#modders you are seen

[chessalein]

Shout out to the CP2077 modders!

I'm goung through all these clothing mods right now to see what I have missed the last 5 month and I'm blown away how many versions there for all these body mods.

It would be easy for them to only do one and be like "Yea, thats it. Eat it or fuck off"

But no.

There are lists of to what body they fit, and these are a freaking lot. Then to watch out for solo arms so the sleeves fit and so on. Its a lot of work and I apriciate it.

Dear modders, with this post I wanna tell you

Your hard work is seen!

Yes, you do it for fun but it still requires time and I'm sure you all aren't a fan of all refits and sometimes sit there like "I rather not...".

But you want as many people as possible to be able to use your work and the time you use for that is a sacrifice at this point. Time you could put easily into the next mod that keeps you awake at night.

So next time you download a mod and see how well it fits your Characters body, take a minute to apriciate what a good work the modder did. When your OC loves loveley in that pair of pants, when he gets to wear something that wasn't made for his bodytype, when she looks ravishing in that top, when they can bring their body to perfection and looking good doing so, including outfits specificly made for their bodytype.

Each mod can bring a smile to someones face. Make them say "Thats exactly what I was looking for!"

And when an outfit or another mod doesn't work, try not to throw a tantrum. Be thankful for all the others you have, you will survive if this one mod isn't working for you. Believe me.

Thanks modders! Remember to stop shrimping if you do it right now, remember to eat and drink while you work on your stuff. And if it doesn't wanna cooperate, take a step away, it will be there tomorrow as well ♥ And when you both rested well, work might be done easier. Don't forget your explanation duck, perhaps when you tell them what you do and have to do, you might find the solution.

[lambda-core]

I am way too tired/jetlagged to make this post right now, but the reason Armada Starscream is so specifically well done to me actually isn't just the way he's got more depth than just wanting to take over Megatron. It's the way he falls back on this image he has of himself as someone who is solely focused on Megatron. And he is obsessed with Megatron, but the disconnect between Starscream and his image of himself is what gives him actual depth.

The reason this is so cool to me is like, that self-image--that he is single-mindedly obsessed with Megatron and will sacrifice everything else for that goal, no matter who gets hurt--is pretty close to what every other Starscream is. (The selfishness you associate with Starscream is a little more subtle, but it's there in the "no matter who gets hurt" clause imo.)

So if you go into this as a Transformers fan, you're already expecting Starscream to betray Megatron and try to best him and rule the Decepticons. But so does Starscream, even when he's demonstrably proven to both his peers and the audience that he's more than that. It's almost like his past incarnations--or the audience's expectation of him--haunt him. It turns his own internal man-versus-self conflict into this really cool man-versus-narrative conflict.

And what's crazy about this is, through the last moments of this arc, Starscream does grow beyond the narrative we'd expect from other Starscreams! But he never admits that to himself, because it's easier for him to cling to the idea that he's laser-focused on his hatred of Megatron. Every time he helps the minicons--every time he helps the humans--even in his last words, he LIES to himself and everyone around him that everything he did was always about Megatron. Because it's easier to simplify himself than to grasp that he might be a complex character. Because he's a person and he has all the messy conflicts that come with that. He falls back on the same ideas every single other Starscream did, and THAT is his undoing. Not that he is self-centered because he's Starscream. Not that he is obsessed with Megatron because he's Starscream. That he THINKS he is all of those things and he will not LET himself be anything else.

I would argue that that's a bigger theme in Armada, as well. Optimus and Megatron more or less spend their final fight coming to terms with their story roles in Transformers. I really feel like if you sneezed on them, they would realize they do this in every universe and in every timeline. Starscream's is the most interesting example to me, though, because he's such a departure from other versions of Starscream; hell, he acts (and looks, lol) a lot more like some incarnations of Thundercracker. But he's still got classic Starscream in him in this roundabout meta reference. He's like an homage to his namesake. It's so cool! And it works perfectly with the story he's a part of.

[lae-zels]

making a video game where your only dnd race options are dragonborns, orcs, githyanki(pre bg3), bugbears, goblins, hobgoblins, tabaxi, kobolds or warforged and if you use mods to yassify any of them im getting my gun

[bethrnoora]

i think i would be more of a fan of morrigans original outfit if the piece underneath the scarf-shirt was something other than a string bikini lmfao

[bennymaxxing]

hey modders just a reminder that using AI for your mods is as bad as AI art and visual deepfakes (especially you sick mfs using AI to make porn mods). just like AI art, you're taking someone's work that they are paid for without consent to get something similar for free and idk how anyone can think that's ok

[cowbot-lumberjane]

DOOM 2 RAYTRACED

Looks like shit m8

[armoricaroyalty]

Why is the Sims community boycotting Curseforge?

I've seen a lot of posts going around calling on Simmers to stop using Curseforge, a modding platform that enables creators to monetize their downloads, with plenty of outrage directed toward modders and CC-makers who are still on the platform. But I've also seen a lot of people who are confused about why there are calls for a boycott.

Curseforge is owned by Overwolf, a company that is donating money to the IDF in support of its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

In late October/early November, Overwolf posted a graphic on their social media asking followers to "defend our defenders" by contributing financially to a fundraising drive for the IDF. They were met with backlash and quickly took the graphic down, replacing it with one that used language about raising money for "those affected by the violence in Gaza" (my phrasing may be inexact) but the money is still going to the IDF and not to any agency actually supporting civilians or doing humanitarian work.

You can see the original graphic on this change.org petition, which provides some additional context.

If you are using Curseforge in any way -- by hosting your content there or downloading from it -- you are giving money to a company that is raising funds for an ongoing military campaign against a civilian population.

This is why people are calling for a boycott. If you are a modder or CC maker for the Sims, you should remove all of your content from the website and redirect people to other DL sources. If you are a consumer of mods and CC, you should stop clicking curseforge links and send (polite!) messages to modders and CC makers to urge them to pull their content from the site.

ETA: Here's another link with more images of the original Overwolf Tweet!

[paper-mario-wiki]

(in reference to your tags) You don't understand, porn modding communities holds up the rest of the modding community. Those mfers will direct and reverse engineer every bit of code, will painstakingly model lovingly rendered nude bodies that are seamless with the base game models, and the rest of us rely on them to do what we do.

Me and every other 3d cosmetic modder I know have folders of loverslab models just because they're the highest quality nude models that we can use as bases for new outfits or when porting characters.

when da vinci drew the vitruvian man he had the same idea to capture the beauty in human form, and the world celebrated him for centuries for it.

and yet when cumzoner2053 spends 200 hours studying the particulars of Bethesda's file structure and proprietary syntax in order to create Optimized Fix for Uncut Deathclaw Scaly Cock 4k Texture Clipping theyre seen as a degenerate.

[woodaba]

The Copied Cathedral: Drakengard

In September 2022, something odd happened. 

A group of talented NieR: Automata modders released footage of a church they added to the game on reddit and twitter. It was a pretty big accomplishment - Automata’s engine is difficult to work with, and many players with a cursory familiarity with it felt that this kind of addition to the game was unfeasible, so for something of this scale to be created represented a shift in the landscape of NieR modding. However, this achievement was practically rendered irrelevant by the way in which they chose to reveal their work: an arg/”hoax” wherein they pretended to “discover” the mysterious church in an unmodded copy of the game, presenting it as a long-hidden easter egg. 

This gained unusual traction. This kind of thing happens a lot, but I’ve rarely seen it gather the kind of steam the copied cathedral did. The collective practiced cynicism of the internet, as well as the increasingly white-box nature of our favourite games, reliably helps quash the kinds of rumors that would easily gain traction on the playground, when it was much harder for someone to definitively prove you a liar when you claimed to have climbed aboard a rocket and shot off into space to find Deoxys in Pokemon Emerald. And I think there’s a pretty clear reason for this: anytime anyone expressed scepticism over the church and its impracticalities, they were met with the same refrain.

“It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would do something like this.” 

This refrain remained intact even when how people engaged with the modders’ work changed. In the beginning, it was “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would include an easter egg that people would only find 5 years later!” When it became clear that the cathedral did not, in fact, exist in the game, it became “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would craft an ARG to tease future NieR content.”

As someone who has had a relationship with Taro’s oeuvre since playing NieR at 14 years old, this was all very confusing to me. Because the Yoko Taro that I thought I knew didn’t do stuff like this. None of his games were ever advertised with any kind of obscure ARG disseminated through social media. His games didn’t really have obscure secret content that remained secret for years after the fact. I thought Yoko Taro was a guy who directed games with sweary, murderous protagonists connected to each other through intricate lorebooks that never left Japan…and showed up to promote Drakengard 3 as a sock puppet. Without my realizing it, what “Yoko Taro” was had changed, and he had become, in the eyes of many, a kind of mystical trickster, whose mad genius was simultaneously incomparable and unpredictable, whilst also falling into neat patterns that were easily and instantly recognisable. 

Did I miss where these collectively agreed readings of Taro and his work came from? And if not, where did this perception of Yoko Taro come from? 

When did Yoko Taro become Yoko Taro?

In The Copied Cathedral Branch A: Anarchy in the UK

It seems appropriate, somehow, when talking about Drakengard, to start at the very end. That’s where the conversation often begins and ends, isn’t it? In the public consciousness, this game is practically a footnote, an inciting incident to the more significant, more complete work; this is the game that led, in one of its endings, to NieR, and in turn, to NieR: Automata.

This history weighs heavily on Drakengard. It’s practically impossible to imagine anyone experiencing it now without some knowledge of how it connects to the various strands of Yoko Taro’s Cinematic Universe. I’m very much included in that - “Ending E leads to NieR” was the first thing I learned about Drakengard, and it was the curiosity over what that meant that led me to the game. It’s unfortunate, then, that this approach completely inverts what Ending E of Drakengard actually is - a joke. 

Going through the experience of unlocking Ending E and playing it for yourself makes this so clear in a way that hearing about it second-hand will never quite manage. You have to go through the painstaking task of finding every single weapon - some of which have requirements so arbitrary and obscure as to practically necessitate a guide - only to unlock an ending where absolutely none of them are required. You play a rhythm game to the tune of the game’s deliberately abrasive and discordant soundtrack, and then are unceremoniously shot down. And in case there was any doubt left, the game laughs at you after thanking you for playing.

In context, this is a prank played on completionists, a surprise sucker-punch that revels in what a stunning anticlimax it is. Good job, buddy! Thanks for spending hours of your life pressing square-square-square-triangle, or maybe circle if you’re nasty. Here’s your reward: a confirmation that you wasted your fucking time. 

And to be clear: I think that’s great. It’s a joke that just gets funnier the more it builds throughout the rhythm game section - starting off easy, and remaining manageable throughout, until you finally reach a section that is so unbelievably difficult practically out of nowhere, pulling the rug out from under you just as you’ve managed to stumble to your feet. It’s audaciously mean, and utterly wonderful. 

But Ending E isn’t a surprise anymore - it’s the most famous part of the game. Ending E of Drakengard is, now, the opening notes of one of the most beloved - and lucrative - series’ in Square Enix’s roster. For most people who play the game now, it’ll be the reason they’re here, either literally, or metaphorically, as their NieR curiosity brings them to this title. For NieR fans, this is not an anticlimax punchline to hours of tedious weapons collecting. This is the final battle between The Dragon and The Queen Beast, a battle fought in terms incomprehensible to the fragile human psyche, ground zero for White Chlorination Syndrome and the Legion, and the beginning of the end of the human race. The fact that I can come out with that jargon without having to take a trip to the NieR wiki demonstrates that I too, am infected with the future history of Taro et al’s work, work that has collectively robbed this sucker punch of its impact, and turned it into the most laboured Marvel Cinematic Universe teaser in the history of the medium. What a terrible thing to do to something you helped create. 

I don’t mean this to say that the mere existence of NieR has destroyed the intentions of Drakengard, but history’s shadow has undoubtedly fallen heavy on this game, obscuring a lot of  what it actually is, even down to what the minute-to-minute play of the game is actually accomplishing. 

The common reading of the game these days is that it is intentionally unpleasant to play in order to comment on or satirize violence in video games. I can see it! Drakengard’s combat is often described as monotonous, but I don’t think that’s quite right. True monotony would turn it into routine, and could potentially allow the player to sink into a flow state that makes the game drift past you. Instead, the game is interested in creating little sticking points that force you to keep yourself present in the fight. Whether it’s long-range attackers, the game’s propensity for enemies to strike at you from outside of the camera’s vision, or scattering enemies in among the packs that require you to approach them slightly differently, the game manages to keep its killing a conscious, methodical act, never letting them forget about the things they’re doing to others. 

But how different is this from its contemporaries? Many of the features I’ve described here - a camera that doesn’t always effectively every threat, parceling out enemy encounters into smaller waves - aren’t unique to Drakengard, but are common to many of its contemporaries on the PS2. In particular, Drakengard does not feel noticeably more abrasive than the PS2 Dynasty Warriors games that the ground battles are in direct conversation with. It’s not identical - Drakengard choosing to strip out the light strategy framing of Dynasty Warriors to focus entirely on killing enemies is notable - but playing a Warriors game alongside Drakengard made the latter feel less like satire of the former and more like imitation - the sincerest form of flattery. If Drakengard is boring, it might simply be because the form it is most closely emulating has often struggled being a critical darling. In fact, for a certain generation of people, the musou form is practically gaming’s biggest and most laughable punching bag. 

This accusation of the combat being, in some sense, deliberately unfun, in particular, largely fails to explain the dragon-riding sections. In the hybrid levels - where you can hop aboard your dragon to rain death from the skies - it arguably acquits itself in this context well enough, particularly with the choice to use an awkwardly close-up camera angle that frames you above the ground but close enough to it to see bodies flying from every fireball and explosion you cause. Anti-air attacks are common and send you flying off your dragon, a consciously annoying friction which again forces you to remain in the current moment and avoid zoning out. But equally, this friction often comes with it a straightforward payoff - the satisfaction of, having eliminated any anti-air threats, of hopping back on your dragon and incinerating an entire platoon of soldiers. Less interesting is the dedicated dogfight missions. Here, there is no sense of weight to the violence at all, and the enemies themselves are so abstract - often being literal evil cubes that shoot lasers at you - that it’s hard to derive any sense of humanity from them. It can definitely be read as an extension of the slight abstraction of the violence that happens when you hop on your dragon during the ground missions - we’re so far above the violence now that we can’t even see the viscera that is so present on the ground - but that just ends up ringing hollow for me. 

No, I ultimately think that Drakengard’s air combat is engaging in very straightforward, very traditional ways. I enjoy it. In particular, the weight of the Dragon itself makes those moments where you swoop down to let loose a volley of lasers genuinely thrilling, in a kind of way that even contemporaries like Panzer Dragoon don’t quite emulate. And yet, despite these sections comprising a significant portion of the game’s runtime - around a third unless you’re going for 100% completion - they seem to elide the conversation surrounding this game as a satirical work. The fairly straightforward video-gamey thrills of flying a big dragon around and shooting lasers at monsters and evil imperial airships would seem to simply be somewhat inconvenient when attempting to explain Drakengard as a deliberately boring game.

I’m being cheeky here, I know. But I do think there is a huge sword of damocles, with the words “PS2 GAMES KINDA PLAYED LIKE THIS A LOT” etched into it, that hangs over anyone reading Drakengard as tedious on purpose. For all that the PS2 and its library is often lauded as one of the high points in the entire history of the medium, growing up owning one didn’t mean you were playing a Resident Evil 4 every time you put a disc into your console. Sometimes you came home from the game shop with something that played quite a bit like Drakengard.

This commonality it shares with its contemporaries is core to what I think Drakengard is actually doing with its violence. I am not suggesting that Drakengard is not abrasive at all, because to suggest they is to ignore what’s happening on the aesthetic layer, particularly the utterly phenomenal score composed by Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara, which is not only probably the best thing about Drakengard, it’s probably one of the best in the medium. Making use of discordant, cut-up, and repeated samples of classical music, the soundtrack drapes the entire game in an uncomfortably dissonant air without falling into completely atonal noise.

Similarly, the dialogue that plays over the gameplay, while presented in a manner not dissimilar from Dynasty Warriors, is of a very different tone, even if it is equally unsubtle. Priests crying out that the world is ending, rival dragon riders going mad, dragons remarking about the worthlessness of humanity and your cause…It isn’t quite Cao Cao talking about how big his brain and dick is, even if it operates on a similar register.

This is an aesthetic dissonance that highlights the ludonarrative resonance that drives the game. It is also a reasonably common maneuver. If you’ve ever played a game with a sad piano track playing out over a boss battle, you’ve seen this before, though admittedly rarely on this kind of scale. Drakengard is less interested in being truly aberrant as it is in this kind of aesthetic dissonance bringing the genre’s assumptions into relief.

This helps explain why some might find the story of Drakengard far simpler than its reputation - or the reputation of its director - might suggest. An evil empire is conquering the world and destroying a series of Seals in order to awaken some dark gods, and the protagonists would prefer if that didn’t happen. It is, quite consciously, an extremely stock video game plot. The difference, of course, is that said protagonists are led by Caim, whose personality, goals, passions, hobbies and sexual fetishes can all be described the same way: “killing imperial soldiers”. Drakengard sees the two points common to the collective idea of the archetypal JRPG hero - dead parents and a high bodycount - and draws a direct line between them, constantly underscoring that Caim is wholly uninterested in protecting the world, and acts in the game entirely to express the trauma of his parents dying in front of him.

(Actually, side note - one part of that isn’t quite true; the game is surprisingly resistant to the claim that Caim’s enjoyment of killing is in any way sexually motivated. It’s just not something the game wants to touch. The game exclusively uses sex and sexuality as a point of straightforward horror and taboo-crossing in a way that is quite revealing. More on this in a moment.) 

Angelus is Caim’s dragon partner, and an absolute riot. She’s almost everyone’s favourite character in Drakengard, and it’s very easy to see why: she drifts above much of the emotional conflict of the narrative, commenting and mocking it in equal turns, like a one-dragon greek chorus, or, if you prefer, a fire-breathing Statler & Waldorf. Crucially though, she remains invested enough in the narrative to never become an annoying figure of detachment. She’s not riffing on things, like a Marvel character might, as if she’s not part of the same world as the rest of the cast, she just has very little patience for the affairs of humans despite her forced entrapment within them. It’s a very delicate balancing act to walk, writing this kind of character without making them irritating, and it's a testament to the script, and particularly the performance, that Angelus comes across so well. Mona Marshall’s dub Angelus is pitch-perfect, infusing her dialogue with a careful balance of righteous, haughty indignation and weary resignation that makes her an absolute delight to listen to as she mocks the worthless humans you and her are roasting with dragonfire, especially once notes of affection towards Caim begin to creep into her character. In a dub of mixed virtues, she’s consistently fantastic, and it speaks volumes that despite this kind of side-glance to the audience becoming a recurring theme in Taro’s work, it's never as successful as it is with Angelus. 

Alongside Caim we have Furiae and Inuart, the central love triangle that drives the narrative. Furiae is Caim’s sister, and the Goddess; a pure shrine maiden whose enforced chastity seals away the Empire’s dark gods. She’s also completely infatuated with Caim, who pointedly avoids confronting her incestuous feelings towards him throughout the game, even as her longing and desperation for him builds and builds, to the point that even Angelus comments on it. Inuart is Furiae’s betrothed, a soft-spoken bard whose sexual frustration at and jealousy of Caim leads him to become brainwashed and turn evil. And then there’s Manah, the game’s villain - an evil little girl who, after being rejected by her mother in favor of her twin brother Seere, turns to the Empire’s evil gods for the love that she has been denied, becoming their possession and instrument in the world. 

This is the actual core theme of Drakengard - that of rejection and resentment, unprocessed, unexpressed, unrequited feelings left to fester and rot, turning outwards onto the world itself, of this kind of unfulfilled need being the origin of violence in the world. For all the hyperbolic claims of Drakengard’s essential horror, it all settles into such a disappointingly neat and straightforward freudian framework. Every character - aside from Angelus - is fundamentally reducible to their singular freudian frustration. This makes the game’s perspective somewhat limited, but also makes it incredibly clear and transparent - there’s no avoiding these taboos. 

It’s not that this is entirely bad - I actually think Caim and Furiae’s relationship in particular is extremely effective, the obviousness of the taboo being brought into sharp relief by how Caim simply refuses to engage with it, letting the emotions fester and fester until, at the point when they are directly stated to him and he can no longer pretend that he cannot see them, his final rejection really hits hard. I particularly like that the game is uncharacteristically ambiguous on the point of whether or not Caim reciprocates Furiae’s feelings, which brings a messiness to how their relationship ends that really works. But by and large, the game is so laser focused on the binary contradiction of each character’s familial trauma, they always break in the exact same way, and it reveals just how little the game actually has to say on its own central topic. 

This becomes particularly apparent once you look at the other playable characters, who aren’t so much one-note as they have about half a note to share between them. Leonard is a kindly and empathetic priest who also happens to be a pedophile. There’s Arioch, a jokerfied elf cannibal who eats babies because she was driven insane by losing her womb in her pact. And then there’s Seere, a young boy who will remain a young boy forever thanks to his own pact. He becomes friendly with Leonard. Each of these characters will send you on side-stories that all feature you slaughtering children.

It’s not just that the transgression here is largely shallow, it's that it's the same transgression, over and over. The conflict between the central trio at the very least is driven by exploration of a theme of unrequited love and the enforcement of taboo reaching a breaking point - for the rest of the cast, there is nothing there except for the taboo, and the taboo encompasses their entire characters. Arioch is a particular low point: the outrageous misogyny inherent in the depiction of a woman being driven completely insane by losing the ability to reproduce is self-evident, as is the game’s complete lack of sympathy for her in comparison with even Caim, but it’s everywhere when it comes to these characters. You can just imagine the sneer on the game’s face as they describe Leonard, the “aha! Isn’t that fucked up!” of quality of the reveal that the nicest member of the party is actually a pedophile. For all that I am willing to be sincere in my engagement with the game’s exploration of familial violence, there really isn’t anything to the missions where you engage in mass slaughter of child soldiers other than “isn’t this fucked up”. And I don’t object to it being fucked-up: my problem is that it’s so one-note that it isn’t fucked up at all. The shock is so surface level that it becomes boring extremely quickly. It’s all so fucking teenage. 

Put a pin in that. 

What the game does gain by how incredibly loud and unsubtle it all is, is that it becomes impossible to ignore. The viscera of the relationship drama is as in-your-face as the viscera of Caim’s violence, and achieves the same effect as the game’s soundtrack (though, less effectively than that). How surface-level it all is may make Drakengard largely unsatisfying to consider on these terms, but it is effectively oppressive, and I think that is key to why the game lingers in the memory. 

As the game goes on, its narrative begins to fray at the seams, sometimes in disappointing ways, and sometimes in delightful ways. The game’s standard ending is fine enough, and sings when it caps off the burgeoning romance between a murderboy and his dragon in an oddly sweet and earnest manner. Caim and Angelus’ odd and sad relationship is easily my favorite part of the game’s narrative, and is, interestingly, something director Yoko Taro fought against depicting in this way, by his own admission. Taro wanted Caim to be as a parasite to Angelus (interestingly, a reversal of the relationship between the Dragon and its rider in Panzer Dragoon, where the will of the rider was subsumed unconsciously by the will of the Dragon), but at the suggestion of producer Takuya Iwasaki, scenario writer Sawako Natori imbues their relationship with an earnest romance without dodging some of the more toxic suggestions of it, and it ends up being the highlight of the game’s writing. It is worth noting, when considering the direction of future games in this series, that almost all of the game’s most effective moments come from treating the relationships with sincerity instead of shock. 

But of course, this isn’t really the end. As would become tradition for the games in the Drakengard/NieR lineage, the game offers a series of branching routes that lead to different endings. As the series would go on, this tradition would become increasingly superfluous, wielded more as an aesthetic and expectation than anything else, but in Drakengard, there remains something exciting about it, as each branch splits further and further from this relatively sedate ending until you finally arrive at the punchline that we all now know is coming. 

Route B feels like the “truest” ending to the game, engaging most with the themes of toxic affection that end up driving the plot. Inuart tries to resurrect Furiae, and does so…but as a monster that kills him, grows giant, and has to be put down by the player. Caim finally confronts his sister and their relationship in the only way he can: murdering her enormous, twisted, eikon. It’s a classic gothic move, but it's the twist of the knife of the route’s final shot, the sky being filled with countless more Furiae monsters, that is distinctly Drakengard. It’s fitting that the game’s theme song plays at the end of this route, rather than the others. This feels like the end of the road for these characters, so it's no surprise that the following routes feel more like we’re veering off that road into far stranger and far sillier territory. 

Route C, on the other hand, is a total misfire. If the last route was the one that felt like it most naturally emerges from the themes of the narrative, then this is the opposite - the one where the entirely offscreen Dragon species decide apropos of nothing that, actually, they’d like to conquer the world, and so Caim and Angelus must do battle. The two lovers battling to the death should be something really impactful, but ends up as a baffling wasted opportunity. Without the care and investment the scenario brings to these characters elsewhere, Route C is a glimpse into a version of Drakengard that didn’t have the touches of earnest investment that elevates these ludicrous mean-spirited caricatures - a hugely boring video game. I’d say that it would be better if it had been cut from the game entirely…if not for how the feeling of the narrative being derailed in this way lays the groundwork for the game’s incredible - and I mean that in both senses of the word - climax.

Branch D is probably the most iconic part of Drakengard, and it is definitely the part of the game that left the greatest impression on me when I first saw it as an 18-year old. Here, the involvement of Manah’s twin Seere makes things with his sister even worse, as he regards Manah’s desire for affection with horror and tells his Golem to kill her, which the God possessing Manah does not take kindly to. Thematically, the route ends here: another rejection, another breakdown in familial bonds - and interestingly, a parallel drawn between Seere and Caim’s respective emotional stuntedness towards the feelings of their sister being drawn but never developed - leading to disaster. You could see a version of Drakengard that has the same approach as Branch B, simply cutting off at the point at which the doom of humanity becomes obvious, but delightfully, the game simply keeps going, setting its final few chapters in the invasion of the Watchers - who, of course, are giant stone babies. 

Of course, here we return to the problem of the future. It's not just that this turn has been spoiled - plenty of works, even the majority, retain their power even after they have been spoiled. Contrary to the opinion of the most annoying guy in your film class, knowing what “Rosebud” is does not actually make Citizen Kane less electrifying. But the power of Branch D is, to me, entirely within the shock value of it. Its excitement is in the sense of how completely the narrative has been derailed. When you know about the giant babies ahead of time, the shock of their appearance is less effective. 

However, unlike Ending E, whose intention I do think is somewhat obliterated by the context by which most players will find it, I actually think the conscious anticipation of this moment by a player of Drakengard coming from the present day won’t rob them of the effect, because the audacity of it all is still enjoyable. It’s an absurd literalization of the game’s shallowest engagement with familial love and desire as violent: evil babies that are going to eat you all…and that you must slaughter in their dozens to survive. I remember showing this scene to friends when I got to it, purely and straightforwardly to say “look how weird and fucked up this is!”, and see their reaction to it, devoid of all the context of the game leading up to this point, which I think is telling. It wasn’t important to me that they knew that this was a game filled with the need for love turning violent. It was important that they see just how weird these evil babies were.

There was a point in my life where, for those around me, the funniest type of joke in the world was the erstwhile Dead Baby Joke, a type of joke where the punchline is always, in some form, a dead baby. The punchline here is pure, naked transgression - you can’t joke about a dead baby! It’s the same kind of impulse that makes swearing when you are a kid fun, of sneaking into a movie the age certificate declares you too old for, and approximately 95% of the reason anyone plays Grand Theft Auto - the fun of breaking boundaries for the sheer thrill of breaking boundaries. And in a game that has made the transgression of taboo the core of its entire being, this feels not like an elaboration of its themes so much as the literalization of them in the most audacious way possible - the invasion of the dead babies.

It’s worth comparing this to the series that Drakengard is perhaps most in aesthetic conversation with aside from Dynasty Warriors: Panzer Dragoon. While Ace Combat was the direct inspiration for the flight mechanics, Panzer Dragoon is the source of much of how they look and feel. And, interestingly, it too is a series that wrestled with the astronomically high bodycount of its game in Panzer Dragoon Saga, the third game in the series which reinvented itself as a to-this-day utterly unique RPG. Set decades after both of the previous games, but not so far that their events have fallen out of living memory, Saga reframed the events of those games as world-shaking historical events that have turned the Dragon into an icon of power not unlike a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Much of the plot of the middle stretch of the game is defined by the factions of the story attempting to control the era-defining power of the dragon, as much because of the fear and symbolic weight of the Dragon as its ability to shoot lasers. 

This reaches its head in one of the game’s best sequences, where the mayor of the hub town asks the player character to assault a nearby Imperial base with their dragon. The mayor knows that this won’t deal a major blow to the empire, but is attempting to demonstrate the use of the dragon as a deterrent against the empire’s moves to annex the town so that he can get elected as the new leader of the town. This, of course, backfires massively when the Empire responds to the threat of the Dragon by bringing their own Weapon of Mass Destruction to the frontline and wiping the town off the face of the map, an irreversible scar left on the game map, removing (almost) every single NPC and sidequest related to the town from the game, all in response to the threat the player and their dragon represents.

The difference here is that while Drakengard makes the violence of its central conflicts more visceral and obvious, Panzer Dragoon makes it more complicated and, ultimately, nuanced. But to frame this as a criticism rather than an explanation accuses Drakengard of seeking nuance as a goal, and failing, and I just don’t think that’s true. Despite Panzer Dragoon Saga’s Empire being about as hazily defined as Drakengard’s, it manages to make them feel like a real entity, one staffed by human beings that believe in their cause and react to the phenomena of the world around them . It’s telling, I think, that when you shoot down imperial vessels in Panzer Dragoon Saga, their crew cry out, often saluting the empire with their last breaths, but Drakengard’s mind-controlled masses of soldiers and their abstract vessels often give no reaction at all. There’s rarely a sense that these soldiers are meaningfully people, or that the Empire is anything other than a mass of bodies for Caim to slaughter. Panzer Dragoon Saga articulates violence as something that affects the world in ways beyond how much blood is spilt when someone swings a sword, while Drakengard is only ever interested in the blood itself, as an expression of the freudian frustrations of the characters. The viscera is the point, and the viscera is what Drakengard ultimately is. 

For all my sincere engagement with the game’s clear themes of taboo and familial conflict, there is a futility to it, because it’s so clear to me that first and foremost, the game is interested in the fun of transgressing these taboos within a largely accessible framework. The thrills of Drakengard are the thrills of watching a Saw movie, the audacity of them actually doing that…the enjoyment of a dead baby joke. This might all sound like an insult, but I promise it isn’t. A couple of years ago, I made a youtube video about edgy PS2 games, where I argued that these kinds of games with self-consciously edgy aesthetics are valuable for the straightforwardness of their rebellious attitudes. Drakengard’s closest bedfellows, to me, are not Panzer Dragoon or Ace Combat or even Dynasty Warriors, but Jak II: Renegade, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within…and Shadow the Hedgehog. Transgression for the sake of enjoying transgression might indeed be shallow, but it is also profoundly worthwhile, especially for young people chafing at the condescending and limited avenues they are offered to engage with the world. Hell, it’s why I was drawn to NieR, when I played that as a 14 year old - I wanted something weird and different, for the weirdness and the difference. And for all my criticisms, I cannot deny just how good Drakengard is at this simple appeal. 

I feel a little like I’m engaging in some Sacred Cow butchery here, and to a certain extent that is a conscious thing. There’s so much received wisdom about Drakengard out there online that I do feel compelled to try to articulate what I think it is actually doing.in the final verdict, I ultimately like Drakengard a fair bit, and I do think it is worthwhile. But I don’t think it’s worthwhile because it is a wildly aberrant, abrasive work that challenges norms. I don’t think it has much to say about video games, and I don’t think it’s meant to be so bad it’s good. In fact, I think it is something that inshrines the norms it tackles in how fundamentally irreconcilable it views them. It is a straightforwardly effective bit of rebellion that we all need as teenagers, one that has a keen understanding of its target audience and their emotional needs. Games market themselves on offering illusions, of freedom and power, and Drakengard offers the illusion of rebellion against and excoriation of the status quo better than most any game I can imagine, and I think that is why it, ultimately, has become quite a popular game. It isn’t a surprise, the right kind of anger for a mass audience has always been popular. Never Mind the Bollocks, Its the Sex Pistols, for all that it declared itself oppositional to society’s norms, was ultimately extremely popular within them. It's loud, in your face, and guaranteed to get at least some kind of reaction out of an unsuspecting player. It is a dead baby joke, a loud, abrasive, screaming metal album played so loud that it pisses off your parents, an act of petulant, adolescent rebellion whose purpose never extends far beyond the rebellion itself. Show me someone who doesn’t see any appeal whatsoever in that, and I’ll show you someone who really needs to cut loose a little. But equally, show me someone who still thinks dead baby jokes are the height of comedy, and I’ll show you someone who needs to hear more jokes. 

in the copied cathedral ending a dead b[a]by jokes

[lunnaris-sims]

A bit of a rant, but I've already seen certain Sims 4 players talking about "how corrupted The Sims 2 is" and how "some players have already experienced game corruption". That wouldn't be too bad, because we are already used to this, but then you see people LAUGHING at the fact that *most* corruption is actually a myth and that the game isn't that easily breakable and saying that's not true.

I am baffled. So many talented modders, who know about how the code works more than the average simmer, have already talked about this. They've been digging into it for months, even years, so I'd assume we should take their findings into account instead of dismissing them just because you think every single thing that happens in your game is "corruption". STOP spreading misinformation just to make the game look bad.

[adventuringalchemy]

not to mention mojang is owned by microsoft now. and microsoft does NOT care. like they literally do NOT care. 💀

they only care about money and marketing and nothing you say will stop a billion-dollar corporation from making an extra buck.

also the revolution shit is kinda cringe imo. 💀

ive been playing minecraft since 1.6, not 1.16, 1.6. Ive voted in nearly every mob vote and every time theres people saying "stop the mob vote!" and not once has someone made an argument thats convinced me for a second the mob vote is a bad idea. when i hear people who say the mob vote is bad all I hear is entitled spoiled brats who watched one youtube video and now repeat it like gospel without doing any critical thinking.

[episims]

Split Character Files

I was let known that my personality-based witch idles mod causes new sims to have split character files.

It made me look into the issue. Since the information about it is spread across various forum threads and lacked some details too, I decided to gather what I've found in this post.

What does a 'split character file' mean?

Each sim has its own character file in Documents directory. For example, Neighborhoods \ E001 \ Characters \ E001_User00024.package is Samantha Cordial.

When a character file is split, in addition to the usual E001_User00024.package there's also a file named E001_User00024.1.package. It would still be Samantha Cordial, but her data would be stored in two files instead of just one.

What kind of mods cause it?

Mods that edit character templates. That means: TemplatePerson (group 0x7FEDFE16), TemplateCat (0x7F99E646), TemplateDog (0x7F3C1917), and TemplateSmallDog (0x7F593B25). In addition, NPCs have their own character templates too.

These templates seem to get copied whenever a new sim or a pet is created. If you have a mod that includes a part of them, it appears the game creates a second character file and then copies any related BHAVs from the mod into it.

Do split character files cause problems?

In SimPe's neighborhood browser, a split character file might not be displayed properly and it's possible that you won't be able to edit the sim's stats with SimPe if that happens.

The game itself seems to be able to parse the sim together from two character files in most cases. However, it's plausible that it causes the empty/wiped face glitch to appear. As I tested the issue, I was able to replicate this myself multiple times with split character files and others have seen this happening in their games, too.

There are also people in related threads who say they have split character files and haven't noticed it causing problems.

Why do mods edit these templates, then?

I don't think it's been common knowledge what exactly causes the issue. And to be fair, creating new sims and then inspecting their character files isn't probably a part of many modder's testing routines. It sure hasn't been a part of mine.

The unpleasant fact is that if we want to make some things happen through mods, editing the code related to templates might be necessary. Ideally, Maxis would've only used them to create new sims and pets, but that's not the case. Their code gets called in various other situations – when witches idle, for example.

Now that we know which groups are involved, I hope modders can at least alert players when we share mods that cause this issue.

How can I know if the mods I use cause split character files?

It's not that common for mods to edit the templates, so suspecting all mods isn't necessary. Here are some mods that do edit them:

My Personality-based Witch Idles (includes code from TemplatePerson, the NPC witch template, and the NPC servo template) the latest mod update doesn't cause split character files anymore

Object Freedom 1.02 by @fwaysims (TemplateCat, TemplateDog, TemplateSmallDog)

lobonanny by Pescado (the nanny NPC template)

Spectral Cat Variety by @hexagonal-bipyramid (the spectral cat NPC template)

AntiGoodWitchIdleAnims by @paradoxcase (the link is broken and kestrellyn hasn't reuploaded this one to MTS, but assumingly involves the same templates as my witch idle mod)

Landlord Gardens Only Communal Areas by simler90 (the landlord NPC template)

Business Mod by simler90 (the chef NPC template, the reporter NPC template)

Gypsy Matchmaker Fix by simler90 (the matchmaker NPC template)

Buy Build Enabler for BV by cathair2005 (the social worker NPC template)

More points for woohoo with professors by Marhis (the professor NPC template)

No Relationship with Servers by Neder (the server NPC template)

Baby Toddler Mod by simler90 (the nanny NPC template)

There are probably more but in most cases, only specific NPCs are affected. Quite many people have reported having split NPCs in their games without noticing any issues with them.

Using these mods doesn't affect existing character files, but it will affect any new ones. You can prevent the split from happening by temporarily removing these mods from your game before creating new sims or pets, but you should keep in mind that this also includes spawning townies and NPCs (when their template is involved, that is) as well as born-in-game babies.

Can we stop the character files from splitting altogether?

If we can, it's sadly beyond my skillset as it appears to be hard-coded. I'm interested in testing if split character files can be safely merged back into one but I don't know about that either, yet.

I hope this clarifies the issue for someone! If I missed some crucial info, please comment.

[krispdreemurr]

Hello Krisp,

Considering I have now officially sunk Into My own funny crack ship Territory, I actually quite wonder if you have ever personally seen a very Bizarre DELTARUNE crack ship, And not one in a Bad or Revolting way, I mean a Funny, Niche, and/or Comedically Absurd Investment from OP one. More specifically,

What is the funniest one you have Seen, I must know if there are Others who also think about really Goofy ships like I do,

You seem like the kind of person that Has seen their many, many peculiar Fandom things after all

That is all, Thankyou and have a Good time zone

okay so way back in the day, in the chapter 1 era. there was an ongoing thing where I was shipping Gaster and Rouxls Kaard. on the basis of them looking vaguely similar and also it being really funny to have the smart science man + the dumbest motherfucker on the planet and them both being completely incapable of basic life tasks together

but thinking about it now. given rouxls' desire to be second in command to slash date any sufficiently powerful figure. and gaster being possibly the game dev/game modder. maybe it could work out after all,

[boatslut]

we all love minecraft but if you want to actually cut ties with it (even if just during the boycott)

i totally suggest Vintage Story. I've been playing it off and on for a lil while now and i like it a lot. its like minecraft, to a degree, as a Blocks Crafty Survival Game, but its more focused on wilderness survival and 'realistic' progression from stone age to modernization. it CAN be a lot more difficult if youre more experienced to a casual type of MC experience, as it is definitely survival heavy. i wouldnt let that deter you tho!!

cool stuff it does, that im aware of from playing atm:

EXTREMELY modding friendly apparently. i heard that the devs used to be modders so theyve intentionally designed the game to be more modding friendly. theres a lot of cute mods, including some really nice realism mods that add irl flora, fauna and fungi based on native biomes

the crafting of certain stuff is more hands on. toolmaking requires knapping by chipping away stone or smithing (i havent done it yet but im p sure its also hands on work), and making pottery is hand built by placing and removing voxels

theres some lore on why the world is empty of civilization, though ive only scratched the surface. it seems cool from what ive seen of it so far

domestication via breeding instead of just 'feed animal the right food'. theres a mod that adds genetics to your crossbreeding but i think its both still early n dev and also i. have only read abt it. it looks cool tho!!

Cookinge...

the wilderness generation is extremely pretty imo. watching plants sway is very nice

the 'temporal distortion' stuff (that i think is lore related) looks VERY COOL imo. silent hill otherworld + reality glitching shit. its neat.

i feel like the challenging-ness makes progression more satisfying but your mileage might vary.

if youre familiar w/ MC's 'Chisel' mod, i am pretty sure in later progression its built in. neat!

there is a creative mode! and a LOT of neat clutter and building materials.

imo going full caveman mode and throwing spears at animals is kinda thrilling. unga bunga

I Think Its Just Neat

idk why i decided to shill this game all the sudden but i do think its worth looking into if ppl wanna try getting into an alternative! its just ~23 USD / 20 EUROS, so its not crazy expensive either. Plus if you wanna play w/ friends, there's a discounted 'family pack' that gives you 4 game keys!

there's also a mod that lets you play as kobolds instead of the default humanoids. look at my 'bold grannie

[shysuccubusstuff]

L&DS LI as Minecraft players!

Credits for the idea to @sizzlingtigerkitten! This is a little drabble, nothing really deep, just for the funsies! ₍^ >ヮ<^₎ .ᐟ.ᐟ How do you see them as?

Xavier as... the Nomad!

The kind of player that spends all of his time moving around the world, leaving little to no traces behind if not for the few torches and blocks randomly placed while he spends the night outdoors. You can expect them to have no bed, after all, they prefer to spend their time fighting against the hostile mobs just to get a good amount of EXP. He has been playing Minecraft for quite a while, but he has never paid extreme attention to the different mechanics on the game, just focusing on enjoying and exploring the world.

Zayne as... the Braniac!

The type of player that learns the wiki by heart. After all, you had told him you wanted to play together, wasn't he supposed to get a good grip on how Minecraft worked and what was or not possible? So he spends the little time he has to spare to read the whole wiki, learning all about the different mobs, potions, how to use redstone, the different crafting recipes... Gosh, you almost gasp after he told you just exactly how were you supposed to actually make the redstone work.

Rafayel as... the Builder!

I feel that since Rafayel takes such interest and pride on his creations, it would only make sense for him to become deeply interested on being able to build properly, even to the point of maybe creating his own building tutorials for those less... able to build. He would also probably become a modder, spending his time creating different mods that would allow him to actually paint in game, maybe creating small texture packs that would let him add his paintings to decorate your little house together... Or maybe even creating those cute mods of mermaid tails! He would probably love the roleplay ones, maybe taking the role of a merman and courting his lovely wife *coff coff*.

Sylus as... the Miner!

He would probably spend most of his time at the mines, after all, they had all he liked! Mobs to fight, riches to get... Just what he wanted to destress a little! In fact, he likes them even more because he gets to hear you scream when you get startled by the strange mine noises that were added to Minecraft. He knows he shouldn't laugh at you, but how could he not when you look like a little kitten trying to remain calm in front of a mirror? I do have to say that Sylus could probably also be a builder/redstone type of player, creating a huge and luxurious base for him and you, including strange traps and switches all over the place just to add some danger to the game. The type who would love adding random traps that could probably almost kill the players that even dared to try to enter his place.

Caleb as... the noob!

He only played because you told him to, so he simply follows you everywhere you go.

You go to the mines? he will be by your side, trying his best to not die from falling to the ground while going down the mines.

You go to a village? He's there, making sure to let you use his inventory to stuff all the objects you wanted to take from there but weren't able to.

It takes a while for him to get used to the game, often being seen dying on the silliest ways... how can someone die from a cactus? That's him for sure. But as soon as he gets accustomed, he becomes a great PvP player! Able to defend you from all the players that tried to get close to you just because of your materials... That of course included acting as a bodyguard for you, once again following you everywhere, except this time he's able to help you, killing all the aggressive mobs that kept following you, always carrying stuff you might need: wood? got it; stone? got it; coal? there; food? just say the word. He's so prepared that it's almost scary, to be honest, why would he have over 4 diamond pickages on his inventory?!

[pinkyjulien]

Hey everyone,

Fair warning, this will be yet another fandom wank post. I'm not going to put it under read more as I want it be visible. This isn't anything "huge" or important either

To put it simply; I finally left the public Modding Server because of Cybervesna.

You should know that there are at least two channels in this server where people can make fun of others in total impunity; in fact, if you call it out, you get removed from said channels. This is what happened to me and why I decided to finally leave this place

The "golden" channel main purpose was to share funny, confusing and/or random nexus comments or moments that every modders get at least once

Instead, for the past 3 days, Cybervesna was kinkshaming and mocking user Bubbliejubblie for their bodyhorror fetish virtual photography in this channel

🔸 You can find screenshot in this imgur album Note that Cybervesna is blocked and her first posts does not appear on the screenshots because of a script - you can see her (going by "Circle-jerk owner") post being replied to in later screenshots

After this happened, I posted a vent post on Tumblr about how much of an asshole move this was, without mentioning the server or cybervesna by name (you can find a screenshot of this post in the next imgur album, covnersation with the moderators)

This morning, I notice that the Golden channel is gone. Following my guts feeling, I decide to ask a moderator in DM about it, then to ask directly in the server

🔸 You can find screenshots of the conversation here as well

To understand why this is unfair, as mentioned in the screenshoted conversation, Cybervesna has been harassing me in this same server, without any consequences for her (she got told to stop in the server, which she then continued into tumblr; something that is now being held against me. I've never seen these posts of her before asking my friends for screenshots of them, to share to the moderators)

🔸 Screenshots about her harassment and how I tried to report it to the moderators, in vain

I should also point out that these two incidents ^ weren't the first time Cybervesna attacked me in a public place "out of spite" or just to air out her own issues with me

🔸 Her attacking me on NexusMods after the DP update

I do not have any final word to say here. Take it into consideration if you want to, be careful of what you vent on your own accounts because people with certain friendships will abuse it to get you out of public spaces.

Do not attack anyone mentioned in this post or visible in any of the screenshots; you can judge them, you can judge me, but do not attack anyone.

🔸 Do not be like Cybervesna, who publicly attacks others for using certain aesthetics, fonts, or "styles"

Edit - I want to add a precision concerning the usage of DMs from ManaVortex and I's conversation

Mana and I had three distincts type of discussions; the modding talk, the user/moderator talk, and the personal talk

The screenshots I've included were exclusively from our "User to Moderator" talks - these discussions happened in the context of my harassment in the Modding Server

I want to explain again why I had to include these DMs, why I think it was important to include them in the context of what happened:

Cybervesna complained in DMs to ArasakaApart, who is also a Moderator of the Modding Server, and sent him a screenshot of my un-tagged private vent post (that she couldn't have direct access to, because she is blocked since 2022)

These out-of-server complains prompted ArasakaApart to remove me from a channel in the server, meaning that Cybervesna's DMs had a direct repercution to the server, to its moderation and to its users

With that in mind, we can assume other instances of moderation took place in DMs - this is the reason I included my DMs with ManaVortex, who is another moderator of this server

This post isn't against/about ManaVortex - or ArasakaApart, for that matter. This post is about Cybervesna's constant harassment and how she was able to use her friendship with a Moderator to kick me out of a channel, by sending a screenshot of a private tumblr post via DM

I personally think it's important to include my own DMs, my own experience with a Moderator, in the context of my ongoing harassment in this server, and how this specific Moderator's actions contrasted drastically with the other Moderator's actions which caused me to eventually leave the server