Erk

Was scrolling for this comment. I spent a few nights excitedly going over it with my friends before I learned about the internet meltdown, it was utterly baffling. I still can't really fathom it, it's one of the best SW movies ever made imo.

I'm not sure how you can argue that. Starfield does have some of mass effect's fun, but also I can build my own ship, dogfight a group of mercs in it, play house with the parts, disable and board a pirate ship in zero g... mass effect, in turn, has a much tighter story and gameplay loop. The core similarity is, what, that they have a space looter-shooter component?

They're different games. Starfield is kind of a fusion of mass effect and no man's sky, there are plenty of similarities between the three but also a lot of differences.

I'm loving starfield and I'll agree with this. It's a mid eighties score kind of game. If it's what you want it's amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.

On the other hand, it's likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there's a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don't think that should affect launch reviews though.

I think this is it. I enjoy making fun of the NPCs in starfield but mostly when I'm playing I don't notice them at all. I do have a few very pretty screenshots of the game. It's not perfect by any stretch but the scope is impressive and most of it really is pretty good

I don't think Bethesda has ever sold based on graphics no matter how much they want to pretend it. Morrowind and oblivion both looked under par when they came out as well.

I'm not a fan of Bethesda's reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it's like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man's Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won't be going back to it despite loving it. They're not going to add the kind of content I want, they're likely never going to, and they're not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they'd allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.

With starfield, I'm excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I've had a friggin good time and definitely got my money's worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.

The upper whites thing has led to some of the funniest memes I've seen in ages, not gonna complain about that one.

I miss forums so much. A federated backend for forums would be nice. I'm so tired of having these giant communities of angry strangers if I want to talk about anything

It's literally not possible to ride my bike home from work without going through traffic on one of the busiest streets. They force us into the car traffic and then portray us as getting in the way. It's infuriating

Assigned snake at birth, it's a yuan-ti thing

ADHD isn't particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we're going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.

People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.

Fentanyl is very poorly absorbed by eating. A dog could sniff it and get it that way, but it would require quite a bit of it and it's pretty unlikely. Given the priors it's way more likely that the cops have the Fenty Fainties, and are applying it to a dog that had a seizure under stress or something.

Police have a long and storied track record of acting like fentanyl is toxic on sight. I had one try to stop me from administering cpr because he was worried there could be fentanyl on the patient's clothes and I might get it on me through my gloves.

I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.

The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don't fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of "your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay" gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. "Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)"