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dalishious · 8 months ago

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(I can’t believe I finished this so fast… I basically blacked out and then it was done lol… Anyway, please remember that this is all just my personal opinion, and if you feel differently, that’s fine!)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review

Objectively speaking, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a fun game that the average player is going to enjoy, especially if that average player is coming in without any prior knowledge to the Dragon Age franchise. I believe this is a good jumping-in spot for people who are curious about the world of Thedas. But in contrast, I have seen a lot of criticism from other hard-core fans that I largely agree with. However, it just so happens that most of the criticism I have is not enough to prevent me from overall enjoying the game. That is to say, for pretty much everything I did not like, there was also something I thought was great… Unfortunately, that makes it a little difficult to give a review. So, I’m going to do my best to keep things as clear and concise as possible by splitting up the “good” and the “bad” aspects of DATV.

The Positive

The best thing to come out of DATV is the new cast of characters that make up your companions and supporting associates. While I do think that some of them could have benefitted from more development time to flesh things out further, just judging what we ended up with, is mostly great. I especially found Emmrich and Bellara to be stand-out examples of strong personalities to grasp onto, whose personal stories really touched me in an emotional way.

DATV also has fun with some returning characters. For example, now that Solas is no longer hiding his identity, we get to see a character that both believably honours his part in Inquisition, while also providing a new, refreshing side to him. There are also a number of characters introduced in Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights that appear in the game, like my personal favourites Teia and Viago, who are an absolute delight to interact with!

I think the three act structure is good, albeit with act three being quite short. There are a few sequences that are an absolutely phenomenal mixture of storytelling and engaging gameplay, like all of Weisshaupt! I also really enjoyed stepping out of the main story every once and a while, and into Solas’s backstory through the Crossroads memories – what ended up being extra special about these is how they mirror Rook’s struggle so well, by the end. They are a nice touch.

The locations are beautifully constructed with smooth interactions of climbing, zip-lining, and essentially parkouring your way around, making them fun to explore! They also came with such distinct flavours and character in themselves that influenced a sense of truly experiencing different parts of Thedas, with different cultures.

The mechanic of building up strength with the different factions, and that actually having a huge impact with the ultimate showdown in the end of the game, makes side quests feel far less inconsequential than in Dragon Age: Inquisition by comparison. That, and they number far less.

I like that the story mode actually feels like a story mode; there were only a couple instances where I really had to worry about death, and even then, I was able to just toggle off the death with the customizable gameplay mechanics and continue on.

Finally, it would be remiss not to say that the character creator for DATV is the best BioWare has ever put out. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of the best in any RPG I’ve ever personally experienced. From the flexibility in morphing a character’s head and body between custom shapes, to the little details like sclera colour, vitiligo, and top surgery scars, makes it a shining example of what RPG’s should strive for. (My only critique here is that it would have been nice to have more skin colours.)

The Neutral

I hated the combat for pretty much the entire first act of the game. I found it too hard to keep up with, and too much like Mass Effect bullshit. I can’t say that it’s completely grown on me yet, but I don’t hate it anymore. It’s fine. So, I’m giving this a special little spot before I get into what I didn’t like all the way to the end.

The Negative

As mentioned above, I do think that there is more that could be done with some of the characters to really achieve their full potential. Davrin and Lucanis—while to be clear I still really enjoy as they are—come to mind first, in terms of those who would have benefited from more development time. Most of Davrin’s screen time just revolves around Assan rather than Davrin himself, and Lucanis is so restrained that it takes a while to really crack him open. Both of these characters have intentional personalities that make them harder to get to know, I understand that, but I feel that it would have been all the more rewarding to have more time dedicated to their company after earning their trust and possibly endearment. Instead, it feels like their romance and friendship with Rook are only half-complete, and then rushed to finish.

There are some companion interactions that are just… cringe. There is no other word for it. Now, this is nothing new for BioWare games, but I feel like the “pulling a Bharv” scene for example, was hitting an entirely new low. (If someone misgendered me and then just started doing push-ups instead of just saying “hey sorry about that, I’ll try to do better” I’d be annoyed, not satisfied.) I also felt like most of the temporary rivalries between companions were artificial in nature, rather than organically part of their characters that actually served a purpose. We already knew Emmrich likes books and Harding likes nature; we did not need a whole cutscene with them bickering about camping. (The exception to this is Davrin and Lucanis, who genuinely had room to grow as people out of their multiple confrontations, not just a one-off scene.)

The music in DATV is, for the most part, forgettable and bland. There is one piece that really stands out, and that’s “Where the Dead Must Go”, which is a real banger. I am not a fan of Hans Zimmer’s OST otherwise; I think it is phoned in, just like most of his work. I deeply wish BioWare would have just stuck with Trevor Morris. The best parts musically in this game are just Morris’s work re-used from Dragon Age: Inquisition.

There are certain parts of disjointedness that separates DATV from the past games that are just… bizarre. This is especially the case when it comes to elven lore. For example, Bellara saying she is afraid that elves will be harshly judged for the Evanrus, or Harding saying that elves are “thriving”… as if modern elves are not deeply persecuted across most of Thedas. It made me question more than once if there just was not time in development to do a proper canon-compliancy check with everything, perhaps?

I want finish this part by bringing up again that the biggest flaw in DATV is that it feels very corporate. To repeat what I said in this post: It is as if a computer ran through the game’s script and got rid of anything with “too much” political substance, in an overcorrection to be “safe”. But now that the edges have been so smoothed down to make a block into a ball, it can no longer support anything.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see a lot of creativity went into the creation of this game… but it is also easy to make assumptions on how that creativity was constrained by development hell and corporate oversight. In the end though, Dragon Age: The Veilguard succeeded in being an overall good time, one that I will no doubt be putting just as many countless hours into as the previous installments in the franchise. 7/10.

#dragon age #datv #datv spoilers #dragon age the veilguard #review #datv review

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felassan · 2 months ago

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IGN - 'The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Interview: Just How Mass Effect Is It?'

"The Expanse: Osiris Reborn looks so Mass Effect that some are already calling it Mass Effect: The Expanse. Based on the debut trailer and what we know about how the game works, it’s easy to see why. And to be fair to the developers at Owlcat Games, they’re wearing their inspiration on their sleeves. In an interview with IGN, creative director Alexander Mishulin and head of publishing Andrey Tsvetkov are up-front about the influence BioWare’s sci-fi series has had on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. But, they insist, it’s more than just a carbon copy."

Rest of post under cut due to length.

"As for fans of The Expanse itself, Osiris Reborn is an exciting project as it offers a new story that sees some of the actors from the much-loved Prime Video series reprise their roles. Owlcat won’t say who exactly (I tried!), but at least we know there’s more The Expanse coming for fans still missing the show after it ended in 2022. In fact, for me, there’s even more to be excited about when it comes to The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. I’m a big Mass Effect fan, I love The Expanse, and I love Owlcat’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which is not just one of the best Warhammer 40,000 games of recent years, but one of the best cRPGs around. Is Osiris Reborn the sweet spot in the middle of a venn diagram of Mass Effect, The Expanse, and Warhammer 40,000? Read on to find out just how Mass Effect The Expanse: Osiris Reborn really is."

"IGN: This sounds a lot like Mass Effect to me, even down to the mechanics and gameplay. Is that fair to say? Alexander Mishulin: Of course Mass Effect is a huge inspiration for the team. It was one of the biggest games of that time, of Xbox 360. It was played from cover to cover by many team members. Being game developers, it's part of our dream to build something like the thing we experienced while we were kids and that made a great impression on us. So in part yes, but while still having Mass Effect as an inspiration, it's still very much an Owlcat game. It's our story with choices and consequences. It's more grounded and realistic. It's also mechanically more modern. And while it still has a similar target in the audience, we are providing more choices and we are more focused on a modern approach where you can make your own playstyle, make your own experience through the game, which separates us in many ways from the mechanical decisions of Mass Effect. In terms of companions, we love companions. We love the companions in Mass Effect, and we want to give them more spotlight. We want to provide you with more opportunities to see them in action, not only in a Suicide Mission, but in most of the missions to see how they can help you go through, or maybe experience some stroke of bad luck and you will go and help them. So they’re a bigger part of the story and, in our opinion, a bigger part of our team. We cannot deny it's [Mass Effect] an inspiration, but it's still our own game and our own dream to make a game with similar feelings and bring it to our modern audience."

"IGN: Who do you play as? Alexander Mishulin: You play as a mercenary, and there is a twist to that. When you are creating a character, you are creating a character with a sibling. As in real life, while you are similar to your brother or sister, you’re still very much different. So when you're creating a character, you start as a mercenary. I can't talk a lot about the story, but you will get in a not really great situation and will start to try to get over that. And also mechanically speaking, when you're creating your own character, you can start creating your own playstyle. You can choose from more pre-generated characters that are thematic to various parts, like being a sniper for example. You can also mix and match everything and create something of your own that is more fitting to your character, or just more fitting to the way you play the game. IGN: And is it like Mass Effect where you can create a male or female character who is fully voiced? Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, the game is fully voiced, also with the main characters. You can create male and females. There is a very robust and expansive character creation with a lot of options to choose from. Nice hairstyles, nice features, everything you would expect from modern character creation."

"IGN: You’ve said you will meet some of the characters people know from the show. Can you say which characters from the show people can expect to meet? Have you got any of the actors? Are they based on the likenesses of the actors from the show with voice work? Alexander Mishulin: We can confirm that there will be actors from the show. But at this time I can't say the name of the characters or the name of the actors. I'm sorry. IGN: But that's really exciting because they're reprising their roles, aren't they? Which given the show has ended will be exciting for fans to see them again. Andrey Tsvetkov: Absolutely. As Alex has mentioned, some of the actors will be returning to their iconic roles and you will see them in the game."

"IGN: One of the things that Mass Effect was famous for was being able to romance your party members with sex scenes. Is that something you have in your game? Alexander Mishulin: Of course. Companions are a huge part of our games. And in all of our games we had various interactions, including romances, and there will be romances in this game too. I can't go into the specifics of which particular characters, or which particular romances of course. But such interactions will be present. As for companions, as I already said, your sibling, either brother or sister because this character will have the same gender as your character — so it's either two brothers or two sisters — you can think about this character as your first companion and most loyal companion from the start. As for other companions, we are not going into details on them, but they represent specialists and professionals from different fields of knowledge. And of course you'll be meeting Martian characters, Earth characters, and Belter characters. All of them will be part of your team, and this will add additional dynamic inter-relations. Because as you know, a lot of events in The Expanse are politically charged, so you can expect some of your companions to have strong opinions about your decisions regarding the politics and allegiances to particular factions."

"IGN: You’ve said the game will have zero-g sections where you go out on the hull of spacecraft. Some of the best moments of The Expanse show were the zero-g scenes. It’s a grounded, hard sci-fi universe, an adult show with gore, nudity, and sex. Will the game be similar in tone to the TV show? Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, The Expanse is very much an adult game with all of those themes, with difficult and tragic moments. Being a cover shooter, you can expect that there is a lot of graphic violence. So yeah, it's very much on par with the show. But in terms of tone, we are exploring The Expanse from a little bit of a different side. You will be seeing dark moments, but you sometimes will be seeing light moments too, because it's not only doom and gloom everywhere. So you can expect to see the more ordinary life of the people of the various factions. Even in the hard situations there are times when people just rise up and become successful. And so you can expect to see the hardship of the Belt characters, but you can also see some of the Belt characters who become very successful and rather powerful. It's our understanding of The Expanse universe. And it's also — sorry for the tautology — it's expanding the setting itself, allowing you to see some of the locations you know from the shows or from the books in different states or in a different light."

"IGN: This game sounds very ambitious and a step up from what I know Owlcat for. It’s described as a AAA action RPG, Unreal Engine 5. When you have comparisons to Mass Effect, people will think of this as a flashy, big budget sci-fi adventure game, which is on a level we've not seen from you as a studio before. It would be great to get some insight into the scope of the project. How have you gone about changing the way the company works to be able to do something like this and meet expectations, which will be high? I know it's hard to say how long the game is, but is this a shorter, tightly constructed linear game? Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, it's a huge step up and a big change to everything in the way we make a game, because all of our processes are really reimagined for this game. But in a lot of fields our expertise allows us to make the step, to take those risks. For example, we are pretty sure about our storytelling, about how we depict characters, depict choices, and provide you with those choices and consequences. When you have this basis, building up on that to make dialogues more cinematographic, make more cutscenes that involve the player and immerse them into the atmosphere, is far easier because you already know how to tell the story, you already know how to present those characters. So we are building up on our strong sides and expanding them to allow us to build this kind of game. And also we of course expanded our own team as well. We hired a lot of professionals, including the people who were working on other AAA titles similar to those, especially on Cyberpunk. So we are building up on their experience as well. In terms of scope of the project, of course it will be smaller than, say, Rogue Trader, which is an immense adventure. But you can still expect most of our staples. So it's not a linear adventure. You will be traveling through the solar system and you will be able to select whoever you want to go on that mission, or do you want to go and help your companion or continue along the story? Time is sometimes also a factor, like if you go into the location earlier or later, something will change and your previous decision will affect the location as well. So all this intricate storytelling is very much in place and you can expect us to deliver on that. It especially works well with the politics, because there are three factions and there is a political game you will be slowly dragged into, and as you start to realize it you understand you can go with it and champion some of the factions, or you can betray them and be a double agent and learn the secrets and sell those secrets to other side. So all this dynamic is in place, but in a shorter adventure. And this adventure is far more cinematographic. That is one part of the reason it is a little bit shorter, because we are trying to bring more action to life, more choices to life. We are not telling it like it was in a book where you read a lot, but you will see a lot of the things that were previously just written with your own eyes, and that requires a lot of effort."

"IGN: Do you have a release window in mind? How far along is the project? Andrey Tsvetkov: Obviously we have a release window in mind, but we won't be sharing it today unfortunately, just because there still might be room for wiggling a little bit, and we will be saving this one for later. What we can say is that we've been working on this project for quite a while now. We started pre-production in 2022. We are not rushing this, right? We are taking our time to do this in the proper manner and we are very excited about how it's actually shaping up. But we will take our time to finish it and we'll be sharing the information about the release window when we are absolutely ready and we are absolutely confident that we can deliver the experience we want in this specific time window."

"IGN: I've got one last question. In the world of The Expanse, humans struggle in space and space travel is difficult. Do you have any mechanics that challenge the player to cope with being in space or space travel in the same way we see in the books and the show? Alexander Mishulin: We actually thought about adding that to the game and even designed some of those. But we decided that we will show those things, we will tell you about those things, but we will not let you play them or manage them because it leads to additional tediousness and draws your attention away from the story and characters. And we want our focus to be very much on the story and the characters. So you will be seeing them, seeing all those elements in cutscenes. You will be seeing the moments when the Juice is coming in and the chairs go into the flat positions. You will be seeing ships that either accelerate or decelerate. You will be seeing all the somersault maneuvers and everything. But you will not be driving the ship by yourself. Of course all the trajectories for space travel will be realistic, not like going straight but taking into account gravity and gravity wells and going around the planets and everything. We are in The Expanse so we're very much grounded and bound by realism, but we don't want realism to take a lot of fun from you. Just sometimes a little bit of fun, but not a lot of fun! But you can expect some of the flesh physics to be in play. Just an example, of course when you're having a shootout in a zero-g environment, the blood will perform in the correct way, not just splattering on the ground. There are a lot of such small details everywhere. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is coming to PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S."

[source] <- there is some concept art at the link

#mass effect #bioware #video games #long post #longpost #osiris reborn

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clowns0up-felix · 2 months ago

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Why do you dislike ToTK if I may ask? :0

Lights a cigarette and stares off into the distance .. well well well

I think Tears of the Kingdom is a lazy story, especially in comparison to any other main franchise Zelda game, and the story is a poor mess that tries to do what Breath of the Wild did and fails at that miserably. You would think copying one of the best games I've ever played (botw) would give them the opportunity to do at least just as good again but all they did was improve the gameplay and add some neat small stuff that you can enjoy while writing a joke of a story. The moment I finished the second temple and found out the ancient sages (or whatever they're called | can't recall) cutscenes were verbatim the same l realized what kind of game this was. Totk had lost its potential right after the first ever teaser trailer, removing that damn rat dying meant they had to kill the games story instead apparently. I loved playing totk and I loved drawing fanart and I loved landing on the light dragon and leaving a silent princess for her, but 2 years later I can't even think about the game without getting annoyed. I get annoyed by people that say it's their favorite zelda game and that feels way too pessimistic but I can't help it the game is that upsetting to me. I don’t dislike people for liking it and I try not to judge I promise, I don't want people to stop leaving excited tags under my totk posts but I simply can’t share that love for a game that I’ve waited for for years only to leave me utterly frustrated. It's an amazing game but that's where it stops because it can't do anything right but the game aspect I feel. I feel like this would've been a genuinely good DLC to botw because it wouldn't have needed a completely new story for that, they obviously just wanted to make all their good ideas come together and had to glue them together with a shit story that does not stick with you except for the light dragon aspect. Rauru from Oot had a bigger impact on me than totk Rauru damn it.

The story doesn't achieve the same emotional impact on me the way botw did at all. I do not think fondly of the Zonai I do not care at all for the ancient sages I did not get emotional watching Sonia die because the Tears were handled extremely poorly from a gameplay mechanic viewpoint, leaving the one of her death to be my third, barely knowing her at that point. She wasn't someone I felt sorrow towards after seeing her die, I at most felt sad that Zelda was sad because she was already an established character I deeply cared for from botw. The Temples, imo, had really cool concepts but every boss except colgera was mediocre at best. The depths had a genuinely great introduction, the way you fly down and that music hits, and the yiga down there are a cool idea, but you get bored down there so fast it's impressive. It can't really offer much I feel. It might've been better to put the split effort from the depths and the sky islands and maybe combine them to create a more creative version of either?

To me the best parts of the game are everything right up to link waking up and everything after Ganondorf transforming into a dragon with some fun stuff sprinkled inbetween. A good game and that's it because there is no story to think about to me...!

There’s a lot more stuff I could get into but I think this paints a decent picture of my opinion

There is a lot of stuff I like ofc don’t get me wrong, I think there's genuine great gameplay improvement from botw (which is just extra annoying bc I hate playing botw and thinking totk did it better LOL), I think the character design is great, I think a lot of the sets are stunning and zelda looks so cute with the short hair they did they great justice looks wise in this game, the dragons are SO COOL! It's a genuine joy to play. But that’s not enough to save it for me.

Whatever . Walks away into the fog

#to any of my friends that recognize this text maybe. yes I copy pasted the one I wrote for Sam’s survey LOL #ask #I’m sorry to all the enjoyers I don’t relate but I’m happy for you that you find joy in it #got more asks asking but they’re all anon so I won’t bother screenshotting them and putting them in here hope that’s a okay

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anim-ttrpgs · 9 months ago

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A big part of Eureka is splitting the party. Normally games are loathe to do this because of the potential to bore players while they passively watch others play the game. I'm curious how you deal with this when you run Eureka. Sending players away seems like it could make it either better or worse. Like if it's at a home, people can go hang out by the snack table and drink and chat, but that doesn't work as well at, say, a game store. I'm curious how people felt about having to leave the game several times.

While the risk of boring the players or putting too much stress on the GM is a real concern, the addage of "don't split the party" actually originated in the TSR D&D era, where splitting the party made them weak and vulnerable to all sorts of situations that would be less of a problem for a full strength party, However, for a game like Eureka that produces more conventional narratives (everyone take note that I did not say that Eureka produces more narrative or is "more focused on narrative", just more conventional narratives) and has more of a focus on intrigue and horror, the party splitting up to cover more ground and collect more clues in the limited time they have to solve the mystery, but also making each one of them more vulnerable if something happens, is an actual trade-off that can improve the gameplay and story.

First of all, besides it just being really entertaining, I really recommend you listen to the Tiny Table Actual Play of Eureka. It has some really good examples of splitting the party and sending players away that are executed really well, and also some good discussion of it in the post-mortem episode and the interview.

I’m going to answer the ask directly from my own gameplay experience, but I really really urge anyone who has played Eureka to comment with their own experiences with splitting the party and sending players away.

Alright, so, obviously how long players are willing to wait their turn is group-dependent, but with our own group, we’ve actually kinda had the opposite problem from players getting bored. Instead, Narrator and the players whose characters are currently in the spotlight start to worry that they’re selfishly hogging too much session time, and try to rush the scene along (to its great detriment), when in reality the players who were sitting out were happy to keep waiting. Realizing this led to us altering the advice regarding splitting the party in the rulebook, and actually recommending the Narrator go a little longer before switching to the other characters.

I personally am happy to wait up to like 90 minutes if my character is out of the scene, because I have faith in my group and also in Eureka that the payoff for waiting will be that much greater, seeing the characters relay what they have learned while they were apart in dialogue rather than the player just saying “My investigator tells them everything that happened.” It really heightens the tension, lets the characters shine, and can even really help with solving the mystery, because having the events and evidence recounted out loud can help with making connections that might have gone over people’s heads the first time.

Of course like the rulebook says, it also comes to the judgement of the play group as a whole, and should definitely be discussed beforehand basically as part of session zero, and even mid-session if it needs to be. (Communicate your preferences to your play group!!!!!) There’s plenty of scenes and situations where having the other players leave the room instead of sitting and watching would add nothing at all to the experience.

Now I want to hear other people’s opinions. If you have played Eureka and had a party split where some players left the room or otherwise excused themselves, how did it go?

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litsenn · 20 days ago

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I'm working on a headcanon fic for Durgestarion and I'm coming up short on the concept of why Astarion claims to love killing so much. I was wondering if I could get your thoughts!

Throughout the game he remarks often about his love for bloodshed, killing, etc, but its also made very clear that he never killed his targets for Cazador, nor was ever allowed to drink from them. I understand that he feels as if those unwilling to help themselves, the weak, etc, don't deserve his mercy or pity, as no one every showed such grace to him, but I wonder what led him to have actual bloodlust or murderous desires for the innocent.

I'm toying with the idea that Cazador possibly used his spawn as a little brigade of assassins, alongside them being his personal UberEats delivery drivers. However, if that was the case, wouldn't Astarion resent every kill since they would have come at the behest of Cazador?

In my mind you're the resident Astarion expert so I'm curious what you think! Thank you<3

Hello, and thank you for your message! (and omg, I’m no expert at all 😅Thank you very much for valuing my opinion, it means a lot, but I’m just someone obsessed with our dear vampire spawn 🩶)

It's a really interesting point and it really inspired, so I’ll try to give you a clear answer through my own interpretation of the game. The least I can say to begin with is that, his appreciation for killing is multifactorial. And since he’s such a well-written character, he’s also complex. So it's going to be quite long (What did you expect? xD)

But first, as it was pointed out by many persons before, let’s not forget that killing is much more "common" in Faerûn than in our world. Even the good guys kill (Wyll, Aylin, Karlach) kill. They kill the ‘bad guys’, but they still kill – and sometimes enjoy killing the bastards.

You can also think of how the companions reply to Durge if they tell them about their urge to kill. They are understanding; we wall want to kill. And sometimes we do it. It happens. Well excuse me! irl, if I told my friends that I wanted to kill everything that moves, I’m pretty sure they’d worry about me. But because it’s a fantasy world where killing is… well… accepted most of the time (at least if you’re killing “the right persons”), murder isn’t such a terrible thing. I mean, when Durge kills Alfira/Quil, most of your companions are appalled because she was innocent, but there's no real consequences.

Besides, in a imaginary world like that of DnD, it’s not so unusual to have characters who enjoy killing, because that’s what makes exciting, gloomy stories, that’s what make complex, grey-aligned characters. Because DnD – the world and the gameplay – is but a tool to make great stories in fantasy settings.

I could mention other fantasy worlds to illustrate my point, and I'll stick to that of The Lord of the Rings and JRR Tolkien generally speaking (first inspiration for most fantasy materials); the good guys (aka the fellowship of the rings, or the Eldar generally speaking) kill all the time: Orcs mostly, but also humans who don’t align with their principles, the Easterlings, or the humans and half-humans who serve Saruman. And it’s quite clear that they enjoy it. Take Gimli in The Two Towers for instance: “Yet my axe is restless in my hand. Give me a row of orc-necks and room to swing and all weariness will fall from me!”

In our real world, that’s not how you deal with conflicts; in our world it would be called war crimes and genocide.

So yeah, this long introduction just to say that we cannot exactly apply the “laws” and “moral system” of our real world to that of a fantasy setting. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind when you study such materials. Because that’s also why fantasy worlds are so satisfying; they allow us to imagine all kind of stuff - in a more or less cathartic way - including violent acts which we would never even consider in the real world. And that’s why we are so fascinated by grey aligned characters in fiction (it also works for sci-fi, comics, etc.)

Back to Astarion and Fearûn.

Why does he enjoy killing? Does he really enjoy it? Where is it coming from? As I said, there are several answers, and they're all multi-factorial. The first thing I want to say is that it's fair to believe that Astarion didn’t relish in such violence before he was turned. The magistrate – whether you deem him corrupted or not - wasn't a killer. Perhaps he issued ruling that would eventually sentence someone to death, but he wasn’t the one killing. So I think we can legitimately admit that his thirst for killing and violence came during those 200 years as Cazador’s slave.

His vampiric nature

Did his vampiric "condition" turn him instantly into a sadistic killer? No, I think it's more nuanced than that. But, vampire spawns are described as "monsters" and they are categorised as natural enemies, as predators and foes, if only by the DnD system. By default, they're neutral evil. So I would say that being turned ultimately changes one's approach to violence, not only because of their hunger which can bring a vampire (spawn or not) to hurt and eventually kill, but also because this 'curse'/'condition' changes something in their nature. A corruption, so to speak, that makes killing something more 'natural'.

Besides, according to the Forgotten Realm Wiki, vampires spawns are mostly driven by pride, thinking themselves better than other creatures, which could also explain why killing other creatures is so easy to them: the moment one thinks oneself above others, killing others becomes more... casual.

Take Dal, for instance – before she was turned, she was a respected physician. We don't know what kind of person she used to be, but when you meet her in the flophouse, she doesn’t look cruel, heartless or cold. On the contrary. She really seems deeply affected by what's happening, she gently tries to bring her brothers back to their senses without aggravating the situation. So it’s fair to believe that she was a kind doctor who cared about her patients. And yet, she eventually kills an innocent child. That murder could fall along the lines of “desperate situations call for drastic remedies”, but the way she plans the murder in her notebook looks so cold. So pragmatical. Nothing like that of a desperate person who kills without wanting to kill.

It's calculated.

I’m not saying she enjoyed killing Victoria, but she did it remorselessly. Pragmatic as a cold doctor who will experiment on patients. Maybe she was already like this when she was alive, but I'm not convinced, precisely because of her empathetic reaction in the flophouse.

This cold, heartless killing is, I think, partly due to her vampiric nature. Even as Cazador's victim, she is now a predator, and her instincts tell her that killing is a normal thing to do.

Likewise, Astarion was supposedly not a killer before. You can imagine him as a cold man, with a questionable sense of justice. But a killer? I don’t think so. Of course, you're free to imagine whatever you want about his past - completely valid - but Larian seems to have discarded the 'corrupted magistrate' bit, and nothing in the game refer even remotely to him being corrupted back then, let alone a killer or a sadistic bastard. So I work on the assumption that he was neither of that - maybe already grey-aligned and cold, but to a certain extent only. And now, he kills. And enjoys it.

“Killing is an instinct for us. I respect you for that." He says to Durge. And this instinct, I don't think it was there when he was alive. I think he acquired it when he became a vampire spawn. What’s instinctive is something which has not been consciously learned. It’s something that has become natural, partly from his vampiric nature, but also, I think, through his experience as Cazador's slave.

The influence of the environment

There’s no denying that those 200 years as Cazador’s spawn were 200 years of utter violence. Astarion was tortured, saw his siblings be tortured, they were humiliated and starved, abused and degraded. In such an environment, violence becomes common ground. It’s hard not to be become violent yourself when extreme violence is part of the daily routine.

His autonomy and free will were taken from him, and he was forced to do horrible stuff: luring people to Cazador, kidnapping children and who knows what else.

And indeed, for 200 years, Astarion knew (well, he thought) that all his 'lovers' would end up killed. He feels responsible for their demise, so even if he’s not the direct killer, being the cause of someone's death is no longer something exceptional to him. He is – whether he wanted it or not – accomplice to those murders.

Besides, Cazador might have also ordered them to do more horrible stuff for specific occasions – Astarion says that his usual mission was just about luring people in, the kidnapping for instance, was an uncommon mission

You mentioned your headcanon about how Cazador could have sent his spawns as a killing brigade. Maybe. After all he sent the spawns to attack your camp in Act 3. But if it happened, it happened exceptionally, at least according to canon.

Because if Astarion dies and you use speak with dead on his corpse, he admits that he only killed a few people in his life. And corpses can't lie.

His job was to lure people in, says the corpse. And that's all.

Besides, Astarion never mentions anything like that - of course he could be lying or not remembering well (after all, he says he didn't really remembered kidnapping the kids, so that could be a thing). But since his corpse only mentions "some" killings, I would say that if Cazador indeed sent his spawns to kill, it only happened a few times.

Now, if Cazador didn't force Astarion to kill those few persons, why did he do it? to protect himself while he was prowling in the streets of Baldur’s Gate? Or did he happily kill them just because he could? or for ulterior motives? To rob them for instance? Everything's possible.

After all, he wasn’t a rogue before being turned, he became one and learned his tricks during those 200 years lurking in the shadows. We can imagine that he used his time in the streets to do all kind of mischiefs, whether for survival or for “fun” – as much fun as he could get in his situation - including relishing in violence because that’s all he knew by then. Also, we know he was mostly prowling in the lower city at night. Not the safest place. In this environment, you become acquainted with thieves, brutes, drunkards and the type of people who won’t be particularly sweet and have gentle conversations about flowers and sweet love-stories. So you mimic them to better fit in. And you get used to it.

We’ll never know about all this, It’s all up to your imagination. But I think it's fair to believe that the people he met at night in Baldur's Gate also influenced his violent behaviour.

His targets/'lovers'

Astarion says it himself: most of his sex-partners weren’t like Sebastian. Most of them were violent. So, not only he was used to lure people to their death, but those people represented (more or less) a danger to him. They weren’t gentle lovers, they were rough and uncaring.

And I speak from experience here, having sex with someone like this because you have to do it to survive is no pleasant experience. And you have to go through the whole thing pretending you're enjoying it.... It makes you used to sexual violence and it breeds its own violence. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in some cases, he was happy to deliver them to his master. There must have been a sense of satisfaction in knowing that they would soon be killed – I tend to believe he would have even preferred to kill the bastards himself.

In any case, that's also a element that must be taken into account when you look at 'why is Astarion so violent': Even the most intimate moments were violent, because his partners were.

Revenge

It naturally brings me to another point: Revenge. Astarion craves revenge. Against Cazador, against the heroes who didn’t save him, against his siblings who remind him too much of himself, against the whole word.

A lot of survivors feel that way.

Obviously, in real life, killing someone to avenge yourself isn’t the healthiest way to deal with the situation, but as a survivor myself, I can’t deny that I had thoughts about killing my abusers. Only thoughts, of course, because I don’t actually enjoy hurting people. But it’s a normal reaction.

In a fantasy settings however, in which murder is quite common business, things are different. It’s kill or be killed as a routine, it’s revenge always taking the shape of murder. Think about Karlach and Aylin who appear as a good-aligned characters and who happily kill their oppressors. The catharsis is real, and as players, we find it satisfying to see the bastards be punished so violently. But would I actually take a knife, find one of my abusers and stab him to death? Hell no.

That's also why fiction exists.

As for Astarion, killing is a way to be in control, to reclaim his autonomy, a reappropriation not only of his body, but also of his vampiric nature and ingrained violence – and it’s not just about killing Cazador or other people who might have wronged him, it’s about being seen as the killer he was turned into. It’s like saying to the world: ”You made me this, you want me to be a monster. Then I'll be that monster, and now you will pay the price.”

Which makes his line “I am so much more than what you made me” so meaningful. He can kill, and he will kill again, but his fate is not to become the murderous monster craving for power every one expects him to become. He is a killer, but he will use these skills to kill those who 'deserve' it (according to the generally admitted morals). More than that, one can imagine that he will kill to better protect those who need protection.

He is a killer, but he won't be the killer people usually see in vampires.

A performance?

This last point is deeply intertwined with the previous one.

One could see his claims about how he enjoys killing as a performance, a role – an exaggeration. Maybe even Astarion himself doesn’t realize he can be someone else than a heartless killer. Because that’s how the world sees him: as a monster who can coldly kill to feed or to become more powerful. And he adopted those bias and hardly believes that he can be anything else (at least until Act 3).

And it would makes sense since he likes playing the professional assassin (like here). And maybe he actually loves being that kind of person – after all, again, in his unromanced epilogue, he says he still enjoys killing.

But in Act 1 and even into Act 2, he’s particularly vocal about enjoying murder, so much that it could be seen as exaggerated. You can even tease him about it after recruiting Minthara.

It can be explained by the fact that he wants to appear as the dangerous vampire, in order to keep people at distance. and to present himself with a certain aura of danger. It’s also a way to protect himself too: Don't get to close or else...

So he adopts (willy-nilly) that dreadful image of the vampire spawn and doesn't really question it: "According to the rest of the world, I'm a monster, and I'll let them know."

Durgestarion: the mirror effect.

Now if you connect all the points above to redeemed Durge's story, it makes even more sense: Astarion was forced to lure people to their doom – Durge was forced to obey the urge and kill people in the name of Bhaal. They’re both used to violence because that’s how they were taught to survive, because that’s how they were taught that one gets power, because that’s how they were ‘rewarded’, or at least, not punished.

There’s some kind of brainwashing shit in this: if you don’t kill, or don’t lead people to their doom, you will suffer. Killing - or not caring about other people’s death - becomes a second nature. For both of them. They learned to enjoy the idea of seeing others being killed because when those people died, Astarion and Durge survived or were rewarded.

And you don’t get rid of that ‘habit’ easily. Whatever you imagine his temperament was before he was turned, Astarion was alive for approximatively 40 years, and was a slave for about 200 years; what’s amazing is not just that he still wants to live, what’s amazing is that he still has the capacity to feel empathy and love in spite of it all, that he still wants to help others (in the radiant road). And in (redeemed) Durge, he can see it, and he can take some distance from his own bias. As his partner, Durge becomes the reflection not just of his enslavement and liberation, but also of his crimes and of his redemption.

They show to each other that freedom from this ingrained violence is possible.

But this violence is nonetheless in him, whether it comes from his vampiric condition, from the horrible environment in which he lived for so long, from his need for revenge, or even from his temperament (or, as I think, from all of this)... what matters in the end, is that he eventually accepts this darkness as a part of himself, without it defining himself. He's more than just that. Therefore, he can target it against people who ‘deserve’ it (according to what form of justice, that’s up to him I guess).

I hope that helps, anon! Feel free to ask if something isn't clear.

#astarion #astarion headcanons #astarion ancunin #bg3 headcanon #headcanon astarion #baldur's gate 3 astarion #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate astarion #bg3 headcanons #bg3 astarion #astarion bg3 #astarion analysis #bg3 analysis #durgestarion #durge x astarion #astarion x durge

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saylor-twift · 6 months ago

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people give all the credit to fontaine for being the “best region” (and they’re not wrong tbh) but why does everyone forget that genshin really started to glow up in sumeru?? like story flow, exploration, multi-layered map, character bursts/gameplay, not to mention the addition of dendro, a whole new element???

granted, sumeru still had plenty of flaws and i’m still not over the fact that they absolutely FUCKED dehya’s shit up so bad (she was the one sumeru character i wanted more than anyone else when it came out) but sumeru was peak in my opinion and im still not over the fact that it’s over. :(

some of my favorite things from sumeru IF you care:

- the relationship progression and teamwork between dehya, cyno and alhaitham. like they all started off super untrusting and unwilling to work with each other but were forced to make it work and ended up making a great team

- the archon quest in general had me so hooked the whole time i loved it (even the annoying ass samsara repetition at the beginning lol)

- Nilou’s burst, gameplay, and design. prettiest character in the whole game imo. (i still wish she had more potential as a dps rather than strictly a bloom/hydro applicator but oh well)

- Nahida’s writing. basically her whole character and development was so good, such a great archon

- literally everything to do with scaramouche/wanderer but if you guys are following me you already know i love him so do i really need to explain?

- absolutely BEAUTIFUL landscape even if it sucks to explore

- coolest looking enemies and bosses in the game i think (especially the eremites like what?? they literally look like they should be playable)

- the music in vorukasha oasis/ basically that whole area in general. the vocals are so pretty i literally stay there for hours just listening to the music, it’s my favorite area in the whole game i go there all the time when im bored

anyways that’s it now it’s y’all’s turn to tell me about your favorite nation and your favorite things in it!!!

#saylor’s thoughts #genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #hoyoverse #wanderer x reader #wanderer #sumeru #fontaine #sumeru is peak you can’t change my mind sorry #scaramouche x reader #nahida #nilou

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blueskittlesart · 1 year ago

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i kinda really wanna see a big ol vent/rant from you about genshin now lol. I would read an essay

I'm not sure you understand the insanity you just unlocked in me but ok

genshin impact is probably the clearest modern example i can think of of capitalism absolutely eviscerating a creative project. For context, I started playing genshin in 2021, just after the 1.4 update. it was venti's first rerun/the first windblume festival if that means something to you. and I really genuinely thought that it might have had something special. It was a gacha that didn't FEEL like a gacha, which was a huge feat to me.

it began with a very simple story pitch--you, the protagonist, are one of a set of twin siblings traveling through space. you come upon a seemingly unassuming world and your attempts to continue your journey are suddenly stopped by a mysterious, all-powerful figure. you are separated from your sibling and wake up alone on the shores of this planet you were attempting to leave together. throughout that opening cutscene and scattered through the world and your character's dialog there are implications that all is not as it seems, that your character is something unique to this world and that they possess powers and abilities that you've yet to unlock. You are told that you must travel the seven nations of this world in order to find your sibling, which is great--a simple, zelda-like objective which drives the player to explore the secondary narratives of the world. none of this is bad on the surface. in fact i'd argue it's pretty good. there's a ton that can be done with these story bones. even at launch the map and combat system were full of potential as well.

Note: for ease of reading, i'm going to label the different storylines of the game now. A-plot refers to the central objective of the entire game; the find-your-sibling plot and everything that encompasses, including the abyss order/dain, the heavenly principles, the fake sky, etc. B-plot refers to the secondary objective present in each new nation, usually meeting the archon and/or solving a problem for the archon. (A and B-plots will occasionally intersect.) C-plot refers to any story, location, or background information which remains in permanent gameplay but which isn't directly related to the A or B-plots, such as dragonspine, the chasm, enkanomiya, etc. D-plot refers to any story, location, or background information which is confined to limited-time events and does NOT remain in permanent gameplay, regardless of its connection or lack thereof to the A and B-plots, such as the golden apple archipelago, the infamous albedo/dragonspine event, the infamous kaeya/diluc event, etc. Lore as i will refer to it in this post refers to any information which is present in permanent gameplay but which is not directly told to the player within the A or B-plot story quests and objectives, including books, weapon, artifact, and item descriptions, world quest dialog and puzzles, etc.

So now we're in mid-2021, there are two nations' worth of B-plot story quests released in full, and we've run into our first problem, which is that the game isn't finished yet. I don't have any actual information about how the game was/is written, but based on what i've observed over the past few years, my best guess is that the A-plot has been fully written since the beginning, at least in some form. there were very early-game events and information pertaining to the A-plot that would take years to see any actual payoff in the main story quests (kaeya's origin story, the 1.3 scaramouche fake-sky drop, the flowers in lumine's hair, etc.) but those kinds of A-plot story easter eggs very quickly dropped off when the game absolutely EXPLODED during the pandemic.

this sudden burst in popularity was the true beginning of the end for genshin, i think, because suddenly they had a HUGE fanbase that desperately wanted more content faster than they could pump out new A-plot or even B-plot story quests. one of the most pervasive complaints about the game when I began playing in 2021 was that there was nothing to do between story quests. update 1.4 (which was the update I started playing at) was important in that it was the first time since genshin's release over a year before that players recieved any new A-plot, in the form of the archon quest We Will Be Reunited, also known as the quest with the most fucking misleading name of all time. you'll never guess what doesn't fucking happen during this quest. anyways. we were a year into gameplay, two nations out of seven released and a third on the not-so-distant horizon, and it seemed obvious that players were owed some sort of A-plot payoff. and that's very much what WWBR was advertised as, from the quest's name to the banners full of art of the twins staring wistfully at each other. The thing is, what i'm describing as A-plot payoff was actually. not really A-plot payoff at all. WWBR was the reveal that the protagonist's sibling was working with the abyss order, and that the abyss order was connected somehow to Khaenri'ah, which at this point casual players would only have known about from THAT QUEST and MAYBE kaeya's character descriptions if they were diligent enough to get him to friendship level 10 (which, btw there is no indication that you should do to get important context about the story of the game, because kaeya is a 4-star starter character and the only character in the entire game that actually has genuinely important story hidden in his character descriptions.) So what I'm calling A-plot payoff felt at the time a lot less like A-plot payoff than it did like an abyss sibling cameo in an attempt to satiate everyone who was begging for more story. We actually gained almost net 0 information. this is very quickly going to become a pattern.

As I've already alluded to, the motives behind this writing decision are transparently obvious. Genshin is a free gacha game which relies on a consistently active and engaged userbase to make its money. With fans getting restless about the lack of engaging story at the time and a new, very ambitious B-plot quest gearing up for release that would require major support from that fan base in order to remain profitable, the writers were backed into a corner. they HAD to throw the fans some sort of bone in order to keep them engaged with the A-plot, since it was originally pitched as the driving force for the story as a whole, but they were also clearly not at a stage of the writing process where it was prudent to give the player any REAL information about the A-plot. This is how we ended up with a 10-second abyss sibling cameo and an offhanded mention of Khaenri'ah, a nation whose plot-relevance was at that point still basically unknown.

The real problem is, WWBR worked. at least, it worked as intended at the time. It satiated story-focused fans in the interlude between B-plot nations, as hyv was gearing up to release inazuma, which required a lot of time in preparation. WWBR was followed almost immediately by the C-plot golden apple archipelago in 1.6, widely regarded as one of the better events of version 1. GAA was memorable especially because it was the first event that involved an entirely new, limited-time-only map, meaning the event had much more longevity than the standard events players were used to. This is, imo, most likely the update combination that led to the standard formula which hyv uses for its quests and events nowadays. the back-to-back release of WWBR and GAA satisfied both fans who wanted A-plot story AND silenced criticisms about the game lacking endgame playability, which at the time must have seemed like a goldmine to writers desperate for a solution to their content-to-fanbase ratio problem.

From here, genshin started following a standard method of release for their next three nations--inazuma, sumeru, and fontaine. the formula generally went as follows: one major version update (usually version x.0) containing a major map update which included all B-plot relevant locations in the new nation, and the first chapter of the B-plot story quest relevant to that nation. this would then be followed by 2-3 version updates which would each contain the next chapter in the nation's B-plot story quest, sequentially. After the nation's B-plot quest ended, during the downtime in which the next nation's story and map would be finalized, subsequent updates would be largely C-plot, and would contain minor expansions of the map to increase endgame playability via exploration and world quests. This is how we ended up with updates like the chasm, the several extra islands in inazuma, and the quite frankly ridiculously large sumeru map, as well as the offloaded maps like enkanomiya and the sea of bygone eras. with the possible exception of the chasm, none of these areas are A OR B-plot relevant. hyv has realized that artificially inflating the map makes their game technically more engaging during the downtime between nations. However, this comes at a price. While the scenery and set design of the game remains consistently beautiful, the actual, mechanical gameplay that populates that scenery very quickly became mind-numbingly boring if not borderline unplayable. While the 1.0 questlines were not perfect, there was at least an emphasis on the player actually DOING things. 1.0 B-plot quests would have you going to mini-dungeon temples and completing challenges which would acclimate you to the combat system while also serving narrative purpose. There were quests that required you to navigate open-world dungeons. Because your characters were lower-level, combat challenges that arose during these quests were CHALLENGES, rather than two-second buttonmashing segments. By the time we get to sumeru, though, both B-plot AND C-plot quests have become little more than moving your character from location to location and tapping through (usually unvoiced) dialog. there's no GAMEPLAY in the quests anymore, because gameplay isn't what makes money. What DOES make money is giving players 300 hidden chests to find in an open-world map segment, each of which gives them 1/80th of a gacha pull. And so the story suffers and the map gets bigger.

Along with the map expansions, downtime between nations usually also nets us one A-plot quest, usually involving the character dainslief, who was the driver of the initial WWBR quest. This is the second half of hyv's magical formula for keeping fans happy between major releases. the A-plot quests will, as a general rule, give players either very little new information or no new information at all, but will dress up the delivery in such a way that it ALMOST feels as though the protagonist has moved forward somehow. the most recent example of this writing style, the 4.7 quest bedtime story, amounts to about an hour and a half of gameplay and, while it DOES contain a segment in which the protagonist finally actually has a conversation with their sibling, that conversation literally begins with the line "I have so many questions, but for some reason I don't want to ask them right now," ensuring that the sibling will not actually be required to give away any plot-relevant information whatsoever, and the quest ends with the protagonist FORGETTING THAT THE CONVERSATION EVER HAPPENED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

As I think I mentioned before, the cardinal problem of genshin impact's writing is that fans want answers faster than the writers are prepared to give them. I don't doubt that there's a game bible or relevant equivalent somewhere within hyv which contains the explanations we are currently lacking in regards to the A-plot. the game is consistent enough in its storytelling for me to believe that this isn't all just being made up as we go along. But I'm also certain that a lot of the late-game A and B-plot that is planned (especially if the Khaenri'ah is truly planned to be the 8th nation of the game) hinges on the player knowing very little about the A-plot. this would be fine if genshin was a standard single-release video game that players could work through at their own pace, but it isn't. it's unfinished, and each nation in the game releases months to years after the last, leaving the writers to scramble to fill in the gameplay gaps and players struggling to remember plot-relevant information when it's brought up literal years after they last heard it mentioned. Not only does the time between updates leave players frustrated about the lack of A-plot, it makes the A-plot harder to understand when it is brought up, because the writers are required to throw in so much dense C and D-plot just to keep engagement high enough to make the game profitable in its downtime. we joke about the insane convolution of genshin's lore, but that is first and foremost a byproduct of its financial model. the game requires engaement to be profitable, and adding lore for players to look into drives up engagement. The fact that having so much story with so little plot relevance muddies the waters and makes the A and B-plot stories considerably harder to understand doesn't matter as long as money is being made.

I want to take a quick detour here to talk about the release of sumeru specifically, because this is when I really began to clock the fact that genshin was declining. on paper, racial sensitivity issues aside (Not that they're not important, but i'm doing this deep dive from a storytelling and game design point of view, nothing else. that's a whole can of worms i don't have time to get into here) sumeru was a really promising addition to the game. The new B-plot quest which was set to drop in 3.0 was highly anticipated for several reasons. Two fan-favorite characters (kaeya and scaramouche) were expected to play major roles, because of earlier C and B-plot quests, and much of the nation's scenery that was teased in trailers and promotional content appeared to tie into the A-plot. the most exciting draw about sumeru and version 3.0, though, was the major update to the combat system.

Arguably genshin impact's most interesting feature upon release was its combat system. The map was basically a botw clone at that point, and the story quests, while decently engaging, were rough around the edges to say the least. What genshin DID have going for it was a unique real-time combat system that rewarded strategy and quick thinking.

Genshin's combat system is elemental, and on release there were 6 elemental affiliations: anemo (wind), cryo (ice), pyro (fire), hydro (water), geo (rock), and electro (electricity.) in a sort of pokemon-like system, certain elements were weak to other ones, but more importantly, certain combinations of elements could drastically boost combat stats. Players got to construct four-slot teams of characters, each with an elemental affiliation and certain "skills" which would match their element, and you were encouraged to use the interactions of these elements to build teams. very quickly, a huge community formed dedicated to optimizing teams and tiering characters. People would even make a game out of building teams specifically to do high-level damage with "bad" characters or characters who weren't designed to be damage drivers (my 100k jean burst was an incredible moment fr.) this was, of course, also a picture-perfect driver for the gacha aspect of the game, which was how players obtained new characters.

Pre-3.0, combat was... well i won't say it was balanced, but there was no elemental reaction that had any MAJOR advantage over the others. when you actually ran the numbers, i believe vaporize was the best reaction in terms of damage output, with the best team being raiden national with kazuha for EM buffs. but a well-built freeze or melt team could do similar numbers, or even better numbers depending on your artifact rolls. (ayaka permafreeze you will always be my #1.) Despite a steady stream of new characters with each update, characters from the earliest version of the game like xingqiu and xiangling were still topping the charts in terms of usefulness and versatility in teambuilding. However, as early as 1.0, players had been teased that a major update to the combat system was planned. There was a seventh element, dendro (plants) which pre-3.0 only existed as an elemental affiliation for menial enemies. there were no playable dendro characters, and the only elemental reaction that existed relating to it was very low-level and not particularly useful in combat.

Originally, dendro was projected to be added to the combat system somewhere in version 2, but its release was delayed substantially, meaning it came out along with its affiliated nation, sumeru. And as soon as it came out, it basically broke the combat system. I assume that the scaling they ended up going with may have been out of fear that players would be hesitant to integrate a new element into their pre-established team builds, and thus they may have been worried about sales on their dendro character banners, and i assume that the fact that 3 elements are required to get the highest-level reaction was an attempt to make the meta more balanced in the face of that scaling, but, well... it didn't work. At this point, the genshin impact combat meta is basically "if you're not using hyperbloom what the fuck are you doing." there's basically no reaction in the game that comes close to it in terms of both damage and ease of use. you are not going to beat a hyperbloom team with anything other than a better-built hyperbloom team. combat is now very heavily skewed in the direction of dendro, meaning that if you DON'T want to use a dendro team, you're going to be doing significantly lower numbers. And since enemies are added with each update, post-3.0 combat becomes difficult and annoying if you don't have a hyperbloom team on-hand.

The major gripe i have with dendro isn't even the scaling, though. I mentioned offhand earlier that the 1.0 B-plot questline had a section which taught you the basics of the combat system via mini-dungeons. These mini-dungeons, of course, taught you the version of the system that existed pre-3.0, so there's no tutorial for dendro reactions. Rather than integrating the tutorial into the story and world like they did in their early quests, upon playing 3.0 for the first time players were given a popup that explained, very wordily, how dendro reactions worked. there was no opportunity to test these reactions in an environment without consequences--if you wanted to try them you'd have to remember the relevant information, build yourself a team, find an enemy to try them on, and just hope you got it right. This lack of integration is something i began to notice more and more with genshin as it progressed, especially in sumeru. where in mondstadt and liyue open-world puzzles would be explained to you by an npc or via environmental context clues, in sumeru you'd be stopped while exploring every two seconds by a popup explaining some puzzle or another which, of course, you wouldn't read, because you didn't want to do the puzzle right that minute anyway, and then by the time you DID want to do that puzzle you'd have no in-game way of figuring out how to do it. The puzzle popups may seem like a small thing, but it's one of the clearest examples in the game to me of the fact that the player experience is so clearly not being prioritized here. the game doesn't even TRY to be immersive anymore. they have no qualms about pulling you out of the story to read a paragraph about how the puzzle works. they don't care how your character, in-universe, is supposed to have acquired that information. they don't care why your character, in-universe, is doing the puzzle in the first place. because they know the reason YOU are doing the puzzle, which is to unlock a hidden chest that gives you 1/80th of a gacha pull.

That was not "a quick detour" was it lmfao. ok anyways. back to the story. Now i want to talk about D-plot, meaning limited event stories, and lore as i defined it earlier, meaning contextual details not present in quests or playable story. This is where i think genshin's story becomes completely inaccessible.

Already, we've covered the fact that in order to consume the very basic story, players have to be willing to wait years between A and B-plot quest releases, punctuated by irrelevant map expansions and interlude quests. I mentioned before that genshin's incompleteness is one of the major problems of its story. the fact that players have to wait years, remembering plot-relevant information that they have no way of knowing will even BE plot-relevant, for the payoff of these narratives is frustrating at best and actively malicious at worst. But in theory, there should be an obvious way to circumvent this. One could just wait until the game IS completely finished to play the whole thing. Sort of like buying a game in early access but waiting until it's actually finished to play it all the way through. that's theoretically possible. but, as i have been hammering home this whole time, genshin is a free game, and therefore genshin relies entirely on a consistently engaging fanbase in order to remain profitable. if genshin does not have a base of players who are willing to log in every day, or at the very least once every update, the game's financial model collapses on itself. therefore, genshin puts on limited-time events. this is a standard in gacha games, as a way to keep the fans consistently engaging. What is not standard, however, is the way that genshin uses these events as vessels for its story. about 19 out of 20 limited events in genshin impact will be useless menial bullshit with no effect on the story or really even the player aside from maybe making you fucking angry. 1 out of those 20, though, will be innocuously named, with nothing in the banner or event description to indicate that it's special in any way, but it will contain serious A or B-plot relevant information that exists nowhere else in the game. My personal favorite example is the infamous 1.3 scaramouche appearance, in which he showed up, told the protagonist that the sky was fake, and then immediately fucked off again. Scaramouche did not show up again until at least 2.0, and the fake sky wasn't so much as MENTIONED again until 3.2, almost TWO YEARS LATER. but there are others, such as the (almost equally infamous) albedo doppelganger event in which a major character's loyalties are called into question, or the event where major biographical information is revealed about kaeya, the only playable character with major known connections to the A-plot and Khaenri'ah. With all of these events, once the event period ends, the information contained within them vanishes from the game completely. there's no way to replay old events that you've missed, even sans rewards, so if you miss a plot-relevant event the ONLY way to catch up on that story is through word of mouth. again, this is a transparent way to keep genshin's userbase engaged during downtime between B-plot quests; if you don't log in and play every event, how will you know if you've missed something important? You might not be able to fully understand the future story if you miss out on the D-plot now!

The D-plot problem is something that I think could, in theory, be circumvented by dedicated record-keeping. if the wiki had anything resembling an easily accessible event database that marked story-relevant events and contained summaries or gameplay videos, at the very least you wouldn't have to fear being completely lost on the off chance that a random throwaway line in an event from fucking 1.3 becomes plot-relevant. but hyv obviously doesn't want that, because it undermines their financial model, and the sheer number of events and the amount of rerunning of irrelevant events they do makes the task of recording and categorizing them all daunting if not impossible.

Then, of course, there's lore. this is arguably what genshin is infamous for in certain circles of the internet. You know that unraveled video where bdg reads every book in skyrim? if you tried to do that with genshin the video would probably be about 10 hours long. and it's not just books; genshin hides (potentially) plot-relevant information in weapon and artifact descriptions, in random hidden world quests, in character bios... the list goes on. and 9 times out of 10, the information is essentially written in code. Plot-relevant characters will have multiple names, or the relevant information will refer to them as vaguely as possible, presumably to further the "mystery" and encourage theorizing among fans. but the sheer amount of information like this that exists within the game makes it all but impossible to determine what is plot-relevant and what isn't. For a topical example, the most recent A-plot quest bedtime story mentions the name Rhinedottir in connection with events in Khaenri'ah, suddenly making that name A-plot relevant. Rhinedottir is an alternate name for the character Gold, whose existence you would only have known of before this point if you'd unlocked and read the character Albedo's character bios. (Albedo is a limited-run character who hasn't been available since november 2022, btw.) the only other information about Rhinedottir permanently available in the game comes from the description of the weapon Festering Desire, which was only obtainable from a limited event back in 2020, anyway. So basically, if you wanted ANY context for that remark, you'd have to have been playing the game since AT LEAST 2022, AND you'd have to have taken the time to go over your weapon and character descriptions with a fine-toothed comb. keep in mind that as of right now (june 2024) there are 85 playable characters in this game, each with 10 unique unlockable character bio sections, and over 150 weapons, each with their own unique descriptions, not to mention over 50 artifact sets, each with 5 unique artifacts, which all have their own unique descriptions as well. there are also 51 different collections of books which contain written lore as well. the idea that any player could keep up with all this, or that anyone could even sift through it all to pick out the important things that they NEED to keep up with, is insane, especially when the game makes a point of withholding crucial plot information from its players within the A and B-plot quests. this amount of written lore only exists, again, to drive up engagement in the hopes of subsequently driving up profit. Even if the average player isn't reading and absorbing all this information, the fact that it's there coupled with the fact that the writers consistently refuse to reveal anything beyond surface-level A-plot information means that there's basically ENDLESS theory fodder. and THAT means that people will be posting their theories and talking with each other and getting into arguments. it means "genshin impact" trends on twitter. it means engagement, and engagement means money.

basically what it comes back to is that everything is so transparently money over player experience with this game. I think what we're witnessing with genshin is what i would call an end-stage gacha game--a gacha game that's gone on a little too long and gotten a little too popular, and so the veil has started to slip a little more than usual. Gachas work primarily because they operate by toeing the line between what is fun to play and what is a predatory mechanic. As long as the actual gameplay remains engaging and rewarding, players can ignore the unsavory business practices underneath. At this point, genshin has swerved too hard into the money-hungriness and is still hoping that they can use their old tried-and-true engagement farming methods to remain popular regardless. currently, it seems like those methods are still working, unfortunately. Like I said in the post that prompted this, i really can't wait for the hyv writer NDAs to expire 10 or so years down the line, because I can only imagine what an insane shitshow writing for this game must be. I want to see the tell-all articles. I want carnage.

That being said, I played genshin impact religiously from 2020 to 2023. I loved the game. Despite myself, I am still really, REALLY interested in the A-plot. I want to know what's going on with the protagonist and their sibling; where they came from, what happened to them, what the heavenly principles are, what role celestia plays in all of this. I want to know Kaeya's full backstory, what role Khaenri'ah plays in the overarching story, and what happened to it in the past. but I don't really have any faith that I ever will, because I know that as long as keeping their fans in the dark and stringing them along remains profitable, that's what hyv will continue to do.

Do I think genshin impact is unsalvagable? in its current state, yes. If I was given the ability to turn back time and convince a bunch of executives of the profitability of this venture, I would change almost nothing about the story of genshin and completely rework the mechanics of its release. I would make it a series of single-release self-contained games rather than a constantly-updating gacha. Each game would be one B-plot quest, or one nation, eight games in all, preferably released once every year. Removing the gacha mechanic, players would be given access to a certain pool of characters to build teams at the start of each game, and then periodically unlock new characters as the story progressed. for example, if you were playing the inazuma game, you'd start out with only your protag, and after progressing to a certain point in the story you'd get a pool of inazuma 4-stars to teambuild with freely. Then, as the story progressed and you met plot-relevant inazuman 5-stars you'd add them to your pool. I'd change basically nothing about the combat system except for a properly integrated introduction of dendro when it makes its appearance in sumeru. Once you completed the story in that nation, you could move onto the next game in the series if it was out, or if it wasn't, you could continue to explore the open world while waiting for the next release. Would this be as profitable as the gacha model? probably not, but what it WOULD do is allow for much more consistent pacing and writing, with the added bonus of not making your userbase feel like you'd shoot them in the head for their pocket change.

#jesus christ. hi everyone #asks

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