#maybe you could just use that mechanic that the ENTIRE GAME IS BASED AROUND instead of having everyone STAGE WHISPER CONSTANTLY

[gunpowdercarousel]

Larian: *Introduces a way that the companions can secretly communicate with you in front of people without needing to verbalize it by telepathically speaking directly into your mind.*

Half the companions anyway: YO this guy a BITCH, let's FUCKIN KILL HIM

[coldgoldlazarus]

Okay, mostly done screeching in excitement, now it's analysis time.

First point: That purple blast of the turret getting taken out looks great.

Looks like we're opening hot, a lot like Corruption's beginning. Hopefully won't be quite as protracted as the Norion battle, though, lol.

Also, I've seen some jokes already about how this section will end with Samus getting depowered like the openings of Prime and Echoes, but given how barebones her arsenal seems to be here, (missiles and morph ball, which sometimes she just starts with and keeps, maybe bombs too) I don't expect that to happen.

The HUD and helmet edges are a lot more dialed back this time, pushed as far into the corners as they can go. Probably better for visibility this way, but I am gonna miss the more wraparound feel of the previous setup, with the missile count and hazard meter along the sides. But this isn't a bad look by any means, and we still have a fair few items here.

A & B: My bet is this is the replacement for the old hazard meter. In addition to keeping it out of the way, putting it right next to the motion tracker is a good move. I may actually remember to use that more this way.

C: Health bar is obvious, of course, but I really like the move of tucking it away into the notch on the top of the Echoes/Corruption/Beyond(!) helmet visor. The lines around it suggest an empty row above, undoubtedly for the energy tank pips once those are picked up.

D & E: Minimap is present as usual, not really much to say there, but I love the addition of a compass direction scroll beneath it, which should be helpful for putting places in context of the broader map. (Tallon IV's elevator label system, anyone?)

F: Missile count has been shunted down from the side to the bottom corner. I'm interested to see if it will grow upward, or just stay in its present spot and scale accordingly, as you collect more expansions.

G: This is the one everyone's already pointed out, but it seems that we won't have a visor OR beam swap readout.

Scan Visor is still an option as shown in the next bit, but based on the lack of an indicator in the hud, it's probably just going to be a toggle between that and combat, without anything else like X-Ray or Thermal or Echo or what have you. (Or it could be that that would only get added to the HUD after picking up a third visor, but I won't hold my breath for it.) Kinda disappointing to deemphasize one of the cool new mechanics the Prime subseries brought to the table, on one hand, but I'm still grateful to have the Scanner, and the extra ones always did struggle a bit to see much use.

Similarly, a bit disappointed this means we're probably looking at a stacking beam like in Corruption and the 2D games, (unless of course beam swapping is still there and just being left off the HUD until relevant for the sake of cleanliness #copium) but not entirely surprising; I'll live.

But what is interesting is what's there instead. The D-Pad seems to be tied to non-Beam weapons or tools instead, with the missile launcher as the only one available at present. I'm really curious to see what the other items will be; I imagine this is going to be Prime 4's unique spin on things. I saw someone suggest affinity weapons like in Hunters, but given those all function like Beams, it feels weird to me to set them against Missiles instead, ammunition requirements notwithstanding. I'm not going to rule those out, of course, but I could see this being something completely different entirely.

Again, I am very glad to see the Scan Visor is still here at least. Even better is that it uses the full-body highlighting of objects like Echoes and Corruption instead of Prime 1's icons. Pretty minimalistic layout, all told; I like that the scanning bar is a ring now. And it doesn't reflect Samus's face by default like in Corruption, which makes sense since we're not liable to have the same kind of mutation shenaniganry happening here.

I forgot to snag a screencap of this bit on my computer, so forgive the lower quality, but this scene is interesting for a few reasons.

The Pirates' breaching charges letting them into this room just as Samus passes through a gap in the wall overhead is a nice touch, and also remniscent of some sequences from early on in Corruption.

The Federation guys in here seem to be wheeling away someone or something on a stretcher in a hurry. That could be important.

Energy tank up in the rail section, but blocked by a box. Are we just going to bomb through to get it right away, or will we drop down into the room, and have to come back from the other direction to pick it up? (Please be the other direction)

Samus looking spiffy here, even at a distance. And as some have pointed out, looks like she's walking out of a portal instead of a door, pointing to either more dimension-hopping shenanigans like in Echoes, or possibly the time travel elements I recall hearing Tanabe wanted to play with at some point. (This plus the black hole look of the logo makes me think this could be more likely.)

Whatever the nature of the portal, though, the interesting thing to me is the sort of circular structure in the rock around it, suggesting a doorframe almost. A lot of the portals on Aether seemed to actively cut into the environment at random, the rock carved out in perfect spheres with fucked-up edges, and interrupting the pre-existing architecture or geology. In contrast, this looks like it was put here on purpose, implying a more controlled creation. Potentially really fascinating implications in that.

I also kinda wonder if these portals will be replacing elevators as a way to get between regions.

Ignoring the big numbers in the middle, (though they do kinda mess with my prediction that Prime 4 was going to be a 2024 holiday title to avoid getting eaten by Switch 2's inevitable 3D Mario launch title,) a couple things stand out to me here.

Giant tree in the background is giant, and I love it for that. Also looks like it's not the only giant tree here, even if still probably the biggest. I hope we get to go there later.

But in addition, we have a bridge in the middle distance, and a tunnel opening in the foreground. I will eat my hat if we don't get to cross that bridge, and my bet is that they're going to pull a similar trick here as with Skytown, letting low-poly versions of other "rooms" be visible from the current one, but dividing them with interior sections for optimization reasons, allowing for amazing landscapes of all traversible terrain. I loved that there, it looks great here, I can't wait to go explore all this myself next year.

[tater-tot-jr]

Honkai: Star Rail fans, I’m here to yap. Major spoilers for 2.4.

So, I’m the certified number 1 space china hater. I hate that place, I don’t trust it, I didn’t like its first story arc that much. But holy shit that ruled. That was awesome. It’s obviously impossible to follow up Penacony and outdo it, and you can certainly nitpick some faults, but the war dance arc thus far was super enjoyable to play.

Let’s start with the fucking Yanqing character development holy shit?? Seeing the ways he matured and humbled himself was super fucking cool, and his dynamic with Yunli was peak comedy. His monologue about why he wields a sword was completely awesome, very well done by the VA. Hoyo making sure to let us know that both him and Yunli are literal child soldiers and we should be concerned about that was based. The conflict between him and Yunli was actually presented really well. (I haven’t done the new march event yet so maybe I’ll come back and edit this if I remember) The didn’t really push someone as correct or incorrect, they just showed us the situation and let us form opinions. Yanqing getting some character development was awesome and I love that for him.

The plot? It still had some of that trademark complexity but it was much easier to follow this time around. It felt like events naturally lead to one another and the characters reacted as they actually would instead of just reacting as necessary to move the plot. It gives you a shocking amount of player agency to succeed or fail and I really enjoyed the stakes that came with that. I’m liking how dark some of it is, it’s not crazy but there are certainly some moments.

I love all the new characters, they’ve all managed to endear themselves to me very quickly. Even the characters I was meh on like Jiaoqiu and Lingsha managed to worm their way into my heart a little. Feixiao is a total badass and Moze really interests me. Yunli was really funny and I enjoyed her shenanigans. As much as some of the mechanics and designs of these new characters disappointed me I still found them compelling in the narrative.

And the fucking angst? Hello?? It was peak.

This might be a hot take but I think the shackling prison is my new favorite singular section of the game. I love Dan Heng, I find his lore and personality fascinating and was dying to see some more of it. His VA did a great job this entire patch, Dan Heng is very stoic so it was impressive how his VA managed to portray the general unease he felt being back in the Luofu. He was just normal enough to not have anyone make a big deal out of it but you could tell that something was just under the surface. Then you get to the shackling prison and it just… man. You get to the door and you hear his voice just break. For someone so stoic you hear him overwhelmed with emotions, and it’s so juicy. Wonderful way to set the tone, Hoyo. Then you get inside and wow it’s evil looking in there. The other chance you get to chat with Danny boy before shit hits the fan is just as good. They decided to give me personally a treat with his lines like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “it’s just as cold as I remembered.” And telling the trailblazer they “shouldn’t have to see this place.” Hoyo chose violence with that shit. Also, Fox Boy™️ literally got held hostage and (kinda) enslaved. Incredible.

The pacing of that section was awesome. Seeing Xueyi get destroyed and then rushing down with Hanya was a simple trick but goddamnit it worked. The way it managed to portray that rushed and dangerous feeling without going overboard on the monsters around you was impressive. It was so much fun to watch the mystery come together in a way that felt like both a climax and a cliffhanger somehow. The cinematic stuff was so well done, it was all so pretty. There were plenty of POV swaps but they felt natural and necessary to the plot. I was unenthusiastic about going back to space china but goddamnit Hoyo has done it again. Fuck.

It was just a really fun patch, 2.5 feels so far away…. :(

[saltboroughs]

i think a lot of it does come down to the fact that both are cat centric games. pb having similarities to fr was fine, because even if it was a straight up clone it would have a completely different subject that different people would appreciate, or it would be a two cakes situation. pb (rightfully) still wanted to move away from that perception, so they started doing other things... only to end up feeling much MUCH more like pce, which is also cat centric. they are still wildly different in a lot of ways, but to me it gives off a sort of uncanny valley effect. like, not to throw around accusations but some aspects in the game feel very derivative of pce specifically.

i can forgive the ttrpg guild gameplay since yeah thats just ttrpg gameplay we cant do much about that one but having that PLUS random followers generated at the start of the game PLUS similar relationship building mechanics (though i will clarify that is looks like pb's is entirely based on item gifting while pce iirc is more centered on scenarios with items to fast track stuff? so yes its different but im making a point) PLUS breeding necessitating mated pairs, its sort of... hmm, to me.

people have already thrown out ideas on how to make some of this stuff feel less derivative, like making followers optional, or instead of infinitely rolling for random followers at the start there could be limited rolls with the ability to freely pick through the previously rolled cats, or having the cats join your camp as part of a tutorial via quest/errand, or just being given a free incense to use if you want to. these would still have the same results of a camp having more than a founder pair in the early game, but would also feel more original to pb.

i also think anon has a point in mentioning that pce is... significantly smaller while pb ended up getting a lot more eyes on it. i think its a bit of a precarious position for pb in terms of optics. i dont believe anything serious is gonna happen but i wouldnt fault people for maybe feeling bitter about it.

[randomnameless]

So considering how feudal nations work and if one is willing to focus on the lesser nobles, actual people (so not just showing Edelgard loyalists but those who dislike her too) and if Ludwig manage to escape capture, it would be reasonable to have a civil war happen?

I think it can since Hubert wouldn't just be able to get the network system of his father after murdering him, and the nobles of Adrestia are the worst in terms of opposition to social mobility and primitive form of gender equality, so the lack of civil war is stupid.

I base my thoughts on how France (I'm French too) had the Vendée rebellion and subsequent massacre and how devotion to the Church fueled support to the Spanish nationalists.

Adrestia is somehow the least interesting nation because of how it lack any of the noticeable internal strife shown, and Hubert being so effective at killing dissidents despite being only 20 (before the war) and having been at odd with many of the Seven who would actually have networks on their own is really Mary-sue ish.

I was a Edelstan at first (though I don't think too extreme) , but the more I see things, the more CF, SB and Edie annoy me (though the toxic fans are key in me stopping from preferring Edie).

Ooh!

Cher compatriote,

Thing is, Fodlan has been shown to be... not so feudal at all, especially the Empire.

I mean, Ludwig is jailed by word of the newest Emperor, when Ludwig is the PM and Edel was only the Imperial Princess at that time.

If we assume PM is just a big title (like the Fraldarius being Dukes) and in a feudal setting, Ludwig would have had a lot of lesser Houses and feudal Lords under his authority - the Emperor jails him? I can't see his bannermen - especially since this imprisonment isn't in reaction to anything he did (recently?) - just stand still and continue with their lives - how come no one reacts "wrongly" when he is jailed, in his territory, or the people affiliated to his name (maybe cousins, cadet branches, or what not)?

FWIW, Ludwig managed to escape and sort of mount a small army of men in SB... But that's nowhere what I would expect from the former PM - when we are told he was the one running things at the end of Ionius' rule - to have/raise, the number 1 of the country drops to a nobody by the heir of the puppet ruler, and apparently, the only ones number 1 can have to help him is 15 guys ?

I mean, Ferdie can have his Aegir personal battalion when he ends his paralogue (i know, it's a gameplay mechanic!) - can't we imagine the Aegir Astral Knights would have been something else than 10 dudes following Ferdie in gameplay, and be instead an entire battalion Ludwig could have used to defend himself, or at least run away with? Or imagine those knights tried to locate and liberate him from his prison in Enbarr?

Adrestia is so not developed that, as you say, it ends up being the most boring place of the three (even if I'll argue on this point : both Adrestia and Leicester are completely empty and without interest, but at least, Adrestia had some history landmarks to imagine things, when the Alliance has... Gloucester and his sheep, I guess?) - but at the same time, it could have been much more : Adrestian Emperors claim to descend from Jesus... but there's an Archbishop around (who is actually Jesus and not their ancestor (or is she?), but that's a secret!) so, to everyone who is supposed to buy the official story... Why should the CoS be administred/ruled by a random archbishop, when Jesus' direct line is still alive and kicking? Why should the Emperors share Fodlan - that was liberated by Seiros herself from corrupted people in the North ! - with the descendants of those corrupted people in the North?

The game instead gives us MAGA "Make Adrestia Great Again" with a resentment for the CoS that isn't explained (in Nopes, it's suggested the Emperor who disbanded the Southern church already was pissed with the Central Church!) and we can only guess it's either about Faerghus existing or something else...

I confess my only interest in Adrestia stems from the country being seemingly, during the WoH and post WoH the country were people are happy and peaceful etc "country of a blue lord", and then, 10 years after the end of the War of Heroes, instead of having some "and Renais was rebuilt and Ephraim became the new King of Restauration and helped everyone" we have "and then Lycaon dies mysteriously and the political situation is so "stable" that his successor duels for her throne", complete with a novel having in the background "and Adrestia still didn't leave the Roman Ludi and had northerners being torn apart by beasts as a form of entertainment"* which is, uh, very very very far removed from Marth'n'Tiki finishing their adventures and returning home.

As you pointed out, Adrestia, for what is developed in-game or mentioned about the place, is incredibly bleak and involves child prostitution, heavy class divide and an extreme misoginy in the current times... when it was created/overlooked, at least in the beginning, by Rhea herself ! When Rhea's current home is a rather peaceful place, Adrestia by comparison is a chamber pot, so what the frick happened there? 1000 years are 1000 years, but damn.

We don't have any intel about it - only mentions here'n'there that Hubert and Supreme Leader (but mostly Hubert because he can be criticised in game having a very... biased view of events and refusing to reconsider, but in the end, Adrestia... cannot be developed or have a civil war, because Adrestia isn't the focus of the story - from what we have, we already know it's a bleak place before and after Edel's coronation so... Her goal is to bring reforms to the world, but it's fitting enough that she doesn't deal with her own turf before bringing "reforms" to the rest of Fodlan.

There's also the very doylist reason of Edel having to be marketable, so in Houses, we cannot have people rebel on-screen for what happens in the Empire, else the Emperor... will not sell. Hell, Nopes had to have her brainwashed to have people react to Agarthans killing her randoms right and left, while the Nobles aren't doing a thing - always hammering the fact that "she's brainwashed so it's not her doing this or condoning this by not moving her army to protect her people it's Thales's fault".

Hubert being hyper-competent is an assumed trait at this point lol, unless he really really works with the Agarthans who lend him their tech and spy reports and whatnot. FE isn't a "realistic" as, say, ASOIAF, but without Hubert, Adrestia doesn't function and Edel's plans don't work so Hubert is both a McGuffin plot device (apparently he can pinpoint shambala because Thales fire nukes? Without access to any satellite?) and the character we all love.

Given how Supreme Leader planned her coup coronation and subsequent attack on GM - especially since Leopold already was in her pocket during the mock battle - I'm pretty sure Hubert, or Leopold's army or hell, some of her "allies" already envisaged this, and had either Aegir's "close allies" Hubert'd or monitored.

Or worse, imagine a scenario where Aegir runs to his friend Varley to explain him what happened, how the Emperor sent an army against him to usurp the throne and how they must warn everyone and Leopold to raise the army against her... Only to have Varley reveal he is now the Bishop of the Southern Church, and Leopold sided with her since the beginning...

I know it's not comparable, but Seteth (or some nuns?) mentions how he hasn't heard a thing about the faithful in the Empire... so either they were killed because they were practicionners of the Seiros faith, or because they rebelled/protested against the war and were, uh, disposed of (tfw the games never care about telling us who were the humans used to create the various imperial demonic beasts we see).

FWIW, I have a plotbunny idea where someone pretending to be Hresvelg bastard - with a crest of Seiros - wants to ask for Nopes!Rhea's help to support his claim to the throne, since Supreme Leader declared her war against the Church, he can put an end to it if he becomes Emperor, right? The CoS is torn between accepting "it would create at least some instability in the Empire, so the Kingdom could breathe a bit and maybe use this opportunity to finally fend them off if the Emperor calls back her troops in Enbarr" and "the CoS doesn't meddle in the affairs of humans like succession issues and only does so if it's to prevent a war but here you want us to create a civil war??"

*it's a novel so historical accuracy isn't that high, and yet, even if it's a porn book, why adding this detail in the background - just like people listening to music - I doubt it was written by a Faerghian writter so what, was this detail "northmen were slaughtered by beasts in the background and it was very funny lol" added just as a background thing, like fish being served as a meal ("historical" detail that might have been true!) or...?

[dragonflight203]

Mass Effect 3 replay, Mars:

-And right off the bat we see Cerberus troopers executing Alliance soldiers. ME3 is not a game interested in subtlety.

I’m always a fan of hating Cerberus, but this feels cartoonishly evil. And it’s quite the whiplash from ME2.

I’d have preferred if Cerberus had stayed in the background before playing their hand. We still could have chased them for the Prothean data, but the enemies that killed everyone in the base could have been Reaper troops.

Then TIM could have made us an offer to work with him in exchange for the data, we could have told him to fuck off (or agreed if Bioware felt very ambitious), and learned later on the full extent of Cerberus’ machinations.

-This is my other main problem with ME3. We spend as much if not more time fighting Cerberus than we the Alliance, and I do not care about Cerberus. They’re just another supremacist terrorist group. Fiction is full of them.

In a science fiction game where the main enemy are eldritch abominations that destroy organics on a regular basis, that’s the enemy I want to learn more about. ME3 should be centered around the Reaper threat. Instead we spend so. Much. Time focused on Cerberus.

Whose attack on the Citadel do we fend off? Cerberus. Whose base do we infiltrate? Cerberus. What grand reveal do we learn? That Cerberus is turning organics into Reaper troops and has learned to override Reaper indoctrination. What enemy leader do we converse with? TIM. Who is the final boss? TIM.

Compared to Cerberus, Reapers are just background noise. And it’s a damn shame because the Reapers are way more interesting. I want to learn about them.

-Kaidan’s suspicions are entirely valid. Shepard worked with Cerberus for an extended period quite recently. Of course their loyalties should be in question and how much they know. Shepard should have expected this.

This is more ME2’s fault for not giving Shepard the chance to tell Cerberus to fuck off or work with the Alliance as an undercover agent.

-The Cerberus troops chasing Liara through the vents is silly. She should have thrown a singularity at them while in there or they should have easily shot her.

-And once again Shepard says the Alliance (Hackett) gave them orders. In this case, to go to Mars.

I repeat: Spectres only take orders from the Council.

ME3 really wants Shepard to just be a very competent Alliance soldier and to hell with anything that gets in the way. It would not be difficult to rewrite the dialogue so Shepard is working with the Alliance, not for them.

-And now Liara tells us about the deus ex machina that will be the backbone of the game. It’d be terrible if Shepard had to actually do any investigating of their own.

-How did Hackett know that Liara is the Shadow Broker?

-Poor James is so lost.

I’m actually quite fond of him. He’s in over his head and he knows it, but he holds his own.

-Why does Liara say that the Protheans came close to destroying the Protheans?

In ME1, Virgil said or implied that the Protheans didn’t stand a chance. The best they could do was sabotage the Citadel to help the next cycle.

I suppose Illos was an isolated research facility, so you could argue they were unaware that another group was working on the Crucible.

-ME3 reverts to the ME1 method of giving you experience points for being curious. For example, reading a data pad. Nice change from ME2.

-Liara, on Cerberus opening the airlock of the cafeteria and killing everyone: This is brutal, even by Cerberus standards.

Are we just ignoring everything we learned in ME1? Cerberus fed a squad of marines to thresher maws and experimented on the survivor. I think that’s brutal.

-I’ve always wondered if the shooting glass mechanic was originally intended to be used more extensively. I think this is the only time in the game where it’s used. Maybe shooting the glass over the cockpit of an Atlas mech, if you want to be generous.

-If you don’t shoot the glass, two of the troopers move like they will leave but never actually open the door.

-Of course Dr. Eva has the same kind of ridiculous bodysuit that Miranda had. I don’t know why I expected anything different. It must be standard Cerberus issue for top agents.

-Shepard, to Liara about how they keep moving: I just think about what I’d lose if I fail.

Shepard is staring at Kaidan during the exchange. Intentional, because I’m romancing him?

-To continue emphasizing how evil they are now, Cerberus turned on the sterility field while the researchers were inside. Just so there are no doubts that they are no longer the morally ambigious group from ME2.

ME2 retcons ME1, ME3 retcons ME2.

-And here is the grand reveal that Cerberus troops are indoctrinated.

This does make their actions a bit easier to swallow through ME3 since they’re working for the Reapers, but still way too much time is spent on them.

-Again, Kaidan’s concerns are valid. We know that Miranda wanted to put a control chip in Shepard. Kaidan has no way of being certain they did not. Shepard could be a deep cover agent and not even know it themselves.

-TIM about the Reapers: Where you see a means to destroy, I see a means to control.

There’s two endings foreshadowed. Still nothing for synthesis.

Also, given TIM pushes control it’s odd that it’s treated as the paragon choice in the endgame. Tim’s thoroughly renegade aligned what with his willingness to win at any cost.

-TIM does not want the Reapers destroyed. He wants to use them to improve humanity’s standing.

TIM is insane, but that’s a known side effect of indoctrination so I’ll give him a pass. The Reapers are far too dangerous to keep alive as tools.

Still, you think he’d remember that from the rachni experiments.

-The Dr. Eva chase is just silly. Realistically you should be able to shoot or attack her, but instead all you can do is run after her. They should have just made it a cutscene.

I’m a vanguard. I can’t even target her for a charge. Ridiculous.

-Liara, supporting the potential of the Prothean data: You know we can’t win this conventionally.

No, and I’m disappointed this is the best alternative Bioware could come up with.

-Bailey’s been promoted to commander. Good to see corruption thriving on the Citadel.

[kate-embershield]

✨Jorvik Riding Academy ✨

PT1

Firstly, i did not expect to get that much attention on my first Jorvik Academy post, so thank you all SO MUCH!!

Second, I want to go more in depth about the Academy. So, in no particular order, i'm going to be going over some of the things people in the reblogs said...

@bridge-to-jorvik Thank you!

And yes, the idea for the Academy is to combine a lot of the current mechanics into one big hub of sorts. More rescue foals, and hopefully with time, sso could introduce foals from different breeds, big shire foals the size of the player, knobby knee'd akhal-teke's, just plenty of new baby's with different builds.

Perhaps with its proximity to Jorvik city, new furniture stores could be opened up, with a wide array off different aesthetics and decor to choose from that players could customise their dorms/homes with.

@samanthawd i'm pretty sure if enough players pitched in a dollar, we could buy a small island.

The idea is definitely that the Academy is a place where even those who aren't students are welcome. In regards to daily's, most of the 'classroom' quests are just general horse facts, learning about Jorvik and its history, the myths and legends surrounding the magical horses. Just general information to make the world feel more full, and even then , there would be alternate daily's where you could 'teach' a class instead of learn.

@toruq i'm absolutely not freaking out because I LOVE your art!!!

I unfortunately haven't had the chance to play the other games, nor read much of the comics, but I was vaguely aware of Star Academy and Jorvik high, just not there names. The academy itself was based off the idea of Star Academy.

Now while I did call it an Academy, it's more of a prestigious title, it would very much be a uni/college of sorts. The idea is that its a higher education program that is open to equestrians globally, resulting in many different disciplines would be taught and practiced.

@froggistain Your reply is a little long to fit, so i've condensed it a bit.

Why not make it an updated Jorvik stables? Since Jorvik stables is already a place cemented in cannon, I didn't want to intrude too much on the existing lore of Jarlaheim and the stables, hence why I placed it in an unreleased area. I wholeheartedly agree that the area could be expanded on and utilised more, and an early concept of Jorvik Academy had it as such, but again, Jarlaheim and the stables are already so familiar to the playerbase.

Factions within the Academy, and respective tack sets. Yes, much like the wild horses, each discipline would have reputation and faction specific tack that would be obtainable through leveling up. The idea of certain sets contributing to certain skills is amazing!

Course building, difficulty and club riding. The idea of players being able to build different courses and tracks is amazing! And with how large the Academy is, even if a club is using one of the arenas, there would still be plenty of room for other players to move about around the grounds. And I love the idea of including a difficulty rating, the entire idea behind the Academy is to teach people the basics of horsemanship without the need to go to a barn or riding school.

Thank you so much to everyone who commented!! I love seeing people enjoy my silly little overzealous ideas!

I've also sketched up some more tack ideas. The first one is more specifically a Parade set, because I love the idea of, much like the Pride parade, once a week/month, students and teachers would ride around central Jorvik, maybe to a town in the planes, maybe to the city. There could be carriages, flags flown, just a big parade that players could ride in or watch.

Again, the classic viridian, but to show how the tacks could look in other colours, i've included pink and purple, with matching riders clothes.

Ive also designed a more regal/armoured set, originally this one was catered towards a magical horse, but i think it could be really fun to branch out with the tack designs in the game. We already have horned bridals, so this was ultimately an extension of those.

The viridian and Gold of the Academy, but with a bit of a vampire/Halloween vibe in the silver and red, and a more muted autumnal pallet in the green and bronze.

And...

✨ spooky horse time✨

I had a lot of fun designing this one, especially since its halloween , and with the new magic horses coming out, I love seeing SSE branch out with additional things on there models, such as the horns and antlers.

Kelpie here was incredibly fun to design, especially with all of the reeds and water-plants hanging from them, and I would love to see some of the unique horses get Quests or chance encounters, it would add so much more to there lore, and the entire lore of the island.

[mister-e-muss]

I had a game development idea, so if you’d like to hear me ramble about an idea involving ATB and Stamina systems in RPGs, follow me. I should warn you though, that this is probably the longest post I’ve ever written.

So, I was looking at gameplay of Final Fantasy 13 out of curiosity, and a thought struck me.

Xenogears, Chrono Cross, and Legend of Legaia all use something I refer to as a stamina system for their attacks: You have a certain amount of points, and you can use as many of them as you want in a given turn, with extra bonuses sometimes stacking on top depending on how many and what types of attacks you’ve used. If you wanted to stretch the definition, then you could argue that Baten Kaitos does this as well, but with cards instead of basic attacks.

This made me realize that Final Fantasy 13 did something similar, but using Time as your resource. You can have an entire log of basic attacks, a medium amount of medium attacks, or a limit break that takes up all your time. What also separates FF13 from the aforementioned examples is that FF13 uses it for all of their abilities and options, instead of just basic attacks.

I know that a lot of the criticism towards FF13 comes from having to rely on auto-input rather than manually planning out your turn. So I started to think on how I would maybe handle the same idea of an “ATBar as Resource” or a take on something inspired by FF13.

My theoretical battle system goes something like this. Like FF13 your options revolve around queuing up sets of commands for your character or characters to enact. Unlike FF13, you have as much time as you’d like to have when deciding your commands. (Think Wait mode in classic FF games and Chrono Trigger, where time pauses as you scroll through your magics.) However, your turn only starts once you’ve queued up your attacks and what have you. When you’ve finished selecting your strategy, the time starts ticking and the abilities you’ve selected all start to charge up, going off when they reach full charge. Like Xenogears Deathblows, there would even be extra moves and bonuses for choosing the right combinations. The key difference here is that it applies to more than just basic attacks. Like using two spells that go off at the same time to combine, or using ascending levels of spell to create an ultimate attack for that element.

I actually made a little design guide for comparison, and hopefully explain the idea better.

I realize that stamina systems might be best used in a more traditional turn-based system, so that the player isn’t getting overwhelmed by constant inputs. However this is why I suggest the pausing as the player picks commands. To keep this more in line with ATB, all of the turns will have a separate ‘Cooldown’ phase that determines when they’ll be able to act again. Maybe even have this cooldown extend the more actions or longer actions are taken. To keep this from getting to confusing, I’m suggesting color coordination. I’m picturing something like this:

(I was worried the photo wouldn’t look good. My colored pencils are not the best quality.)

Hopefully even a system as theoretically complex as this would be manageable if everything is laid out properly. A standard party status would look something like this:

Revisiting the whole Combo Finisher/Deathblows mechanic, I feel like this is a personal preference rather than a solid design necessity, but when your combat relies heavily on experimentation, a clear way to keep track of what works is vital. I’m not suggesting that all the combos are listed fighting game style right off the bat, but rather that the game keep track of discovered combos and potential combos.

Like, say that you have used the level 1 Thunder exemplified in my first diagram, but you haven’t yet acquired the other two Thunders, or if you have them but haven’t used them in that order yet. Then when you start your turn with Thunder it will register in a database that you can check on the main menu. It will say “[Thunder l.v.1] + [???] + [???] = [???]” This doesn’t really tell the player much, but it does say at least that there is a combo move that starts with the basic Thunder. This means the player will find out when they are on the right track, won’t hesitate to experiment, and have a place to check their moves if they step away from the game for a while. I’m not a believer in explaining to the point of killing discovery. However I’m also very much against blind aimless wandering.

This last idea might be a step too far, but at this point I’ve spilled everything else, I might as well spitball this too. What if, in this theoretical RPG, you could combine turns? Pass one character so that when the next one finishes cooldown, they pool the available attacks and queue points so that even bigger and more complex combos can be built?

Idk Man, it’s half-an-hour into the next morning, and I don’t even know if a game like this sounds like a good idea. I am not, have never been, and most likely never will be a game developer. This is just the most detailed gamecrafting thought that I’ve ever had, and I feel like it should be written down and documented just in case. And hey, if there are any Indie devs out there who would want to take a crack at this type of combat, please tag me, I would Love to see if this works in practice as well as it does in concept!

Thank you all for indulging my very detailed ramblings.

[quartings]

My Big Pokémon Gen 10 Theory:

I've seen tons of speculation on what region future Pokemon games may be in, or what new flashy battle gimmick they'll have. And since I haven't heard anyone propose this theory , I thought I'd post it here for future reference!

TLDR: The Gen 10 Special Feature will involve getting rid of the turn-based battle system entirely and having manually-controlled Pokemon in real-time battles!

Why do I think so? Because they've been slowly testing it out over the last few years.

Legends Arceus introduced Strong and Agile styles, which allow Pokemon to attack multiple times in a row, breaking from the standard back-and-forth turn order already. Despite this, battles weren't in real-time in this game- enemies would still wait for you to input your attack before the rest of the battle proceeded.

But you know what IS in real time? Tera Raids in Scarlet and Violet. While internally the game still registers "turns" in these raids, if you don't input your attack in time during these raids, you can still easily miss out on attacking for a turn, while everyone else is still in the heat of battle.

Another minor but important change for this theory is battles now taking place in the actual overworld instead of a small arena that matches the environment. Allowing you to move around during the battle (Legends Arceus) or at least move the camera around freely (Scarlet & Violet).

And now with The Indigo Disk, they've introduced a new mechanic called "Synchro", that allows you to manually control your Pokemon and move it around, something that we know more from games like Pokepark and Mystery Dungeon. This I believe, is the second-last piece of the puzzle. Preparing us for the eventual game where rather than standing around clicking orders to our Pokemon once per turn, we'll instead manually control our Pokemon to move around, attack at any rate, and dodge enemy attacks just like in the anime! (I am a touch sad that this feature was introduced in the same games Ash Greninja got scrapped, but hey...)

But what is the final piece of this puzzle, you may ask? I believe it's figuring out what to do with the Speed and Accuracy stats. For the last 26+ years of Pokemon, the Speed stat decides who attacks first in a turn. But if turns are gone, then what now?

Maybe instead, Speed will now decide the actual movement speed of your Pokemon as they dash around the battle? A Regieleki would be able to become an actual blur of lightning, while a Shuckle would be practically immobile.

Or to make things simpler, Speed could maybe determine the attack rate of your Pokemon. An Electrode could maybe fire off 10 Thunderbolts in 5 seconds, while a Pincurchin might only be able to fire 2 Thunderbolts in that time?

Meanwhile, accuracy could tie into the literal accuracy of your moves. Moves like Magical Leaf could lock on to your enemies from across the map, while a Focus Blast could just fly off the map in the opposite direction you aimed it.

Or if they didn't want to go too overboard with this system, they could also just add a "charge time" setting to attacks. Where moves like Scratch can be spammed as much as you can tap the A Button, while moves like Solarbeam could take a solid 5 seconds or so to charge and fire.

But yeah, this is my big theory for the future of Pokemon! Let me know what you think, or if I missed any details! I can't wait to come back to this post in 3+ years when Gen 10 actually introduces "ZetaStretching" instead, where all Pokemon become oblong and all their moves become OKHO moves, haha.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

https://www.tumblr.com/rawliverandgoronspice/718014251940315136?source=share

Ill be honest and say i think the removal of sheikah related lore was not for internal weird racist reasons and instead simply for game design reasons, why the zonai tech is so similar in concept and execution. totk is a sequel and also a redux, they needed technology for mechanics and a reason for the world to change and introducing an entirely new race of characters would be the perfect scapegoat. it feels like it ignores botw almost entirely because 1) new players 2) to be a finished version of botw more mechanics and more content. the narrative was barely a thing in this game because what mattered the most was design and gameplay above all else. i don't think caring about gameplay first particularly bad, it's a fun game they will probably revolutionize the industry once again, and that nintendo doesn't care about lore at all but it really wasn't the priory here at least that's how I felt when i play the game. i adore the overworld and the npcs but the main quest (tears) story itself is very stale. best praise i can give to it is character design and zeldas sacrifice/how they handled her and link that's literally it (vague because i don't know if you've gotten there yet, it's after the completion of the tears quest and getting the master sword). zelda lore at this point is a sandbox and us fans will do what we want with it. sorry for the ramble!

Hey, thanks for the ask!

So I sort of agree, especially on the first part. I absolutely believe that yes, sheikah were not sidelined for malicious reasons, and the ease of just having one super-powerful ultratech culture you rely on was cleaner than having the old relics hanging around. I actually think it's the cleanest choice to make (one that would have been *even cleaner* would have been to write a story and think of a world that reinvent its landmarks based on that new ideas of archeology and the past bursting back into the present, which is theme that coats the game but doesn't ever permeates it). I still think any acknowledgement that it used to exist would have enriched a world that has, ultimately, very little new things to teach us about itself (I have scoured the Depths a bunch, and it's a combat/exploration hotspot, and that's cool but also what a missed opportunity to try some proper FromSoftware-style worldbuilding down there!). I don't think this would have confused new players; if anything it could have hinted at more and gave the new players any reason to pick up Breath of the Wild? But: the world is a playground! That's cool. I think it could be a much more meaningful playground, that's all. There's a category of players who kind of need some light modicum of internal consistency to be invested in exploration, and will just get bored otherwise (I have seen a bunch of people making this exact remark, and honestly... yeah, there are areas in the game I'm not interested in exploring just because I know it's a consequenceless challenge in the end --I'm just not the kind of player that is hooked by a game loop on its own merit, I need to understand what I'm building towards or I lose interest. It's the kind of thing that wouldn't have changed anything to a regular TotK's enjoyer experience, but would have greatly enriched the experience of players like me)

Still think that making Sheikahs a subset of hylians was a very weird choice. Not an outright malicious one, but one that does build up with all of the other weird choices and make this Hyrule feel like a revisionist Hyrule; and one they simply... didn't have to make.

(I'll maybe do another post about this, but there are so many things in this game that would be very confusing to a new player either way also --but that's kind of going into another territory)

I disagree about one general point, however, and I may get offtrack here a little but I guess you gave me an excuse to rant a little about how narrative design is perceived by the general public and what has been frustrating to witness in regards to the conversation surrounding this game from my perspective.

Mainly, this notion that "they had no other choice" because they chose to prioritize gameplay. I'm going to overshare a little (again sorry) but I work in gamedev in real life; I am actually a narrative designer that did quest design and game writing on a couple of games, some of them that also qualify as AAA open worlds. I think it's completely fair to see this game from a player perspective as a series of compromises struck to privilege the aspect of the game they were the most confident with --however, it is literally my real life job to walk through situations that can be extremely similar to this one and find solutions that weave narration with fun experiences game and level designers managed to put together. It doesn't mean that story has to swallow gameplay: if anything, narrative designers always try to privilege mechanics first and treat them as narrative devices in their own right before whipping out the actual cutscenes and the constant writing (and this game was somehow under AND overwritten in my opinion, especially in English --so I don't think it even solved this aspect?). This is not at all aimed at you in particular but at the internet at large; it ends up being quite grating to see assumptions being made about what can and can't be done in non-linear narrative as like, a fact of the universe instead of it being a specific field that deserve research and investment just like any other graphical advancement or intricate interactive feature, and explain away poor design decisions by the strange notion that they had no other choice, as if Nintendo studios aren't comprised of a bunch of humans who made active and passive choices. Like, I worked on very similar issues. There are solutions to how you feed information to the player in a non-linear way. There are ways to maximize impact and depth, even when you let the player guide the story. Again: it's fine if it doesn't bug you or a lot of people --but there are flaws. It happens. It's gamedev. It's a miracle any game is made at all --and this one is its own sort of miracle. What strikes me as strange is that I never see that level of excuses made for companies that do not cultivate that same image of being an unapproachable, united workforce, that get instead torn to shreds at the slightest sideway brush --but that's another subject maybe (maybe).

Narrative design is this thing that, when it's not there, people don't realize it could be; and when it is there, people take it for granted unless it's very visibly front and center like in Edith Finch or Disco Elysium or any other number of indie games (generally it's the indies who do all the research and development and take all of the risks on that front --like seriously I worked in narrative-driven studios, known for their narrative games, where 2/3 of the game designers couldn't care less about emotional impact beyond satisfaction/frustration/boredom, and it's infinitely frustrating (heh) to have your specialization considered optional fluff when you know how far thematic cohesion can push a game when handled well ANYWAY anyway). So: I was always going to care about the way they handled narrative, because it's how I'm wired, what I research, and I also played this game in part because I was very curious on how they'd push their explorations of BotW's possibilities, which were very interesting if a little limited. Needless to say, this was a let down. And I think it's not unreasonable to have higher narrative standards than this.

I do want to autocorrect myself on a statement I put out before, however, that being the notion that not enough research was put into narrative. I think I want to push forward a new theory that sounds much more plausible to me (again based on nothing but speculation and weird déjà-vu vibes, which is perhaps why I care that much :) :) ), and that being: a lot of research was done, and then cut. It seems very plausible the narrative used to be much more ambitious than this --and then, for one reason or another, somebody panicked, or the thing got out of hand, or they couldn't get it to work exactly right, and everything was downscoped pretty late into production. Six years of development is a long time, and I don't think anyone with the standards of a Nintendo employee would have been happy with handling the storyline the way it was. It kinda feels like a rushed cobble-up of loose threads after a massive downsizing, leaving plot holes and suboptimal emotional experience. Again: just a theory, no proof at all. But I absolutely wouldn't be surprised, and it would explain a lot of things.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Devs' Intentions

I read an article yesterday (I think it was GameRant) about a whole bunch of stuff that was cut out of Baldur's Gate 3 before official release. I don't remember all of them, but that's probably because they weren't very important to me one way or the other. However, there were a few that, for better or for worse, caught my attention. And ... well, I'm me. Before I start liveblogging the ridiculous cuteness that is the start of the Shadowheart romance (because whatever multiverse she lives in, Alisaie apparently goes for the dark-haired, mostly-serious, adorkable-when-allowing-herself-to-be-vulnerable godly ones), I wanted to talk about a few of them.

Exhaustion Mechanic: Oh dear sweet fucking gods, I'm glad they scrapped that one. Apparently that whole bit where the companions remark how tired they are is a holdover from that, but it used to come with a decrease to stats, just like the exhaustion mechanic in the PHB. Except ... I'm not sure they could have implemented that without it being ridiculously punishing. Encumberance is bad enough; don't hit my stats because I want to keep playing without taking a long rest, okay?

More Crafting Than Just Potions: Apparently at one point they were looking at allowing people to make and enchant their own weapons and armour. This is why you tend to find gems and metal ingots all over the place. While I'm a little sad about the lack of a crafting mechanic, I can see why they left it out - having a herbalism kit in the TTRPG version is one thing, but carrying around a fucking forge is something else again. And at least now I know this, so I can actually sell off the stupid metal ingots (except the infernal iron, obviously) because I don't actually need them.

Minsc: Apparently he should have been introduced earlier in the game, with a much more comprehensive character arc. I'm not sure why they went with the "rushed in Act 3" introduction to him in party, mostly because I haven't got that far yet, but I would imagine it has something to do with party management.

The Entire Upper Level of Baldur's Gate: Apparently there's an entire section of Baldur's Gate the city that was just ... excised from the game. Maybe they didn't have enough time to finish it, or maybe it just made the game too unwieldy, but apparently data mining indicates that there were a few things tied to the upper city that ... well, were really, really important to varoius characters' endgame states. So if you're dissatisfied with some characters' endings? It's probably to do with that. (And I won't go any further because spoilers.)

The Dark Urge: Now, here's the one I look at and really think, "Larian learned some lessons from Divinity: Original Sin 2" as regards player agency and going too far on the grimdark. Because apparently? Originally, the only way you could have an original character was to take the Dark Urge. There was no Tav / Dark Urge divide; if you wanted your own character instead of playing one of the origin characters? You were stuck with the Dark Urge, whether you wanted it or not. Now, don't get me wrong; if someone wants to play that, more power to them. Just, from what I've read about it, it does involve a certain loss of agency dependent on your stats. If you have to resist that Dark Urge, you're going to need saving throws, and if that's your dump stat because you wanted to play a strength-based character, that's just ... yeah. I don't mind the option being there; it's interesting on the conceptual level. I just wouldn't want that to be my only option. So I'm glad that Larian pried themselves out of Grimdark Valley long enough to go, "Okay, some people might not want to spend all their time fighting blind murderfrenzy just to play a good character", and make a separate, non-Dark Urge Tav. I also figure it has something to do with the issues in Divinity: Original Sin 2 where you'd want to take a specific course of action only to have one of your companions slaughter the quest objective before you could talk to them. (Still never forgiving them for that.)

So ... yeah, some things I'm really glad they stripped out. Others I wonder why? And some, while I enjoy them as mechanics (look, I am a crafting fiend, okay?), I can accept that they wouldn't have added much. I guess I wonder the thought processes that were going on in dev meetings where they came to those conclusions. I imagine the Dark Urge thing and the exhaustion mechanic thing both got, "Look, we can't stick them with this; they will riot", but ... what happened to that whole section of Baldur's Gate?

Maybe I've been dealing with too much bullshit from various AAA game companies*, but if they sell that shit as DLC I am going to set something on fire.

* - YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU, BIOWARE, WITH YOUR SELLING OFF THE ACTUAL ENDING AND/OR KEY ELEMENTS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT GAME IN THE SERIES AS DLC. I AM NOT FORGIVING YOU FOR LEGACY, AND I AM CERTAINLY NOT FORGIVING YOU FOR TRESPASSER. DLC IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN ADDED EXTRAS, LIKE SOLDIER'S PEAK! YOU USED TO UNDERSTAND THIS, EVEN IF YOU DID STICK A FUCKING AD FOR IT IN CAMP.

[talenlee]

How do Pokemon Breed?

I’m something of an originalist in Pokemon. I think that the games are the core of what the narrative flows from and everything else is flexible story that builds on that. What’s more, in Pokemon, people can say things, but there’s nothing saying that they’re right. People are wrong all the time in Pokemon, and sometimes people even lie to the player characters, to themselves, or to one another.  What’s more, the player character is a kid, somewhat, but also a kid who is experimenting with and learning about Pokemon training and breeding, so chances are good, people would explain the useful things to them.

But they don’t.

There’s a mechanical answer to the question of course. After the first two years of the game and then for twenty-ish years of the game, what you did was you dropped the Pokemon off at a daycare centre, and if the pair of them were compatible in some way, they’d produce an egg if you spent enough time waiting around. This version of the system was pretty elaborate, too – whether or not the Pokemon bred and the results of how it bred was a bit like a complex flowchart where you had to check details all the way down. For example, two Pokemon of the same species could breed, obviously, but two Pokemon of the same type could check each other’s genes, which was how the game did its best to keep Pokemon that were related from creating offspring. That system isn’t checked any more, which I think means that you can hypothetically get two sibling Pokemon to reproduce nowawadays. Or maybe they’re just more complex now and the game tracks that some other way.

This egg hatches based not on time but the number of steps you take while holding it, which I guess is either a compromise of the way the games express time, or it’s an actual mechanical need where the Pokemon eggs require constant agitation. There are Pokemon who supply warmth to eggs that speed this part of the process up, which kinda suggests the latter, especially in the newer real-time games where you can see Pokemon wandering around and doing their own thing.

Nowadays, instead of a daycare centre, where Pokemon get up to the thing they get up to off-screen where you don’t see it and don’t have to work out what a Cradily’s donger is like, Pokemon instead reproduce by going to a picnic and having a sandwich. Doing this, they leave an egg in your basket and they can leave a lot if the sandwich is really good. The thing is, they do this without you necessarily losing attention on the Pokemon. There’s some interface fades, which I guess can be treated as a lapse of attention, but also, do you think of the time and experience of Pokemon as being a wholly in-camera real-time experience? It doesn’t seem to be, at least based on the way that the game cross-fades to combat scenarios.

But that’s the mechanics of the game and the camera. These mechanisms are there to let you, the player, engage with the game system of Pokemon, which is mostly about transferring information between Pokemon of stats, moves, and sometimes natures or even species. That’s not really answering the question I’m asking, which is instead:

How do Pokemon breed?

There’s a lot of routes to take this kind of analysis. Pokemon is a game world with a lot of supplementary material, and some of that material was generated en masse to feed a demand for media in a wide variety of markets and audiences. If I wanted to I could find any number of sources that explain how Pokemon Breed in a variety of different G-rated nonsense ways. Plus there’s the Pokedex, full of unreliable information (as far as we know). If you want to, you can construct an entirely realistic, meat-based way to consider Pokemon Breeding. I understand if you go to furaffinity you can find an extensive documentary process considering all sorts of material opportunities here.

I don’t want to, because there are infinite texts of dubious relationship to the core material. There’s a genuine chance some local magazine to your home town made its own Pokemon Guide and writing from an unguided expert trying to pump out a booklet for a kid to buy got made and was licensed enough to have a Pikachu on the cover, but none of that implies they know anything about what they were writing about.

This is of course, a game for four year olds, but I think the thing that deserves attention in all this is that the Pokemon aren’t animals. We know they’re not. The whole nature of Pokemon is that their world is so wildly different to our own and we keep on defaulting to think about Pokemon in a way that treats them as animals. Pokemon breeding, as best we know, doesn’t even require physical contact. They need to like one another – compatibility is an issue – but it’s not like the Pokemon even need to materially interact as far as we know.

We know that Pokemon can change their mass and scale freely; they shrink down to get into the Pokeballs, rather than the Pokeball coercing them into it. When you throw the ball, it’s not that the ball captures them and does something weird and wonky to them, it’s that the ball is something the Pokemon investigates. What this means is that the entire vision of agency you see in the Pokemon universe, with trainers capturing things, is actually kinda backwards. Pokemon trainers aren’t capturing things, they’re presenting an opportunity to the Pokemon and seeing if the Pokemon wants to do it. The battles between Pokemon and trainer are also consensual – the Pokemon can refuse to do things – and if you want to see it, check out what happens when you transfer a high-level Pokemon to a starting character. Pokemon are sentient and sapient. Pokemon are also capable of regeneration and production of food that humans can consume and give it up consensually. A bunch of them are in some way, plants, at least they’re considered grass types and have some kind of self-sustaining relationship to sunlight.

Okay, then, so they’re not animals, not proper animals.

What does that mean for their breeding?

Well, I mean, whatever you want it to.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[whatstrangeloops]

The Hades II prediction post

Wow! Hades II! That was a swerve from a studio that’s pointedly never done a sequel to any of their other games. In a way, surprising with their first sequel is entirely in character for Supergiant, who if you’ve seen interviews with the team, have always approached development from an innovation-first perspective. After Bastion, Transistor was developed around incorporating narrative elements into the mechanics more strongly, then Pyre was about writing for a large cast, and Hades, finally, was about synthesizing all their previous work into the rogue-like formula, distilling the gameplay and storytelling elements they’d kept consistently and those that they’d innovated upon previously into one release.

So what will Hades II be about, what will be it’s driving innovation? First though, let me write about the fluff. I think Hades II will have dual-wielding. The trailer really seems to emphasize both Melinoe and Hecate dual-wielding weapons. And close watchers will have noticed that Melinoe uses mismatched weapons, a sickle and a dagger. Could this mean we might get to choose a dual wielding loadout? I think it could be likely, such a system existed in Bastion and I expect that Transistor’s “weapons equipped in different primary or utility slots create build wide modifiers” system could be on the table as well.

I am also entirely certain that we will see more areas. Hades five (5) zones (I count The House of Hades as a zone) were fully fleshed but not very numerous especially comparing to SGs previous releases. I will go ahead an claim that Hades II will have closer to 8 or maybe 10 zones though I’m not sure if these will be linearly arranged, arranged on branching paths, or if instead they will crib some notes from the Spelunky games and implement secret side zones only accessible by player investment. The prospect excites me though. There are two new zones featured in the trailer, a sort of haunted forest, probably the first zone and a blink and you’d miss it shot of a mechanical “submarine” type area with fish and aquatic based enemies. Interesting. Passingly, I know that in the Greek mythos Poseidon and Hades were actually once possibly the same god only later split into different domains. To be clear I’m speaking about the historical evolution of the Greek mythology and not an explicit narrative element in any story. This detail could have interesting thematic or story implications but I’ll get to that in a bit. Anyway, it would also be cool if they remade some of the areas from the first game but you had to go through them the other way. People go crazy for that kind of thing.

What about Magick? That’s intriguing. At first, I thought that maybe this was going to replace the cast but rewatching the trailer I see that the cast is seemingly still it’s own thing. The UI in the trailer is clearly not fully fleshed out so I think it’s wise not to draw speculation from every single thing present in the trailer. It seems Magick is similar to the abilities that the exiles had in Pyre though. More movement based abilities would be an appropriate addition of complexity for a sequel...

And actually that brings me to what I teased at the start of this post. What is the principle driving Hades II’s development? I think that the innovation the Supergiant wants to explore, the new challenge they’re trying to face with this game is “How do you make a sequel?”. You might think, duh, it’s Hades 2 but you have to remember that this is Supergiant’s 5th game but only their first sequel and how do you do a sequel? I think the modern game enjoyer takes sequels for granted. We just sort of expect eventually any popular game will have a follow up but at the same time a game franchise that just pumps out sequels is seen as being commercialized or creatively bankrupt. Think about like the Madden or FIFA or Call of Duty or Assassins' Creed games. Gamers talk a lot about what sequels or entries are good or bad relative to other members of that game’s lineage. Do you just give the fans what they think they want, more of the game they already liked? Do you simplify or do you expand? How do you bring back old favorite characters whose stories you supposedly wrapped up in the last game and/or how do introduce new characters to exist alongside those old ones? These may seem like silly, basic questions but they are also fundamental to the creative structure of any sequel.

Based on this prediction I am going to speculate on the choice of Chronos as the new villain. I think it fits in my framework. We are all expecting, on some level, that Hades II will take us back to what it was like to first be playing Hades (the first) so the antagonist being Father Time himself usurping and re-establishing an older order is something that I don’t think will be left unaddressed. After the trailer posts were immediately speculating that at the end of a rogue-like cycle Chronos will simply send you back in time to the beginning again. And that Hades and Poseidon connection I mentioned before? What if Hades and Poseidon hadn’t been split historically? What if Chronos can see a different timeline? Multiverse stories have just been in the water lately and time travel and multiverses have been arm-in-arm since, ohhh that Flash comic from the Silver Age? I’m think I’m saying that at least we’ll be seeing some of the older and stranger elements of the Greek mythology being mined in this sequel. Hopefully maybe.

I could write a more, about Hecate I think, but I don’t feel like drinking anymore tonight so I think I’ll leave it at this.

[kyndaris]

Pokemon Beta: The Real Treasures were all the Friends we Made Along the Way

Following on from what felt like such a huge leap forward in terms of what Pokemon could be, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet felt like taking two steps back. This was especially true when it came to gameplay, performance and quality of options. And while the story provided players with an illusion of choice, it was clear form the start that they would all converge to a central point and thus remain a very much guided experience with a singular ending despite its protests of openness. 

Worse, one could not rush to the very end with a paltry team of Level 5 Pokemon and hope to take on the big bad right from the very start. Breath of the Wild, this was not. And therein lay Scarlet and Violet’s greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness when it came to linear storytelling.

It should be known that I usually play the first game in every new release. That means, Red, Gold (although in terms of the Johto, I was more enthralled of Lugia, so Silver it was for me), Ruby, X, Sun and Sword. However, this time round, I played Violet instead as the concept of fighting future Pokemon just seemed much more enticing.

The game started out as most Pokemon games do with the protagonist starting off in their small humble town that doesn’t even sport a Pokemon Centre. In Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, the conceit is that it’s your first day of school after moving to Paldea. As you come down the stairs, having dressed in your version specific uniform, there is a knock at the door. Director Clavell serves somewhat in the role of the professors of old, introducing the player characters to the world of Pokemon and even giving players the option to choose one of the three starters to begin their journey in earnest: Sprigatitto, Fuecoco and Quaxly.

Suffice it to say, I picked the fire crocodile.

And as I stepped out of my casita (with its Encanto vibes), I was sent straight into a battle with new rival: Nemona (who lived down the street in a palatial mansion and several wait staff to attend to her every need). Nemona was a a rival that I very much liked. She was a breath of fresh air from the excitable Hau and the almost forgettable Hop. Fearless and always eager for a battle, she was also used sparingly through the game. So, even as I was going from gym to gym, gathering badges, Nemona wasn’t entirely forced down my throat. Yes, there were a few battles here and there but it wasn’t constant. AND she was pretty helpful in those first few hours - teaching players how to catch Pokemon before leading us to the Academy at Mesagoza. Although she was of little aid when my character fell down a cliff and found the mythical Miraidon.

Still, the fact that I now had a legendary HM slave in my arsenal was nothing to sniff up. I even cleaned up all the different Pokemon that were immediately available in and around Los Platos and whatever else that could be found in the area.

By the time I finally made it to Uva Academy to begin my education, even my Fuecoco had evolved into a Crocalor.

At the Academy, I was then introduced to a plethora of new characters, each unique in their own way. From Team Star and Penny to the teachers. One of my favourite teachers was Ms Tyme and her very first trick-question that wasn’t entirely based on maths but on actual game mechanics. I also loved Salvatore and Saguaro. As for Professor Hassel, there was something about his design that reminded me either of a Pokemon or a character of another game. Initially, I thought his design was similar to Isabelle from Animal Crossing but the more I looked at the two of them, the similarities began to fade away.

Someone, anyone, help me identify who this dragon-user Elite Four Professor looks like!

Once I was introduced properly to the school, and after maybe a week or two of in-game time had passed in quick succession as part of the story, Director Clavell announced what we had all been waiting for: the Treasure Hunt. And suddenly Paldea opened itself up for proper exploration with its ‘three storylines.’ Which, as I’ve stated above does get funnelled into one story where the player characters along with the allies they made throughout each storyline work together to save the world in a fairly cliche Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) story.

Still, I really liked getting to understand the motivation and backstory behind Team Star. In fact, it was probably my favourite ‘storyline’ that got explored. As for the gym badges and the hunt for the Herba Mystica - they very much leaned into traditional Pokemon tropes that only lent a little to the characterisation of Nemona and Arven and were just gimmicky ways to improve Miraidon or proceed down the tried and true path of becoming a Pokemon Master.

The only downside to the whole game was the fact that GameFreak, once again, refused to implement any form of ACTUAL voice acting. Unfortunately for me, whilst I wouldn’t have minded voicing all the characters like I did with The Great Ace Attorney, I caught a cold/ flu/ possibly COVID at the start of the new year. Which left me with a horrid cough that threatened to take away my voice on multiple occasions and refused to go away. Nevertheless, it could not stop me from giving Nemona a very questionable Spanish accent and voicing a few of the cinematic cutscenes.

WHY ARE THERE CINEMATIC CUTSCENES WHEN YOU DON’T INCORPORATE ANY VOICE ACTING?

Honestly, it boggles my mind to know that GameFreak has moved to 3D sprites with MOVING mouth flaps and they still don’t feel the urge to add voices to pivotal scenes.

But maybe that was beyond the skills of the developers? After all, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet had many things wrong with it when it to performance. In fact, it’s the Cooperajah in the room. Because even though I started my Pokemon journey almost two months after the most ardent fans, I still found myself struggling with dips in frame rate and the long load times when it came to Pokemon boxes. Then, of course, there was the strange motion of non-playable characters (NPCs) that were no further than ten metres away. 

Some have pointed to the hardware of the Switch for the poor performance of the game. Which I honestly do not believe to be true. Why? Well, even though the Switch is pretty old, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which I played in mid-2022, also sported a huge world to explore with an enviable draw distance and I didn’t encounter as many issues as I did in Pokemon Violet.

The lack of optimisation and performance issues for Pokemon Violet was enough to be grating. And yet I pushed on. For, despite the fact that the game crashed on me three to four times during the entire duration of my playthrough, I was still able to to find a semblance of  fun and joy in the game.

And complete my Pokedex with the help of a few friends.

Admittedly, the lack of quality of life options in the game was also a letdown. Especially when it came to its ‘Let’s Go’ mode. While some of the mechanics were explained in the lessons at the Academy, these were usually after the third badge. Which meant that a player could have conceivably grinded a Pokemon to their evolution level via the R or ZR button but not have it evolve. 

While moves could be ‘remembered’ on the fly, there was no option to simply allow a Pokemon to evolve once it reached the conditions needed. An oversight in my opinion when it came to the ‘Let’s Go’ feature of the game.

Even fast travel was poorly explained with the Flying Cabs. And the fact that you could lock the map by pressing down on the right analog stick. Which could have all been done through a few additional tutorial boxes.

Now to the Pokemon in question. A lot of the new additions felt quite gimmicky in terms of gameplay. That isn’t to say that they were bad but none of them truly stood out except the Tinkatink evolution line. Smoliv was cute, true, but Arboliva wasn’t as majestic as I could have hoped. 

Although, I’m sure professional Pokemon battlers will find use for them regardless. For me, though, I ended up keeping the composition of my previous Pokemon teams with the only addition being the starter I had chosen: Skeledirge, Gyarados, Lucario, Garchomp, Luxray and Grimmsnarl. I like my heavy hitters! There’s nothing wrong with that!

Overall, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are a bit of a mess. And not in the good way. Did I still manage to enjoy myself? Yes. But it was at the expense of Pokemon’s good name and reputation. Although, from what I’ve heard, it’s been an issue for quite a while now. 

Will it mean that the next game will be a slower purchase? Possibly.

I’m not going to pay top dollar for a broken and unfinished game. It might be endearing the first time but it should not be acceptable. Especially when even the patches purported to fix it don’t seem to do much at all.

And so, it feels like a beta that is trying to dominate and be an alpha. But failing hard at it. Just stick to your own beta! No omega is going to ever want to be with you! 

[farer-dreamer]

Game Mechanics and Levels (Take 1)

9/8/24 - by next week I am going to be taking a hacksaw to like half of these ideas

I figured I should actually, y'know, write out what the gameplay mechanics and such are for this thing instead of just spinning them around in my head at maximum velocity.

yapping below the read more if you're interested

General Gameplay Mechanics

Basic 3D environment movement, jumping, and a dash.

Player HP - Sliding health bar? 100 HP?

The camera will be 3rd person, controlled by mouse movement.

In SOME areas it'll be locked to one perspective (like the hub area)

Maybe I'll have the player be able to zoom in and out via the scroll wheel

The basic gameplay loop is as follows:

Player starts out on the subway

The subway stops, player exits

Player enters a random level, subway leaves

Player explores the level and finds the subway car door once again

Player enters the subway, loop

During the intermissions in between the levels, the player will have a chance to interact with the subway car's AI, Ferri, where they can store or sell items they've picked up on their travels.

Player Inventory

The player will have an inventory where they can collect items they find in the levels.

limited to maybe 5 slots?

Items

The player will be able to collect items in the various levels, from there they can decide if they want to sell them for currency (used to buy rarer items from shops), or use them on themselves, or store them on the subway.

Different items can have different effects on the player (healing, speed, jump height… maybe some other sillay effects and such if time allows)

If the player dies they'll lose all the items they're currently holding in their inventory.

Currency

Currency can be obtained either through finding coin bags in levels, or by selling items during level intermissions. Admittedly I am still on the fence about if I want to include coin bags in levels or not as I feel like finding and selling items would be more interesting

Also still debating over whether the player should also lose all their currency after dying, leaning towards no.

Levels

Ok to start. I fully expect to scrap some of these as we get into development.

Level Hub - Subway Car (Ferri)

The magical subway car that takes the player anywhere. Controlled by an AI named Ferri that the player can interact with via the terminal at the front.

Talking with Ferri will let the player store/sell their items and save their game

Ferri will also give hints to the player!

Occasionally NPCs will be sitting on the train when Doc enters, they can talk with them during the level intermissions

Exploration Level 1 - Half Floor

Level based on the weird floor that was in between the 14th and 15th floor of my old school (dubbed the 14th 1/2)

There's an NPC on this floor, Sloppy Joe, you can chat with him and after visiting on this floor he has a chance to appear on the subway car.

To complete this level there's a maze of ventilation the player needs to make it through

If I decide to keep the items/coin system I'll have some of those hidden here

Exploration Level 2 - Digital Bliss

Level with aesthetics based on windows XP. Low poly plants and nature and… stuff like that.

Heavily taking inspiration from another project of mine about a world that takes place inside of a computer and the main characters are all like…. programs and computer viruses and such

I'm still not entirely sure what I want to put here right now… but I kind of want to try and do some computer wizardry with C# and have the game send out popups and such.

The player could get damaged here by glitches? maybe?

Shop - Keep's Shop

A shop that has rotating stock every time you visit it and sells items that can't be found in levels

If I get rid of the item system this one is getting scrapped for now.

Minigame 1 - Chase

A small platforming segment where the player has to escape a giant monster that's chasing after them (the subway doors reappear at the end of the level)

Still coming up with what I want this area to look like and what the monster should be… maybe it wont even be a monster? just some danger chasing the player that OKOs them when they get hit.

Visuals aren't as big of a priority on these levels so I hypothetically could stay with some more basic structures. Maybe it could be an unsteady crumbling building? and you gotta escape the decay?

Minigame 2 - Hold!

ok so this one basically the player would need to hold down a button for 30(?) seconds total while avoiding getting hit by canonballs? Lazers?

lowkey I am tempted to make this level themed after my one clown character, Offiz. In one of my games I made last school year I gave them an attack that would shoot smiley-faced balls at the player.

I imagine the button would be in the center of a circular circus tent, canons on the wall that shoot bouncy balls at random

If the player does not complete the task in time they'll be teleported back to the subway car (this goes for the other levels to, I think it'd be funny when time's up the subway door pops up underneath Doc)

Honestly the planning for this thing is driving me a bit mad, while the dev time I have for this thing IS longer than time I've gotten in the past, it still is roughly 6 months. Most of my game projects I worked on at my previous university would be done in half a semester, though of course they were rather half-baked and buggy due to the time constraints. I guess I'm just worried that I'm going a bit too in over my head for this, but at the same time if I remove too much I feel like I'll be losing some of that game element to present come thesis presentations… I guess with all this preproduction stuff there's also part of my brain that's just like DUDE YOU'RE LOSING TIMEEEE when like. I kinda have to do this? I have to pitch my idea. I don't know, this is probably just another battle with myself.

There is part of me that feels like I'm biting off more than I can chew again though. I don't know. I have an informal pitch with the professors next week so I'll probably get some feedback then. If anything honestly after writing all of this out I am considering scrapping the item/currency/shop system to focus more on gameplay/exploration… but I also feel like I'm losing player incentives y'know? The only actual incentive would be to just explore around, which sure isn't bad on its own but I also want this to be fun. Perhaps I'm being too harsh on myself.

[wobblinpenguins]

A few notes about Ch. 6

The fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49875277

The chapter I’m referencing isn’t currently done, but I’ve just finished the first part and I want to give a quick rundown on how I feel about it and why I’ve made Corrin a bit more emotional. I’ll try to keep this more focused on the work rather than bashing Fates’ writing. 

But I do have to bash the game’s character writing first. A lot of the characterization is botched thanks to the absolute hell that was the game’s development, but I think it really had potential (which is one of the reasons why I’m even able to write this fic in the first place). Not to mention, it also had a different purpose: as a part of a whole (a script for a game) instead of an entire work on its own. Obviously, it could’ve been better, but for the most part, it allows the chapters to flow (kinda, if you don’t take time to think about the plot). 

The tone of this work is entirely different, evidenced by the tag “Psychological Drama,” which I do plan to stick to. Perhaps it might not be a psychological drama at the level of Crime and Punishment, but I do want to craft characters with more realistic depictions — even in fantasy. Since the visual realism is mostly left up to the imagination (with vivid descriptions), most of the realism from the characters comes from emotional & psychological depictions that check out. But, of course, that takes a lot of time to think through and double check, which is totally NOT a copout of why these are taking so long. 

Honestly, when playing through the original game my first time (when I was like 14 or something), it didn’t strike me as odd when Corrin only barely reacted to the beginning of the story, but when playing again later, it struck me as incredibly weird. Their birth mother dies in their arms (shocking enough to make them transform into a fucking dragon) and then, with no time to grieve, they march to a field in the middle of Hoshido and proceed to alienate themselves from one of their families — both, in Revelation. 

In a sense, I also made Corrin more emotionally fragile, based on her context. She grew up tethered solely to her family: her only childhood friend was almost executed because she went on a picnic with him outside the grounds and the only people she had left to interact with were her adoptive siblings and her servants (loyal to Nohr). The person she thought of as a father then tells her to kill people before sending her on a death mission when she refuses. Then, her entire world shatters as she is told that she’s actually a princess of Hoshido instead! So the only deep connections she’s had in her life have been entirely based on family, and it’s all ripped away from her.

If someone like that suddenly loses all familial relationships, I’d be surprised if they didn’t melt into a pile of emotionally destroyed goo. And, in the games, it’s supposed to happen much sooner than the timeframe I gave in the story! I suppose you could make the case that they were deluding themselves that the rejection from Xander and Ryoma could easily be fixed and using that as a coping mechanism to prevent from entirely breaking, or maybe they were just sigma-pilled stoics or something. But even that makes no sense: they obviously feel grief and remorse at other points in the plotlines (see any sibling death, Mikoto), and they are emotionally expressive too, so how were they unaffected by that shit?

It’s a case of “I’m looking too much into this,” probably.

This incarnation of Corrin is not so fortunate, I’m afraid. When she gets hit with this, especially since she’s just beginning to grow emotionally, it’s a rather hard and long lasting sucker punch. She will eventually crawl out of this hole (real crazy spoilers). Her influences growing up (Xander & the Nohrian siblings) show in how she tries to bottle her emotions up but the total weight is too much after she has those around her to connect to. I’m trying not to have Corrin cry too much (having her come across as OoC), but the first few chapters of the game would be rather brutal to a girl who is seeing the world for the first time. I promise she won’t sob at a hat’s drop when she recovers from this.

I also wanted to talk about Elise, because she’s in a similar state of emotional distress. From my experience with Fates, Elise also seems to derive a lot of her emotional wellbeing from her family, so she would probably be sensitive to conflict between the siblings. Being at the beginning of teenagehood (no way she’s older than fifteen at most) brings its fair share of emotional instability just from growing up, and then when she’s hit with Corrin disappearing, reappearing, and then Xander shutting down any chance of reconnection! Rough. Honestly, until I was writing it, I felt a depressive episode was a little extreme for Elise, but after, I think it fits and gives her a bit more depth. 

Also, it feels like I’ve struck gold with a lot of the dynamics that’re building in the story (even if I might be trying to refine that gold with a janky set up in my backyard). Elise and Lissa being best friends was a shoe-in, but I’m surprised other crossover stories haven’t really touched on how perfect a friendship they would have. Unfortunately, since I don’t want the story to be 8 million words long and as focused as someone’s 20/200 vision, I wasn’t able to show much of Lissa’s stay in Nohr and interactions with the Nohrian royals. If it strikes my inspiration, I might write a few side-stories detailing that time — same for Robin’s month-long stay in Hoshido. 

Speaking of word-length, I feel like this story will easily break a million words and I’d rather not bore you guys with a rewrite of a plot you’ve no doubt played or read or seen a dozen times over, so I’ll be leaning more into plot divergence from this point forward. Also, I may disappear for a while before coming back and posting some chapters, like I just did for this chapter…. lol…… 

Well, I’ve spent too long with this story idea stuck in my head, so I’m putting it in words and doing it till the end, so don’t worry if I go no-communication for a while. I will still be working on it. And I’ll definitely try to get it to more than one burst of updates a year too. This thousand word brain dump likely rambles too much to get a consistent point across, but if you read it, thank you for reading. Chapter 7 is fully planned (ch. 8 is ~85-90% planned), but I’ve barely started writing it, so it’ll probably be a little bit until then. Who knows, though — I could have another burst of creativity before I go back to college in the fall. 

…

Okay, I’ve finished the chapter now, and I only have a few more thoughts to add: chapter seven is like 1% written and chapter eight is fully planned, so I’ll start working on those soon. It was super satisfying to click post on chapter six, so that’ll fuel me for the next few days or few thousand words. Also, Fates is over eight years old (internationally) at this point, which is kind of messed up, so I feel like I’m just constantly aging and then decaying into dirt at this point. Oh well… 

Wish they would announce a new Fire Emblem 4: Genealogy of the Holy War remake before I die… hmm, looks like I’ll just keep this clown makeup on, then…