u/JageshemashFTW

Warden: I killed a High Dragon in the mountains, an Archdemon dragon, a ghost dragon, and even fought Flemeth who turned into a dragon.

Hawke: Damn, that’s impressive! I only ever fought one High Dragon in a mine, but it was still probably the hardest fight of my career.

Rook: I think I got you beat, Warden. Let’s see, I fought the two blighted dragons, at least one Archdemon (I’ll be nice and credit Solas for the other Archdemon), a spirit dragon in the Fade, and Mythal’s dragon aspect.

Warden: Okay, I see you Rook. How about you, Inky? Think you can top that?

Inquisitor: (war-flashbacks of her 12 goddamn High Dragon fights, including an actual, literal dragon GOD)

I’ve checked the disk itself, it’s squeaky clean. Not a smudge or scratch in sight. I deleted and reinstalled the game file, I even cleared my PS5’s cache. Nothing. And it crashes almost immediately, I can barely get any game time in.

I’ve checked the disk itself, it’s squeaky clean. Not a smudge or scratch in sight. I deleted and reinstalled the game file, I even cleared my PS5’s cache. Nothing. And it crashes almost immediately, I can barely get any game time in.

A hybrid-genre Daredevil game with nighttime segments where you patrol Hell’s Kitchen as Daredevil and daytime segments where you defend your clients as Matt Murdock ala Phoenix Wright

Unlike Spider-Man or Batman, Daredevil is a very dirty fighter. In combat, you’ll be expected to take hits, but the game reflects this with a Grit mechanic where the lower your health, the more Grit you have to spend on special moves or empowering your Billy clubs.

One big core mechanic is the Devil Counter.

Every time Daredevil gets hit, you have a short window to hit back with a devastating follow-up, which are context-sensitive depending on how Daredevil gets hit and the environment.

Here’s the thing though, Devil Counters have incredibly tight timing windows to pull off, but the more hurt Daredevil is, the more generous this timing window becomes.

This, combined with Grit, ensures a consistent flow in the combat of this game.

You’re going to get hit, you’re going to get hurt, and you’re going to make them pay for it.

Just recently found out that there are Warcraft novels and I want to check them out… But then I found out that there’s apparently over 30 of them.

Are they worth getting into? Cause that’s a pretty serious commitment…

AC: Gameplay aged like milk, but still respect it as the foundation for everything that came after.

ACII: The worst game of the best trilogy equals out to still a pretty damn good game.

Brotherhood: Everything that was good about ACII is just better here.

Revelation: The best game of the Ezio Trilogy, cutting out all the fat and just leaving us with pure Assassin’s Creed fun.

ACIII: My all time favorite game in the series, bar none.

Liberation: A fun, if kinda incidental, adventure.

Black Flag: More of a pirate game than an Assassin’s Creed game, but damn if it ain’t a great pirate game!

Rogue: It’s honestly a crime that one of the best stories in the series is also one of the shortest.

Unity: A massive upgrade on the formula in nearly every regard… Except the combat, which is honestly kind of a dealbreaker for me.

Syndicate: Basically just a streamlined Unity-style experience with a MUCH better combat system.

Origins: Definitely some growing pains to get used to the whole RPG thing, but still a pretty good RPG.

Odyssey: One of the worst games in the series… for the first few hours, then it gets better and better until it’s one of the best games in the series.

Valhalla: Gonna be honest, I only really started liking this one once I stopped treating it like an Assassin’s Creed game and started treating it like a Viking game.

Mirage: A lot of good ideas that do keep my interest, but held back by a very barebones foundation.

Shadows: Gonna be honest, haven’t played that much of it, soooo… Review pending.

Black Flag Resynced: I’m… still digesting how I feel about Mirage/Shadows style gameplay in a setting that very much was not designed for that gameplay.

By ‘Era’, I’m categorizing them as…

Classic Era: AC1 - Revelations

Colonial Era: ACIII - Rogue

Pre-RPG Era: Unity and Syndicate

RPG Era: Origins - Valhalla

Modern Era: Mirage - Resynced

While I definitely feel like each Era has had their own pros and cons, their own ups and downs, if I had to pick the one that resonated with me the most personally? I’d have to go with the Colonial Era. ACIII in particular is still my all-time favorite Assassin’s Creed game, period.

Like, this has been a problem for me since Valhalla, but the way they handle sprinting in all of the more modern Assassin’s Creed games makes me want to pull my hair out.

So, sprinting is a toggled state. You push the button, and it makes you go faster. Simple, right?

Thing is, this also toggles the speed of your parkour. If you want to parkour faster and not be so sluggish, you need to be in a state of sprinting. Okay, that’s not too bad.

Thing is, if you, for whatever reason, come to a stop for even a single, momentary second, the sprinting state stops and you need to press the button again to resume it. And there’s a lot of moments while parkouring that you might stop for a split-second to recalibrate yourself, but that split-second is all it takes to end the sprinting state.

THING IS, the actual animation difference between parkour without sprinting and parkour with sprinting are just similar enough that it can sometimes take a second to register when the sprinting state ends and you need to press the button again, and sometimes, you’re already in a sprinting state but the parkour in the new games is already sluggish enough where you think ‘Maybe I’m not in the sprint state?’ so you’ll go to press the button and turn on sprint state only to realize, no, you were already in sprint state, the parkour is just that sluggish in this particular moment, and you’ve only accomplished in making yourself slower.

Now, I’m sure there’s probably a setting buried somewhere in the options menu that could allow you to switch from making sprint state a toggle button to a held down button, which would address pretty much all of my criticisms. Right?

THING IS, the sprint button is mapped to the L3 button, which is the single worst button in the entire controller to hold down when it is also your primary MOVEMENT SYSTEM!!

And, honestly, I know I’m making a mountain of a molehill here. I know this is way less of a big deal than I’m making it out to be. But it’s just such an avalanche of minor, nitpicky annoyances, and I’m just kinda tired of it after FOUR games.

EDIT: And, honestly? I think what really chaps me about this is that it’s such a monumentally easy fix. Just have some, ANY kind of indicator on the HUD that tells you whether sprint is currently toggled or not. But they haven’t thought to do this after FOUR GAMES?!

Other than that, though, I’ve been enjoying Resynced immensely. How about you guys?

Pretty much what it says on the tin.

So it would take place 20 years after Part II, but with a short prologue only 10 years after. The prologue opens with Dina taking JJ out on his first proper patrol or food hunt or whatever. They accidentally get caught up in a swarm, and Dina ends up getting bit and put into a position where she can’t do the the deed herself, so JJ has to put her down, at her request.

(Before anyone gets upset with me, I personally love Dina as a character, but it’s not a Last of Us story if it doesn’t brutally murder the people you love.)

Utterly heartbroken and distraught, JJ stays with his other mother, Ellie, who in the intervening years has been trying to reconcile with Dina in Jackson with… mixed success, let’s say. Lots of flashback potential to see the two of them messily repairing things in the intervening 10 years. Very messily.

Ellie, already super messed up from the fact that, time and time and time again, the people she loves just keep dying, Dina was the final nail in the coffin before Ellie becomes full recluse, her only real human contact anymore is JJ who tries to provide for Ellie as much as he can while Ellie, in her own words, rots away.

Fast forward another ten years where JJ is a young man, he and Ellie get a surprise visitor from Lev who tells them what he and Abby have been up to since Santa Barbara. After rejoining the New Fireflies in Southern California, they’ve officially pivoted from their goal of curing the Cordyceps to simply outlasting them with a new project. The first ever fully restored ‘Neo-City’ that is fully self-sufficient. Basically a much larger version of the Jackson community, but on a metropolitan scale, in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, the very existence of this Neo-City has drawn in opportunistic raiders all throughout the region, including the remnants of the Rattler gang who have a score to settle and have more or less created a loose ‘coalition’ between these different raider factions into a full-on raider army, essentially laying a prolonged siege on Los Angeles.

They end up kidnapping Abby and are using her for ransom to extort food, medicine and other supplies from the New Fireflies, but the Fireflies’ leadership have already decided that Abby is an acceptable loss and have no plans to make a deal with them. Essentially, Abby is completely worthless to them, and once they realize that, they’ll kill her.

Knowing he’s against the clock, and knowing he can’t take them on by himself, Lev sought out Ellie because, well, let’s face it, she’s kind of the most dangerous person in the entire apocalypse. If there’s anyone who even stands a chance of rescuing Abby, it’s her.

Problem is, Ellie could not give a single rat’s ass about Abby. Sure, she chose not to kill Abby herself back in Santa Barbara, but she will lose absolutely zero sleep if someone else does it for her.

Which is why it surprises, and horrifies Ellie when JJ volunteers to go back with Lev to Los Angeles and help him rescue Abby himself.

Gameplay-wise, I imagine a similar type of ‘playstyle specialization’ between Lev and JJ that Ellie and Abby had. One is much more focused on stealth and tactical lethality, the other is much more direct with better firepower. With the fun little twist that the ‘children’ of Ellie and Abby would flip their respective dynamics around, with Lev being the stealthy, sneaky guy and JJ being the more in-your-face guy.

The biggest thing, however, would be the ability to switch between protagonists at any time you wanted, GTA V style, for puzzle solving and creative tactics in combat.

He’s the one who argues Marlene down to go through with the procedure despite the fact that Marlene was clearly having second thoughts. When Marlene asked him if he’d be willing to go through with it if it was Abby? Jerry very pointedly never answers the question, he just keeps redirecting towards ‘it’s for the greater good’.

Abby even tries to alleviate his conscience by saying ‘If it was my life on the line? I’d want you to do it.’

And that’s great for Abby… But that’s her choice, not Ellie’s. And yeah, Ellie would have probably said the same thing, but Jerry doesn’t know that.

The moment Jerry decided to not wake up Ellie and get informed consent? That’s when I completely lost all sympathy towards him. I’m still sympathetic towards Abby cause, end of the day, that’s still her Dad. Someone kills your Dad, you don’t just take that lying down. I don’t blame Abby for wanting to kill Joel.

I blame Jerry for putting Abby into that situation in the first place.

But, I don’t know, I think there’s something to a ‘simple’ gameplay loop if it’s still tightly woven together and satisfying.

When you get right down to it, Last of Us is a resource race. You have a limited amount of ‘stuff’ and you’re always trying to make sure you have an abundance of ‘stuff’ on hand when you need it.

That, of course, describes countless video games, but Last of Us does have a legitimately smart ‘ebb and flow’ to it’s encounters where you’re routinely put into situations where you absolutely have to use ‘stuff’ to get through it, but almost always followed by periods of calm where you can focus on replenishing the ‘stuff’ you used up.

Now, this is all super obvious, I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here and pointing out some secret to genius game design. Like I said, countless games have done this exact same thing.

I just really like Last of Us because it just feels like it strikes a really good balance between ‘Crisis moment, use your stuff!’ and ‘Calm moment, gather stuff’. Obviously, other games have done this too, Last of Us just feels like it knows exactly how to pace those moments.

It’s not always about innovation. Sometimes, it’s about refinement.

Cause like, the justification they give is that they have to go over this hill in order to reach a radio station where Henry’s people are waiting to rendezvous with them, at least as far as Henry knows at the time. And they figure that, instead of climbing over the hill, they could instead cut through the hill via the sewers.

Y’all, I don’t know about you, but if I’m living in a post-apocalypse where the zombies are specifically fungi-based, the last place I’d want to be is in an environment where fungus is known to propagate.

Joel is, in a word, a bit of a hard-ass when it comes to Ellie. He’s authoritative with her, doesn’t have much patience with her fooling around, has trouble trusting her with the more grown-up parts of surviving in an apocalypse (like, most recently, only just coming around to letting Ellie carry her own gun), and generally keeps things curt and abrasive with her.

Yet, mere moments after meeting Henry and Sam, when Joel and Ellie are searching a room for supplies, Joel finds a comic book and nonchalantly gives it to Ellie, knowing she collects them, to give her some kind of entertainment in the middle of the apocalypse. It’s not even treated as a big deal between them. Just ‘Here you go, Ellie.’ ‘Oh, cool. Thanks, Joel.’

Meanwhile, Henry is very openly warm and loving to his little brother, Sam. He is fiercely protective of him, does his best to praise him when he shows initiative and survival skills, and apparently trusts him enough to carry a gun without it being treated like a big deal. On the surface, they seem to be much more equal partners than Joel and Ellie ever could be.

But then comes the scene where Sam finds a toy robot in a toy store, and Henry promptly flips his lid, brow-beating Sam to leave the toy behind, citing they only take ‘what they need’ (implying that Henry doesn’t see a need for leisure items in an apocalypse) and talking over Sam when he tries to argue that the toy robot would take up practically zero storage space.

Basically, Joel has a hard time treating Ellie like a grown-up, but does remind himself that she still needs to be treated like a kid every now and then, because she is. Henry has fully accepted that Sam needs to be treated like a grown up in the apocalypse, but he completely forgot how to treat him like a kid when he needs to. And you need to be able to do both.

Like, correct me if I’m wrong, maybe I’m misremembering the lore here, but from what I understand, the Cordyceps causes the infected to have exacerbated rage and hunger in order to spread the fungus between as many hosts as possible, because they primarily spread through biting. I get that.

So then… why do the infected only seem to target humans specifically to satisfy that hunger?

Like, I know why the Cordyceps want that, but how can the infected tell the difference? As far as the infected is concerned, they’re just phenomenally pissed and hungry, all the time, and nothing else.

Shouldn’t we be seeing infected voraciously chowing down on, like, berries and nuts in the wild or hunting animals like deer? Like, yeah, definitely chase down and eat humans too, when you see one. By why are they just wandering around, muttering to themselves, when there are no humans to bite?

Like, say what you want about individual narrative choices from game to game, it is honestly impressive that every game in the series advanced their relationship in some way from the previous game. They never felt like they were static or retreading old ground, they genuinely felt like they were learning more and more about each other as partners and growing closer as the series went on.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Uncharted’s overall story is, at its core, a love story between these two.

So one of the more common criticisms I hear about Veilguard is that the buildcraft lacks the same amount of depth and player choice as earlier games like Origins and DA2.

And like… Yeah, that is definitely true in an objective sense. There is definitely less fine tuning and minutia to be had in Veilguard. But I also think it’s a bit more complicated than that.

How do I put this? Previous Dragon Age games had more depth in the buildcraft, but Veilguard feels like you get the most expression out of your build. And there is a difference there.

Like, Origins and DA2 has a lot more objective depth in how you build a character, but it also feels kinda homogenized by the end-game, playthrough to playthrough. Like, Origins and DA2 have a settled ‘meta’ when it comes to building your character with no real reason to deviate from it once it clicks for you. Veilguard, while some builds may be more viable than others, all feel fun to play, regardless of your build, which naturally invites more experimentation.

And that mainly comes down to two things. One is the fact that every piece of equipment is unique. And because you can upgrade any piece of equipment to have endgame level stats, all you really need to care about are their special effects, which is much more fun trying to piece together than just ‘number go up’. Second is the fact that subclasses in Veilguard play a much larger role in fight-to-fight gameplay loop than previous games. In previous games, subclasses were essentially just a collection of extra abilities that you added on top of your class’s established toolkit. In Veilguard, subclasses actually change the feel of playing that class.

Like, in practice, it feels like there’s nine distinct classes as opposed to three classes that have a few extra bells and whistles that you can pick from. And you can tell this was intentional on the developer’s part because they outright showcase the subclasses right at the very beginning of character creation. Something that, to the best of my memory, no other Dragon Age game does.

None of that is to say that the buildcraft in the early games were bad! Far from it! The criticism that Veilguard’s buildcraft doesn’t have as much depth as the older games is entirely valid if that’s something you valued in the older games.

It’s just that Veilguard clearly had a different mission statement in how build expression should come across, and I feel it’s important to acknowledge that when comparing Veilguard to the rest of the series.

Uncharted 4 does something kind of different from the previous games that I find really interesting in retrospect.

In the first three Uncharted games, the games are all about trying to get to a specific location. El Dorado’s treasure vault, Shambala, Iram of the Pillars.

But once you’re actually at that mythical location, you’re also at the tail end of the game. Finding that location immediately kicks off the climax of the game right up until the final boss.

In Uncharted 4, you actually spend a good deal of time exploring Libertalia, probably making up the entire last third of the game. You learn all about the colony’s history, both good and bad, and get a really good look into the psychology of the people who built it. Shambala and Iram were both beautiful locales that made for an appropriately cinematic backdrop to have your finale in them, but you don’t really know that much about them as places other than ‘something bad happened here.’

I had this idea for a potential method of expanding Daggerheart’s buildcraft and I’d love to know what you all think.

Basically, the idea is a set of new classes, but with a few exemptions that keep it from being a full class. Namely, they would only have a Class Feature (or set of Class Features), NO Hope Feature, only one Sub-Class that only has Foundation and Specialization cards, no Mastery, and only one Domain.

Namely… all the things you would get if you were to multiclass in the game. Get it? They’re classes that only exist as multiclass options.

The idea is that they’d be less classes themselves and more like modifiers to existing classes. One specific application I had in mind was say your Campaign Frame had some kind of… unlockable power unique to that world. Miniclasses would be a way to mechanically represent that player achieving that great power.

Like, imagine a world where powerful spirits can inhibit the body of a chosen vessel, making that player their Avatar. A miniclass would be a way to mechanically represent this spirit attaching itself to one of your players, granting them entirely new abilities that they didn’t have before.

Could also be a great way to showcase or playtest new Domain decks without needing to build an entirely new Class around it.

When Maric knighted Gareth Mac Tir, he was doing the one thing that was in his power to honor a man who was making the ultimate sacrifice for him. But as for as Loghain was concerned, Maric knighting him was basically a form of emotional manipulation. Not intentionally so on Maric’s part, even Loghain could admit that the gesture was genuine from Maric’s perspective, but the act of knighting itself was seen as a form of manipulation, regardless of intent.

From Loghain’s perspective, Gareth already had a duty as a father and leader of this commune to *not* throw his life away for some brat he just met, regardless if that brat is actually the King or not. So for Maric to knight Gareth in response to him choosing to sacrifice himself to Bann Ceorlic’s men so that Maric and Loghain can get away? Loghain cannot see that as anything other than an insult. The final nail in the coffin of just how pointless his father’s death was, in Loghain’s eyes.

It’s a genuine miracle that these two ended up becoming friends by the end of the book.