Strength to start. This is barbarian but like. 20 times better. It is, fundamentally, a tank class, and it is very good at it, with one even more tank-focused subclass and one that is more about retaliatory damage. You do have a damage-halving ability once per day, but really guardian's questions are incredible. I think Travis and Ashley likely gave feedback. Also rage doesn't render you incapable of concentration as that doesn't seem to be a thing, so multiclassing seems way more possible (you are, I think, only allowed to do one multiclass, and not until you reach level 5 minimum, which I am in favor of). Yes, you can be a Bardian.

Ranger: This is what I built! It is based on Sage and Bone (movement around the field/dodging stuff) and it is Agility-based, including for spellcasting, which is a MASSIVE help (as is, again, the fact that CON isn't a thing.) The subclasses are basically being really good at navigation, or animal companion. Most importantly to me you can be a ranger with a longsword and you are not penalized; Bone works with either ranged weapons or melee.

Rogue: Midnight (stealth/disguise/assassination spells and skills) and Grace-based. Yes, rogue is by default a spellcaster, which does help a LOT with the vibes for me. One subclass is basically about having lots of connections (as a spy or criminal might) and the other is about magical slinking about. Hiding/sneak attack are also streamlined. I will admit I'm still more interested in…almost everything else, but I think it evened out a lot of rogue weaknesses.

Seraph: Splendor (healing/divine magic) and Valor. This is your Paladin equivalent. It is strength-based for casting, again making hybrid classes way less stressful. Questions for this area also incredible; you do have something not unlike a lay on hands pool as well. Your subclasses are being able to fly and do extra damage; or being able to make your melee weapon do ranged attacks and also some extra healing stuff, the latter of which is my favorite. Yasha vibes from this, honestly. Single downside is this is the only class where they recommend you dump Knowledge. I will not, and I never will. Now that I don't have to make sure CON is high? I am for REAL never giving myself less than a +1 Knowledge in this game.

Sorcerer: Arcana (raw nature of magic/elemental vibes) and Midnight based. Yes, sorcerers and rogues now share a vibe, for your convenient….less enthused feelings. Instinct-based, which intrigues me, and the core features are in fact really good. The two subclasses are either one that focuses on metamagic abilities, or one that is elemental based. I would play this for a long-running game, though it's not my favorite, and I can't say that for D&D sorcerer (except divine soul).

Warrior: Blade and Bone, and the recommended build is Agility but you could do a strength build. Fighter! One subclass is about doing damage and one is about the hope/fear mechanics core to the game that I have NOT talked much about. I will admit, the hybrid martials and Guardian are more interesting to me but you do have good battle knowledge.

Wizard: Codex and Splendor. Wizards can heal in this system; farewell, I will be doing nothing else (jk). Knowledge-based, and you can either go hardcore expertise in knowledge, or be a battle wizard.

Other scattered thoughts: healing is not as big a deal here; there is no pure cleric class! There is also no monk, warlock, or artificer. There is not a way to do monk as a weaponless class really though you might be able to flavor the glowing rings as a monk weapon and play a warrior. Wizard, meanwhile, with the right experiences and high finesse, would allow for some artificer flavor. Cleric and Warlock are the two tough ones and I will admit those are tricky; I feel like you'd have to multiclass (which you cannot do until level 5) between perhaps seraph and a caster class and you're still going to come off very paladin.

#critical role #daggerheart #ttrpg mechanics #long post

[imsobadatnicknames2]

What's OSR? I've seen you mention it several times in your RPG posts. Is it like a genre of rpg or...?

Hey, sorry I took so long to reply to this lol you probably already just googled it by now.

But like. Anyway.

OSR (Old-School Revival, Old-School Renaissance, and more uncommonly Old-School Rules or Old-School Revolution, no one can really agree on what the R means) is less like a genre and more like a movement or a loosely connected community that seeks to capture the tone, feel and/or playstyle of 70's and 80's fantasy roleplaying games (with a particular emphasis on old-school editions of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the Basic D&D line but pretty much anything before 3e falls under this umbrella), or at least an idealized version of what people remember those games felt like to play.

There isn't exactly a consensus on what makes a game OSR but here's my personal list of things that I find to be common motifs in OSR game design and GM philosophy. Not every game in the movement features all of these things, but must certainly feature a few of them.

Rulings over rules: most OSR games lack mechanically codified rules for a lot of the actions that in modern D&D (and games influenced by it) would be covered by a skill system. Rather that try to have rules applicable for every situation, these games often have somewhat barebones rules, with the expectation that when a player tries to do something not covered by them the GM will have to make a ruling about it or negotiate a dice roll that feels fair (a common resolution system for this type of situation is d20 roll-under vs a stat that feels relevant, a d6 roll with x-in-6 chance to succeed, or just adjudicating the outcome based on how the player describes their actions)

"The solution is not on your character sheet": Related to the point above, the lack of character skills means that very few problems can be solved by saying "I roll [skill]". E.g. Looking for traps in an OSR game will look less like "I rolled 18 on my perception check" and more like "I poke the flagstones ahead with a stick to check if they're pressure plates" with maybe the GM asking for a roll or a saving throw if you do end up triggering a trap.

High lethality: Characters are squishy, and generally die much more easily. But conversely, character creation is often very quick, so if your character dies you can usually be playing again in minutes as long as there's a decent chance to integrate your new PC into the game.

Lack of emphasis on encounter balance: It's not uncommon for the PCs to find themselves way out of their depth, with encounters where they're almost guaranteed to lose unless they run away or find a creative way to stack the deck in their favor.

Combat as a failure state: Due to the two points above, not every encounter is meant to be fought, as doing so is generally not worth the risk and likely to end up badly. Players a generally better off finding ways to circumvent encounters through sneaking around them, outsmarting them, or out-maneauvering them, fighting only when there's no other option or when they've taken steps to make sure the battle is fought on their terms (e.g. luring enemies into traps or environmental hazards, stuff like that)

Emphasis on inventory and items: As skills, class features and character builds are less significant than in modern D&D (or sometimes outright nonexistent), a large part of the way the players engage with the world instead revolves around what they carry and how they use it. A lot of these games have you randomly roll your starting inventory, and often this will become as much a significant part of your character as your class is, even with seemingly useless clutter items. E.g. a hand mirror can become an invaluable tool for peeping around corners and doorways. This kind of gameplay techncially possible on modern D&D but in OSR games it's often vital.

Gold for XP: somewhat related to the above, in many of these games your XP will be determined by how much treasure you gather, casting players in the role and mindset of trasure hutners, grave robbers, etc.

Situations, not plots: This is more of a GM culture thing than an intrinsic feature of the games, but OSR campaigns will often eschew the long-form GM-authored Epic narrative that has become the norm since the late AD&D 2e era, in favor of a more sandbox-y "here's an initial situation, it's up to you what you do with it" style. This means that you probably won't be getting elaborate scenes plotted out sessions in advance to tie into your backstory and character arc, but it also means increased player agency, casting the GM in the role of less of a plot writer or narrator and more of a referee.

Like I said, these are not universal, and a lot of games that fall under the OSR umbrella will eschew some or most of these (it's very common for a lot of games to drop the gold-for-xp thing in favor of a different reawrd structure), but IMO they're a good baseline for understanding common features of the movement as a whole.

Of course, the OSR movement covers A LOT of different games, which I'd classify in the following categories by how much they deviate from their source of inspiration:

Retroclones are basically recreations of the ruleset of older D&D editions but without the D&D trademark, sometimes with a new coat of paint. E.g. OSRIC and For Gold and Glory are clones of AD&D (1e and 2e respectively); Whitebox and Fantastic Medieval Campaigns are recreations of the original 1974 white box D&D release; Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord are clones of the 1981 B/X D&D set. Some of these recreate the original rules as-is, editing the text or reorganizing the information to be clearer but otherwise leaving the meachnics unchanged, while others will make slight rules changes to remove quirks that have come to be considered annoying in hindsight, some of them might mix and match features from different editions, but otherwise they're mostly straight up recreations of old-school D&D releases.

There are games that I would call "old-school compatible", that feature significant enough mechanical changes from old-school D&D to be considered a different game, but try to maintain mechanical compatibility with materials made for it. Games like The Black Hack, Knave, Macchiato Monsters, Dungeon Reavers, Whitehack, etc. play very differently from old-school D&D, and from each other, but you generally can grab any module made for any pre-3e D&D edition and run it with any of them with very little to no effort needed in conversion.

There's a third category that I wouldn't know how to call. Some people call then Nu-OSR or NSR (short for New School revolution) while a small minority of people argue that they aren't really part of the OSR movement but instead their own thing. I've personally taken to calling them "Old School Baroque". These are games that try to replicate different aspects of the tone and feel of old-school fantasy roleplaying games while borrowing few to none mechanics from them and not making any particular attempts to be mechanically compatible. Games like Into the Odd, Mörk Borg, Troika!, a dungeon game, FLEE, DURF, Songbirds, Mausritter, bastards, Cairn, Sledgehammer, and too many more to name. In my opinion this subsection of the OSR space is where it gets interesting, as there's so many different ways people try to recreate that old-school flavor with different mechanics.

(Of course, not everything fits neatly into these, e.g. I would consider stuff like Dungeon Crawl Classics to be somewhere inbetween category 1 and 2, and stuff like GloG or RELIC to be somewhere imbetween categories 2 and 3)

The OSR movement does have its ugly side, as it's to be expected by the fact that a huge part of the driving force behind it is nostalgia. Some people might be in it because it harkens back to a spirit of DIY and player agency that has been lost in traditional fantasy roleplaying games, but it's udneniable that some people are also in it because for them it harkens back to a time before "D&D went woke" when tabletop roleplaying was considered a hobby primarily for and by white men. That being said... generally those types of guys keep to themselves in their own little circlejerk, and it's pretty easy to find OSR spaces that are progressive and have a sinificant number of queer, POC, and marginalized creators.

#ttrpg #osr

[felassan]

post from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf developer Luke B. (Game Systems Director for Dragon Age) on the unofficial BioWare forum, discussing the reasons why in Dragon Age: Inquisition there was no healing mechanic and instead the barrier system was introduced in the gameplay:

"I can't speak to any other games directly but I can give a bit of historic context for DAI. The game was initially a more dungeon/linear delving - see how far you can get - experience and there was no barrier of any kind. As a side note: healing has always been a hot topic in design because as soon as you include it there are many other conceits you now need take into consideration for the gameplay - one of which I will call 'the Anders problem'. Anyway, as DAI got the date moved and shifted more into the pseudo-openworld the concept of attrition (see how far you can get before having to return to camp) became less relevant and we needed to help the Players have more moment-to-moment agency around their survival. Unfortunately for various reasons (one of which is the sad reality of designing a game with a shifting timeline) the healing couldn't be re-added so we ended up with more of a mitigation strategy in the barrier system. It went through a lot of iterations but eventually landed on what it shipped with which I would call... acceptable (but just barely). Now, I will concede that a part of the reason it didn't return after that shift was an aversion to holy trinity gameplay specifically for MP but it wasn't the core reason. As a side story, trying to balance the game (as that was my job on DAI - and yes, it could be much better haha) we had to all but force Players to take barrier. It is intentionally the first skill in the first tree for the Mage and all the autolevel (I also handled that) is designed to get it right away. Feel free to ask other DAI questions, I'm happy to answer about things I was directly involved in 😁. Anything DA:D related you'll have to wait for at least a few months after launch to grill me...though I'm hoping they let me stream at launch as an official thing 🤞." [source]

a user asked about what the hardest class to balance in DA:I was:

"I feel like anyone who was around for the post-launch content will already know the answer to this as it was the bane of my existence when I got put exclusively on MP after launch but the Knight-Enchanter barrier absorbing was a pain. Stuff like that is very challenging to feel good without being broken as they are relative to damage so scaling is fairly open-ended. Too little and the casual players won't get use out of it, too much and the character builders will be wildly OP. We actually had a 'no nerfing' guideline for the SP side so it was a hard battle to fix that silly thing 🙃." [source]

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #long post #longpost #some interesting behind the scenes snippets of info

[jaeminri]

02:35 ⁝ sim jaeyun ✿ 0.4k words

"so what's going on with you and jake?”

you choke a little on your lunch, hitting hard on your chest as your wide eyes look up at riki.

“what?”

riki is nonchalant as he raises his brows as if he's talking about something so obvious (it isn't, you think). “you know, the two of you call so often. even though you both claim it's just to play games, but you only play like for an hour and talk for the remaining six. isn't that kinda weird for 2 people who used to have feelings for each other?” he says.

speechless, is what you are.

“how do you know about all this?” you pop with squinted eyes, unable to recall a time you ever told anyone about this, much less riki in fact. he's known to be quite a talker, and telling him anything about your personal life means telling the whole world.

the boy laughs, “heeseung hyung rooms with jake, so he keeps complaining that jake makes a lot of noise when talking to you.”

“oh.”

“yeah, oh.” riki mocks with a roll of his eyes. “so? what's up? are you two talking again?”

you don't answer. well, a part of you doesn't want to because you know how big his mouth is, but another part of you can't answer, because you don't know. you don't know what you and jake are. friends? yeah, for sure, maybe. but how can two people who used to have a thing just talk so casually for hours like it's nothing and be friends? how can two people who used to have a thing talk about having crushes on other people and past relationships as if they hadn't almost been in one together? it's these questions that always rear its ugly head into your brain — they keep you up at night.

you're not afraid to admit that you still like jake even after two years of the end of your situationship, even after a year of him rejecting you when you told him you still liked him even though he didn't anymore. initially you had denied your feelings for months, pushing it off as just something friendly. until jay started asking you stuff and it all clicked like a machine mechanism.

it hurts to think about jake sometimes because you can sort of tell that he doesn't feel the same. yet sometimes, you wonder how he really feels when he asks you to get online, when he talks to you for hours, when he gets into a habit of showing you videos of his gameplay, when he talks about other girls who like him (you wonder if he thinks about you).

when you look at riki, he's waiting expectantly, then your phone vibrates with a ping, so you look. and it's the same damn message that you give in to all the time, even though you know it's not good for you, as per what jay says.

[1:35pm] jake: play tn?

© JAEMINRI, 2023

#kflixnet #bjnet #k labels #hyfenet #enhanet #i relate to this tm lol #flop but all good #i vented #enhypen x you #enhypen x reader #enhypen x y/n #enhypen jake #jake sim #jake sim x you #jake sim x y/n #jake sim x reader #jake x you #jake x y/n #jake x reader

[blacktobackmesa]

What do you think about Darnold being a tutorial NPC like Coomer? Nobody really talks about his "ACTIVATE DEVIL GUN MODE" bit and how he's seemingly unaware of it.

God, it's FASCINATING.

Darnold is the game's way of adapting to a surprise change in game mechanics. The scenario got bumped around by the existing AI characters, and oop, now Gordon's missing a hand and taking constant bleeding damage. Now the underlying algorithm has to come up with a fix to make it all fit into the gameplay. Hey, you made it through the tough part, have an overpowered weapon with unlimited ammo! Ah, but that's a new feature... there's no audio clips or special behavior present in the data to give to the Long Jump Module scientist.

So the game patches itself up while Gordon is slogging through Act 3, putting together a Tutorial NPC that can give Gordon an upgrade and teach him how to use it. The game has a lot more time to put something together than it did with Dr. Coomer, who had to be generated as soon as the game started. This NPC also had a lot less tutorial behavior to have baked in-- while Coomer had every in-game mechanic and several cut features wired into his programming, Darnold had to be a one-hit wonder. Help a fellow scientist in need, tell him how to use his new ability. That's all he had to work with. The rest of their personality could be randomly generated.

However, since the game was so URGENT in its need to have this bug fix patched in, the instructions ended up a bit. Forceful. And by forceful I mean the game copypasted words into Darnold's mouth without asking. Rude.

#darnold #hlvrai darnold

[slugpupencyclopedia]

Thoughts on the pups+ mod?

Generally its a good mod, I really do enjoy pups+ I have like, minor issues? but thats really it. I'll put a read more and a more in depth look.

Pups+ is a mod that adds new versions of pups to your game based on some of the playable campaigns, this includes abilities, personalities, and food needs. Yes I like it, it has its issues but I do like it. It's a great mod. /gen

Tundrapup -Saint variant. -Gives the player saint tongue. -Unable to throw spears. -Can't store food. Aquaticpup -Rivulet variant. -Increased speed and agility. -Fast in water. -Gives a boost underwater. Hunterpup -Hunter variant. -Able to throw spears at Survivor strength. -Carnivorous, eats large corpses. -Taller then an average pup.

Rotundpup -Gourmand variant. -Highest food requirement, eats basically anything. -Throws spears at Hunter strength, exhausts very easily. -Large, slams on creatures, carrying one will let you do the same. -Spits up items when given a disliked food. The basic spawn chance for these pups is 18% for a Aquaticpup 11% for a Tundrapup 25% for a Hunterpup 16% for a Rotundpup 30% for a regular pup

You can adjust these in the remix menu settings. PROS: -This mod allows for pups to be waaaaay more fun and useful. -The variety breaks up gameplay, its nice, each pup has its own look and food requirements.

-The mod is compatible with multiple different mods, Slugpup Safari, Rainbow pups (eeeeeh), Dress My Slugcat, and Dev Console. -Also allows for slugpups to store items! -Also works with Genetic Slugpups! (for everyone but survivor and monk, lol) CONS: -Because of the way the color generation works, and how its linked to personalities, a lot of variants will be the same color scheme, so yes it works with Rainbow Pups, but, variants tend to look the same.

As you can see, a lot of the colors match up. even if you do adjust the percentage typically they'll still group up into colors- why is there a routund pup in the tundra pup cage wait. -Hunter pup is almost indistinguishable from a regular pup, technically they are meant to be "taller" but, typically the only way to tell is 1. the color (see con above) or two, throwing a corpse at them to see if they eat it. /lh

The left pup is the regular pup, the right is the hunter pup. -This would be fine if you could see the food pip bar, before hibernating, but what ends up happening es a lot of time my hunter pups starve for a cycle, because they will still eat plants. -Hunter pups I find typically very useless to me, and more frustrating, if you're good at combat, they tend to just get in the way. -Rotund pups can be INCREDIBLY frustrating, but that's just because of the exhaustion mechanic when they're on your back. I think if it was a little less often it'd be better.

All in all I DO enjoy this mod, and do use them in my own playthrus, I do recommend it, but highly suggest adjusting the ratios on spawns.

#rain world #rainworld #rain world downpour #rainworld downpour #slugcat #rw downpour #slugpup #thank you for the ask! #rainworld mods #rw mods #rw modding

[sheltershock]

I just unlocked Eight’s palette yesterday and the additional challenge placed on this run specifically is really interesting from a story perspective with what was set up earlier in the DLC. So I ended up typing up this little essay on the intersection of gameplay and themes in Side Order. Slight spoilers under the cut!

Eight so far hasn’t gotten much attention at all in Side Order. Which makes sense for a silent protagonist, but I couldn’t help but see the narrative parallels with the gameplay associated with Eight’s run. Side Order is about confronting the fear of change and the fantasy of living in a bland, but safely controlled world of order. Marina gets a lot of guilt from the Memverse getting all messed up with her constant apologies, but maybe her desires and the ones of engineers aren’t the only key players in the development of Order and its takeover. 

It’s revealed in the Dev Diaries that Eight was always intended to be the first subject in the Memverse project. Which inherently makes her special since the tower’s creation at some point took her specifically in consideration. But then when everything goes wrong, Eight is trapped there. Even when you beat the DLC and can leave the Memverse, it’s always your player character that transitions between spaces, not Eight. And sure, (a piece of) her soul is trapped in the program, but so are Deep Cut’s, and all of them are able to give the pre- and post-run news report about the situation in Inkopolis. So why is Eight unable to leave the space? 

What I was surprised to find was that Eight’s palette wasn’t actually inside locker 36 like the game implied, but it was revealed that her palette was the lockers themselves. Like, all 36 of them. And even Marina calls out that it's “kinda weird.” Afterwards, the extra challenge of the final run reveals itself, a run with minimal hacks. The more hacks you have enabled, the less chip slots you are afforded. In order to have access to all thirty-six chip slots in Eight’s palette, you need to have zero hacks enabled, which resets you back to where you were in the beginning of the DLC after the tutorial run. 

The thing that got me thinking about how interesting this was from a narrative perspective is that this challenge is really hard. It’s very difficult, in fact, at time of writing I have not beaten it and I’ve played for multi-hour sessions. But this difficulty switch actually reflects the themes of the DLC, and possibly how Eight feels and what she’s experiencing. 

At the beginning of the game, the tower is chaotic and scary. You don’t know about the floors or their properties and the chips you can get are random. You don’t know what awaits you on that next floor and that could make you entirely start again from the beginning. And that’s exactly the fear that Octolings have about going to the surface. They are completely starting over at a game that they don’t know the rules of, or if there are any rules at all. 

But then there’s the introduction of the hacks. The hacks are a valuable and life changing modification to the challenges and randomness ahead. You want more lives? Sure! Take less damage? Go for it! More upgrades for the drone? The more the merrier! Are the prices at the vending machine more expensive? Here, have a discount! Oh, you don’t like challenges or the chips available for this floor? Just hand over some coins and we’ll spin the roulette again! You can even reveal the bosses ahead of time and reroll what you get if you don’t want a certain one. Runs get easier, and more forgiving. And as you get further, the tower gets safer, more secure. More controllable. If you know what you’re doing, you can even manipulate the entire program to get solely what you want. 

Except your memories. 

As a player, you have to fully clear the tower eleven times before even unlocking Eight’s palette. Which matters because once you’ve cleared it eleven times with different loadouts, you become pretty familiar with the mechanics and might even have reliable plans for specific floors. And that’s without the hacks. The tower becomes routine at that point, and with all the hacks, it’s likely you plan trips to specific vending machines on certain floors. I remember having specific membux amounts I wanted to reach and trying to save up to spend on floor fifteen. You watch your in-game timer on levels start to decrease and feel a bit of pride when the happy clear music plays and you see the little “updated!” next to your time. You know your way around the tower now. 

And Eight gets that experience too. Eight also experiences the repetition of each successful and unsuccessful run. The tower becomes familiar to her too, and maybe, comfortable. Eight gets to climb the tower, again and again, with her friends in an environment that she understands and can reasonably control. Pearl even has a line sometimes when you start a floor that echoes this sentiment, “let's hurry this up so we can go hang out with Marina and Acht some more!” And isn’t that the perfect fantasy for a freed Octoling? An environment of freedom, with a little spontaneity for spice? To be able to hang out with people you like, and aid each other in battle where the greatest punishment is that you get to enjoy this all again? Nobody controls you or tells you what to do. You call the shots. You pick the floors. You snap your fingers and decide how hard you want this to be. 

And that’s exactly what Order stands for, an unchanging, safe world. Born from the wishes of the Memverse’s engineers, ironically standing in the way of the point of the program. At least, that’s what Smollusk said. But this is a world that Marina designed, with Eight as an intended subject. Not the only, but an intended subject. The person who was supposed to be saved first, ended up to be the last you find to save. Interesting. But maybe Order came to life specifically from Eight’s desire.

Eight is special. When you reach the top of the tower and face Smollusk with Eight’s palette, it recognizes it. “At wast[last]!,” it says, “you finawwy bwought me THAT Palette!” And it even calls Eight out by name. Smollusk doesn’t have dialogue calling out or even recognizing specific palettes you’re using, but it recognizes Eight’s. And the thing separating the palettes from the player is the lockers, a piece of Eight’s soul itself, may represent Eight’s desire to stay. The reason to keep playing is because everyone’s palettes are locked in a piece of Eight’s soul, tucked away. Because if the lockers weren’t there, then it would be significantly easier to reconfigure everyone’s palette. And easier means faster. 

All of this would make the necessity of minimal hacks symbolic. Eight’s palette is resistant to Marina’s hacking, which serves two purposes for the narrative. One, it makes the game harder, which makes it harder to walk away from. If it takes one hundred attempts to clear that tower with minimal hacks, then that’s one hundred more repetitions experienced before it all has to eventually end. It’s another form of the lockers, extending the time of the evitable. 

Its second symbolic purpose is that Eight has to let go of her grasp of control and embrace chaos to reach the top and reconfigure her palette. And it’s hard. Both mechanically like previously mentioned, but it also makes you feel Eight’s frustration with embracing chaos. Disabling my extra shields and damaged swim speed and extra lives, going back to the hardest, least controlled phase of the game feels bad. Embracing that chaos is difficult. Just like how it would be for Eight. 

But it is possible, it’s just a slow climb up. Floor by floor. Facing nearly impossible challenge after nearly impossible challenge. And while you have the option to skip, it’ll cost you. But prices are much higher, the hits you can take are much more expensive, and you move much slower. But you still have your friends. Even if they can’t help you hack your way to the top, or drop five consecutive bombs, they’re still there for you. Keeping the elevator warm, and helping you resist gravity. Maybe they can’t exactly be much of help going up, but Eight’s friends can help her from falling back down. A team of four. How fitting. 

Now, I haven’t cleared Eight’s palette yet, I’ve already mentioned this. And the 2/3 secret Dev Diaries I got doesn’t spark confidence about learning more about Eight, unfortunately. And I’ve accidentally been slightly spoiled that she doesn’t get her memories back which is disappointing. I wish there was more specific emphasis placed on the characters in the DLC, to be honest. But as I was playing I noticed this little ludonarrative happening with Eight’s run that I thought was super interesting and probably the closest I’m going to get for Eight development for the DLC. I haven’t played the first or second game(I didn’t have the hardware at the time), I just watched them and I heard that the memcakes in Octo Expansion actually reveal Eight’s personality so I’m going to have to read those, because I haven’t. But I like Eight, and I liked this neat little unspoken story going on in Side Order, like the agent herself. 

#splatoon 3 #splatoon side order #splatoon 3 side order #side order #side order dlc #side order spoilers #agent eight #i just had some thoughts and hopefully organized them coherently enough #I’m really liking side order though #very fun #I want to make fanart but I’d have to actually build up the nerve to draw again #but I’ve always liked the Splatoon artstyle and wanted to learn from it so…. #yeah #goodnight #thanks for reading #shelti rambles

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 9 - Harm & Healing

Space is dangerous. A huge portion of the rules space in Torchship is given over to various ways it can hurt you, but before we get there we have to establish how being hurt works, and how to get better after it happens. 

Harm and Healing is the first in a section called Detailed Systems, which is a catch-all section for systems which, while not foundational the way Core systems are, will still come up fairly frequently. The book ‘unspools’ in this way, starting broad and getting more specific as you go through chapters.

Of these, Harm is the one that will be most likely to come up for many people. 

Harm Tracks

Every character has four Harm Tracks on their character sheet, abstracting the various ways you can get messed up on your missions. You can, if you must, think of each slot on the track as a Hit Point for this sort of Harm. The track has 12 slots, but this is to account for characters who are tougher than average; most people only have 8-slot long Harm Tracks, and you shade out the parts you aren’t using.

However, if you’re playing a very tough alien, you might have more Injury tracks, while a Baseliner has a longer Toxicity track than their genetically-modified peers whose metabolisms run leaner. Conversely, some Traits will shorten your track instead; genetic Augments can end up with shortened Toxicity tracks, for instance. 

The four kinds of Harm all have slightly different effects and happen for different reasons, but follow the same basic mechanical rules in terms of how they are inflicted, recorded, and removed. They are:

Injury, for actual physical damage to your character. This is the one that can kill you directly, so its management is really important!

Stress, for the mental and emotional strain of the job. Stress is the easiest to take, and the easiest to remove, over the course of gameplay.

Radiation, recording the progress of radiation poisoning, should it happen. Radiation is unique in that you never take it directly from radiation sources; you always take it as Ongoing.

Toxicity, your body’s ability to handle potentially dangerous substances. This can track poisons, but is mostly used for restricting the amount of pharmaceuticals you can stuff in your body.

Taking Harm

Broadly speaking, you can take harm in two ways. The first is to take it directly, where you simply get told to fill in a number of spaces on the track.

That’s simple enough, but there’s a further twist. Every time you take Harm, you also have to roll something called a Shock Check, which is rolled using one of your Universal Abilities. Powering through Injury is a roll of Wild Animal, while keeping calm and collected after radiation exposure tests Cosmonaut. Failing has a variety of effects, but most put you temporarily out of action.

The second, and often much more dangerous, way you take harm is taking Ongoing Harm. Every hour in-game, you increase your Harm Track by the amount of Ongoing Harm you’re taking. That gives you some time to work with, enough to come up with clever solutions like the space cadets you are, but left untreated your Harm Track will fill up. Atop that, Ongoing still inflicts Shock Checks, so if you’re bleeding from Ongoing Injury, there’s a chance every hour you go into shock!

As you climb the tracks, you face increasing negative effects to your character. Injury is the most direct, inflicting increasing amounts of Disadvantage (we renamed Complications btw) and making your checks harder as you deal with the consequences. High Stress makes using Unity more expensive, which can hurt a lot given that Unity is one of the primary ways you remove Stress.

Finally, Toxicity and Radiation both have the same effect of downgrading your rolls on Checks, effectively representing the way the mounting illness and the accompanying psychological impact makes you less able to use the skills you have. Don’t worry though; 6s are always successes, no matter how bad it gets.

Filled Tracks

Once you fill your track, each one has a special penalty. For Radiation and Toxicity, you start taking Injury; this takes the form of untreatable Ongoing Injury for Radiation (you’ll need to lower your Radiation before you can heal it), while any further Toxicity you would take when the track is full just becomes Injury.

For Stress, a filled track means your character just can’t function anymore; they’re either panicking too badly to act rationally, or they’ve just shut down from the stress. Don’t worry; this is a good chance to take over an NPC using the B-Team rules until your character gets back on their feet.

When your Injury track fills up, you die. 

Healing

To avoid your tracks filling up, you need to use the Healing rules. Because Being A Doctor is a whole 1/8th of the character skill archetypes in the game, we made sure that doctoring has some teeth to it, same as filling out Investigation Checklists for researchers or hacking for Signals (we’ll get into that one next time we do a mechanics diary). You don’t just get to lay on hands and Cure Light Wounds (which would be very handy in a setting with lasers, where light can cause a lot of wounds) but rather you have to actually address the problem the way a doctor would.

Because of this, there are four ways that healing works in Torchship. Characters have a degree of passive healing that slowly removes Harm; it works on Stress and Toxicity automatically, heals Injury so long as you’ve gotten some treatment, and doesn’t do anything for Radiation.

Still, this is not really practical for most gameplay purposes, though it works a little better than in most games as you really can just quantum leap to another crewmember and leave Captain Archer recovering in his quarters. Fortunately, it’s the future, so faster healing is available.

Harm Stabilising is first aid, where you remove Ongoing Harm. When people have been hurt, especially in a mass casualty situation, this is the priority; prevent people from getting worse. This is done as a simple Check using the responder’s medical Tool dice pool; if you get at least 3 Passes (that’s successful dice rolls, we revised that language too) you remove 1 Ongoing, while further Passes remove more.

Stabilising is difficult, especially if the patient is in a bad way. It’s harder to do the more Harm Factors the patient is dealing with, and there’s a chance of inflicting more Harm if you mess it up. For that reason, it makes logical and mechanical sense to attempt some Harm Management before Stabilising. 

Management is what you do in the field to suppress the effects of Harm; it’s painkillers, anti-nausea drugs, and so forth. No Checks are needed; you simply take some medication, which is either the pre-designed stuff from your stockpiles, or custom Harm medication you crafted with the pharmaceutical crafting rules. You take some Toxicity from the drugs, and the Harm Factor effects are gone!

Harm Management suppresses penalties, but doesn’t actually remove Harm. Once the duration of the meds are up, the effects come back, and if you keep popping pills to stay functional you’ll reach max Toxicity in short order. You need to actually deal with the Harm directly, and that’s where Harm Recovery comes in.

Recovery is a Check you can perform on a patient after they have been Stabilised. Successes grant negative Ongoing Harm, healing the patient over the course of hours. You can’t go faster than that (yet), but getting somebody from the brink of death back to fully healthy in the space of eight hours is still pretty impressive! Every time you perform Recovery Treatment, the patient takes 1 Toxicity, so you may have to wait for their Toxicity to reduce before going on with it.

Death

As mentioned earlier, characters can die. Any character, not just the ones working in Security. Fortunately, it’s the future, which means that a lot of circumstances we might call Dead are, in fact, Only Mostly Dead.

Which means they’re a little bit alive.

Curing Death is a special Check that doctors can do which simply requires they roll as many Passes as the character has Injury. As this is going to be more than you can roll dice in most situations, you’ll need to get every advantage you can. With a specialised, emplaced tool for bringing back the dead, you can roll 8d6, which will be enough in most circumstances if every one is a Pass. That means you’ll need every scrap of Unity you can to reroll until you get it.

It also gets harder the longer somebody’s been dead. Having a frozen compartment on board (which you might, for smuggling things past tachyon sensors) also means you can keep a body on ice to buy you a few more hours; you can always build a freezer in an emergency. If you have Sleeper Pods aboard your ship, you can use the advanced cryogenic chambers to keep a character around indefinitely, until you develop the technology to bring them back.

Just remember to be waiting outside the pod in your weirdest clothes, ready to yell “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!”

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg #cw injury

[talesfromthebacklog]

Tales From The Backlog: FaeFarm

6/10

I’ve heard this game being quoted by a few folks as the cozy game of the season. While it is good; the game holds itself back from being truly great.

FaeFarm doesn’t have a ton of substance. It has an awesome aesthetic and solid gameplay, but it made a lot of choices that weakened it in comparison to its competitors. And while it has a strong aesthetic, I would dare say FaeFarm doesn’t have a strong identity.

The best way I’d pitch FaeFarm to other people is that FaeFarm is a strong introductory game that will easily get anyone acclimated to farming/life sims. It is not first on my recommendation list in general for most gamers though.

Let’s dig into why that is.

I want to first talk about what I think FaeFarm gets absolutely right. Tools and your weapon don’t take inventory slots. They get to exist in a separate pocket and switch out for you automatically. Brilliant. Loved this. I never knew how much I wanted a system like this. This should just be the standard from here on out. Period. Inventory management is a key part of the gameplay in these games but at the same time I feel like most people want stuff like their pickaxe always on hand.

Especially in a magic world. This isn’t Resident Evil, let me carry around essential tools.

This along with the infinite shed inventory that can be accessed by all of your work stations are so good. But It still draws the line where it can’t be accessed just anywhere and I like that.

The dungeon “elevator” chart that shows you what item that is on each floor you completed is also a great quality of life improvement. The rates they appear also appear on that chart which is another neat touch. It adds to the sense that you’ve completed an area.

Flower breeding is here too. It’s a simple mechanic, but I enjoy making fields of rainbow flowers. I always enjoy this mechanic when it’s present.

Then there’s the actual farming. Which you could theoretically skip altogether. The game offers several vegetables but things are in categories. So whether you have a potato or an onion the game simply classifies it as a root vegetable. Which ruins the point of the variety. And while FaeFarm has seasonal vegetables, most of the plants you have you can plant during any season. I can grow corn year round if I want to. (That is a complaint)

Don’t get it twisted, the farming is fun. It’s a lot less time/stamina consuming which makes it so you can run around doing your other activities. I like that the super moves cost mana rather than stamina so you can save it for other things. But the variety feels… shallow when they all end up being processed into the exact same things. You get the feeling that it didn’t matter what you picked or what season you picked it.

This isn’t just the farming, by the way. Fishing, catching critters, foraging. The only things that truly get differentiated is metals and gems. Which some people may like, but I don’t.

I feel like that’s the common theme with FaeFarm. It’s a shallow experience. Which isn’t meant to be a knock against it. But the game definitely comes across like it’s… structured for young children. And I acknowledge it is. That’s not a bad thing and not all games need to be deep, but this shallowness affects the core gameplay. It’s going to be the difference between the game being remembered or forgotten for its competitors. I’m cool with being wrong but I think FaeFarm is gonna disappear from gamer’s memories very quickly.

The shortcuts in FaeFarm (especially after you get your faerie wings) are a lot more satisfying than other games. Especially with the winged double jump. You can swim too! Moving feels good. I love that there are unlockable fast travel points.

Combat is fine. Animal care is standard fare. The dungeon crawling is solid. The enemies are standard fare. I really have nothing special to mention about these aspects. The story is standard fare. It’s cute. I like it. The drawn cutscenes are cute:

Coming back to those aesthetics, let’s talk about THAT: I’ve always had a soft spot for fem fantasy. Unicorns, mermaids, faeries, I unapologetically think it’s cool. That’s what attracted me to FaeFarm as a gamer.

But there’s a lot of small choices that make this aspect less fun. I thought there would be a large number of looks. There’s really not. Which is a shame because I think this aspect is actually really important to aesthetic games like this.

There is a surprising lack of options. From clothing, to dye, to the wings themselves. And these options expand over time but I can’t help but feel that some of these aspects, like dye, shouldn’t have been locked in the first place.

I get unlocking recipes and stuff. But it annoys me 100% of the time when a high aesthetic game makes dyes an absolute chore to get. Like let me live my life? And then the game doesn’t even let you pick the color of your starting outfit, so god forbid you want a hair color that doesn’t match.

It’s a nitpick but I stand by that nitpick. Games like Animal Crossing handle the dye situation a lot better. If you’re going to emphasize customization there should be some aspects that inherently make it more enjoyable. And they do emphasize it! You get rewarded for decorating by raising your stats. They leave little secret furniture recipes everywhere. They want that to be rewarding. But it’s not necessarily fun, it’s a means to an end. Let me have fun, because decorating currently is something only to boost my stats. And with a small furniture catalogue that would’ve gone a long way to making me want to actually decorate my house.

And then there’s the same face syndrome. Which is a shame because the body types and designs are largely really good. It feels wasted… and lazy.

Side note: I was thinking about what the models looked like. And the models from FaeFarm kinda look like the nicer Roblox characters folks like to make. Not saying that’s positive or negative. No complaint here.

The chibi sizes are a nice proportion. I don’t like the games (Harvest Moon does this frequently) where the game equates chibi characters to look like babies. I hate that. Especially with romancable characters. FaeFarm actually strikes this balance well.

Too bad the dialogue is… juvenile (It’s also super bland, but again you don’t play FaeFarm for the dialogue so I think that’s ignorable). FaeFarm isn’t meant to be deep. But it is hard to want to woo certain villagers when they act like actual children. And again… I acknowledge what FaeFarm’s target demographic is, but with romance NPCs it totally can turn me off to those sections of the game. It is what it is. I don’t care if it’s meant for children, I can still critique it.

Rune Factory does that shit too. Sometimes they even put in actual children which is a big ick. It genuinely can ruin the experience for me. Argyle suffers from that problem the most.

I dated this guy. Nhamashal. He was fine. I was either going to pick him or Pyria. I picked him because he matched my house better. Lol.

As far as I’m aware there is practically zero benefit to befriend or romance anyone. There is no functional benefit and the NPCs have near nothing interesting to say so there isn’t an emotional benefit either. (This is partially untrue. Friends will give you the same empty radiant quests over and over. But you would have made more money going and doing other things. So I consider them a waste of my time.)

FaeFarm’s residents don’t have enough identity or dialogue to care about whether you exist or not. I don’t even think my husband sleeps in the house. He just kinda mills around the farm now.

FaeFarm is a good game. But it isn’t first on the list of games I would be apt to recommend to other people. I’d suggest Rune Factory and Stardew Valley over Faefarm. But if you were looking for something new and you’ve already played those games, FaeFarm is perfect.

And… again Faefarm is a strong introductory game. It has a good, decently quick but in-depth, tutorial on how the world works. But that’s all I consider FaeFarm. It’s an introductory piece. I disagree with this being the cozy game of the season. I would say that’s too generous of a compliment. But it does get a lot right.

I would recommend FaeFarm over Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon. I get that some people like the slower pace but I just think games like FaeFarm, Rune Factory, and Stardew offer more complete experiences. “Harvest Moon” especially has really fallen off. I don’t touch those games anymore. I moved over with the real Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons.

#faefarm #fae farm #farming sim #gaming #Tales From The Backlog #TFTB #stardew #Stardew Valley #Harvest Moon #Rune Factory #Story of Seasons #Nintendo #Nintendo Switch #Faeries #Faerie #Fairy #Fae #cozy games #cozy gaming

[dduane]

After knowingly being a fan of your Star Trek work since the 90s, and having pushed Young Wizards on as many folks as I can for the last (how long have I been on here?) dozen years or so, and having bought the full download pack just before UK sales went on hiatus due to taxes, I have finally, finally started reading SYWTBAW. I'm instantly in love. The character introductions are perfect. The system explanations are natural, fitting with what the characters know themselves. I'm so happy! But that's an aside, a happy bonus...

I have been a fan of the X-Com/UFO game series since I first discovered it, which was when they brought the game to the Playstation in '95? Wow, that game was wild. I would go visit my friend and play with him, working on tactics for missions for hours on end, then come home and boot up my own system and run more missions on my own. I had multiple memory cards so I could save while engaging the enemy and also keep a save safely back at base if things went pearshaped. When I finally entered the PC-owners market in 97, it was one of the first games I installed there and I still have a copy on every computer I've owned since, and play regularly. I have the official strategy guide, and (the point of this message) I have the tie-in novel that you wrote! Finding that was a lucky thing, I've never seen or heard of another copy. I love what you did with the story, how it ties in well to the mechanics and spirit of the game without remaining constrained to the specifics of the game engine's limitations due to programming requirements.

When it came to writing about games, and writing for games such as Wing Commander, did you (do you still) play (m)any of them to learn more about the systems and lore?

Firstly: thanks for the nice words about my work. :) Much appreciated.

In answer to the question you wound up with: I'm not gaming actively at the moment... there's too much other stuff going on locally that requires my attention. But when I've been asked to participate in a game-based project, I absolutely spend as much time playing it as possible before I get down to work. I'll never be able to spend as much time on it as any given game's major enthusiasts would. But I do my homework, and make sure I have the data I need to handle the story issues and to drive a decent plot.

When I was working on Privateer 2: The Darkening, this wasn't so much of a problem, because I came in as cold as anyone else: nobody outside EA had played the game before. :) That said, I hadn't been hired for my expertise as a gamer, but as a screenwriter. I did spend a lot of time with the game designers and engineers, watching how gameplay was supposed to go and working out how I could best reinforce that rhythm in the way the scenes I was writing played out. It was a really enjoyable collaboration, as the engineers were as fascinated with what I was doing as I was with what they were up to. If there was a downside to the experience, it was having to be more or less a prisoner in Slough for six weeks while the writing and rewriting happened. But this kind of thing is an occupational hazard, best taken as gracefully as possible. (Though that wasn't hard in retrospect, especially considering the cast who wound up speaking the lines I'd written. Clive Owen, Brian Blessed, Mary Tamm, David Warner, John Hurt, Mathilda May, David McCallum, Jürgen Prochnow,... my God, what a lineup.)

X-Com: UFO Defense, though, I'd known for a long time and had played quite a bit: so when asked to pitch, I more or less came in hot with a bunch of issues that I felt needed more attention than they'd had in the actual game. I was delighted to get more or less carte blanche to handle them, and to create a bunch of edgily professional characters to run around destroying the bad guys. It was also, frankly, a ton of fun to use the narrative to blow up or drop alien spacecraft on things that (in real life) were annoying me in that timeframe. For example, in the culmination of one battle I dropped a big alien ship through the beautiful Renaissance Revival roof of the main rail station in Zurich because I was cranky about some slippery floor tile they'd installed downstairs in a refurbishment of the ShopVille shopping center. (I mean, seriously, people track huge amounts of snow and slush in down there when they come off the escalators from street level: why would you not put nonslip tile on that floor? It's deeply irresponsible. So they had it coming.) :)

...Anyway, it was really enjoyable having a chance to play around with what I imagined Earth's geopolitics to be doing under gameplay conditions, while also enacting a more than usually complex game scenario in prose. I don't know if or when I'll be doing that kind of work next, but writing the X-Com: UFO Defense novel definitely left a good taste in my mouth.

Thanks for asking!

(ETA: and here are those tiles. ...The cubical affair in front is an art installation: an illuminated "fountain". It was originally made of wires or strands of plastic cable, down which drops of glycerine, or something like it, slowly slid. But they seem to have swapped that out for water. And, oh look, there's video!)

#X-Com: UFO Defense #Privateer 2: The Darkening

[blueskittlesart]

how would you define a ‘zelda’ game? im making an au of sorts for it but sometimes i cant tell if im taking the zelda out of zelda- whether the master sword is a requirement or not (maybe not because of the four sword?) or having light vs dark/good vs bad as a general theme. this also kinda fascinates me as people tend to complain abt botw as being less of a zelda game compared to past entries. why though? ive seen the lack of stakes being complained about but i dont think a story should have to have world ending stakes to be a zelda game or a good story- could be wrong though. also with how every zelda game strives for a different Vibe than the last what makes one better than the other? anyways yadda yadda replace a ships wooden boards until every board is replaced is it still the same ship, whatre your thoughts?

actually what makes a zelda game a zelda game anon here. i think a better question would be what makes a zelda story a zelda story

as someone who has also/is also writing their own zelda game i do have a lot of thoughts about this. obviously one of the things that defines mainline zelda games is the formula, which if you're doing a ganon/demise villain and you want to be canon-compliant, you're gonna want to follow to some degree in order to stay consistent with the lore. there are other things that go into it though, like the themes, writing style, the presence of certain elements, etc. let's get into what i think is important!!

first of all, the formula. this only applies to mainline games, so if you're looking to do a sequel-style story you have a LOT more freedom, and certain games bend these rules quite a bit so they're not hard-and-fast, but if you want your game to FEEL canon-compliant it's good to take these steps as a general guideline.

opening segment--this is where link wakes up with nothing and has to run around the starting point of the game collecting items to progress. almost every mainline game will have him begin sleeping in a bedroom of some kind, and the player's first action will be to move him out of bed, so if you're struggling for a start point, that's a classic. he usually needs to find at least a sword and shield in this segment, and the player will be encouraged to talk to npcs to get some exposition along the way.

at the end of the opening segment the player is given the true first task of the game, which usually involves travelling somewhere, often with the goal of meeting zelda. the player may also be told to begin seeking out dungeons at this point, or zelda might tell them when they meet her in person for the first time.

the first dungeon section of the game will usually include 3-4 dungeons, often forest/water/fire/air themed and located in those respective regions of hyrule. these dungeons will have a map item to be found as well as (usually) some other dungeon item which allows you to progress through dungeon puzzles (classic items include bombs, boomerang, bow & arrows, hookshot, etc) and a boss fight at the end. when the player completes each of these dungeons, they are given an artifact which they have been told will somehow progress the gameplay for them once they collect all of them. (e.g. in oot the 3 gems unlock the temple of time) this is a crucial point bc no one is gonna want to do your dungeons without a gameplay-advancing reward at the end.

after the final initial dungeon there's usually a mini-boss fight of some kind, often with a secondary antagonist (girahim, agahnim, zant, etc) (if you're using botw as a reference point, stop doing that now, because botw ends here in terms of formula)

after all of that, there's what i like to refer to as a catalyst. this can technically be anything, but the most important point is that it must dramatically shift the trajectory of the story and/or the player's perspective. in oot it's the time change, in wind waker it's the underwater-hyrule reveal, etc. often (but not always) this reveal will come along with a new gameplay mechanic in which something about either the player or the world can be modified to access new areas of the map/solve new puzzles. (oot age-switch, alttp dark vs regular world, tp wolf form, etc) if your game includes the master sword, this is usually when the player will get it.

with a changed perspective and access to new areas, the player is now informed of a NEW goal, usually to beat ganon, who by this point has definitely kidnapped zelda and is holding her hostage. this kicks off the second segment of dungeons. usually there are 6-8 dungeons in this section, following the same map/item/boss/reward formula. (most classic games have you rescuing PEOPLE from these dungeons, but modern ones kinda did away with the damsel-in-distress thing lol)

once those dungeons have been completed, it's time for the final dungeon of the game, which is ALWAYS hyrule castle. this one may have a map, but usually doesn't have any dungeon item or even that many puzzles, it's really more about hacking through menial enemies to get to the big guy. the final battle of the game will be your big bad (usually ganon) and will traditionally have 2 phases, one inside the castle (where, if he ever looked human, he will look human) and one outside of it (where he will become much more monstrous.)

that's the VERY BASIC formula of MOST mainline zelda games. but like i said, plenty of games bend or cut out parts of this formula completely, and some games that follow it pretty well don't feel quite as 'zelda' to me as others. so there are obviously other things that make a zelda game a zelda game.

the first & one of the most important to me is the theming of the games. the franchise has cyclical overarching lore which really lends itself to explorations of coming-of-age, trauma, and healing, which is often what the most successful games focus on. I don't think a successful game NEEDS to be a coming-of-age, but it ABSOLUTELY needs to have SOME central theme to be built around. the best zelda games are the ones which clearly have something to SAY, a secondary thematic narrative that makes their stories relatable and impactful instead of just pure fantasy escapism. if you're looking to emulate the impact that zelda games have on their players, finding something relatable to the human experience and building your story around an exploration of that theme is a great place to start.

another thing to consider is the zelda writing style. zelda games occupy a really interesting niche among modern rpgs because they have such a long history and are often very married to emulating their predecessors. What this means in terms of writing is that zelda still employs a VERY player-based mode of storytelling. the games which define this franchise were built and released when storage space was the single biggest constraint game developers had on their stories; thus, they were built with the incentive to keep cutscenes and dialog to a minimum. this meant that if the developers wanted to tell a story in their games, they needed to get the PLAYER to tell that story for themself. what sets modern zelda games like botw apart from other rpgs (for me, at least) is the almost complete lack of action-breaking cutscenes and dialog. whenever you have a long cutscene in an rpg, you're forcibly removing the player from control of their character and therefore taking them out of the action to some degree, ESPECIALLY if the player character makes decisions during those cutscenes free of the player's influence. zelda games are very careful to avoid taking the player out of the action in almost EVERY instance. you will very rarely see cinematic cutscenes, and you will NEVER have link moving or taking action on his own independently of the player. the entire story & writing process tends to follow that same principle--how can we convey this story to the player through the player's own actions? very rarely will the story be outright stated to you through dialog or cutscenes, instead you will have to piece things together yourself, keeping the player centered in the story at all times.

you mentioned the presence of the master sword in your ask, and i think that breath of the wild is a good example of a zelda game that removes a lot of the standard elements of the franchise without losing the feeling of a zelda game. the master sword, while technically present, is not required to beat the game at all, and it's completely possible to beat ganon without ever finding it. the triforce is totally absent and not even MENTIONED throughout the ENTIRE game. despite this, (in my opinion) botw doesn't lose that zelda feeling. i think the reason for this is because it holds on so tightly to the theme and writing style i mentioned above, and pulls in just enough elements of the formula that it's still recognizeable despite clearly being something new. (the divine beasts are the dungeons, dungeon items are replaced with runes, there are clear REFERENCES to the lore even when its not stated outright, etc.) i also think part of the reason that botw is successful in this regard is because there's a REASON thematically for it to be divorced in this way from other games. it takes place at least 10k years removed from every other game and in the wake of a massive kingdom-ruining tragedy, so the fact that some changes have been made to the standard mechanics players are used to feels natural when paired with this changed version of hyrule. if you want to make a drastic change like that, i think it's always going to feel a bit more natural if you give players a REASON for that change, even if the reason is just 'well EVERYTHING is different so obviously this thing is too.'

final point, and not necessarily as important as the others but still worth noting, i think mood and art direction are something worth considering as well. I have NEVER seen a dark&moody adaptation of zelda that still felt like zelda to me. not to beat a dead horse, but these games originally come from the NES. for YEARS they were defined by sharp, brightly-colored graphics, and i really do think something is lost when you strip all the color and cartoonish-ness from them. (this is NOT a dig at botw btw, i actually think botw did a REALLY good job of creating a world that was both adequately colorful AND realistic. this IS a dig at twilight princess.) many of my favorite zelda games are defined by their bright and blocky art styles, and if anything i think zelda games are a testament to the fact that you can make a thematically dark game WITHOUT sacrificing your art direction to black overlays.

anyways!! hope this helps lol

#asks #can you tell ive thought about this a lot. sword of fate made me think about this SO much #zelda analysis

[cinna-bunnie]

having vague thoughts about E3 and the current state of AAA game development in general..

like yeah direct promotions have had more of an impact than Big Events for me, and the main thing I'd want to see out of E3 are trailers for new games or the conversations that follow online - but a few points on that

I can just as easily look up “new games for [platform] [year]” on youtube

Something about the way AAA games are built these days makes me get bored of them ⅔ of the way through, if I even make it that far, on top of them charging more for less content and hiding away the rest behind multiple DLC packs

I've mostly been buying indies the past few years and have gotten a lot of fun out of them; they continue to deliver a nearly unrivaled experience of fun gameplay mechanics and interesting/emotional stories at a ridiculously low cost

I also have emulators for going back and playing old games I really liked so I'm not exactly desperate for new games

and idk!! weird to see E3 officially ending but I also think the landscape is very different these days including the game companies themselves. I'm not a game dev so I can't rly speak to what the change has looked like on their end over the past 10-20 yrs.

#i kind of wanna read or watch an interview with someone who's done game development for Years #and see them talk about What's Changed bc on god these AAA games can be so different from each other #but still somehow sm of them get kind of boring and repetitive FAST #i can def fw some games. I haven't played all of resident evil but they've always been fun. the only one I've played but not beat #is RE zero. also metroid - they know what they're doing over there. MP HD remake?? 😴🛌 MP Dread?? 😲⁉️🏃‍♀️💨 #i am also a fromsoft girlie.. I've never played armored core but elden ring FUCKED. especially after i learned how to mod it 😹 #i played totk and that was fun but... idk if imma beat it 🙈 I'm p into dead cells rn. I've never been able to sit through a zelda game #(u absolutely should still play it when u get the chance though it's been great so far. i just... played it for Months lmao) #anyways!! idk!! i am rambling!! games as an art are so good‚ games as A Product are.. hm 😶 #and it's not like those r mutually exclusive but where is the LOVE!!!!

[cherrybombrs]

do u have any wiz101 beginner tips!! i just started recently cause it's a very charming mmorpg but after the unicorn way quest it threw so much tutorial and gameplay mechanic at me and my little pea brain cannot keep up, any advice?

OK HIII for starters thank u for helping me realize i had asks turned off on da wiz blog... i've since fixed that so. that should be good now <3 ^_^

AS FOR BEGINNER TIPS... i played the very first arc YEARS ago like a year or two after wiz's first release. i played back in 2011 so everything is like a blur to me- and i do have like. TWO wizards that i made to start fresh with just to see like. how things changed and. YEAH. i see what u mean with how they just kind of throw u at the wolves once ur done with that section

unfortunately i dont have many tips in that regard just because the starting point of the game has changed SO much fundamentally from the time that i played, to now. but i could give u some small things that might make ur life a little easier???

edit: PLEASE ALSO CHECK ALL THE REBLOGS AND THE REPLIES FROM ALL THE LOVELY PEOPLE!!! THEY HAVE ADDED MORE THAN I COULD EVEN THINK TO REMEMBER THEY R THE REAL MVPS!!!!

find a friend who can trade u monstrous TC (treasure cards)!! they're additional spell cards you can add onto your deck that upon use get used up, but monstrous comes super in handy because they boost your damaging spells DMG by a big amount. it'll make the slough of early game much quicker.

WHILE UR DOING UR main scenario quests, look around at the side quest in the area!! i never did this growing up but it dawned on my now how crazy smart this is LOL a lot of side quests will be like "hey wizard go beat up these things for me pleaseeeee" and you can sync up ur quests along with ur sidequest and they'll both count. literally a win-win

the further u go on in the game, u should keep ur deck smaller- less spells means more likely to pull what u need in that moment means less prolonged battles that go on for longer than they need to. ALSO LEARN RESHUFFLE its a balance spell and you learn it in krokotopia. CORRECTION YOU LEARN IT IN COLOSSUS BLVD FROM MILDRED FARSEER (THANK YOU @/divine-deer!!!!) literally worlds most op spell in the game love it

there's some side content that the game throws at u randomly. iirc, theres grizzleheim starts at level 20 and then you keep getting called back there until u reach 45 (that's for wintertusk, highly recommend for that level!!) wysteria, lvl 25 i believe there's the underwater section in wizcity sewers in olde town aquilla (HIGHLY rec doing this for the sky iron hasta, that bad boy will carry you to lvl 100 LOL) and much much more. i know there's more but I'm literally forgetting because there's so many side worlds

when in doubt. just look up whatever you're dealing with and add reddit on the end. i don't like reddit but damnit those mfs have ALL the answers for literally anything

this is ALL i can rlly think of off the top of my head rn BUT if u ever have anymore questions my dms are always open as well as my ask box ^_^ i love wizzzzzz

#bailey-boompants #ask #wizard101 #w101 #i'm gonna reblog this to the wiz blog since its SUPPOSED to be there but. ya u get it #THANK u for asking this i hope some of those tips helped... i know it doesn't answer everything but. yea. wiz has a lot of. Things in it #it can be hard to like. comprehend #not to mention half the spells that have like. fucking hieroglyphics in them like. Ok what you mean 675 death fist 40% broken heart 3 devil #like WHAT.

[laurelnose]

a disorganized pile of ninefox ttrpg thoughts

it is HERE! also it was late in shipping by like, a day? or two? so android press sent me the PDF version also, which was very very nice of them. For this I will forgive them the weird jank in the PDF version’s character encoding. (Maybe like 5% of characters consistently copy-paste as different characters. I think they fucked up the font subsetting somehow. It’s fine, it’s just weird. Makes quoting it a little bit of a hassle. Might be less fine if you use a screenreader.)

So pleased with several little random details which are not at all relevant to like, gameplay or the worldbuilding at large but which I just kind of wanted to know. The calendar months! The full set of Kel rank symbols! Signifiers for Kujen and Tseya! <3 Also, an additional set of symbolism for the factions per the calendar months? If I’m reading this correctly it's Rahal/Wood (!?), Andan/Bells, and Vidona/Knives. [We basically knew the other three, which are Shuos/Eyes, Kel/Pyres, and Nirai/Stars.] As a visual artist I am contractually obliged to be hype about all my little guys getting Symbols, they make my life easy and fun.

This is a slim little volume, so it’s light on lore details that you couldn’t find either a) in the actual series or b) on Lee's dreamwidth. That said, one new bit was that it was not previously clear to me that the nominal arrangement of power in the heptarchate was explicitly unequal between the Liozh and the others — I thought the extant six turned on the Liozh as one of their fellows, not that they deposed the ruling faction. Interesting.

Disappointing: there are no mechanics for the calendar besides the ability to tag the current festival/remembrance. :( I wanted to roll dice about calendrical rituals!! Funnily enough there's a whole little caveat section where he’s like, inevitably someone will want to have space battles, which can be accommodated by keeping them character-focused bc this system is not designed for battle sim crunch. No similar apology for those who might want magic system crunch, if anyone wanted any further evidence that Lee and Jedao are the same guy, lmao.

Other than that I’m not actually that much of a crunchy rules guy myself so I like the system itself fine. I enjoy the concept of every check involving not necessarily skills but character traits. And also the commitment to sixes. You need A LOT of d6s for this game.

If you’re really committed I think it would be fun to play with a set of these (normal d6s except instead of numbers or pips they have clock faces showing hours 1-6):

Jedao’s character sheet is so funny. “Complications: I have abysmal taste in lovers.” BE NICE TO HIM LMAO

It’s not entirely clear to me under which circumstances you wind up the Hexarchate Clock. Is it actually only if Kujen is in play? Does that mean he’s literally required if you want to run a long take-down-the-whole-hxx campaign?

The prewritten scenarios are neat! I don’t have a lot to say about them. They look like they would be fun. I like “The Field of Diplomacy” and the concept of the adjacent polity a lot. Oh also the note at the end of “A Heretical Sacrifice” that is just like “if the ‘human sacrifice’ bit is too vague for you and you want to add more torture, here are some ideas!” is 1) funny and 2) appreciably graphic and wince-inducing. HXX-typical gore: delivered on!

This is a petty note, but excluding servitor PCs on the grounds that this is a game about moral complicity and thus only human faction members can be PCs sure is a Statement. I know servitors are slaves and thus the moral calculus is certainly different, but like, the complicity is the entire point of Hemiola’s arc??? And faction servitors quite obviously often consider themselves to be legitimately part of that faction? The one Shuos servitor we meet is as interested in games as any fox, the assault on Shattered Needles is made possible because the Unspoken Law’s servitors consider themselves Kel, the Aerie interlude with sin 𝑥² is about a servitor who considers itself so deeply Kel it wants to go down with the hivemind. I understand they complicate things mechanically but excluding servitors for thematic reasons is silly.

That said, I feel like a servitor hack wouldn’t be too much more mechanically complex. None of the prewritten scenarios work with an all-servitor group, but I think they could all be run with one or maaybe two servitor PCs. You’d have to do some pregaming to figure out how you’d open communication between human/servitor PCs. Lore-wise, the faction traits are clearly not meant to represent the faction exotics or the Shuos wouldn’t have one; they read more like “specialized skills developed as a consequence of picking this faction” than calendrical stuff, so faction servitors could have standard faction abilities, with the caveat that a lot of interpersonal Edges may be hard for Andan servitors to hit on account of social interaction between servitors & humans being, well, you know. Alternatively, no faction abilities for servitors, but all servitors +2d6 to anything involving grid-diving and/or mechanics. Servitors can have ranks just like human PCs, though these ranks are only relevant to other servitors (and possibly moths). Servitors can probably tag calendar traits like humans, they just can’t participate in formations or affect calendrical gradients (neither of which have explicit mechanics in this system anyways). Heresies are the same for servitors as humans.

This really made me want to dig out that calendrical cryptocurrency heist concept I had to see if I can put together a scenario. And maybe also make some cardboard game spinners for a tactile clock experience...

#machineries of empire

[otakween]

Digital Monster: D-Project - Final Thoughts

Some quick stats:

This is my 13th Digimon game completed in less than 2 years, yay me!

This game took me 10 days to play. Love me a game that doesn't overstay its welcome.

This game was fantastic! It was probably most similar to the first Digimon World gameplay-wise, but waaay less convoluted and a lot cuter. Unlike in DW I had no problem getting the digivolutions I wanted and progressing through the game at a comfortable pace. There were a few "guide dang it!" moments here and there, but the game is mostly reasonable about hinting at what you're supposed to be doing. Full thoughts below.

Notes:

I loved the meta premise of this game. Basically when you boot it up, DemiDevimon comes along and "corrupts your game file." You then get sucked into the game world, "Swan World" (geddit, cuz Wonderswan?) The rest of the game is dedicated to restoring your corrupted surroundings and returning evil digimon to their nice forms. Very satisfying.

The v-pet aspect of the game was fun. The controls for calling/releasing your digimon were very intuitive. I liked how I could release them in various places like I was putting them out to pasture. The only really annoying thing was keeping the digimon fed because you had to input 4 digits to get one meat over and over and over again.

Of course I just used a guide to figure out the right codes, but the "enter a code and get a mystery digiegg" gimmick was cute. I really liked the animation of the egg slowly generating. It was a little weird because what digiegg you started with didn't matter much in the end, but oh well.

For some reason you have the ability to praise and scold your digimon? I understand praising because maybe it raises their happiness (I never actually checked), but there is no advantage to scolding in this game as far as I could tell.

Instead of the DW1 digivolution mechanic where you need a PHD in digivolving to get the right digimon, you just raise them in a certain environment to get the desired outcome. SO much easier. I liked that I could switch from line to line going from rookie to champion to make the game go quicker.

Except for the crazy last boss, it sort of felt like the difficulty level remained the same throughout the whole game. I brought a rookie into many battles, for example, and ended up being fine.

Omg the sprites in this game are so good!! Battling was so fun to watch (you can button mash to improve accuracy, but you don't really participate). Some kind soul uploaded all the sprites for download. I thought the Kyubimon victory animation was really funny:

Once I discovered jogress/DNA evolution I was like HELL YEAH 🔥🔥🔥 cuz the animation was so badass and took up like half the screen (wish I got more screenshots). There was also a really satisfying "BOOM!" sound effect during digivolution.

Lots of colorful, fun environments (especially compared to the last game which was blah). Another quality of life complaint is you have to go all the way to the start of the map every time you need food. There should have been more shortcuts to get from place to place.

I was actually kind of grateful that digimon die in this game. They have a pretty long lifespan, which is nice, but sometimes you need to clear up storage in your PC or you want the chance to raise a different type, so mons dying wasn't as soul crushing as in previous games.

If you can't read Japanese, I think I'd still recommend this game. The visuals and gameplay are enough to carry it and the controls/menus are pretty simple.

I give Digital Monster: D-Project an 8 out of 10

#digital monster: d-project #digimon #video games #games #wonderswan #oswan

[genericpuff]

my thoughts on tears of the kingdom (on a non-zelda blog)

so here's the thing, I love Zelda.

I've been playing the series since I was a child, practically raised on it by my oldest brother whom I have a 10 year age gap with. One of my most cherished childhood memories was when he got me Wind Waker on the Gamecube as a birthday present, I would have been around 7 years old and he would have been 17. Zelda was and still is a huge part of our lives.

So skip to today, we both got Tears of the Kingdom on launch day. We're both busy adults now who live far away from each other so we've just been updating each other on our progress and sending memes.

But I've got a lot of thoughts about the game that I really want to get out, as someone who's been with this series for two decades. My brother started with games like A Link to the Past and that was practically my first exposure to the series as well as it's what I would watch him play, alongside Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

There will be mild SPOILERS ahead concerning the gameplay and story, so don't click the jump unless you've already played the game or don't mind getting spoiled!!! LONG POST AHEAD!

So I guess let's just get on with this, yeah? I'm not gonna separate it into "good" vs. "bad" because I find everything in this game has good shit that comes packaged with bad shit. It's a lot of pros with cons attached, so trying to separate it cleanly between "good" and "bad" isn't going to be a very productive approach.

I've seen TOTK described as "DLC" for Breath of the Wild (derogatory) while on the opposite end, Breath of the Wild has been described as the "tech demo" for Tears of the Kingdom (positive). Frankly, I can see where both sides are coming from. There are lots of elements in TOTK that feel like they could have been in BOTW, whereas other elements can confidently stand on their own separate from that of BOTW.

One such example is the new Sheikah Slate, aka the Purah Pad. While there are some features from BOTW that are surely missed (Cryonis, sigh) others have been replaced with far more beneficial features such as Ultrahand and Fuse (the bread and butter of this game) and Recall, which - controversial I'm sure - is far more functional and has way more opportunities to be useful than BOTW's Stasis ability. The Ultrahand ability alone is a massive upgrade, allowing you to go wild with the game's physics engine. The shrine puzzles are a lot stronger in this respect, having more to work with by combining the Ultrahand ability with thematic Zonai devices, often times taking you through a gauntlet of rooms with similar puzzle-solving, each more challenging than the last. There's nothing more satisfying - and doubly frustrating - than seeing the solution to a shrine you've already spent three days on and going "Wait, I could have done that???" It just goes to show that the inventive creativity necessary to solving these puzzles from BOTW has carried over twofold into TOTK.

However, I feel like these new features are less rewarding as the game goes on. While mechanics like Cryonis and remote bombs made exploring feel unique and accessible in BOTW, the lack of these features in TOTK have made exploring feel far more difficult than it should be. What used to be an easy - albeit slow - endeavor such as crossing a river by creating ice block bridges with Cryonis has now turned into an exercise in futility and physics knowledge. You can't just cross a river, you have to build a boat out of whatever resources you can find or use to cross said river. And while this is a very inventive feature that has really stretched the creative bones of its players, it's a feature that becomes draining. Sometimes you really do just want to cross a river without having to build a spaceship or a ferry. Sometimes you do just want to be able to get up to the top of a cliff without needing to build a hot air balloon. Even with the Autobuild ability, these new mechanics do really start to feel grating after a while, especially for someone such as myself who struggles with executive dysfunction and doesn't want to build yet another boat or flying car just to travel 10 feet.

Regarding that last statement, I think the inclusion of the Ascend ability helps to combat tiresome climbing, but it never seems to be an option quite as often as it could be. I've seen people praise the ability stating that it helps them avoid climbing cliffs entirely, but more often than not, I've found the ability is only usable for a third of a rocky mountain where it happens to have a platform jutting out that's close enough for Ascend to reach - with the rest of it encouraging you to just climb up naturally, or, you guessed it, use the Ultrahand ability to build your way up. The Ascend ability - like Statis from the game's predecessor - is very specific and not accessible enough in the world's design to make it actually helpful. You know exactly when and where you're supposed to use it, and trying to use it outside of those instances won't get you anywhere. Of course, I'm not going to judge this ability too hard because it's still more than what we had in BOTW, but I find its application isn't quite as useful as it could be.

And boy, there are a lot of things in TOTK that don't have as strong an application as they could. I think there's no truer place this could be said than the expansion of the game's map, through The Sky and The Depths.

Disappointingly enough, just like in Skyward Sword, which suffered for having a strong premise but weak delivery with an open sky that had nothing to do in it, Tears of the Kingdom has barely fleshed out its Sky and Depths areas enough to make them feel memorable or worth going out of your way to explore. Once you've explored 10% of either, you've experienced all of it. While the Sky and the Depths each have their own dungeon, neither of them really feel justified enough to explain why they had to be there. The Depths don't add anything to the nature of the Fire Temple - by the time you're finished with it, you'll forget you're even in the Depths - and while the Water Temple does have the addition of lowered gravity up in the Sky, no other islands have this, so it feels like a random addition in the way of a gimmick that doesn't actually play much of a role in the dungeon's puzzle-solving.

As for the Depths, I do have to say that the game introduced it in the best way possible. No one spoke of them, outside of an NPC in Lookout Landing sending you on a quest to find a nearby one, but they still don't describe to you what you're about to come upon. It wasn't in any of the gameplay trailers. You see a big hole in the ground with gloom coming out of it, you know you can jump down into it, but it's not until you actually do that you realize you're diving down into the belly of a completely different beast. Link keeps falling and you're realizing how dark it's getting and hoping you can pull out your paraglider in time to hit a ground that you realize you cannot see - when the music shifts and the horns blare and your stomach sinks realizing just how dark and vast this place is.

The Depths are what I truly fell in love with in this game. I was struck with that primal fear in my gut that I hadn't felt since playing Majora's Mask as a child. For the first time in forever, I felt like the smaller species, like a speck of dust in unfamiliar territory. It was a welcome feature for a game that - if you had preceded it with Breath of the Wild - needed something to shake things up.

But, unfortunately, that initial thrill wears off eventually. The Depths become just that - a vast expanse with nothing in it. Aside from the odd treasure chest containing a piece of gear, the Bargainer's Statues, and a couple main story quests that take you down there, the Depths have nothing. Mapping them out is a feat in and of itself, even more daunting than mapping out the above ground with its tens of lightroots, but once you get at least 50% through the map, you realize that there's really nothing else to it. In fact, the map of the Depths exactly mirrors that of the map above you, with even less to do due to its lack of notable landmarks (outside of a central mining area, the Korok Grove, and the aforementioned Fire Temple), lack of biome distinction between areas (aside from the Eldin area created specifically for the Fire Temple), and lack of shrines. Once you figure that out, mapping out the rest of it is an unfortunately boring cakewalk.

I think both of these new inclusions in the game are unfortunately half-baked, making TOTK in and of itself feel like a tech demo for something that could have been more expanded upon. That said, it's a tall order, to ask for the game to run an in-depth open world map on three separate levels - the hardware itself already often struggles to load the Depths if you dive down into them too quickly, as the fall itself is its own cleverly hidden loading screen - but it's a shame to see it essentially repeat the mistakes of Skyward Sword, and it's where I feel that "this could have been DLC" complaint comes from.

There are features that feel like mild downgrades from BOTW, such as its new Fuse ability to fuse together weapons. While it seems inventive at first, the amount of inventory being carried over from BOTW makes the gameplay grind to a halt as you scroll through your pop-up inventory list to find the right thing to attach to your arrows or weapons, often times mid combat. While you can sort your menu into different sections - such as 'most used' and 'most powerful' - such a thing could have been fixed by allowing the player to create their own custom lists of items or just reducing what is and isn't capable of being fused. It feels like an unnecessary extra step thrown in to BOTW's weapon degradation mechanic just to make it feel more unique.

Moving on, this is where I want to talk about the game's story. Like the last game, it asks Link to piece together the memories of companions already gone. The story woven within these memories is a tragic one, with an emotional depth to it that I found myself relating far more to than in BOTW, which asked us to sympathize with characters who we had never met and were already gone. On the flipside, TOTK manages to tell a similar story with a lot more emotional depth, now using Princess Zelda as the tether between the present and the past, in a way that I feel works much better than in BOTW. Its climactic twist felt like something you would find in Spirited Away, and its one that I felt was appropriate for the game's setting and themes. That said, I still do not find myself compelled by this game's version of the Champions, similarly to what I experienced in BOTW. At the very least, it brings back cast members from BOTW for us to connect through, such as Purah and Lady Impa, who I was happy to see return.

And then there are the Sages.

I have a lot to say about the Sages.

The Sages have to be the single worst inclusion of this game. And that's not to say they ruin the game, but in a game full of wonderful moments and amazing gameplay, they definitely feel like a tarnishing C- on an otherwise perfect report card. Just like in Breath of the Wild, the game's main story gameplay is the weakest part of Tears of the Kingdom. While BOTW had Link conquering the out-of-control Divine Beasts, TOTK asks Link to unearth ancient temples and awaken the spirits of sages long gone for their powers to be reborn through their descendants, three of which happen to be the successors of BOTW's Champions: Riju, Sidon, and Yunobo. While the development team and press surrounding this game called these temples "traditional dungeons", they are fundamentally the exact same as the Divine Beasts, following the same 4-beat structure in which you have to activate 4 'locks' (themed around the dungeon's setting) to unlock the dungeon's boss. I found these dungeons were often even easier than the Divine Beasts of BOTW, essentially asking Link to solve four separate shrine puzzles to get to a boss that follows a simple mechanic loop. While the bosses are far less repetitive than the Blights of BOTW, they are also far less intimidating or punishing, barely requiring any extensive thought to figure out how to overcome them. The hardest boss in the game - the Gibdo Queen - ironically had one of the easiest dungeons out of the four.

But here's the thing - Tears of the Kingdom is built the exact same way as Breath of the Wild, giving the player freedom to choose the order in which they complete dungeons, if they even choose to complete them at all... but unlike past Zelda games which offered this freedom, TOTK fails in how it delivers these dungeons and the narrative surrounding them. I was miffed upon completing my second dungeon - the Fire Temple - and realizing that the cutscenes it presented were the exact same as the first one I did - the Wind Temple - and sure enough, that same cutscene played out from its respective sage for the following Water Temple and Lightning Temple. They are all the same. While one could argue this was their way of navigating around the freedom of choice - to allow the player to experience neutral cutscenes that won't be out of order or out of context - the memories themselves are also out of order and out of context so having the dungeon cutscenes be varied should be a feature, not a bug to patch out. Currently, with its repetitive cutscenes and what you gain from completing a dungeon, it makes them far less enjoyable to do, knowing you're essentially just doing one big shrine with a giant enemy (one you can find in the Depths for farming, which makes them feel far less unique or imposing) with the reward of a heart in the end.

Of course, I'm forgetting to mention the other reward you get after completing a dungeon. Sage abilities. The biggest downgrade from BOTW by far.

In BOTW, upon completing a Divine Beast, you would be granted with an ability from its respective Champion, typically a passive one - meaning, if you had the ability enabled, it would activate on its own or you could trigger it a specific way, such as Mipha's Grace which would automatically revive you once in between cooldowns (basically a fairy you didn't have to catch) and, the fan favorite, Revali's Gale, which could be triggered by holding down the jump button and would grant you so much more ease of exploring.

Tears of the Kingdom, instead, asks "What if we made all of the Champions their own characters who could run around you, get in your way, and offer even less useful abilities?"

The present Sages - Yunobo, Tulin, Riju, Sidon, and Mineru - are akin to a teenager taking way more dogs than they could handle out for a walk. They are five nuisances who will run away from you when you need them, and run around you when you're just trying to pick up an item, causing you to accidentally trigger their abilities which are simply mapped to the A button. Too many times I've had them trigger a fight with enemies I was trying to avoid, blow away loot I was trying to grab, or blow up explosives that I wasn't aiming at, killing me outright. While they can be turned off, I feel like it could have been far easier to implement them in a way that wasn't so distracting and obtrusive - currently, the way they're implemented basically demands you keep them turned off until you absolutely need them. Considering a map of the Switch controller buttons comes up with the A button highlighted, it begs the question, why even have the other three buttons visible onscreen if they can never be mapped? Why not make use of different buttons for different companions? Or make them passive abilities similar to that of the Champions from BOTW? Overall, their inclusion feels clunky and not well thought out, and their abilities aren't near beneficial or useful enough to justify this much headache. At most, Yunobo is helpful in blowing up rock walls when you don't have Bomb Flowers, and Tulin is helpful in gusting you towards a landing spot while gliding through the sky, but that's about where their usefulness ends. Unlike in BOTW, the efforts required to gain their abilities barely feels like a reward, but more of an obligatory chore, making the dungeons feel even less rewarding to do.

With all that said, unlike in BOTW, Tears of the Kingdom never becomes a smoother experience to explore. The effort you put into completing the dungeons and gaining better weapons and gear never feels rewarded with anything substantial or worth working for. The Sage abilities are a burden and give very little benefit to exploring or combat the same way BOTW's Champion abilities did, the dungeons themselves aren't experiences worth writing home about, and the story is so milquetoast and repetitive that once you beat one dungeon, you've experienced all of them.

That said, while I've done a lot of complaining, there are a lot of things about the game I'm enjoying compared to Breath of the Wild. One such thing are the sidequests - there are a LOT more of them in this game, and many of them feel far more engaging and rewarding than Breath of the Wild. Accessing the Great Fairies requires an actual sequence of quests now, in which you bring a travelling band back together, and from that point forward, you can always hear them playing their music at the stables scattered throughout Hyrule. Hateno has its own questline that rewards you with what's possibly Link's greatest piece of fashion ever, Cece's Hat. Even the small quests feel more rewarding to do because TOTK feels far busier than BOTW did. There are far more NPC's, and the world itself just feels more lively; I wouldn't expect any less in the sequel to BOTW which experienced a cataclysmic event that wiped out the population of the kingdom. It's nice to see the difference in how the towns operate in TOTK because you can feel it through its sidequests. There are still Yiga Clan members in disguise on the surface, but it's far less now compared to BOTW where you couldn't talk to an NPC on the road without getting shanked.

Of course, it wouldn't be a BOTW sequel without one of its most daunting sidequests of all - the Korok Seed quest. This time, there are 1000 Korok Seeds to find, with new puzzles to find them, most notably the escort quests, which require you to build whatever godforsaken Roman-era torture device you need to build to get wandering Koroks from Point A to Point B.

That said, the unfortunate news I have to break to you after finally seeing someone complete the quest themselves - all that awaits you in the end, once again, is "Hestu's Gift" which I have to say, isn't as quite as funny the second time around. While in BOTW it felt like a funny nudge at completionists, in the vein of "Haha, look at you! You worked so hard to get all those seeds and all that awaited you was a pile of poop! It's all in good fun! The real prize was the adventuring you did along the way!" but having that be the end prize again in TOTK where we're exploring regions we've already explored before feels far more passive-aggressive, like it's making fun of you for really doing what the devs expected you to do a second time, with a snarky, "Seriously? You're that stupid? You really thought there'd be something new this time?" Especially considering the Koroks exclusively populate the Sky and the Surface - giving players even less incentive to want to explore the Depths, further robbing this new expansive area of less identity. Ironic that the Depths, an area so big that it requires its own hidden loading screen, would end up having even less to do than the Sky itself, which barely covers any surface area in the game's overall map by comparison. It's a damn shame the devs couldn't be bothered to think of something to reward the player with for all their work. At least in BOTW it could be said the reward was the exploration, as so much of BOTW's map goes untouched by its main story and its world was brand new to us back then - it's not brand new now, though, and the areas that are new are going completely unused.

I realize this review is getting quite long, but I want to close it with one final point - Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom's place in the Zelda franchise.

There's a startling lack of one specific thing that makes a Zelda game truly Zelda, despite the dev's best efforts to return its old school elements such as traditional "dungeons" and its nods to previous games in the title through its referential gear sets implemented right into the game (vs. exclusively as DLC in BOTW) - and that's the Triforce.

It's said that a true Zelda game can't contain its core triad of characters - Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf - without containing the Triforce in the center of all of it, and yet Tears of the Kingdom did this, and frankly, it just proves that point.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm not good at singling out a 'favorite'. Whenever people ask me what my favorite Zelda game is, my mind races through all the titles I played as a child - Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess - and yet I rarely think of Breath of the Wild and likely won't think of Tears of the Kingdom either. It's not for lack of trying or consideration, I do think both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are respectable games, both inclusive and exclusive of one another, but rarely does my mind go to them because to me, they don't feel like true Zelda games. And I didn't realize why until I recalled that the last game we had featuring Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, and the Triforce as core setpieces... was Twilight Princess. A game that will be turning seventeen this year, and will likely be twenty by the time the next mainline Zelda game releases. And one could argue even Twilight Princess doesn't count because Ganondorf was a last second addition - if we want to be really obtuse about it, technically we haven't gotten a game featuring Link, Zelda and Ganondorf as our main characters since Wind Waker, a game that turned twenty years old last year!

I felt its absence especially in Tears of the Kingdom, seeing Ganondorf manipulate his way into stealing the sigh 'secret stones' (I'm sorry but that name is so fucking cringe, please just call them "sacred stones" or "mystic stones" or SOMETHING more interesting than "secret stones", we don't even get any sort of lore or hinting towards where they came from, they're just magical McGuffin's with a stupid name) but not once mention his true motivations prior to finding out about the stone's existence. There was no emotional motivation such as what can be seen in The Wind Waker through a Ganondorf scorned by his lost culture and the kingdom that he just wanted to see wiped out to make things even; or Ocarina of Time Ganondorf who sought to access the Sacred Realm and take the Triforce and all its power for himself. Shit, there wasn't even a mention of Demise, the massive plot-twister of Skyward Sword, which Nintendo attempted to make the ultimate explanation as to why the games and their stories experience the same warring cycle from generation to generation; an explanation that could have worked, if they had actually followed up on it through BOTW and TOTK - yet, despite having the opportunity to do so, seem to just be whistling around the issue, pretending like it's not there. Despite having an Ouroboros in its title art, this cycle of death and rebirth is noticeably gone in Tears of the Kingdom.

Look, I get it. The developers have already stated that they're intent on moving forward with its open world format in future Zelda games. It's making them a lot of money. It's refreshing. It's bringing new fans into the franchise. And it's bridging the gap between generations by re-introducing classic exploration elements of retro Zelda while trying to also balance the narrative elements that modern post-N64 Zelda fans have come to expect.

But when you tear apart all the original components of a franchise, of its themes, its characters, its stories, and replace them with new components only slightly reminiscent of the old... can that franchise really be called the same thing anymore? When people ask me what my favorite Zelda game is, I don't think of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom because to me, they're just not Zelda games. They're just what they are - Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo had a huge opportunity to make Tears of the Kingdom into a game that could tie its predecessors together with a neat little bow, and yet it still took the half-baked way out, layering it instead with its own story that doesn't even really work or take advantage of the foundation it's standing upon. They're their own games, and that's okay, but I can't help but feel that the further we go down this road, the less it'll encompass what made Zelda what it was to begin with.

And yeah, I'm sure I'm just being a typical 'old Zelda fan' who's complaining about the exact same thing that people complained about in games like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. But when your Zelda game featuring Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf does not mention a word of the Triforce, I think both retro and modern Zelda fans can agree to even a slight extent that you can't have Legend of Zelda without the Triforce. That would be like having Super Mario without Power Stars (or some equivalent of them) or Kirby without its existential nihilism or Sonic without Chaos Emeralds. Sure, you can have games in their franchises without their respective trademarks, but do it enough times and people will start to notice something's seriously off. I think we can all agree that while Twilight Princess and Wind Waker may be, aesthetically and thematically, completely different games, you can't deny they're Zelda games at their core because they still have that signature cast fighting over those pesky golden Doritos.

In this respect, Tears of the Kingdom feels like it's suffering from the same problem Star Wars is suffering from - it exists to spite the titles that came before it, but knows it won't succeed without the fans of those titles so it makes as many cheeky references to those titles as it can without paying actual respect to them. It even opens the game with references to things that retro gamers will recognize - Rauru, Ganondorf recognizing Link's name, etc. - but then all those elements are later revealed to be unique to TOTK, such as Rauru being the first King of a Hyrule that's exclusive to the BOTW timeline, or Ganondorf only recognizing Link's name because a time-travelling Zelda told him his name, not because it's the same Ganondorf of titles' past. It feels incredibly disappointing to have all this setup and so little payoff especially for these games that are claiming to be the 'next step' for the franchise. It feels less like a 'next step' and more like a complete reboot for a different audience. These games are not reminiscent of what pulled me and my brother into the franchise way back in the day.

But I dunno, maybe it's a weird hill to die on. I don't want to be one of those "not my Zelda" puritans but when the games don't even contain elements of what made them distinctly Zelda back in the day, down to its trademark features, it makes me wonder what exactly where the series is headed.

Anyways. That was a lot. I do want to make it clear that I am enjoying this game, very much so, but like many games that top the charts with solid 10/10's on release, I feel like there are definitely still places the game could have been further refined, despite the extra year it took to polish it. From the inconvenient gameplay halters like the inventory fusing, to the obtrusive butchering of the Sage abilities, so many things could have been tightened up just a bit more to further improve on what Breath of the Wild started, rather than trade out what BOTW did for weaker alternatives. It's a game of gimmicks, rather than one of substance. While Breath of the Wild lacked substance itself in many regards, it at least had the benefit of being a brand new format, with a vast world one could spend hours exploring - with that same world returning in Tears of the Kingdom, with very little done to flesh out the attempts to expand it, it very much feels like it's simply riding off the coattails of Breath of the Wild, and in that regard, I can agree to an extent with the "DLC" arguments, while also agreeing that there are things in TOTK that very much improve on BOTW and make it look like a tech demo.

One thing I will recommend in the end to those of you who might be reading this - do not play Breath of the Wild right before Tears of the Kingdom. Whether it's your first time playing BOTW or you're wanting to revisit it, don't do it. I was fortunate enough that my last time playing BOTW was several months ago, but I've seen loads of people not enjoying TOTK because they replayed BOTW in the days before its release, and let me tell you, this game is far less of a unique or fun experience if you play BOTW right before playing TOTK due to the world design. If you play them one after the other, you'll burn yourself out on it and not get to appreciate what TOTK adds to BOTW's world as much as if you had gone in partially or mostly blind.

And that's all I'm gonna say on that. Tears of the Kingdom gets a 8.5/10 from me. I am excited to see where the franchise goes next in terms of its open world concept, I hope Nintendo can at least stray away from this version of Hyrule so we can get something new like we did in BOTW. Tears of the Kingdom was by no means a negative experience for me, and I'm planning on getting back into it tonight and tackling more of its sidequests, which are probably one of my favorite parts of the game. I could very well be way too hard on it, so this opinion could change over time as I spend more time in its world, but these are my general experiences that have come up in the back of my mind over the past couple weeks since its release.

Thanks for reading!

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