#which isn't a universal negative for me in games! death stranding starts with like 4 hours of cutscenes and i watch every second of them

[showyoumyfavoriteobsession]

(Light spoilers for act 3 of Hardspace Shipbreaker)

The story in Hardspace Shipbreaker is focused on unions/labor rights, and I was really curious how they were going to handle the conflict of, like... in-universe, you're doing extremely dangerous work under unethical conditions to try and pull yourself out of deep debt; but as a player, the "work" is the extremely fun and satisfying gameplay. So at some point the devs have to face a game design problem: squaring the story they want to tell with not stopping the player from experiencing the fun part of the game. And I really liked how they did it! They managed to meet both goals by telling the player to just absolutely destroy a ship - giving them something fun to do, a slightly different problem to solve that (probably) wasn't something they would have done in normal gameplay, as well as being a good in-universe justification (a work slowdown, destroying profits, showing solidarity). I haven't been totally enamoured with the story in the game - I'm into the themes, but the writing is a little clunky and the scenes tend to slow down the pace of the game - and I thought they might just have the workers go on strike, which would be thematically appropriate but kind of a bummer in terms of gameplay. It was a pretty clever way to solve that conflict.

#j rambles #i played like 25 hours of this game in early access but hadn't gone back to it since the 1.0 release #so i'm finally playing the story #and i am having fun but. mostly because the gameplay is fun #i primarily like story-heavy games and this doesn't have *that* much story but it still feels like it drags the game down in places #there are no dialogue options so all the dialogue that doesn't take place during a shift i'm just. sitting there listening to them talk #which isn't a universal negative for me in games! death stranding starts with like 4 hours of cutscenes and i watch every second of them #maybe it's because the shifts are so short that when i'm ready to just go on to the next day i don't want to stop all that momentum #but i also get that having *all* the dialogue happen during shifts would be hard to justify diegetically and would probably get annoying #but anyway. it's a good multitasking game. i've been watching a bunch of old drawfee streams while playing lol #and as i said i'm detoxing from bg3. still love that game and i'll probably go back to it but i really needed a break from playing every da #looking forward to my steam year in review this year lmao. last year my most played game was like. 13% of my total playtime? #doing some quick math i think i played almost twice as much bg3 as the next 5 most-played this year combined #wild