Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.
I use arch btw
Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.
Pronouns are she/her.
Vegan for the iron deficiency.
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you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.
Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.
By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.
It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.
Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.
Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.
So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.
Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.
Majority of people: do horrible thing
Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.
Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?
you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.
I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.
Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.
it’s a party based dark fantasy action rpg.
It’s also a stat heavy build forward game where you can make completely broken characters for post game.
It’s also a sprawling open world with relationship systems with benefits and dating.
It’s got a cool pseudo multiplayer where you send your porn to other players and if they like your porn you get gifts. Oh sorry, pawn.
you climb monsters which is cool.
It’s also a game where fire is bane to wolves.
Elden ring (had to stop playing on release due to arthritis, hands working better atm). It’s pretty good. I got up to volcano manor on release, doing liurnia atm so still on the easy/familiar stuff although finding a few things I didn’t get last time.
Dual Scythes are fun but garbage slow in pve so I might respect after the fight with empty nester. Trying a dragon communion build but there aren’t many dragons early game so mostly I just have no useful stats so far haha.
Palworld. It’s also pretty good.
Eh I’m calm as shit about games, usually I end up in peels of laughter with the comedic deaths.
Lies of P wasn’t for me though. It felt less like the game was trying to get me to master the game, more like each boss was an individual challenge to master with little translation between them.
A shame, as I adored the base combat system and had a ball with the levels. I stopped playing after king of puppets, either bosses just folded or I felt like I had to memorise them.
The rabbit brotherhood was the exception, I adored that fight. Despite the multiple enemies it felt fair and tbh is the only multiple enemy boss in this style of game I’ve loved.
I don’t have a healthy brain? Could be better could be worse but no fucking way would I let a private company with a shady safety record run by an insane megalomaniac fuck with it.
Anything that’s plugging into your brain just can’t be controlled by a small group of people with the sole motive of line goes up. Open research and public ownership are required. The consequences are just too terrible otherwise.
I’m not amazing at these games, particularly the faster ones, but I’m pretty good to the point I tend to play thematic builds or and actively eshew OP stuff because it’s funnier to kill a dragon with a dagger than a big sword.
I think elden ring is almost flawless until after leyndell. Going from one of the best levels they’ve ever made, filled with thoughtful design to bats that 2 hit your 60 vigur build in the flat, empty snowfields is… A decision.
It’s basically tradition that the bottom falls out of these games in the last bits. I think elden ring is just too big, even the levels with great design like elphale end up becoming tedious slog fests because there’s just nowhere for them to take it. Hey look it’s those basic soldiers, but they’re umm golden now and they hit like a truck and umm explode and uhhh 8 Royal revenants. Hmm game design!
The broken scaling of everything means that a lot of the boss fights end up either you wombo combo them, they wombo combo you, or it’s a tedious scratch and run away event. There’s no epic genichiro or owl level toe to toe lightning duels. Even malania, a boss with absolutely stunning design, becomes dying to waterfowl dance in one/two hit/s over and over till you learn to dodge it or just snap and pull out the blasphemous greatsword and chain pancake her to death.