Charzard4261

I'm so glad someone's mentioned CrossCode! Such a wonderful experience from beginning to end. The world really feels alive with every inch of a mal being used to either enhance the story or hide a puzzle! I loved seeing chests and figuring out how to get to them across several maps.

I'm really looking forward to their next project, Alabaster Dawn. I hope it's just as good!

Of course nothing should be inflexible, but I'm just saying there's no reason for every campaign to be derailed completely. If your players are actively going against the scenario something's gone wrong. And yeah, if you give them the opportunity to do something, be prepared for it to happen and roll with the consequences.

Unless you play low level John Does every time, characters should know stuff about the world they've lived in their whole lives. And if none of that ties into the scenario are you playing a campaign or in a sandbox?

If everyone's on the same page and wanting to play out a story, seeing how your characters and world changes in response to things not playing out as expected is part of the fun. It should never truly derail unless someone is trying intentionally to, in which case you need to talk about it. Or you got complacent and dangled a campaign altering thing too close for them to resist...

I can't imagine how infuriating that must be. How do you live with it?

I was the same! I think it was the Egyptian inspired series where one of the characters asked about what happens when people who don't believe in anything die. Even though I don't remember the exact answer, the feeling of oblivion has stuck with me ever since.

I'd still like to believe that all the gods are actually having a giant battle for supremacy though lol.

I have extremely sensitive hearing. I can tell when there's an animal scarer nearby.

This brings me to Microsoft Teams. You might have seen people mention that their dogs know when someone joins the call before they do. That's because they introduced "ultrasonic howling" to detect if they're in the same room as you, and mutes their mic.

It hurts like fucking hell with headphones on.

This sounds like Osvaldatore's Apex source is being sniffed out. It's just believable enough that the opportunity to be the guy to leak TF|3 was too exciting to pass up.

I hope one day they'll have the courage to actually make TF|3 but I imagine there would be few who worked on the original left at Respawn. I know a bunch of big names left when I played Apex a ton from launch to two years back or so.

I think this looks better than flat blue, but it really depends on the rest of your map. Can't really see a lot of it here.

And why are there a few short horizontal lines in the left side of it?

This is so crazy to me. Why the hell did they start hiding the address? The one thing that can't be faked? Couldn't believe how hard it was the first time I needed to check.

This is similar to what Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson) suggests in one of his other works - that the afterlife is simply whatever you believe it to be. It's pretty comforting imo.

I can still hear the Stevegulls... Scene partner was a mistake!

This article somehow set me on a long path of reminiscence and reflection on how I've not been particularly enjoying many new releases. I usually compose these ramblings and hit delete instead of send, but this hits close to home so please allow me to take to the stage just this once.

It started by reminding me of one of my favourite games of all time: Kid Icarus Uprising. Each level opens with a 5 minute on-rail segment before transitioning to a third person mode where you can explore a little as you make your way to the boss. Every few levels has a unique mechanic to spice things up too, overall providing a great and balanced variety of gameplay whilst you experience an entertaining story through to the end. It's repayable not because there's a ton of different outcomes to dialogue trees or a different NPC to romance, but because it's fun!

I also love to be involved in the game's story, watch the drama unfold around me in real time as characters come and go and tensions ebb and flow. I'd rather have one major choice to make or none at all than this constant deluge of meaningless multiple choice dialogue boxes and quests with outcomes boiling down to "the easy way" or "brute force".

I feel like the success of "open world" games has taken a toll on single player experiences, with it's philosophy mistakenly applied when it probably shouldn't have. I grew up with the DS+ family and since moving to PC I've seen a similar thing happen with Battle Royales and multiplayer, so I can only assume this has happened before and will happen again.

Obviously the answer is Indie games, but visibility is the key problem to solve. I love seeing people talk about their favourites, so if you have one that resonated with you please give them a shout-out! I won't keep you here any longer so I'll only briefly mention the one that gripped me the whole time: CrossCode.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.