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What’s the fucking point? Literally one of the biggest titles this year, it’s sold millions of copies on Steam alone, and devs are getting shafted.

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*Dead media (assassinated)

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trying to find good lore friendly custom clothing for skyrim

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[skyrim guard voice] i heard kendrick lamar murdered drake… with his voice! shouted him apart!

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Not to be a bitch but sometimes people engage with fiction in the most boring way possible, and nowhere is this clearer than in videogames. Like what you mean you hate a character just because they were kind of abrasive when speaking to the player character? "They were mean to me" and it didn't occur to you to wonder why? Like, what might their attitude toward you reveal about the world? About the social dynamics within it? About their own perspectives and backgrounds and personalities? Does it even occur you to ask? Would you only have liked them if they bowed to your presence and talked about how great you are? Like I'm sorry but you're so boring. How boring fiction would be if it cathered to you

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There's also this Gamer Behavior (derogatory) where I see these folks going off the rails about having a meltdown because of something that is 100% optional.

Taash exists as a nonbinary romance option. They have optional side quests regarding their exploration of their nonbinary identity. You 100% do not have to do any of this and can in fact ignore Taash 99% of the time and the worst that will happen is MAYBE not getting the exact ending you wanted from the final battle. Maybe. Because you don't have to send Taash at all if you make other character choices.

But cue freak out over the game forcing you to gender them correctly and forcing them as a romance onto you etc etc. I did not romance Taash and found it quite easy to not pursue that option actually. I did do their character side quests but only because if I'm paying that much money for a game I'm doing alllllll the things including the optional stuff.

You have the option of top surgery scars and colored hair and more in the character creator. You can just as easily not have these things on your character and instead look like something else. You do not need to put any character traits on your character that you don't want to.

But cue freak out about normalizing mental illness and transgender traits and SJW aesthetic. It's woke now. Top surgery scars are by default turned off and you have to locate it within the menu and then press buttons to turn them on. Somehow that is seen as forcing them onto the player.

You have the option of romancing a man and a nonbinary character as Yasuke. To be entirely clear there are also women available for Yasuke and in order to romance the other two you have to like, deliberately put forth effort into chasing them. This is not a Gale BG3 situation where being mildly nice to him turns him into an incel that refuses to leave you alone- it very clearly lays out that if you choose these options this character will take it as pursuit of a romance. The easiest option is to simply not do that.

But cue freak out about how Ubisoft is forcing the gay agenda on you and making you be gay and witness gay things. You literally do not have to do this. There's even a setting which you can turn off romance options entirely. If it bothers you that much, you can skip over it completely, or go kiss a different person besides either of the queer romances.

Within the game itself you don't really have to play as Yasuke outside of a very limited number of quests. You can actually play entirely as Naoe and ignore that Yasuke exists for the bulk of the game. Naoe is the much more Assassin's Creed style character as she relies heavily on stealth tactics and does poorly when outnumbered and surrounded (ask me how I know lmao) compared to Yasuke who is much more an Eivor situation of a wrecking ball in combat but sucks at parkour and stealth.

But cue freak out about how these guys think it's stupid that a 6ft tall black dude built like a wall of muscle would be in a stealth game. Yeah uh the game actually tells you straight up that if you want to do stealth you need to be Naoe because Yasuke kinda doesn't blend in. "How is this guy standing on rooftops not being seen" he actually goes get spotted and quite readily on every difficulty except the easiest because the man is 6 feet tall with nearly jet black skin and that sort of is a bit out of place in a setting like idk feudal Japan. You can switch between them- so once the game opens up and gives you the option you genuinely can just ignore Yasuke if you want to play as the series-typical assassin instead of the RPG tank.

Really the problem is that these Gamers (derogatory) have a difficult time with "other people besides you like playing these games" because they already have what they are asking for but they're mad that there is the option to do something they specifically dislike.

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Thinking a lot recently about the constant comparison of Oblivion to Skyrim, particularly claims that Oblivion is superior in every way strictly by virtue of quest length and the greater grandiosity of the organizations in Oblivion, and I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually going on with Tamriel during the time period of Skyrim. Even though it's like...one of the core concepts of the main storyline.

Putting most of this under a cut for length, but I just...I think people misunderstand what's going on here. This is not a "One Game Good Other Game Bad" post, it's an analysis of a major, key difference in story basis between the two that I think gets lost in the (frankly asinine) argument about which is superior.

See, everything in Skyrim sucks. Every organization you can align yourself with is falling apart. Literally every single one.

That's the point.

To summarize:

The Companions (equivalent to the Fighters' Guild) are about a dozen strong, literally cursed, and their most beloved leader gets murdered very early in the storyline.

The College of Winterhold (equivalent to the Mages' Guild, not to the Arcane University) has seemingly only been saved from collapsing into the sea because a master of Restoration fused himself with the structure itself when the Sea of Ghosts tried to tear it down a little under a century ago and his presence is constantly physically "healing" the foundation.

The Thieves' Guild has lost the favor of every possible patron deity, having been outright cursed by Nocturnal after one of her Nightingales murdered another and stole the gift she offers her champion, while the boon that the organization's founder claimed from her in ages past (the cowl) is missing.

The Dark Brotherhood has been all but completely dismantled, the Night Mother's tomb in Bravil having been raided and struggling to persist without a Listener for over a decade; the bodies of the Night Mother's children have been lost and she's essentially being smuggled from region to region in an attempt to find a safe place to continue operations.

The Empire itself has been kneecapped, forced into a traumatic treaty by a fascist regime determined to strike the beliefs and culture of anyone not Altmer off the face of the planet; the Thalmor have gone so far as to torture and radicalize the figurehead leader of the Nords in order to use their own nationalism and superiority against the Empire, sparking a civil war that will further weaken the Empire and allow the Aldmerri Dominion to destroy it wholecloth.

This extends out into the rest of the world, too! We have confirmed existence of Hist-deaf Argonians. The Dunmer are floundering to recover after the quadruple-whammy that is the fall of the Triumverate, the destruction of Vivec City when Baar Dau finally made impact, the Red Year, and the Argonian uprising. The Bosmer are literally endangered due to habitat loss following a super-isolationist cultural shift due to wars with the Khajiit and Altmer. The Void Nights were devastating to Khajiit culture and population in ways that have yet to be fully explained.

The world is falling apart. Everything is dying.

And then Alduin shows up.

We all kind of talk about Alduin carrying on as World-Eater through the course of the Skyrim storyline like it's him being a piece of shit, since he'd started it ages ago and was just displaced in time to land on the Last Dragonborn's head in the Fourth Era, but I don't think that's the case.

Based on the state of things, I think Alduin arrived right on time. I think it's the end of the world. The only reason he "should" be stopped is because the Last Dragonborn has the capacity to stop the world from ending in a more down-to-earth sense than just defeating Alduin: they can't save everyone, but they can "fix" every single organization that's holding "the world" together.

They can align with the Imperials and keep the civil war from further crippling them, keeping the Empire from being too weak to push back against the Aldmerri Dominion.

They can save the College of Winterhold, the only group in the right place at the right time to stop the Eye of Magnus from opening, and in doing so make sure that the Psijics are able to put it somewhere nobody else can find it.

They can lead the Companions, cure the curse for those members who don't want to run with Hircine after death, which bolsters their spirits enough to keep doing what they can even when everyone else is trying to kill each other. A single neutral martial force in the middle of a civil war.

They can regain Nocturnal's trust for the Thieves' Guild, restore the Nightingales, and in doing so they can return the luck that was stolen from them as punishment for Mercer Frey's transgression. They can even reclaim the Crown of Barenziah and award the guild with a paragon to increase their newly-regained luck.

They can hear the Night Mother, becoming Listener for the Dark Brotherhood to restore the balancing force of Sithis in the world, purify the most broken Sanctuary the Brotherhood has ever had, and finish a story set into motion way back in the Third Era—Emperor Titus Mede II is murdered under the order of a Motierre, a descendant of a mark the Brotherhood specifically kept from dying during the Oblivion Crisis.

The Last Dragonborn can't do anything outside Skyrim—there's nothing they can do for the Argonians or the Bosmer or the Khajiit, and they can only do very little for the Dunmer via work in Solstheim—but they can work with every single guild or guild-adjacent group, strengthening the Empire to stand against the biggest threat to Tamrielic culture since the First Era, and in doing so they can make it so the world isn't ready for Alduin to eat it.

The Hero of Kvatch exists when Tamriel, and presumably Nirn as a whole is in the prime of its life, that's what makes the Oblivion Crisis such a big deal. This is a world that isn't ready to give up, it still has the strength to fight, it just needs someone standing at the head to direct it. The Last Dragonborn comes into the story when everything is falling apart and nothing really feels worthwhile, when it's hard to see why the world is worth saving. They have the chance to prove that there's still some life left here, that the world isn't too far gone to save—Alduin arrived right on time, it's the Last Dragonborn's job to change that.

I can see how coming from Oblivion to Skyrim would feel disappointing and hollow, but I'm pretty sure that's literally the point of the story.

Oblivion tells you the world is worth saving because it's got so much left to live for, even with the odds stacked so high against it. Skyrim asks you whether a world that's dying is still a world worth saving, and it's up to you to prove that it is.

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Nexus Mods was acquired by Chosen, a company focused on growth and monetization of gaming startups.

Reddit thread

Dark0ne, creator and ex-owner of Nexus Mods, stepped down today in an update post:

NexusMods post

Users on Resetera were able to found out more about this sudden change of ownership:

Resetera thread

Victor Folmann, CEO of Chosen, published this "Gaming Startup Monetization Cheat Sheet" on his LinkedIn

Link to the post

Users are already sharing their fear of NexusMods allowing more bigoted mods in the future, and taking down inclusive ones to follow the current "anti-woke" trend in the gaming industry

Reseta threada bout their change in moderation concerning bigoted mods following Oblivion Remastered launch

Another User, this time on NexusMods forum, noticed queer and inclusive mods being removed following Dark0ne's post

Link to the forum post

It is also worth mentioning that Chosen and its CEO are seen using AI generated images on their website (including generated images depicting Tracer from Overwatch) hyping up ChatGPT on his Linkedin account, and are including "rewarding gamers with crypto money"

Users speculate that Chosen buying out NexusMods is to potentially train an AI model that generates mods

More about Nvidia's AI "RTX Remix" and future projects

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I honestly went into this game thinking Cirrus would be my favorite—but nope. It’s Francesco and Keir. I love them both so much, especially Fran—my little angel 🥺🩷🩷

That feels like a pretty common story! I like to call Cirrus the "bait" of Obscura, in that he seems to do a great job luring in people to try the game out, who then either discover he is exactly what they were hoping for, or realise he is a touch spicy and find someone else to love.

Actually, now I'm curious about how common this experience is, so let's find out together!

No "nuance" option this time! Though I can't stop you from being more nuanced in the replies, I guess.

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Any experienced stuffed animal buyers out there know of a brand that would have a yellow dragon plushie? I don’t like ones with cutesy anime faces and it must be snuggly (no hard plastics, minimal bad textures, no sparkles). The one from jellycat is ideal but it’s been retired and as such the prices on eBay have me 🤨

Feel free to rb for reach or suggestion, he would be my birthday gift from me to myself

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I started Rogue Trader and I’m going iconoclast and also aiming to romance Marazhai because yes please. He needs to step on my character and I am not ashamed to say so by any measure, lol.

I have it that Evelyn is uncomfortable in her position because she was a nobody before all this. Grew up an orphan on an orbital space station.

I’m using her early life to set the stage for her iconoclast romance to Marazhai make sense.

Essentially, her Triumph was the Apex of Brilliance as a psyker which was “upon solving the mystery of a powerful psychically active xeno-artifact, you managed to destroy the creation of countless enemies of humanity” which I’m deciding also meant killing a bunch of xenos in the process.

She was a quiet voidborn child when this happened and immediately others either through jealousy or fear then gave her her Darkest Hour of Grim Portents, “you were accused of being possessed by a warp entity and forced into exile, leaving your soul forever scarred”. Basically claiming that her connection to the xenos artifact was proof of her corruption.

So essentially she was forced to flee from her home after doing something she didn’t fully understand the implications of and was tormented with both guilt and actual warp hauntings privately until a Black Ship picked her up and brought her to Terra to do the sanctioned psyker test that of course was also horrible.

But she’s been living with this confused and conflicted guilt since childhood and then when she meets Marazhai, she’s both just naturally attracted to him and kind of using him to alleviate her guilt by letting him do what he wants.

Putting herself into sub space also means she doesn’t have to make decisions or think of anything but pleasing him. And I think it kind of balances out their relationship dynamic given that he’s not actually in charge given his situation on the ship and how easily she could decide she has no use for him. But that will be a different post once I finally pick him up.

I’m sticking with telepathy and divination as her main psyker abilities, which before she was sanctioned just used very minimal effects to stay unassuming. I can’t afford the dlc (I’m so financially suffering atm 🥲), so I can’t make her a bladedancer like I want.

I headcanon her to appear waifish and a bit uncanny given her voidborn origin.

I’ll have to make her in the sims for a more detailed appearance.

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Victor Frankenstein syndrome aka you spent nights over nights crying and bleeding over this work and now that it's finally done you're just like "nvm. it's trash" and go to bed

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“[Keanu] Reeves said a recent conversation about “The Matrix” with a 15-year-old put things into a terrifying perspective. The actor explained to the teenager that his character, Neo, is fighting for what’s real. The teenager scoffed and said, “Who cares if it’s real?” “People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art,” Reeves said. “It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?” “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation,” Reeves continued. “We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.””

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Keanu Reeves Slams Deepfakes, Film Contract Prevents Digital Edits - Variety

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Ice delivery man in Houston, TX circa 1920 Check this blog!

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i actually think it's criminal that i have not yet seen a single opossum post in this "with mama" trend. they carry their babies on their backs!

let's explore with mama

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