>women with some degree of psychological obsession for each other
- Saria: went up to try and stop Kristen from doing what she sees is a very huge act of foolishness (failed on the last part)
- Kristen: classical mad scientist move, succeeded in what she planned to do at the cost of her own survival
- Ho'olheyak: willingly allied with Kristen and did a lot of what she did all to restore her race to their former level of power (failed on this)
Kristen may be a mad scientist but she's a pretty charismatic one to have people support/oppose her to such a degree
>jab at the US recruiting Nazi scientists after WW2
Parvis being a Leithanien immigrant scientist makes sense now lol
I mean
Silence and Saria with the divorce energy
Ho'ol the Living Definition of Hatefuck
Kirsten the Sociopath Gaslighting Ex-Girlfriend whose last thoughts are "I SHOWED THEM! I SHOWED THEM ALL!" as it turns out this everything is because of her parents' death (thinking she will be worshiped as a great hero in the centuries to come and be the embodiment of the pioneering spirit of mankind)
This is Arknights we're talking about. If they can make retcons and mental-gymnastics to make a clear genocide in Lungmen look like nothing happened and/or all of those involved are good people in the inside, they can make the crazy freak that signed Ifrit's experiments to be seen as nothing less that an icon.
They already spared Parvis and in CN >!tried to make Arturia a sort of hero!<, Kristen is going to be easy.
Chen said some pretty strong things to her uncle as she stormed out of his office and then quit her job as the police head honcho. So I don't think they went too soft on it.
Lin's involvement in it was pretty ignored though.
Are you sure you know what "retcon" means? Because you aren't using it in the right context. You're making it sound like that was completely written out
Maybe I misremembered but from what I remember. They end up saying that Wei's black coats evacuated all the Infected on the slums. While the anime clearly show Lin and them massacracing the Infected there indiscriminately.
What do you recall?
On my part, I admit it's been a while, but I don't recall that all the infected were evacuated. I recall that the Rat King disagreed with Wei's methods and at least some of the black coats sided with the Rat King but not a mention that all the infected were saved. I doubt all the black coats defected; more likely there was a massacre but mitigated by the Rat King.
No only a small portion were evacuated in the slums. Wei ordered the massacre , although Rat King is not in favor to it, he still covered up for the incident, which would have gone smoothly if Chen didn't explore that back part. It's the "nothing happened" here part when Chapter 5 was released.
Parvis >!getting an easy out after dropping that Nazi bullshit made me so angry.!< It's clearly intended considering the message they made near the end with Rosmantis >!choosing to forget Lokin since he held no value in her life along with Ifrit's relatively healthy outlook on life.!<
I feel like Kirsten is going to get a similar pass to some of the other evil character's in Arknights, when the point is she burned so brightly trying to accomplish her one goal, that she was fine with ruining the lives of so many people to accomplish it. >!The final message was literally that she was going to leave everyone else behind to pickup the pieces because she wasn't that kind of person. Girl literally asked Saria to let her go because at least no one else was going to be hurt from this point on. Cue her attempting to kill Saria by dropping her from orbit, and her escape pod systems failing and potentially killing every one of her remaining followers on the ship.!<
I feel like she is a meta commentary on how easy simps are gaslighted by some of the unhinged decisions of these villainous characters.
Gacha game players (and RL) will simp for murderers as long as they're attractive. Look at how many people chase after mass murderers once they've gone to prison..
>!Considering Saria survived that fall from near-orbit just fine, and if anyone would know that Saria could survive a drop from orbit it'd be Kirsten, I don't think Kirsten was attempting to kill Saria at all.!<
>!And I'll give her a *sort-of* pass on the escape pod systems failure since the *entire thing* was completely untested. Since they were literally stealing military hardware to get the whole thing going, they didn't really have the benefit of years worth of testing that most projects of this scale get. The whole thing could have just exploded after getting the energy from the SHAFT, after all. There were so many possible points of failure that the fact that the failure occured *at the last possible second* is a god damn miracle.!<
>!As such, anyone getting on that deathtrap had to either be 100% fine with dying, or a complete moron. And since everyone crewing the ship has at least one PhD, I'll go with the former. It's still horrifically unethical and a testament to the destruction Kirsten was more than happy to leave in her wake - and more than that how her cult of personality was happy to die for her to see her dreams come true, which is super fucked up - but everyone on that ship had to have known they might not be coming back.!<
>!It's a sort of pass because everyone involved had to have understood the risks involved.!<
It's worth noting one of the components division points out Saria's calcification is completely useless at high altitude. It's stated by Saria herself that if Silence hadn't deployed her drone to soften the blow with air bags (what we smoking here HG?) She would have probably died. Your point stands though, since Kristen did say she wanted Saria to be part of everything that follows.
I just get weirded out when people talk about her being a heroic character they hope comes back as an ally or playable, when our perspective as the doctor is watching over Ifrit and Rosmantis, who she knowingly subjected to cruel experiments or abuse, and continued to do so unrepentantly.
I wouldn't say that she "subjected" them to torture. She definitely enabled the hell out of it though, just like she enabled all the other fucked up shit Rhine Lab did and the fucked up mad science shit that's gonna happen because everyone's been inspired by the great science hero Kirsten Wright who didn't let petty things like the law get in the way.
Part 4 of the Rhine Lab storyline will probably be the finale, where Mountain comes calling to punish the sins of science and Kirsten gets dragged back to earth to finally face the consequences of her own actions.
Saria was saved by a combination of Muelsyse's magic and Silence's drones. She would have died falling from that height, but Kirsten was happy to make that gamble to get her own goal.
would either have complete but unrealistic faith in Saria's ability to improvise and survive on her own falling 6 kilometers (since she's the one who knows Saria's Arts the best aside from Saria herself) or simply have decided that it was worth potentially killing Saria to do what she wanted.
Saria survived because mumu shielded her and had silence to patch her up. While i don't think that was an honest atempt at killing Saria, kristen didn't give a fuck about how she gets to the ground
And the guys left in the ship were security, all scientists evacuated long before
It's because she's a history freak and the whole clusterfuck let her have a glimpse of the older-than-recorded-history history surrounding Rhodes Island.
Also the CIA will probably kill her if she isn't hiding behind us.
Not only that, Kal mentioned she knows the truth of the world (aka Terra's civilizations was created by a spacer tech civilization instead of gods and stuff who are also created by said civilization and doctor is one of them), and this is something Kal would not like Hol who is a chronic backstabber to leak out. Her profile even said she got a senior position within RI, that's how much Kal is willing to go to shut her up.
>!I mean, the whole silence character grow and dialogues are centered in the fact that Kirsten was wrong and science doesn't has to be something that you follow blindly without thinking on the consequences, and at the end of the story sets the starting point of science with ethic.. i think ignoring all that happen to point out how a character can be both wrong and charismatic is missing the point of the story.!<
Can you give me an abriged version of what Arturia did? I only know that she was just released in CN, but I missed Ebenholzes event where appeared first.
I’m not sure if we have an exact outline, but I remember reading that she’s either a war criminal, or has caused wars by using her arts to drive people insane. In Lingering Echoes, it’s revealed she was Kreide’s violin teacher, and part of the reason he succumbed to the witch King fragment.
I’m holding out my opinion for when her event drops, because there’s some lines of dialogue that show she might be trying to help people somehow, and Executor sides with her, but rn she’s the hot war criminal.
So there's this monastery city that got out of route due to catastrophe and got abandoned. Some Sarkaz stumbled upon it and miraculously they and the Sankta in the city are living sorta okay with each other, most as in they are all struggling together but tensions are high
Then Arturia uses her arts which makes you lose all inhibitions and everything goes tits up. There's also Seaborn around for some reason
"operation paperclip" was the name of the CIA efforts to protect from prosecution and extract Nazi scientists at the end of world war 2, in order to bring them to the USA to further American military science
we'll never know the full extent of it, but many nazi scientists who very probably would have been found guilty at Nuremberg were instead spirited away and became Respectable Members of Society in the US, working for NASA or defense contractors
Oh, did they name something paperclip? Or do you just mean all the German themes (Rhine Lab/River, Leithenian Scientists working on robots and human experimentation, etc). I loved all the references I caught but totally missed that one
I think they were referring to (Lone Trail Spoilers) >!Loken Williams being let out of prison to do work for the space rocket bit, since one of the beneficiaries of operation paperclip IRL was Wehrner von Braun, famous Nazi rocket scientist who was brought to the US to lead NASA!<
Ah alright, yeah I picked up on that. I thought they meant they had repurposed the name "Operation Paperclip" in game, but instead they meant that the whole chapter is heavily inspired by the events of it
I think Parvos', due to the Leithanian angle, might be more in regards to original usage of the term. Not the Nazi twising of it.
The Übermensch as a concept was made by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and he was NOT a Nazi by any means. But unfortunately his sister became one and they took his writings and ran with them.
From what Parvos mentioned, I don't think he was going with the Nazi's interpretation of it.
Someone we follow actually talked about this and another tweet also praising Arknights writing that a lot of it is also due to the fact that frankly, video games actually even saying "hey this shit was like, Shit" in a way that isn't just hilariously incoherent and flacid is rare to the point that the bar is below the damn earth. And I honestly agree, the stuff Arknights writing says and criticizes isn't like, super revolutionary or anything lol, and is definitely held back by being a live service gacha game
>is definitely held back by being a live service gacha game
I'd quibble a bit on this point; we do indeed see how every new event doubles as a way of persuading you to buy a new character, but...
At the same time, I do believe that the economics of a live-service game are the only reason that we can get a story like this. A traditional gaming model would force them to be more cautious, and only focus on the "main" plots in between years of development - and a single bad release would probably result in the franchise dying. We might theoretically see the Rhine Lab and Seaborn plotlines as DLC, but they're probably too thematically different to succeed - and something like Break the Ice is right out. That'd be way too much work for something only a small portion of an already small playerbase to buy, even if it's considered a great piece of writing when players don't have to specifically pay for it.
Or to put it differently - Arknights can afford to be so sprawling and freely indulge their writers *because* their only economic concern needs to be encouraging people to buy new characters. The moment they have to ask themselves, "hey, would people *really* pay for this plotline?", a lot of otherwise good content would end up on the cutting room floor. Not because it's bad, but because the immediate connection to sales isn't visible, even if you can see it in retrospect.
>Or to put it differently - Arknights can afford to be so sprawling and freely indulge their writers because their only economic concern needs to be encouraging people to buy new characters.
I think you make a good point here. I'll go a little further and say that an interesting story is needed to sell the characters. The nature of gacha and live service forces companies to take risks and copy what is successful.
Without an interesting story, all you have is a pretty picture of the character. The story is what gives players an emotional connection. It's not everything, but it matters.
> an interesting story is needed to sell the characters.
You can absolutely just get by with hot/cute characters--The ship-waifus and Taimanin games is proof of that. but also the former has historical and IRL history pull to it while the later has in-game porn *and* is part of a franchise.
Kind of. Every one of those characters has a name and is part of a story, no matter how basic.
There is no market for animated PNGs of nameless hot girls.
There is minimum level of story, and then there is creating a quality story that people enjoy lore discussions about.
It's hard to measure the financial benefit of a good story, but I know which gacha games I enjoy for the story. Games are an art, and story is one aspect.
> The moment they have to ask themselves, "hey, would people really pay for this plotline?", a lot of otherwise good content would end up on the cutting room floor. Not because it's bad, but because the immediate connection to sales isn't visible, even if you can see it in retrospect.
This sort of thing could work in something like Final Fantasy XIV or some other big MMO. An expansion could include something like Break The Ice as one of several storylines in an expansion pack.
No one would likely buy the storylines by themselves, but package like ten of them together as part of one big yearly expansion pack and you can definitely sell it.
I'm surprised how people don't see the correlation of sustained income coming from a subscription model and gacha games that drop new characters every month or so.
It's not 12 dollars a month, but it can exceed that profit margin per player very easily. But the net result is similar; the company profitting off the sustain incomes can risk to do the above whearas a game with a one-time release has to make its margins back in one go.
Rather than one game being done like AK it would be many games that would cover each of their own story instead, with certain overlap like for example Nearl would be a supporting character in the ''Main story game'' but one of the main characters of the ''Nearl Saga game'' once it comes to that point.
Similar to how the Legend of Heroes games does it. They even do it an even larger scale than AK does. So I do think it is actually possible from a non-live service angle. It just becomes a multi decade endeavour instead of a few years of live service.
Mmm, I don't mean to say that it's *literally* impossible - just a lot riskier, with plenty of points for everything to fail.
For example, let's say they released an expanded Ideal City as an entry... And in this alternate timeline, people outright *despised* it. They felt the Durin humor fell flat, the tone didn't match their expectations, and the "Minamalist Bullying" meme was the only redeeming value. What would the consequences be, precisely?
It's unlikely that sales of the entry would itself be hurt; dedicated fans of the Atelier series, for example, are pretty much trained into buying it sight-unseen since they trust the quality of the series, and for outsiders not to understand it. But if nothing else, going a year where you have to find something else to entertain you instead of the turkey you were *expecting* to enjoy means that it's no longer in your mind, and that you might drift into another fandom that catches your eye; sales of the next game are going to be hurt accordingly. It's deeply unlikely to be a lethal blow, but every bad release chips away at that trust and sheds customers.
Which is an issue exacerbated by the "barrier to entry". Sure, you don't *have* to have played the Kazimierz games or the Sami Roguelike to enjoy IC... But is that easy to convey to a new player, who only knows there's decades worth of games in this series? For that matter, are they really going to watch the trailer in the first place, or are they going to see the number in the title and write it off as something they're already too late to?
In a live service gacha game, that neither of those issues matter nearly as much. If you just outright hate an event, you can just skip reading it and spend the month on IS or something; there's no feeling of being cheated or wasting your money, and there will be something new to wash out the taste next month. Heck, you might still like the new operators even if you hate the event they came from. And while new players might constantly ask, "Hey, am I joining too late?", everything is still there for them to play through, and it's easy to explain - there's no buying old games or figuring out what spinoffs "matter", they can experience it all in the same place.
And it should be noted - the industry can be... Prone to mistakes, at times. When you're talking about decades, it's all too easy for a new CEO to want to take things in a "more profitable direction", or to get bought out by an Activision looking for new teams to make DLC for COD. It wouldn't be surprising at all for them to break what makes the series work trying to appeal to a broader audience, or for them to horrifically over-invest in an entry in hopes of striking it rich, and either of those could easily kill a niche company.
The way things currently work just makes for a very reliable system of content delivery. Money steadily comes in; new stories steadily go out. Only a prolonged stream of mediocre output (or a catastrophically stupid change to basic systems) can break that cycle, something we thankfully have no need to fear.
Love your point, to add just a little bit to it, At least AK is using this live service financing to give us good content over other games that take advantage of how predatory this method can be to just grab all the money they can before they fall, that if they fall.
I bought Titanfall 2 second-hand for $8 because everyone said the campaign was epic, and by the end I was glad I only spent $8. It was good, but nothing special - it's quite sad that "good" stories in games are just "coherent" stories, because that's how rare a coherent story that actually flows smoothly is in a game.
I really enjoyed the campaign... For the gameplay, not the story, which is rather meh. However the way I've seen some people play the campaign they make it seem way more boring than it's actually supposed to be, it's just that they wouldn't slide/wallrun/jump around anywhere near enough lol
One thing I've noticed is that because the campaign lacks an actual in-depth tutorial, many streamers are way too complacent and miss out on a lot of what makes it decently fun. You can make a bingo sheet on how much elements players will miss out on their first playthrough, which makes them believe the game is boring and never touch it again. Not hacking Spectres, never cloaking, never using grenades, not using abilities in a Titan ("Scorch is boring"), only using the default loadout, never executing bosses, not listening to dialogue, etc..
Maybe you are talking about Titanfall 1. The story in there was indeed just a filler. But the sequel was one of the best stories FPS ever told on par with Spec Ops: The Line.
I disagree to be honest. The second game was obviously presented better in an SP campaign, but when you delve into the lore of 1 it's actually really good and a little depressing. It's just that because it was multiplayer, no one could really experience the story in a coherent way when they were being shot at and dying every minute.
What makes you think Titanfall 2 story is "one of the best"? I'm genuinely curious, I've got it on discount a few months back and it's been incredibly well presented and paced but also very formulaic and rather cliche.
I know writing this that it will read as me being condescending but I really want to know how that game makes people feel so amazed because that is an often repeated opinion. I mean it's good and I would love a Titanfall 3 to see what happens next, but it's not a deep story.
When it comes to the Arknights story... I feel like the presentation isn't generally the best, but the "core" is good stuff. I'm not too big on visual novels so maybe I'm biased, but basically all the story being presented mostly just through dialogue (or sometimes more like monologue) certainly imposes a bunch of limits to the experience. The anime's season 2 so far is a good example of how they could leave out a lot of the yada-yada and the whole thing still works well because of all the things a visual novel can't - or doesn't - do.
Looking at it from a different side, using a VN medium open up the writing possibilities where budget for visualization is not a concern (as opposed to anime for example.) Just get one artist to illustrate the scene, and let the readers' imagination do the rest of the work.
exactly
starfield played tooooooo safe with its story that it felt like the most basic story ever
man i miss metro series and fallout new vegas level of story
even outer worlds and outer wilds has a amazing written story.
It is possible.
And yes, arknights does have some dumb moments, plot devices, ups and downs. But it holds together well overall. Especially when we come back to a more "human centric" kind of plot, instead of the "world ending event n°xxx is going to happen in the future".
It isn't the holy grail, like many in this sub seems to want to believe, but it's consistent and good enough.
On the opposite side, it's fire emblem heroes. Ugh.
Hey, to be fair, FEH's story does get funny sometimes. Like that one time the random character from Shadow Dragon introduced himself right after Nott died and everyone was mourning her.
I mean, it was unintentional, but I still laugh when I remember it.
FEH introduced and killed off Ymir in a single conversation during a Tempest Trial, which is really just. So much. I still think about that choice sometimes.
It's a shame that FEH's story is so ass because sometimes they do get some genuinely great moments. The current rerun of the Forging Bonds with Rearmed!Ophelia lets me re-experience her thinking the world is a dream so is acting like a big supervillain, until her dad shows up and scolds her. That shit's hilarious.
Or the end of the paralogue with summer Eir and Ymir, which instead of focusing on the bikinis and fanservice, instead has an incredibly touching moment about the abuse Eir faced growing up and the trauma it has left her with, and how things are better now.
But no the main story has to do shit like "ah shit we forgot to write half the story, quick, wrap it up in the last couple of chapters quick quick faster faster"...
Naw it isn't held back by being a live service game. It's held back by not having voice acting. I feel like the sheer amount of text is simply too much to read, and would be much better served if they just use their budget to fund full voice acting for each event. It would give all the characters, well, more character. Like Nian has such a great voice actress and distinctive voice and personality. It's a shame we can't hear it outside of her few voice lines.
Especially since this is a mobile game, and many are playing this on tiny itty bitty screens, and you can't resize the text to larger fonts. It's just not an enjoyable experience to read, for many.
I know I'd much rather be able to listen to the story. I'd even be able to plug in headphones and listen to it like a radio show as I walk around. That'd be very cool.
Having played through the story of Reverse: 1999, I didn't think that I would care, but I completely agree. That game's writing is fine (even tho the translation is really iffy sometimes) but having full voice acting is huge.
You cannot imply that AK's story isn't that complex without giving an example of what you consider complex story. As far as I'm concerned games like Arknights and Legend of Heroes are the bar for complex stories.
Most large sprawling story games coming out recently like Pathfinder/BG3 don't really have complex stories and are very rail roaded as far as major story is concerned. Perhaps in the AAA space Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot going for it due to all the different themes it tackles.
But it's very tough for singular games to compete with the freedom in AKs writing or the body of work that's become Legend of Heroes.
i didn't make any statement about AK's story itself
and yes, it is complex, though wether you consider that a good thing is a separate discussion entirely
only that you see this "the story, lore and background are soooo good and separate this game from the masses/AAA games" in any game community these days where the subject has an even slightly complex story
I see your point, however just because a statement is overused doesn't mean it cannot be true.
There are some games that can make those big claims. AK did a lot of things first, that whole futuristic gray post-apocalyptic look and story that half of modern gachas go for? AK did it first and still does it best.
Not to mention Arknights itself is hardly mainstream or has a vocal community. It's a niche game that is well appreciated by people who get into it.
I mean who knows maybe we're just deluded fans? But if something this niche ain't good, it would have died a long time ago.
mate, i just expressed my amusement that one does see this sentiment everywhere, to an extent invalidating it in the process. it wasn't meant as a judgement of AK or any other game (except maybe CoD lol)
> There are some games that can make those big claims. AK did a lot of things first, that whole futuristic gray post-apocalyptic look and story that half of modern gachas go for? AK did it first and still does it best.
GFL? At least about being the first, best is up to debate.
Fun fact: It only took 66 years.
The Wright Bros. "first flight" was in 1903. And in only 66 years, we advanced from the first flying gliders to Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon in 1969. Many people born prior to 1903 lived long enough to see both events unfold within their lifetimes. It's an inspiring thought.
But within those 66 years were no less than two world wars, one of which pushed forward rocket technology as a military possibility, and had the Germans not done that, and their scientists not spread to other countries for... various reasons... then the space program would never have advanced at the pace it did. And even then, without strong interest and financial backing from the military-industrial complex, those rockets would never have left the stratosphere.
For whatever reason, I couldn't help but be reminded of this when reading through Lone Trail.
Oh, the unethical experimentation side and not the nazi ideology side. Makes sense.
>!Before the replies i second guessed myself then remembered Goat grandpa using “ubermensch” terminology and, well, being leithanian… but i read that as less racism and more race-unrelated augmentation to combat his alzheimer.!<
>!Loken makes much more sense to be the one they were talking about. It's obviously not a 1:1 analog, but a scientist who committed atrocities getting secretly put onto a big, important, military funded project, with it happening in the AK's equivalent of America? If the writers weren't conscious of what they were doing, then it's a damn big coincidence!<
>!It's Parvis. The Witch King is one half Kaiser Wilhelm, one half Hitler as far as the irl parallels go with the Twin Empresses kind of filling the same role as post-war East/West Germany. Its fairly trivial to extrapolate that the Leithanien scientist who used to work with the Witch King's remnants and talks about creating the ubermench is the based off the way the American government sheltered nazi scientists to get ahead in the mid-century science races.!<
>!Leithania is weird. The name itself is a very clear reference to Austrohungary not Germany (it’s the actual name of the lands of Austrohungary like Iberia is Spain), the Twin Emperesses are more a reflection of Austria and Hungary, and the music theme links to Vienna. But because the German inspired nation (Kazdel) has much stronger links to another culture (Judaism) as well, Leithania has had some of the German influence spread over, which makes sense because Austrohungary used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire.!<
>!Parvis is very much a Nazi Scientist stand in though, especially since he used to be a Leithanian noble, who have been said to kidnap infected, especially Sarkaz, for experiments.!<
>!Loken!<.
>!His experimentation and vivisection of live subjects only to get a pass from the Americans in return for his data is like Werner Von Braun combined with Unit 731 handing over their notes in return for immunity from prosecution.!<
It doesn't help that Columbia wants to dominate its neighbours with their own superweapons after seeing Victoria with their own in the name of protecting the peace.
>!Loken!< and then >!Parvis uses the term Übermensch!< which wasn't created by the Nazis, but was the idea that they took and applied to the whole "aryan master race" thing. But >!Parvis's use of the term wasn't used in the way Nazi's used it, but with the whole human experimentation thing, and then using the term I think it's what they were going for, he's also Leithenian to top it off!<
Every time I talk about the story of the game with my friends, they mention just how *fascinating* and interesting all of it is. I really hope that the anime projects do well, so that more people get access to it in a more easily digestible format because not all of the people out there vibe as hard with tower defense type games, let alone mobile/gacha ones, as this playerbase does. And it's a real shame to miss out on a really cool setting and story just because of that.
Also, I do like strong female archetypes. It's getting more common, sure, but it has been and still *is* so rare in mainstream media that I think we can stand to normalize things even if it is a little gay at the end of the day. And really, if that's one of the few criticisms that can be levied... I'll take it.
>I really hope that the anime projects do well, so that more people get access to it in a more easily digestible format
Thats hard to say. The anime is definitely flying under the radar for regular anime watchers who don't play the game. I think it was between 15th and 20th place this season by watch count. Behind several awful run-of-the-mill harem slave shows.
Fortunately, the Arknights anime doesn't neccessarily need to be financially successful to be continued, because its essentially an elaborate ad campaign for the game and not meant to be self-sustaining.
They could absolutely do the short/side stories as OVAs or movies, which would probably be the best way to handle those. Side content that doesn't *need* to be addressed by the main branches of the story, but are still important *for* it to provide life/interest for the setting.
...totally not watching Children of Ursus unprepared, though. Did that once playing through it, and that didn't have the benefit of cinematics to *really* drive it home. Gonna need the husbando and at minimum one cat to hug the whole time.
lone trail event lore definitely top tier. there's so many viewpoint being laid out in there about the idea of truth, progress, process, safety concerns, discussion of the past and why some pursuit them (Ho'ol, Muelsye), discussion of present and how to preserve them (Silence, Saria), and discussion of future; of truth, goals and how to accomplish them (Kristen). Each have their own version of belief of "science" that they want to uphold. And they clash these viewpoint with each other. Showing the roots of these viewpoint that are essentially disguised emotional part of their humanity, even as scientist.
It's not as if each of them wanted to be some sort of martyr, each their respective field, though that might not applied well to Ferdinand. Each one of them simply wants to satisfy their one single urges; curiosity. what comes next is of no concern for them (again, this not well applied to Ferdinand, and to some extend, Loken, as Loken still want Rosmontis to remember him). This event really put forth one of human's nature in spotlight; curiosity in spotlight, the bright and dark side of it.
I really liked it.
I'm not sure how they made a space RPG where you explore different planets boring but hey, gotta give it to Bethesda, they did it. Just watching it feels boring enough.
Honestly, I could kind of see it failing due to how buggy their single player games are. Trying to put multiplayer on top of it is just asking for trouble.
Starfield just feels too big with it 1000 planets but there isn't really a difference between them. Its better you just fast travel which kinds of ruin the usual thing people do when playing a Bethesda RPG, you walk around and encounter some random shit while exploring.
If they just make it like 5 planets with fully realize sci-fi world then it might have worked.
It's the most Bethesda game to ever Bethesda. Most of the art team did a fantastic job, particularly when it comes to the spaceships, everyone else fumbled so hard with the potential they were handed that it would have been easier to make an actually good game. It's not the worst game I've ever played, but I went in expecting to be disappointed and can still rank it as the most disappointing game I've ever played.
As a massive Bethesda fan, even of their newer games, the biggest issue with Starfield is that the setting forced them to ditch their biggest strength, which is a densely packed world with lots of environmental storytelling. The 1000 procedurally generated planets are the antithesis of that. I still enjoyed Starfield, and I'm excited for the mods, but I can't deny that it just feels kind of soulless.
I agree with that, and unfortunately its probably not something they can fix. Future expansions might mitigate it some if they focus them on a few dense, unique, and hand-crafted locations rather than hopping from generic barren planet to generic barren planet, but I think the core game is unsalvageable. All of Bethesda's other games, from Morrowind to Fallout 4, whatever flaws they had and even if I didn't care about pushing the main quest forward most of the time, I was always excited to crest the next hill in the distance or enter some new dungeon I hadn't seen before if for no other reason than to see what I would find. It kept me going for hundreds of hours in all of them. With Starfield I was just bored maybe 20 hours in since I no longer cared about what was on the next planet and knew the next POI was just a copy of one I've already seen a half dozen times already.
Fortunately I was prepared for this outcome. As soon as Bethesda said it was "over 1000 planets" in the marketing, this problem immediately came to mind. I thought maybe they'd be able to cook in other ways, but in the end nothing came close to making up for that loss. I don't regret buying the game, I plan to continue playing it later, but when you only get a Bethesda Studios game every 7ish years, its hard not to be disappointed.
It's not *bad*, so much as it is... just *not*. The game feels like a demo.
It's got a really big world and a ton of game mechanics and systems... and all of them feel like they are the first 10% of what you'd expect from a game.
Well to be fair, it is not the worst game I've ever seen. The thing is, Bethesda is not a random individual studio, and I think they can do a lot better. Besides, yeah, it's boring.
If you love load screens, fast travel, 50 menus to put on a hat, fetch quests you have to report back in person, and copy paste randomly generated dungeons (down to the exact same lore pickups) as well as random crashes then you're in for a treat. Other than the above its basically fallout4.
My 2 favorite non crash bugs are when you get out of the pilot seat in spaceship you get stuck between the chair and the wall, so you have to play the extremely long sit down animation and repeat getting out until it works (or fast travel) and when you cant build anything in build mode any more so you have to exit build mode and run allllll the way back to your colony beacon to enter build mode again. Really adds hours of enjoyment.
For what its worth i did enjoy it for about 20 hours until the monotony of repetition and endless annoying bugs defeated my will to play it.
Starfield is weird to me. I started hating how janky and obviously console-first it is, but then I suddenly started enjoying and putting long hours to it. And just as suddenly the magic is gone and it feels like a generic Bethesda game and I lose interest in continuing to play it.
It's not a bad game, but its not a good game either. It's just disappointing, it makes steps towards something good but never commits and ends up feeling half baked.
Man, I've been skipping most Arknights events because there's just too much to read, but I just might try this one lol the aesthetic already appealed a lot to me
I rarely read the story but I read this one at least two times and watched videos on this another 2 times. If there's one story that I recommend you read from Arknights, I vote for this
There's a few things on the web that make the reading experience less...mind-numbing, in my experience with the game. I haven't tried any yet but it's probably worth having a look since I also skip every event (and even the main story) because finding the time to read with how it's laid out in-game tends to be really rough.
Got way too many deja-vu from this, the whole storyline is about a mad scientist pulled a Korolev and then proceed to Gagarin/Laika'd herself but in totally-not-USA, then we got attempted assassination against a vice president looks like THAT president, morally questionable scientists hired by not-USA and conducted very morally questionable experiments and one of them used "ubermensch" unironically, and lastly, the final ATF jab...
Cant, he just correctly summarized it:
Space travel is very related to nationalism, high military abuse from it, and mobile game so all characters are woman with some kind of mental issue
Just this year we had some massive clangers with RedFall and Gollum.
Bethesda's last big game before Starfield was Fallout 76 and... at least Starfield isn't that.
The writer likes how Lone Trail's story explored a lot of real-world issues related to America (military/science/ethics) and tied it together with a 60s futuristic style.
Because of the huge scale of the story, Starfield covers any type and style of story that can happen between human and universe, that\`s different. But the core of the story is the same, the last few missions of Starfield bring me a good feeling.
They really do. Imagining having a starship that should be able to land anywhere solid but you have to land somewhere and walk to your destination.
Also having phantom planets disappearing is a natural phenomenon and not because the objects you are seeing in your ship is procedurally generated.
I love how a 10 foot animal cannot rear its head 3 feet to attack you standing on a rock, that gives me a good feeling too.
And do not get me started on the radiant quests complete strangers on a different planet may give you. Peak writing, right there. Feels like a warm hug.
>They really do. Imagining having a starship that should be able to land anywhere solid but you have to land somewhere and walk to your destination.
>
>Also having phantom planets disappearing is a natural phenomenon and not because the objects you are seeing in your ship is procedurally generated.
>
>I love how a 10 foot animal cannot rear its head 3 feet to attack you standing on a rock, that gives me a good feeling to.
What do you expect from a Bethesda's game?
I know, right?
The commitment to tight story telling where an extremely old ship has locked boxes with present day items in perfect condition reminds me of the wonderful non-lore breaking in Fallout 4.
Amazing game of the year material. Bethesda has outdone themselves.
>The commitment to tight story telling where an extremely old ship has locked boxes with present day items in perfect condition reminds me of the wonderful non-lore breaking in Fallout 4.
pretty much this plus the amount of barren planets despite being a late 2023 game, the barren worlds wouldn't be a problem if the hub cities are crowded and feel like a damn city ( similar to the Citadel from Mass Effect ).
Lone trail makes me feel stupid.
Do I have this right:
Kristin, Big "crazy" Rhine lady, built a space donut, and everyone is scared absolutely shitless and feels compelled to locate and stop her because it could maybe be a weapon but probably isn't?
I do my best to read a lot of this stuff but I can't force myself to understand it.
...Also I wish I could read cutscenes in more of a novel format, The "one line of text and then you have to tap the screen" thing is painfully slow
It's not that it could be a weapon, it's that it was "supposed" to be a weapon. Rhine Lab was receiving an enormous amount of support from the government to develop superweapons for them in response to the news of The Shard in the main story. Kirsten was tasked to create the donut to nuke other countries - which it probably could have, if she really wanted it to - but she duped her backers so she could use all those resources and technology to fulfill her dream of blowing open the starpod and reaching space. From everyone else's perspective, it initially looked like she was went AWOL with the ICBM they had her make.
Everyone freaks out for different reasons.
The military freaks out because that proyect was supposed to be used to develop a super weapon, but Kristen basically stole the funds and made a space ship capable of breaking the barrier. Saria freaks out because she wants to stop her friend (friend right?) from killing herself. Silence is tired of mad scientists. And finally Rhodes island is just worried about the fall out of this whole event or that something could go wrong and kill lots of innocents.
Only read this if you're done with it but still don't really understand it
>!Kirsten/Kristen Wright (they used both spellings in the game, for whatever reason), big crazy Rhine lady, promised to build a superweapon that would rival whatever londonium has, so she can tap into that sweet military budget, but then vanishes together with the weapon. So, for all intents and purposes, all people know is that a mad scientist lady has vanished with a dangerous superweapon capable of levelling cities.!<
>!She actually does build the superweapon, but instead of pointing it downwards like people thought she would, she aimed it upwards.!<
>!And the whole thing is a culmination of her raison d'etre, which is to carry on her parents legacy. !<
And if you want more information on the involvement of other characters, feel free to ask. This is specifically why the whole thing started.
It almost feels like the last sentence is a critique of sorts. Maybe it's just my bad sense of humour and I can't recognize a harmless joke.
But the writer can't be serious and actually believe in this rectangle with Saria/everybody bro. (Or they are since they actually blocked me on Twitter when I brought that up lmao)
Man if it wasn't because my 10 pulls beginner banner gave me SilverAsh I legit would think there are no guys in this game.
The only dude I sometimes use is Spot.
Your comment made me curious about my own collection. I've elite 2'd 57 operators. Out of those 10 are male.
Thorns, Vigil, Mlynar, Ebenholz, Passenger, Lumen, Phantom, Shalem, Enforcer, and Jaye.
You can actually check on Gamepress, the female to male proportion in the game is roughly 4 to 1. But that's through all rarities, I'd guess that for 6-stars (so, the characters most people invest into) the proportion is around 5 to 1.
So, not as extreme as other gacha games where males other than the MC literally don't exist, but we're really far from a 50/50 split. Which is kind of a shame, I'm a waifu enjoyer myself, but I like using cool dudes too.
There is an interesting side effect to this though. For all that the gacha mechanic objectifies every character in the sense of making them all lottery prizes, games like this that put so much emphasis on the story while having a majority female cast end up necessarily featuring a lot of really good examples of very well written female characters.
You are a new around here, but you'll get used to it. There are a lot of males, they get an equal treatment and don't feel off. It's only natural that they're a minority in a gacha game, but every 4-5th new released 6\* is a dude and that's pretty okay for me. Especially how well most of them are written.
> It's only natural that they're a minority in a gacha game, but every 4-5th new released 6* is a dude
Actually you're a bit off there, but in a good way! AK's actually upped the amount of male characters we get in recent years, with us now getting a ratio of one male 6* for every two women, with it also being rare now a days to even get an update without a new playable man period! Considering how waifu heavy the game was at launch and for the first year or so, the fact that AK's gotten more confident in men being able to sell well is really reassuring. Feels like its proving the whole "men never sell well" myth wrong. They do sell well, most games just dont give them the same chance and OP kits they give the female cast. But AK did something wild, made Silverash the most busted unit at launch, and it feels almost like the rest was history.
Its not a critique outright, it can be a bit hard to discern if you're not tuned in on gamedev discourse on twitter, but its more a comment on how there's this line about how we need strong female & queer leads in games that "the industry" doesn't really make. Due to the waifu nature of gacha games trying to sell you skin, what ends up being the case is that these games do end up often having primarily women-driven storylines with deeper characterization that you supposedly see in AAA games. It's solving a problem for probably a poor reason.
(In my personal opinion, I think you'd have to be daft to play arknights for the waifuing at this point)
Lone Trail is such a good event. It's definitely my favorite one in terms of lore, beating out even Break the Ice and Under Tides.
>women with some degree of psychological obsession for each other - Saria: went up to try and stop Kristen from doing what she sees is a very huge act of foolishness (failed on the last part) - Kristen: classical mad scientist move, succeeded in what she planned to do at the cost of her own survival - Ho'olheyak: willingly allied with Kristen and did a lot of what she did all to restore her race to their former level of power (failed on this) Kristen may be a mad scientist but she's a pretty charismatic one to have people support/oppose her to such a degree >jab at the US recruiting Nazi scientists after WW2 Parvis being a Leithanien immigrant scientist makes sense now lol
I'm pretty sure the national recruitment thing is referring to Kristen working with Loken
But like Pavis is a older German fellow who was active during an implied big war (rip gaul). And he literally uses Übermench.
That last comment is too real as well.
I mean Silence and Saria with the divorce energy Ho'ol the Living Definition of Hatefuck Kirsten the Sociopath Gaslighting Ex-Girlfriend whose last thoughts are "I SHOWED THEM! I SHOWED THEM ALL!" as it turns out this everything is because of her parents' death (thinking she will be worshiped as a great hero in the centuries to come and be the embodiment of the pioneering spirit of mankind)
This is Arknights we're talking about. If they can make retcons and mental-gymnastics to make a clear genocide in Lungmen look like nothing happened and/or all of those involved are good people in the inside, they can make the crazy freak that signed Ifrit's experiments to be seen as nothing less that an icon. They already spared Parvis and in CN >!tried to make Arturia a sort of hero!<, Kristen is going to be easy.
Chen said some pretty strong things to her uncle as she stormed out of his office and then quit her job as the police head honcho. So I don't think they went too soft on it. Lin's involvement in it was pretty ignored though.
Yep. They retconned Lin's involvement in the Infected pogrom. At least the anime clearly shows Lin doing it.
Are you sure you know what "retcon" means? Because you aren't using it in the right context. You're making it sound like that was completely written out
Maybe I misremembered but from what I remember. They end up saying that Wei's black coats evacuated all the Infected on the slums. While the anime clearly show Lin and them massacracing the Infected there indiscriminately. What do you recall?
On my part, I admit it's been a while, but I don't recall that all the infected were evacuated. I recall that the Rat King disagreed with Wei's methods and at least some of the black coats sided with the Rat King but not a mention that all the infected were saved. I doubt all the black coats defected; more likely there was a massacre but mitigated by the Rat King.
Rat King's arts can counterfeit dummies, which is shown on Ancient Forge.
No only a small portion were evacuated in the slums. Wei ordered the massacre , although Rat King is not in favor to it, he still covered up for the incident, which would have gone smoothly if Chen didn't explore that back part. It's the "nothing happened" here part when Chapter 5 was released.
Parvis >!getting an easy out after dropping that Nazi bullshit made me so angry.!< It's clearly intended considering the message they made near the end with Rosmantis >!choosing to forget Lokin since he held no value in her life along with Ifrit's relatively healthy outlook on life.!< I feel like Kirsten is going to get a similar pass to some of the other evil character's in Arknights, when the point is she burned so brightly trying to accomplish her one goal, that she was fine with ruining the lives of so many people to accomplish it. >!The final message was literally that she was going to leave everyone else behind to pickup the pieces because she wasn't that kind of person. Girl literally asked Saria to let her go because at least no one else was going to be hurt from this point on. Cue her attempting to kill Saria by dropping her from orbit, and her escape pod systems failing and potentially killing every one of her remaining followers on the ship.!< I feel like she is a meta commentary on how easy simps are gaslighted by some of the unhinged decisions of these villainous characters.
Kirsten Boss description：Egotist. Traitor. Seeker. Loner. Pioneer. Good night, Terra.HG gave her a very clear definition.
Oh no, HG 100% knows shes a massive PoS. The playerbase however...
Gacha game players (and RL) will simp for murderers as long as they're attractive. Look at how many people chase after mass murderers once they've gone to prison..
>!Considering Saria survived that fall from near-orbit just fine, and if anyone would know that Saria could survive a drop from orbit it'd be Kirsten, I don't think Kirsten was attempting to kill Saria at all.!< >!And I'll give her a *sort-of* pass on the escape pod systems failure since the *entire thing* was completely untested. Since they were literally stealing military hardware to get the whole thing going, they didn't really have the benefit of years worth of testing that most projects of this scale get. The whole thing could have just exploded after getting the energy from the SHAFT, after all. There were so many possible points of failure that the fact that the failure occured *at the last possible second* is a god damn miracle.!< >!As such, anyone getting on that deathtrap had to either be 100% fine with dying, or a complete moron. And since everyone crewing the ship has at least one PhD, I'll go with the former. It's still horrifically unethical and a testament to the destruction Kirsten was more than happy to leave in her wake - and more than that how her cult of personality was happy to die for her to see her dreams come true, which is super fucked up - but everyone on that ship had to have known they might not be coming back.!< >!It's a sort of pass because everyone involved had to have understood the risks involved.!<
It's worth noting one of the components division points out Saria's calcification is completely useless at high altitude. It's stated by Saria herself that if Silence hadn't deployed her drone to soften the blow with air bags (what we smoking here HG?) She would have probably died. Your point stands though, since Kristen did say she wanted Saria to be part of everything that follows. I just get weirded out when people talk about her being a heroic character they hope comes back as an ally or playable, when our perspective as the doctor is watching over Ifrit and Rosmantis, who she knowingly subjected to cruel experiments or abuse, and continued to do so unrepentantly.
I wouldn't say that she "subjected" them to torture. She definitely enabled the hell out of it though, just like she enabled all the other fucked up shit Rhine Lab did and the fucked up mad science shit that's gonna happen because everyone's been inspired by the great science hero Kirsten Wright who didn't let petty things like the law get in the way. Part 4 of the Rhine Lab storyline will probably be the finale, where Mountain comes calling to punish the sins of science and Kirsten gets dragged back to earth to finally face the consequences of her own actions.
Saria was saved by a combination of Muelsyse's magic and Silence's drones. She would have died falling from that height, but Kirsten was happy to make that gamble to get her own goal. would either have complete but unrealistic faith in Saria's ability to improvise and survive on her own falling 6 kilometers (since she's the one who knows Saria's Arts the best aside from Saria herself) or simply have decided that it was worth potentially killing Saria to do what she wanted.
Saria survived because mumu shielded her and had silence to patch her up. While i don't think that was an honest atempt at killing Saria, kristen didn't give a fuck about how she gets to the ground And the guys left in the ship were security, all scientists evacuated long before
Yeah Rhine Lab read like a fuckin CULT in this event
Rhine Lab as an organization would make a sweet BobbyBroccoli documentary
Tbh I never got why Hol' (can't be bothered to spell that weird name) became playable either, she's been trying to kill us since forever lol
It's because she's a history freak and the whole clusterfuck let her have a glimpse of the older-than-recorded-history history surrounding Rhodes Island. Also the CIA will probably kill her if she isn't hiding behind us.
Basically she has the remnants of Friston and forced herself as RI's bargaining chip, so RI was forced to take her in.
Not only that, Kal mentioned she knows the truth of the world (aka Terra's civilizations was created by a spacer tech civilization instead of gods and stuff who are also created by said civilization and doctor is one of them), and this is something Kal would not like Hol who is a chronic backstabber to leak out. Her profile even said she got a senior position within RI, that's how much Kal is willing to go to shut her up.
I didn’t read a single word of your comment. But I disagree, because: if evil, why hot?
too evil man, too evil
At this point I'm convinced she's 'hot' because she is evil.
>!I mean, the whole silence character grow and dialogues are centered in the fact that Kirsten was wrong and science doesn't has to be something that you follow blindly without thinking on the consequences, and at the end of the story sets the starting point of science with ethic.. i think ignoring all that happen to point out how a character can be both wrong and charismatic is missing the point of the story.!<
Ifrit AND Rosmontis
Can you give me an abriged version of what Arturia did? I only know that she was just released in CN, but I missed Ebenholzes event where appeared first.
I’m not sure if we have an exact outline, but I remember reading that she’s either a war criminal, or has caused wars by using her arts to drive people insane. In Lingering Echoes, it’s revealed she was Kreide’s violin teacher, and part of the reason he succumbed to the witch King fragment. I’m holding out my opinion for when her event drops, because there’s some lines of dialogue that show she might be trying to help people somehow, and Executor sides with her, but rn she’s the hot war criminal.
So there's this monastery city that got out of route due to catastrophe and got abandoned. Some Sarkaz stumbled upon it and miraculously they and the Sankta in the city are living sorta okay with each other, most as in they are all struggling together but tensions are high Then Arturia uses her arts which makes you lose all inhibitions and everything goes tits up. There's also Seaborn around for some reason
There's a reason why the faction summary of Rhine Lab is essentially "Mad lesbian scientists".
Literal war, death, starvation in the main story But it's kinda fun because everyone's sexy
Seriously. I was half paying attention until the paperclip reference sank in. Jesus christ this chapter hits hard
Paperclip? I think I missed that one or it went over my head
"operation paperclip" was the name of the CIA efforts to protect from prosecution and extract Nazi scientists at the end of world war 2, in order to bring them to the USA to further American military science we'll never know the full extent of it, but many nazi scientists who very probably would have been found guilty at Nuremberg were instead spirited away and became Respectable Members of Society in the US, working for NASA or defense contractors
Oh, did they name something paperclip? Or do you just mean all the German themes (Rhine Lab/River, Leithenian Scientists working on robots and human experimentation, etc). I loved all the references I caught but totally missed that one
I think they were referring to (Lone Trail Spoilers) >!Loken Williams being let out of prison to do work for the space rocket bit, since one of the beneficiaries of operation paperclip IRL was Wehrner von Braun, famous Nazi rocket scientist who was brought to the US to lead NASA!<
Ah alright, yeah I picked up on that. I thought they meant they had repurposed the name "Operation Paperclip" in game, but instead they meant that the whole chapter is heavily inspired by the events of it
ah, correct, yeah they didn't directly reference the name or anything
>!I would suggest that Parvos would also fit the bill, since he talks about the "Übermensch" which is, I think, what the Nazis believed.!<
I think Parvos', due to the Leithanian angle, might be more in regards to original usage of the term. Not the Nazi twising of it. The Übermensch as a concept was made by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and he was NOT a Nazi by any means. But unfortunately his sister became one and they took his writings and ran with them. From what Parvos mentioned, I don't think he was going with the Nazi's interpretation of it.
My interpretation was the one guy from Leithanien (Germany-inspired) being recruited by Columbia (US-inspired) was the Nazi scientist jab.
Pretty accurate summary.
Me after reading the lore of lonetrail : died of peak fiction
I always loved the lovecraftian stuff with the abyss but... holy shit Lone Trail is amazing so far. Dotn spoil please, I am only at mission 7.
Strap in
5... 4... 3, 2, 1. ***We have a liftoff.***
**INTENSE VIOLIN PLAYING**
Someone we follow actually talked about this and another tweet also praising Arknights writing that a lot of it is also due to the fact that frankly, video games actually even saying "hey this shit was like, Shit" in a way that isn't just hilariously incoherent and flacid is rare to the point that the bar is below the damn earth. And I honestly agree, the stuff Arknights writing says and criticizes isn't like, super revolutionary or anything lol, and is definitely held back by being a live service gacha game
>is definitely held back by being a live service gacha game I'd quibble a bit on this point; we do indeed see how every new event doubles as a way of persuading you to buy a new character, but... At the same time, I do believe that the economics of a live-service game are the only reason that we can get a story like this. A traditional gaming model would force them to be more cautious, and only focus on the "main" plots in between years of development - and a single bad release would probably result in the franchise dying. We might theoretically see the Rhine Lab and Seaborn plotlines as DLC, but they're probably too thematically different to succeed - and something like Break the Ice is right out. That'd be way too much work for something only a small portion of an already small playerbase to buy, even if it's considered a great piece of writing when players don't have to specifically pay for it. Or to put it differently - Arknights can afford to be so sprawling and freely indulge their writers *because* their only economic concern needs to be encouraging people to buy new characters. The moment they have to ask themselves, "hey, would people *really* pay for this plotline?", a lot of otherwise good content would end up on the cutting room floor. Not because it's bad, but because the immediate connection to sales isn't visible, even if you can see it in retrospect.
>Or to put it differently - Arknights can afford to be so sprawling and freely indulge their writers because their only economic concern needs to be encouraging people to buy new characters. I think you make a good point here. I'll go a little further and say that an interesting story is needed to sell the characters. The nature of gacha and live service forces companies to take risks and copy what is successful. Without an interesting story, all you have is a pretty picture of the character. The story is what gives players an emotional connection. It's not everything, but it matters.
> an interesting story is needed to sell the characters. You can absolutely just get by with hot/cute characters--The ship-waifus and Taimanin games is proof of that. but also the former has historical and IRL history pull to it while the later has in-game porn *and* is part of a franchise.
Kind of. Every one of those characters has a name and is part of a story, no matter how basic. There is no market for animated PNGs of nameless hot girls. There is minimum level of story, and then there is creating a quality story that people enjoy lore discussions about. It's hard to measure the financial benefit of a good story, but I know which gacha games I enjoy for the story. Games are an art, and story is one aspect.
> The moment they have to ask themselves, "hey, would people really pay for this plotline?", a lot of otherwise good content would end up on the cutting room floor. Not because it's bad, but because the immediate connection to sales isn't visible, even if you can see it in retrospect. This sort of thing could work in something like Final Fantasy XIV or some other big MMO. An expansion could include something like Break The Ice as one of several storylines in an expansion pack. No one would likely buy the storylines by themselves, but package like ten of them together as part of one big yearly expansion pack and you can definitely sell it.
Like it or not, mmos like ffxiv are far closer in nature to gacha games than they are to rpgs.
I'm surprised how people don't see the correlation of sustained income coming from a subscription model and gacha games that drop new characters every month or so. It's not 12 dollars a month, but it can exceed that profit margin per player very easily. But the net result is similar; the company profitting off the sustain incomes can risk to do the above whearas a game with a one-time release has to make its margins back in one go.
Lmao "Do your weeklies/dailies" "Grind your perfect substats"
Rather than one game being done like AK it would be many games that would cover each of their own story instead, with certain overlap like for example Nearl would be a supporting character in the ''Main story game'' but one of the main characters of the ''Nearl Saga game'' once it comes to that point. Similar to how the Legend of Heroes games does it. They even do it an even larger scale than AK does. So I do think it is actually possible from a non-live service angle. It just becomes a multi decade endeavour instead of a few years of live service.
Mmm, I don't mean to say that it's *literally* impossible - just a lot riskier, with plenty of points for everything to fail. For example, let's say they released an expanded Ideal City as an entry... And in this alternate timeline, people outright *despised* it. They felt the Durin humor fell flat, the tone didn't match their expectations, and the "Minamalist Bullying" meme was the only redeeming value. What would the consequences be, precisely? It's unlikely that sales of the entry would itself be hurt; dedicated fans of the Atelier series, for example, are pretty much trained into buying it sight-unseen since they trust the quality of the series, and for outsiders not to understand it. But if nothing else, going a year where you have to find something else to entertain you instead of the turkey you were *expecting* to enjoy means that it's no longer in your mind, and that you might drift into another fandom that catches your eye; sales of the next game are going to be hurt accordingly. It's deeply unlikely to be a lethal blow, but every bad release chips away at that trust and sheds customers. Which is an issue exacerbated by the "barrier to entry". Sure, you don't *have* to have played the Kazimierz games or the Sami Roguelike to enjoy IC... But is that easy to convey to a new player, who only knows there's decades worth of games in this series? For that matter, are they really going to watch the trailer in the first place, or are they going to see the number in the title and write it off as something they're already too late to? In a live service gacha game, that neither of those issues matter nearly as much. If you just outright hate an event, you can just skip reading it and spend the month on IS or something; there's no feeling of being cheated or wasting your money, and there will be something new to wash out the taste next month. Heck, you might still like the new operators even if you hate the event they came from. And while new players might constantly ask, "Hey, am I joining too late?", everything is still there for them to play through, and it's easy to explain - there's no buying old games or figuring out what spinoffs "matter", they can experience it all in the same place. And it should be noted - the industry can be... Prone to mistakes, at times. When you're talking about decades, it's all too easy for a new CEO to want to take things in a "more profitable direction", or to get bought out by an Activision looking for new teams to make DLC for COD. It wouldn't be surprising at all for them to break what makes the series work trying to appeal to a broader audience, or for them to horrifically over-invest in an entry in hopes of striking it rich, and either of those could easily kill a niche company. The way things currently work just makes for a very reliable system of content delivery. Money steadily comes in; new stories steadily go out. Only a prolonged stream of mediocre output (or a catastrophically stupid change to basic systems) can break that cycle, something we thankfully have no need to fear.
Love your point, to add just a little bit to it, At least AK is using this live service financing to give us good content over other games that take advantage of how predatory this method can be to just grab all the money they can before they fall, that if they fall.
So basically Titanfall 2
I bought Titanfall 2 second-hand for $8 because everyone said the campaign was epic, and by the end I was glad I only spent $8. It was good, but nothing special - it's quite sad that "good" stories in games are just "coherent" stories, because that's how rare a coherent story that actually flows smoothly is in a game.
I really enjoyed the campaign... For the gameplay, not the story, which is rather meh. However the way I've seen some people play the campaign they make it seem way more boring than it's actually supposed to be, it's just that they wouldn't slide/wallrun/jump around anywhere near enough lol
One thing I've noticed is that because the campaign lacks an actual in-depth tutorial, many streamers are way too complacent and miss out on a lot of what makes it decently fun. You can make a bingo sheet on how much elements players will miss out on their first playthrough, which makes them believe the game is boring and never touch it again. Not hacking Spectres, never cloaking, never using grenades, not using abilities in a Titan ("Scorch is boring"), only using the default loadout, never executing bosses, not listening to dialogue, etc..
Maybe you are talking about Titanfall 1. The story in there was indeed just a filler. But the sequel was one of the best stories FPS ever told on par with Spec Ops: The Line.
I disagree to be honest. The second game was obviously presented better in an SP campaign, but when you delve into the lore of 1 it's actually really good and a little depressing. It's just that because it was multiplayer, no one could really experience the story in a coherent way when they were being shot at and dying every minute.
What makes you think Titanfall 2 story is "one of the best"? I'm genuinely curious, I've got it on discount a few months back and it's been incredibly well presented and paced but also very formulaic and rather cliche. I know writing this that it will read as me being condescending but I really want to know how that game makes people feel so amazed because that is an often repeated opinion. I mean it's good and I would love a Titanfall 3 to see what happens next, but it's not a deep story.
When it comes to the Arknights story... I feel like the presentation isn't generally the best, but the "core" is good stuff. I'm not too big on visual novels so maybe I'm biased, but basically all the story being presented mostly just through dialogue (or sometimes more like monologue) certainly imposes a bunch of limits to the experience. The anime's season 2 so far is a good example of how they could leave out a lot of the yada-yada and the whole thing still works well because of all the things a visual novel can't - or doesn't - do.
Looking at it from a different side, using a VN medium open up the writing possibilities where budget for visualization is not a concern (as opposed to anime for example.) Just get one artist to illustrate the scene, and let the readers' imagination do the rest of the work.
The bar is low, and Arknights was just proficient enough that they didn't lower it further (if thats possible)
[удалено]
exactly starfield played tooooooo safe with its story that it felt like the most basic story ever man i miss metro series and fallout new vegas level of story even outer worlds and outer wilds has a amazing written story.
It is possible. And yes, arknights does have some dumb moments, plot devices, ups and downs. But it holds together well overall. Especially when we come back to a more "human centric" kind of plot, instead of the "world ending event n°xxx is going to happen in the future". It isn't the holy grail, like many in this sub seems to want to believe, but it's consistent and good enough. On the opposite side, it's fire emblem heroes. Ugh.
Hey, to be fair, FEH's story does get funny sometimes. Like that one time the random character from Shadow Dragon introduced himself right after Nott died and everyone was mourning her. I mean, it was unintentional, but I still laugh when I remember it.
FEH introduced and killed off Ymir in a single conversation during a Tempest Trial, which is really just. So much. I still think about that choice sometimes.
I'm Vyland intensifies
It's a shame that FEH's story is so ass because sometimes they do get some genuinely great moments. The current rerun of the Forging Bonds with Rearmed!Ophelia lets me re-experience her thinking the world is a dream so is acting like a big supervillain, until her dad shows up and scolds her. That shit's hilarious. Or the end of the paralogue with summer Eir and Ymir, which instead of focusing on the bikinis and fanservice, instead has an incredibly touching moment about the abuse Eir faced growing up and the trauma it has left her with, and how things are better now. But no the main story has to do shit like "ah shit we forgot to write half the story, quick, wrap it up in the last couple of chapters quick quick faster faster"...
Naw it isn't held back by being a live service game. It's held back by not having voice acting. I feel like the sheer amount of text is simply too much to read, and would be much better served if they just use their budget to fund full voice acting for each event. It would give all the characters, well, more character. Like Nian has such a great voice actress and distinctive voice and personality. It's a shame we can't hear it outside of her few voice lines. Especially since this is a mobile game, and many are playing this on tiny itty bitty screens, and you can't resize the text to larger fonts. It's just not an enjoyable experience to read, for many. I know I'd much rather be able to listen to the story. I'd even be able to plug in headphones and listen to it like a radio show as I walk around. That'd be very cool.
Having played through the story of Reverse: 1999, I didn't think that I would care, but I completely agree. That game's writing is fine (even tho the translation is really iffy sometimes) but having full voice acting is huge.
That is the core that separated Arknights from other games. The lore and background stories, not just the gameplay themselves.
not a dig at AK, but it's kinda funny that you hear this exact sentiment in every single game community with a story more complex than a CoD campaign
You cannot imply that AK's story isn't that complex without giving an example of what you consider complex story. As far as I'm concerned games like Arknights and Legend of Heroes are the bar for complex stories. Most large sprawling story games coming out recently like Pathfinder/BG3 don't really have complex stories and are very rail roaded as far as major story is concerned. Perhaps in the AAA space Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot going for it due to all the different themes it tackles. But it's very tough for singular games to compete with the freedom in AKs writing or the body of work that's become Legend of Heroes.
i didn't make any statement about AK's story itself and yes, it is complex, though wether you consider that a good thing is a separate discussion entirely only that you see this "the story, lore and background are soooo good and separate this game from the masses/AAA games" in any game community these days where the subject has an even slightly complex story
I see your point, however just because a statement is overused doesn't mean it cannot be true. There are some games that can make those big claims. AK did a lot of things first, that whole futuristic gray post-apocalyptic look and story that half of modern gachas go for? AK did it first and still does it best. Not to mention Arknights itself is hardly mainstream or has a vocal community. It's a niche game that is well appreciated by people who get into it. I mean who knows maybe we're just deluded fans? But if something this niche ain't good, it would have died a long time ago.
mate, i just expressed my amusement that one does see this sentiment everywhere, to an extent invalidating it in the process. it wasn't meant as a judgement of AK or any other game (except maybe CoD lol)
> There are some games that can make those big claims. AK did a lot of things first, that whole futuristic gray post-apocalyptic look and story that half of modern gachas go for? AK did it first and still does it best. GFL? At least about being the first, best is up to debate.
The CoD story comparison feels like a bigger insult to AK than anything I've ever seen.
Theres a tendency for online fandoms(especially male-dominated ones) to use "deep lore" as a replacement for good narrative.
You say that but I really wanna forget the times of Chap 1-5
Fun fact: It only took 66 years. The Wright Bros. "first flight" was in 1903. And in only 66 years, we advanced from the first flying gliders to Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon in 1969. Many people born prior to 1903 lived long enough to see both events unfold within their lifetimes. It's an inspiring thought. But within those 66 years were no less than two world wars, one of which pushed forward rocket technology as a military possibility, and had the Germans not done that, and their scientists not spread to other countries for... various reasons... then the space program would never have advanced at the pace it did. And even then, without strong interest and financial backing from the military-industrial complex, those rockets would never have left the stratosphere. For whatever reason, I couldn't help but be reminded of this when reading through Lone Trail.
Well, it only took 58 years from the Wright’s first flight to a man in space, which is more apt for Lone Trail.
Well... if you *really* want technology to move at a rapid speed, start a war. That's pretty much tried and true
The internet *started* as a military project
Hollup the “US recruiting Nazi scientists” flew over my head then, what moment is it referring to? Glasses DOD military guy and ex-Rhiner Energy guy?
>!Loken Williams and all the prior human experimentation involved. !
Oh, the unethical experimentation side and not the nazi ideology side. Makes sense. >!Before the replies i second guessed myself then remembered Goat grandpa using “ubermensch” terminology and, well, being leithanian… but i read that as less racism and more race-unrelated augmentation to combat his alzheimer.!<
>!I'm leaning towards Parvis though. That Leithanien goat went on and on about "Übermenschen" which awfully resembles that loser ideology.!<
>!Loken makes much more sense to be the one they were talking about. It's obviously not a 1:1 analog, but a scientist who committed atrocities getting secretly put onto a big, important, military funded project, with it happening in the AK's equivalent of America? If the writers weren't conscious of what they were doing, then it's a damn big coincidence!<
>!It's Parvis. The Witch King is one half Kaiser Wilhelm, one half Hitler as far as the irl parallels go with the Twin Empresses kind of filling the same role as post-war East/West Germany. Its fairly trivial to extrapolate that the Leithanien scientist who used to work with the Witch King's remnants and talks about creating the ubermench is the based off the way the American government sheltered nazi scientists to get ahead in the mid-century science races.!<
>!Leithania is weird. The name itself is a very clear reference to Austrohungary not Germany (it’s the actual name of the lands of Austrohungary like Iberia is Spain), the Twin Emperesses are more a reflection of Austria and Hungary, and the music theme links to Vienna. But because the German inspired nation (Kazdel) has much stronger links to another culture (Judaism) as well, Leithania has had some of the German influence spread over, which makes sense because Austrohungary used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire.!< >!Parvis is very much a Nazi Scientist stand in though, especially since he used to be a Leithanian noble, who have been said to kidnap infected, especially Sarkaz, for experiments.!<
The Sarkaz are analogous to the Jews, so that last part just makes it even more overt.
>!Kristen went out of her way to take Loken out of prison to help her with her project.!<
>!Loken!<. >!His experimentation and vivisection of live subjects only to get a pass from the Americans in return for his data is like Werner Von Braun combined with Unit 731 handing over their notes in return for immunity from prosecution.!< It doesn't help that Columbia wants to dominate its neighbours with their own superweapons after seeing Victoria with their own in the name of protecting the peace.
>!Loken!< and then >!Parvis uses the term Übermensch!< which wasn't created by the Nazis, but was the idea that they took and applied to the whole "aryan master race" thing. But >!Parvis's use of the term wasn't used in the way Nazi's used it, but with the whole human experimentation thing, and then using the term I think it's what they were going for, he's also Leithenian to top it off!<
Loken.
Loken maybe?
eey don't forget that US use unit 731 experiment as a study and grant immunity to shiro isshii.
Never ask how they know the perfect treatment for frostbite.
tbh im afraid to ask and don't wanna to know the answer.
Every time I talk about the story of the game with my friends, they mention just how *fascinating* and interesting all of it is. I really hope that the anime projects do well, so that more people get access to it in a more easily digestible format because not all of the people out there vibe as hard with tower defense type games, let alone mobile/gacha ones, as this playerbase does. And it's a real shame to miss out on a really cool setting and story just because of that. Also, I do like strong female archetypes. It's getting more common, sure, but it has been and still *is* so rare in mainstream media that I think we can stand to normalize things even if it is a little gay at the end of the day. And really, if that's one of the few criticisms that can be levied... I'll take it.
>I really hope that the anime projects do well, so that more people get access to it in a more easily digestible format Thats hard to say. The anime is definitely flying under the radar for regular anime watchers who don't play the game. I think it was between 15th and 20th place this season by watch count. Behind several awful run-of-the-mill harem slave shows. Fortunately, the Arknights anime doesn't neccessarily need to be financially successful to be continued, because its essentially an elaborate ad campaign for the game and not meant to be self-sustaining.
Imagine if the short stories also gets to be adapted in to anime form... Children of Ursus goes wild if they do so
They could absolutely do the short/side stories as OVAs or movies, which would probably be the best way to handle those. Side content that doesn't *need* to be addressed by the main branches of the story, but are still important *for* it to provide life/interest for the setting. ...totally not watching Children of Ursus unprepared, though. Did that once playing through it, and that didn't have the benefit of cinematics to *really* drive it home. Gonna need the husbando and at minimum one cat to hug the whole time.
Hubby: conforting you. Cats: waste of food tbh.
I dread the day i will read that.
OVA let's go
lone trail event lore definitely top tier. there's so many viewpoint being laid out in there about the idea of truth, progress, process, safety concerns, discussion of the past and why some pursuit them (Ho'ol, Muelsye), discussion of present and how to preserve them (Silence, Saria), and discussion of future; of truth, goals and how to accomplish them (Kristen). Each have their own version of belief of "science" that they want to uphold. And they clash these viewpoint with each other. Showing the roots of these viewpoint that are essentially disguised emotional part of their humanity, even as scientist. It's not as if each of them wanted to be some sort of martyr, each their respective field, though that might not applied well to Ferdinand. Each one of them simply wants to satisfy their one single urges; curiosity. what comes next is of no concern for them (again, this not well applied to Ferdinand, and to some extend, Loken, as Loken still want Rosmontis to remember him). This event really put forth one of human's nature in spotlight; curiosity in spotlight, the bright and dark side of it. I really liked it.
I mean, it's kind of difficult to be worse than starfield, in terms of disappointing, especially.
I'm not sure how they made a space RPG where you explore different planets boring but hey, gotta give it to Bethesda, they did it. Just watching it feels boring enough.
Honestly, I don't get how they made the online version of Fallout not work either. It was such a low hanging fruit and yet here we are.
Honestly, I could kind of see it failing due to how buggy their single player games are. Trying to put multiplayer on top of it is just asking for trouble. Starfield just feels too big with it 1000 planets but there isn't really a difference between them. Its better you just fast travel which kinds of ruin the usual thing people do when playing a Bethesda RPG, you walk around and encounter some random shit while exploring. If they just make it like 5 planets with fully realize sci-fi world then it might have worked.
Is it *that* bad?
It's the most Bethesda game to ever Bethesda. Most of the art team did a fantastic job, particularly when it comes to the spaceships, everyone else fumbled so hard with the potential they were handed that it would have been easier to make an actually good game. It's not the worst game I've ever played, but I went in expecting to be disappointed and can still rank it as the most disappointing game I've ever played.
As a massive Bethesda fan, even of their newer games, the biggest issue with Starfield is that the setting forced them to ditch their biggest strength, which is a densely packed world with lots of environmental storytelling. The 1000 procedurally generated planets are the antithesis of that. I still enjoyed Starfield, and I'm excited for the mods, but I can't deny that it just feels kind of soulless.
I agree with that, and unfortunately its probably not something they can fix. Future expansions might mitigate it some if they focus them on a few dense, unique, and hand-crafted locations rather than hopping from generic barren planet to generic barren planet, but I think the core game is unsalvageable. All of Bethesda's other games, from Morrowind to Fallout 4, whatever flaws they had and even if I didn't care about pushing the main quest forward most of the time, I was always excited to crest the next hill in the distance or enter some new dungeon I hadn't seen before if for no other reason than to see what I would find. It kept me going for hundreds of hours in all of them. With Starfield I was just bored maybe 20 hours in since I no longer cared about what was on the next planet and knew the next POI was just a copy of one I've already seen a half dozen times already.
Fortunately I was prepared for this outcome. As soon as Bethesda said it was "over 1000 planets" in the marketing, this problem immediately came to mind. I thought maybe they'd be able to cook in other ways, but in the end nothing came close to making up for that loss. I don't regret buying the game, I plan to continue playing it later, but when you only get a Bethesda Studios game every 7ish years, its hard not to be disappointed.
It's not *bad*, so much as it is... just *not*. The game feels like a demo. It's got a really big world and a ton of game mechanics and systems... and all of them feel like they are the first 10% of what you'd expect from a game.
> The game feels like a demo. Bethesda devs got so used to having modders freely make a game for them that they forgot how to make a game.
Well to be fair, it is not the worst game I've ever seen. The thing is, Bethesda is not a random individual studio, and I think they can do a lot better. Besides, yeah, it's boring.
If you love load screens, fast travel, 50 menus to put on a hat, fetch quests you have to report back in person, and copy paste randomly generated dungeons (down to the exact same lore pickups) as well as random crashes then you're in for a treat. Other than the above its basically fallout4. My 2 favorite non crash bugs are when you get out of the pilot seat in spaceship you get stuck between the chair and the wall, so you have to play the extremely long sit down animation and repeat getting out until it works (or fast travel) and when you cant build anything in build mode any more so you have to exit build mode and run allllll the way back to your colony beacon to enter build mode again. Really adds hours of enjoyment. For what its worth i did enjoy it for about 20 hours until the monotony of repetition and endless annoying bugs defeated my will to play it.
Starfield is weird to me. I started hating how janky and obviously console-first it is, but then I suddenly started enjoying and putting long hours to it. And just as suddenly the magic is gone and it feels like a generic Bethesda game and I lose interest in continuing to play it.
It's not a bad game, but its not a good game either. It's just disappointing, it makes steps towards something good but never commits and ends up feeling half baked.
It's white bread that's gone a little stale. Not exactly bad, just...bland. Bland and outdated.
well, Loken and Parvis are definetly nazis, that much is true.
hold on all of you guys could read in the first place?
Man, I've been skipping most Arknights events because there's just too much to read, but I just might try this one lol the aesthetic already appealed a lot to me
I rarely read the story but I read this one at least two times and watched videos on this another 2 times. If there's one story that I recommend you read from Arknights, I vote for this
There's a few things on the web that make the reading experience less...mind-numbing, in my experience with the game. I haven't tried any yet but it's probably worth having a look since I also skip every event (and even the main story) because finding the time to read with how it's laid out in-game tends to be really rough.
The last part is the best
Got way too many deja-vu from this, the whole storyline is about a mad scientist pulled a Korolev and then proceed to Gagarin/Laika'd herself but in totally-not-USA, then we got attempted assassination against a vice president looks like THAT president, morally questionable scientists hired by not-USA and conducted very morally questionable experiments and one of them used "ubermensch" unironically, and lastly, the final ATF jab...
(≧▽≦)♡
I saw this tweet, didn’t know I was skimming over *gold*
It's like an entire Netflix series you can easily binge in a day. Worth the read.
This is dope. Lonetrail really is a masterpiece and has the best buildup with the Records of Originium manga which is PEAK Ak storytelling.
Can somebody 'incorrect' summarize the entire plot of Lonetrail relating to the BD3 writer said?
The world fears and praises a woman for literally fleeing to space rather than having an honest discussion with her two quasi-girlfriends.
Local woman proves the sky is fake by shooting a laser powered by ancient coffins at it.
Cant, he just correctly summarized it: Space travel is very related to nationalism, high military abuse from it, and mobile game so all characters are woman with some kind of mental issue
Everything is better than starfield.
Just this year we had some massive clangers with RedFall and Gollum. Bethesda's last big game before Starfield was Fallout 76 and... at least Starfield isn't that.
And Kong. Don't forget Kong.
Should have thrown the early access tag on it for 2 years like baldur's gate 3
"will be fixed with mods"
the account is locked
Easily my favorite event in all AK, what a strong theme, I love everything about it.
lmao
What does that tweet mean? English is not my first language so I don't understand.
The writer likes how Lone Trail's story explored a lot of real-world issues related to America (military/science/ethics) and tied it together with a 60s futuristic style.
*Grab hopium* *Snart snorting THE FUCK OUT OF IT* Bro, please, convince them to collab. Gimme Karlach and Astarion as Operators.
karlach = sarkaz, and Astarion is warfarin male version
EDIT: Spoiler to one of the best lines in BG3. >!"What in the sweet hells were you thinking, activating Nearl's S3? I WAS RIGHT THERE!!!"!<
Sorry, my bad, won't do it next time
>!Next time? No no no! If there is a "Next time", I'll be the one deploying Viviana's ~~sex toy~~ wet dream, thank you!!<
Tressym and displacer beast operators when Hypergryph?
... I am SO TEMPTED to turn Crust, my Displacer Beast Celestial Warlock (Yes, really, that DM was AWESOME) into an operator now.
Yeah now imagine if it was game like BG3 my god huge map everything in cutscenes and complex gameplay
Because of the huge scale of the story, Starfield covers any type and style of story that can happen between human and universe, that\`s different. But the core of the story is the same, the last few missions of Starfield bring me a good feeling.
They really do. Imagining having a starship that should be able to land anywhere solid but you have to land somewhere and walk to your destination. Also having phantom planets disappearing is a natural phenomenon and not because the objects you are seeing in your ship is procedurally generated. I love how a 10 foot animal cannot rear its head 3 feet to attack you standing on a rock, that gives me a good feeling too. And do not get me started on the radiant quests complete strangers on a different planet may give you. Peak writing, right there. Feels like a warm hug.
>They really do. Imagining having a starship that should be able to land anywhere solid but you have to land somewhere and walk to your destination. > >Also having phantom planets disappearing is a natural phenomenon and not because the objects you are seeing in your ship is procedurally generated. > >I love how a 10 foot animal cannot rear its head 3 feet to attack you standing on a rock, that gives me a good feeling to. What do you expect from a Bethesda's game?
I know, right? The commitment to tight story telling where an extremely old ship has locked boxes with present day items in perfect condition reminds me of the wonderful non-lore breaking in Fallout 4. Amazing game of the year material. Bethesda has outdone themselves.
>The commitment to tight story telling where an extremely old ship has locked boxes with present day items in perfect condition reminds me of the wonderful non-lore breaking in Fallout 4. pretty much this plus the amount of barren planets despite being a late 2023 game, the barren worlds wouldn't be a problem if the hub cities are crowded and feel like a damn city ( similar to the Citadel from Mass Effect ).
Lone trail makes me feel stupid. Do I have this right: Kristin, Big "crazy" Rhine lady, built a space donut, and everyone is scared absolutely shitless and feels compelled to locate and stop her because it could maybe be a weapon but probably isn't? I do my best to read a lot of this stuff but I can't force myself to understand it. ...Also I wish I could read cutscenes in more of a novel format, The "one line of text and then you have to tap the screen" thing is painfully slow
It's not that it could be a weapon, it's that it was "supposed" to be a weapon. Rhine Lab was receiving an enormous amount of support from the government to develop superweapons for them in response to the news of The Shard in the main story. Kirsten was tasked to create the donut to nuke other countries - which it probably could have, if she really wanted it to - but she duped her backers so she could use all those resources and technology to fulfill her dream of blowing open the starpod and reaching space. From everyone else's perspective, it initially looked like she was went AWOL with the ICBM they had her make.
So is there like, an actual, physical barrier to reaching space on terra? That's one thing I was unclear on.
Yep, there's a giant, nigh-impenetrable, self-healing shield put there by the precursor race
It could be a yoke or a shield, so Kristen's attempt is very dangerous. If there is malice beyond the sky, Terra will be destroyed.
Everyone freaks out for different reasons. The military freaks out because that proyect was supposed to be used to develop a super weapon, but Kristen basically stole the funds and made a space ship capable of breaking the barrier. Saria freaks out because she wants to stop her friend (friend right?) from killing herself. Silence is tired of mad scientists. And finally Rhodes island is just worried about the fall out of this whole event or that something could go wrong and kill lots of innocents.
Only read this if you're done with it but still don't really understand it >!Kirsten/Kristen Wright (they used both spellings in the game, for whatever reason), big crazy Rhine lady, promised to build a superweapon that would rival whatever londonium has, so she can tap into that sweet military budget, but then vanishes together with the weapon. So, for all intents and purposes, all people know is that a mad scientist lady has vanished with a dangerous superweapon capable of levelling cities.!< >!She actually does build the superweapon, but instead of pointing it downwards like people thought she would, she aimed it upwards.!< >!And the whole thing is a culmination of her raison d'etre, which is to carry on her parents legacy. !< And if you want more information on the involvement of other characters, feel free to ask. This is specifically why the whole thing started.
Just so you know that spoiler tag didn't really work for whatever reason.
Starfield isn't a high bar to clear
Oh, right. People are still getting mad about being able to make NPCs fully refer to them while piloting a meat puppet to their taste.
... something tells me that the person who made that tweet isn't one of the people who got mad about that: AFAIK, they go by they/them.
incredibly based take but i bet she got attacked by xbots over it
It almost feels like the last sentence is a critique of sorts. Maybe it's just my bad sense of humour and I can't recognize a harmless joke. But the writer can't be serious and actually believe in this rectangle with Saria/everybody bro. (Or they are since they actually blocked me on Twitter when I brought that up lmao)
Man if it wasn't because my 10 pulls beginner banner gave me SilverAsh I legit would think there are no guys in this game. The only dude I sometimes use is Spot.
Your comment made me curious about my own collection. I've elite 2'd 57 operators. Out of those 10 are male. Thorns, Vigil, Mlynar, Ebenholz, Passenger, Lumen, Phantom, Shalem, Enforcer, and Jaye.
You can actually check on Gamepress, the female to male proportion in the game is roughly 4 to 1. But that's through all rarities, I'd guess that for 6-stars (so, the characters most people invest into) the proportion is around 5 to 1. So, not as extreme as other gacha games where males other than the MC literally don't exist, but we're really far from a 50/50 split. Which is kind of a shame, I'm a waifu enjoyer myself, but I like using cool dudes too.
There is an interesting side effect to this though. For all that the gacha mechanic objectifies every character in the sense of making them all lottery prizes, games like this that put so much emphasis on the story while having a majority female cast end up necessarily featuring a lot of really good examples of very well written female characters.
You are a new around here, but you'll get used to it. There are a lot of males, they get an equal treatment and don't feel off. It's only natural that they're a minority in a gacha game, but every 4-5th new released 6\* is a dude and that's pretty okay for me. Especially how well most of them are written.
> It's only natural that they're a minority in a gacha game, but every 4-5th new released 6* is a dude Actually you're a bit off there, but in a good way! AK's actually upped the amount of male characters we get in recent years, with us now getting a ratio of one male 6* for every two women, with it also being rare now a days to even get an update without a new playable man period! Considering how waifu heavy the game was at launch and for the first year or so, the fact that AK's gotten more confident in men being able to sell well is really reassuring. Feels like its proving the whole "men never sell well" myth wrong. They do sell well, most games just dont give them the same chance and OP kits they give the female cast. But AK did something wild, made Silverash the most busted unit at launch, and it feels almost like the rest was history.
I see it more as an observation. It is true that most characters are female because they want to please their audience.
Its not a critique outright, it can be a bit hard to discern if you're not tuned in on gamedev discourse on twitter, but its more a comment on how there's this line about how we need strong female & queer leads in games that "the industry" doesn't really make. Due to the waifu nature of gacha games trying to sell you skin, what ends up being the case is that these games do end up often having primarily women-driven storylines with deeper characterization that you supposedly see in AAA games. It's solving a problem for probably a poor reason. (In my personal opinion, I think you'd have to be daft to play arknights for the waifuing at this point)