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k0ra-kumori · 3 years

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Killer Frost, Caitlin Snow (DC Super Hero Girls 2019)

#PolarDemons

It was an ordinary day at the Metropolis school, I was getting ready to go to class, and maybe my mind was still a little tormented by what happened to Casey Krinsky, I was thinking about it too much in the last few days, and I don't know why , maybe it was because every time I met her at school I felt a sense of guilt and wanted to apologize to her? No ... I already tried that, and it didn't work.

- Zee! Are you okay? You're already standing there for about 5 minutes! Let's be late, and mr.Chapin promise that if we were late again he would kick us out! (Babs)

- Sorry Babs, I'm coming after you.

I was startled when Barbara called me, but I needed to get out of that trance, maybe the class distracted me a little about Casey.

(Time Skip)

It was time to go, and studying only made my mind worse, I needed a break, Mr. Chapin was unbearable today.

"Where are my friends?" I thought, we usually all leave the class together, I went looking for them and while I was walking down the main hall I saw a crowd, and my friends were there too! I went to them as soon as possible.

- Girls! What are you doing? I looked for you everywhere.

- Hey, duh! We told you in the class that we were going to come here, but it looks like you were too distracted to pay attention to us. (Kara)

- i-I'm sorry is that I ... What are you looking at?

- The new girl, her name is Caitlin Snow, she makes magnificent ice sculptures, it looks like she was transferred

from the old school because her parents moved to metropolis.(Karen)

- I heard she was the most popular girl in the school she came from, it looks like you're going to have competition Zee haha. (Kara)

Kara slaps my arm as part of the joke and I have a very weak laugh, I was happy to have another student at school, and it looks like I wouldn't be the only popular girl here now, you might think it's envy or something, but something about this girl tells me that she’s not welcome here, there’s something wrong with her ...

- Aren't you Zee zatara? I heard a lot about you. (Caitlin)

I didn't notice Caitlin approaching, I was distracted again.

- A-ah hi, yes it is me, very pleased.

I reach out to her for a friendly handshake, but she doesn't fight back ...

- My name is Caitlin Snow, you don't feel threatened by me or anything, do you (Caitlin)

- T-threatened ?! excuse me?

- It's just that I was the most popular girl in my school before I left, and you are the most popular girl here, so ... (Caitlin)

- Oh, of course, I’m very calm about it.

- If that's what you say ... (Caitlin)

Caitlin walks towards the exit of the school door, but in the middle of the way she stops in front of the photographs of all the proms that the Metropolis school has had, and by chance, I was the queen of all these proms, she looks calmly all the pictures one by one, when Caitlin then takes one of my prom queen pictures in her hand and suddenly ... she throws it in the trash.

- I was the most popular girl in my school, and believe me Zee zatara, I don't like to share anything with anyone, especially titles, and in fact, you should feel threatened by me. This school is already mine, bye bye. (Caitlin)

I couldn't believe it, she threatened me?! I didn't feel threatened by her in any way, but now ... I felt very threatened, and it wasn't because of my title.

- You saw that-- GIRLS!

- Ah it was bad zee, we were seeing the ice statue, it moves can you believe it ?! This is very cool! (Kara)

- Were you going to say something, Zee? (Jess)

- No, I don't think so. Let's go home?

(Time skip)

After a long and tiring trip home I had time to relax a little, I was thinking more clearly now.

- Caitlin Snow is not it? Let's see what you do for a living.

I search for Caitlin's name on instagram, and luckily I found her profile, she was in first place in searches.

- but what is so impressive about you ...

I keep looking for something suspicious in Caitlin's profile, I know you think I'm jealous, but believe me, it's not jealous, I'm suspicious of this girl. Well, I look around for a while and I can't find anything, all I found out was that Caitlin makes a video of make-up, ice sculptures, and that her family has their own business, she and her mother give presentations on magical ice sculptures. and skating in a theater ... familiar isn't it? Maybe I would even be jealous of her? After all, she was beautiful, intelligent and had her own business. I was already accepting that I was getting jealous of the girl with white hair, when I decide to click on any video on her Instagram just to end it all, the video was starting, Caitlin talked about makeup, how to make a perfect contour and these things, I watched the video for about 2 minutes, until something caught my attention... I realized that every time the mirror appeared, the image would lock up, looking like those films from the 1950s, you know? I thought it was strange, but I didn't want to watch the rest of the video with the image of a film from my father's time! so I used my magic to make the video stop locking... it was a mistake, because as soon as I cast the spell on the video, I looked in the mirror, and believe me, it was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life, there was something with ... horns in the mirror! This confirmed my suspicions, there was something wrong with that girl and I intended to find out what.

- Zee, it's time to sleep.

- Okay daddy, good night.

I turn off the light and fall asleep, but I still thinking about it for a bit before falling asleep.

(Time skip)

I was already at school, and last night I decided that in addition to discovering what is strange about this girl, I was going to keep everyone away from her, if there was something more sinister behind it, it was better to let everyone away so that no one would get hurt, so I decided to give a magic show at school today, so no one would be around Caitlin.

- Ladies and gentlemen, witness the unique, incredible and fabulous, Zee zatara!

I was waiting for people's cheers, but nobody said anything, maybe everyone was on a different side of the school? Well, I take my bench and my special effects and look for a place with a lot of people at school, and walking through the halls I saw her... it was too late, everyone was surrounding Caitlin and watching her ice skating show, there was always an ice rink here? How come I never noticed ?!

- Sister! You arrived at the right time, we watching the new girl skating on the ice, join us! (Diana)

Diana pulls my arm to take me to Caitlin's show, but I release my arm from Diana's grip.

- Everything is fine? Don't you want to see the show? (Diana)

- I-i want, but ...

I sigh.

- Diana, there is something wrong with this girl, I don't know what it is but, there is something wrong with her.

- Something wrong? What you mean? (Diana)

- Yesterday I was watching a video about her on instagram, and in the reflection of the mirror something with horns appeared, look!

I had taken a screenshot of the video if it was useful, so I showed it to Diana.

- something with horns? where? (Diana)

- Right there in the mirror!

- Zee, has nothing there. (Diana)

- b-but, you don't see it?

- ... Look zee, you must be feeling threatened by Caitlin's presence I know, but remember what I said to Barbara Minerva when she said she was the cheetah? I said "One person’s success doesn’t exclude another person’s success" you don’t have to be jealous of her, Zee.(Diana)

- No, no, no, Diana please believe me I’m not jealous of her, don’t you see the horned creature in the mirror ?!

- Sorry zee, you will need more than a blank mirror to prove that Caitlin is a monster. (Diana)

Diana is gone, she went to see the show like everyone else...

- Diana... the monster... I don't believe it, am I going crazy?

I was questioning my sanity now, she is not here at school for 3 days and is already driving me crazy, is it me who is to blame? Was my magic playing with my mind? I didn't know anything else at this point, if the diana who was born in a home full of magic and monsters didn't believe me, who else would believe it? Maybe Casey Krinsky was messing with my mind right now, I better go wash my face to ease the tension.

(In the bathroom)

- control yourself Zee, you're going crazy, keep calm! My god what is happening to me...

My makeup was totally messy now, maybe redoing it would help me, so as soon as I look in the mirror I see the horned demon's reflection, from the chest down he was just bones, his outside ribs gave him a touch ghastly.

- Do you talk to yourself? (Caitlin)

- C-ca...Caitlin ?!

I look in the mirror again, and the reflection was normal now, it was just Caitlin's reflection.

- Weren't you at your skating show?

- I was, but I had to come here to touch up my makeup, by the way, today is crazy day and nobody told me? Hahahaha (Caitlin)

She snorts out of the bathroom. In just 2 days she dropped my food, made me stumble, and ruined my school work, I was sick of her being mean to me.

- Why you hate me?

- I do not hate you Zatara, you are cool, the only problem I have with you is that you are in this school with me, I remember saying that I do not like to share, and that the title of popular girl was mine, 80% of this title already belongs to me, but if you don’t leave the game I’ll never have the rest. (Caitlin)

- I'm not leaving this school, especially since I know you're hiding something scary from the rest of the people.

- Girl, you're crazy. (Caitlin)

- I'm not crazy, what is it then?!

I show the mirror photo to Caitlin, and she smiles arrogantly.

- it's good to know that you have magic.

- W-what are you talking about?

- Find out for yourself, Zatanna.

Caitlin comes out of the bathroom, leaving me with doubts and alone there.

(Time skip)

It's been 5 days, and Caitlin is officially the most popular girl in school, my friends just talked about her and about the ice skating shows, that didn't help at all, so I decided to stay a few days alone.

- Should we go over there and talk to Zee? I'm already getting worried. (Jess)

- I tried to talk to her a couple of days ago, but she insists that Caitlin is a villain, I think we better let her have some time. (Diana)

I watched my friends from afar, I was missing them so much, but I couldn't go back without discovering the horrible thing that Caitlin was, I couldn't solve this case on an empty stomach, so I went to get a snack in the cafeteria, I got one a little bit of spaghetti and I went towards my table, but suddenly Caitlin puts her foot in front of me and I fall to the floo ... face to face with the spaghetti, the whole school laughed at me.

- I do not believe that! (Kara)

- G-guys, calm down, it could have been an accident. (Karen)

- Accident will be my fist landing on the face of that pale white girl! (Kara)

I get up, I had noodles all over my hair and face, I was already irritated by all that and I wanted to hit Caitlin, but I couldn't, Jess taught me that anger is not always the way. I was annoyed, but I tried to stay calm.

- Caitlin, can I talk to you outside for a minute?

- Of course my dear, I'll be back girls.

(Out of school)

- about what you want to talk?

- "About what you want to talk?" Really?! What was that?!

- It was an accident.

- Accident ... ACCIDENT ?! ARGH.

I got annoyed, Jess would be disappointed in me, but I couldn't take any more teasing, I ended up not even caring if she was going to know that I have magic, so I hit her with a spell of magic, and of course, I regret doing that.

- Oh my god, I'm so sorry Caitlin, I'm really sorry!

Caitlin didn't move, I was worried, and as soon as I was going to call the ambulance she started to move... But it wasn't just that, I don't know if I hit my head too hard on the food tray a few minutes ago or something like that, but, I was watching Caitlin increase in size, that's right, she was growing and her shape and clothes were changing, the sky was getting cloudy and for some reason it started to snow ... it was summer! Why was it snowing?!

- I'm already tired of you Zee zatara ... (Killer Frost)

- C-Caitlin?

I was getting farther and farther away, it was getting really weird, as Caitlin moved her shape seemed bigger, she leaned on some bricks of the destroyed wall in order to get up, and as soon as she stands, I get scared, Caitlin was super tall! She had to bend down to go through the door, she are so big.

- I will kill you, Zee zatara! (Killer Frost)

I had no more doubts, Caitlin had super powers and was ready to transform into one of her ice sculptures, I wasted no time and soon changed too, and as soon as I was going to run away, she took me by the cape.

- You're in so much trouble. (Killer Frost)

- I don't want to fight with you, please let's talk!

- I have nothing to talk to you about! (Killer Frost)

Caitlin threw me so far and so high, that I ended up on the 7th floor wall of a building. My body was hurting a lot, but I had to defeat it, but as soon as I got up, Caitlin landed on my body and tried to hang me.

- By the way, you can call me Killer Frost instead of Caitlin in the next life, Zee Zatara! (Killer Frost)

- I'm not afraid of snow!

I teleport to the opposite side of Killer Frost, I needed to defeat it somehow, so I create a loop to be able to hold it, I throw the loop at Frost, but it freezes it and turns the shards into sharp pieces of ice, then throw them at me, I teleport again and try to hit her with my magic, but she creates an ice shield to protect herself from my attacks.

- Frost, let's talk! I do not want to hurt you!

- BUT I WANT TO HURT YOU! I JUST WANTED ATTENTION, YOU ALREADY HAVE TOO MUCH ATTENTION! (Killer Frost)

The earth begins to tremble, and in the midst of so much snow a giant snake made of ice chases me, I run, but the snake captures me.

- You always had everything you wanted Zatanna, attention, love, friends, and now it's my turn to have it all!

I wanted to say something, but then I start to feel my body getting cold, I look at my legs and see that I'm starting to freeze, would this be the end of me? No ... I couldn't die like that, I needed help, and luckily, I see a shiny golden lasso looping the tail of the giant snake that held me, the snake melted, and behind it revealed five super heroines, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Green Lantern and Bumblebee.

- Are you okay? (Wonder Woman)

Wonder woman said, she took my hand and saw that I had a low body temperature.

- stay out of this fight, you could end up hurting yourself even more. (Wonder Woman)

#dc super hero girls #dc comics #cartoon network #batman #dc #lauren faust #bat #batboys #super hero #dick grayson #caitlin snow #the flash #killer frost #zee zatara

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felassan · 4 years

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Insights into DAI’s development from Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

The book is by game industry journalist Jason Schreier (it’s an interesting read and well-written, I recommend it). This is the cliff notes version of the DAI chapter. This info isn’t new as the book is from 2017 (I finally got around to buying it). Some insight into DAO, DA2 and cancelled DA projects is also given. Cut for length.

BW hoped that DA would become the LotR of video games. DAO’s development was “a hellish seven-year slog”

The DAI team are compared to a chaotic “pirate ship”, which is what they called themselves internally. “It’ll get where it needs to go, but it’s going to go all over the place. Sail over here. Drink some rum. Go over here. Do something else. That’s how Mark Darrah likes to run his team.” An alternative take from someone else who worked on the game: “It was compared to a pirate ship because it was chaotic and the loudest voice in the room usually set the direction. I think they smartly adopted the name and morphed it into something better.”

A game about the Inquisition and the large-scale political conflicts it solves across Thedas, where the PC was the Inquisitor, was originally the vision for ‘DA2′. Plans had to change when SW:TOR’s development kept stalling and slipping. Frustrated EA execs wanted a new product from BW to bolster quarterly sales targets, and decided that DA would have to fill the gap. BW agreed to deliver DA2 within 16 months. “Basically, DA2 exists to fill that hole. That was the inception. It was always intended to be a game made to fit in that”

BW wanted to call it DA: Exodus, but EA’s marketing execs insisted on DA2, no matter what that name implied

DAO’s scope (Origin stories, that amount of big areas, variables, reactivity) was just not doable in a year, even if everyone worked overtime. To solve this problem, BW shelved the Inquisition idea and made a risky call: DA2 would be set in one city over time, allowing locations to be recycled and months to be shaved off dev time. They also axed DAO features like customizing party members’ equipment. These were the best calls they were able to make on a tight line

Many at BW are still proud of DA2. Those that worked on it grew closer from all being in it together

In certain dark accounting corners of EA, despite fan response to DA2 and its lower sales compared to DAO, DA2 is considered a wild success

By summer 2011 BW decided to cancel DA2′s expansion Exalted March in favor of a totally new game. They needed to get away from the stigma of DA2, reboot the franchise and show they could make triple-A quality good games.

DAI was going to be the most ambitious game BW had ever made and had a lot to prove (that BW could return to form, that EA wasn’t crippling the studio, that BW could make an ‘open-world’ RPG with big environments). There was a bit of a tone around the industry that there were essentially 2 tiers of BW, the ME team and then everyone else, and the DA team had a scrappy desire to fight back against that

DAI was behind schedule early on due to unfamiliar new technology; the new engine Frostbite was very technically challenging and required more work than anyone had expected. Even before finishing DA2 BW were looking for a new engine for the next game. Eclipse was creaky, obsolete, not fully-featured, graphically lacking. The ME team used Unreal, which made inter-team collab difficult. “Our tech strategy was just a mess. Every time we’d start a new game, people would say, ‘Oh, we should just pick a new engine’.”

After meeting with an EA exec BW decided on Frostbite. Nobody had ever used it to make an RPG, but EA owned FB dev studio DICE, and the engine was powerful and had good graphic capabilities & visual effects. If BW started making all its games on FB, it could share tech with sister studios and borrow tools when they learned cool new tricks.

For a while they worked on a prototype called Blackfoot, to get a feel for FB and to make a free-to-play DA MP game. It fizzled as the team was too small, which doesn’t lend itself well to working with FB, and was cancelled

BW resurfaced the old Inquisition idea. What might a DA3 look like on FB? Their plan by 2012 was to make an open-world RPG heavily inspired by Skyrim that hit all the beats DA2 couldn’t. “My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content.” People complained there wasn’t enough in DA2. “At the end of DAI, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level’.”

It was originally called Dragon Age 3: Inquisition

BW wanted to launch on next-gen consoles only but EA’s profit forecasters were caught up in the rise of iPad and iPhone gaming and were worried the next-gen consoles wouldn’t sell well. As a safeguard EA insist it also ship on current-gen. Most games at that time followed this strategy. Shipping on 5 platforms at once would be a first for BW

Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BW’s first 3D open-world game, and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on 5 platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. “Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did. With tools that don’t exist.”

FB didn’t have RPG stats, a visible PC, spells, save systems, a party of 4 people, the same kind of cutscenes etc and couldn’t create any of those things. BW had to create these on top of it. BW initially underestimated how much work this would be. BW were the FB guinea pigs. Early on in DAI’s development, even the most basic tasks were excruciating, and this impacted even fundamental aspects of game design and dev. When FB’s tools did function they were finicky and difficult. DICE’s team supported them but had limited resources and were 8 hours ahead. Since creating new content in FB was so difficult, trying to evaluate its quality became impossible. FB engine updates made things even more challenging. After every one, BW had to manually merge and test it; this was debilitating, and there were times when the build didn’t work for a month or was really unstable.

Meanwhile the art department were having a blast. FB was great for big beautiful environments. For months they made as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn’t know yet what the designers needed. “For a long time there was a joke on the project that we’d made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures.”

The concept of DAI as open-world was stymying the story/writers and gameplay/designers teams. What were players going to do in these big landscapes? How could BW ensure exploring remained fun after many hours? Their teams didn’t have time for system designers to envision, iterate and test a good “core gameplay loop” (quests, encounters, activities etc). FB wouldn’t allow it. Designers couldn’t test new ideas or answer questions because basic features were missing or didn’t exist yet.

EA’s CEO told BW they should have the ability to ride dragons and that this would make DAI sell 10 million copies. BW didn’t take this idea very seriously

BW had an abstract idea that the player would roam the world solving problems and building up power or influence they could use. But how would that look/work like in-game? This could have used refinement and testing but instead they decided to build some levels and hope they could figure it out as they went.

One day in late 2012, after a year of strained development on DAI, Mark Darrah asked Mike Laidlaw to go to lunch. “We’re walking out to his car,” Laidlaw said, “and I think he might have had a bit of a script in his head. [Darrah] said, ‘All right, I don’t actually know how to approach this, so I’m just going to say it. On a scale of one to apocalyptic... how upset would you be if I said [the player] could be, I dunno, a Qunari Inquisitor?’”

Laidlaw was baffled. They’d decided that the player could be only a human in DAI. Adding other playable races like Darrah was asking for would mean they’d need to quadruple their budget for animation, voice acting, and scripting.

“I went, ‘I think we could make that work’,” Laidlaw said, asking Darrah if he could have more budget for dialogue.

Darrah answered that if Laidlaw could make playable races happen, he couldn’t just have more dialogue. He could have an entire year of production.

Laidlaw was thrilled. “Fuck yeah, OK,” he recalled saying.

MD had actually already realized at this point it’d be impossible to finish DAI in 2013. They needed at least a year’s delay and adding the other playable races was part of a plan/planned pitch to secure this. He was in the process of putting together a pitch to EA: let BW delay the game, and in exchange it’d be bigger and better that anyone at EA had envisioned. These new marketing points included playable races, mounts and a new tactical camera. If EA wouldn’t let them delay, they would have had to cut things. Going into that BW were confident but nervous, especially in the wake of EA’s recent turmoil where they’d just parted ways with their CEO and had recruited a new board member while they hunted for a new one. They didn’t know how the new board member would react, and the delay would affect EA’s projections for that fiscal year. Maybe it was the convincing pitch, or the exec turmoil, or the specter of DA2, or maybe EA didn’t like being called “The Worst Company in America”. Winning that award 2 years in a row had had a tangible impact on the execs and led to feisty internal meetings on how to repair EA’s image. Whatever the reasons, EA greenlit the delay.

The PAX Crestwood demo was beautiful but almost entirely fake. By fall 2013, BW had implemented many of FB’s ‘parts’, but still didn’t know what kind of ‘car’ they were making. ML and team scripted the PAX demo by hand, entirely based on what BW thought would be in the game. The level & art assets were real but the gameplay wasn’t. “Part of what we had to do is go out early and try to be transparent because of DA2. And just say, ‘Look, here, it’s the game, it’s running live, it’s at PAX.’ Because we wanted to make that statement that we’re here for fans.”

DA2 hung on the team like a shadow. There was insecurity, uncertainty, they had trouble sticking to one vision. Which DA2 things were due to the short dev time and which were bad calls? What stuff should they reinvent? There were debates over combat (DAO-style vs DA2-style) and arguments over how to populate the wilderness.

In the months after that demo, BW cut much of what they’d shown in it. Even small features went through many permutations. DAI had no proper preproduction phase (important for testing and discarding things), so leads were stretched thin and had to make impulsive decisions.

By the end of 2013, DAI had 200+ people working on it, and dozens of additional outsourced artists in Russia and China. Coordinating all the work across various departments was challenging and a full-time job for several people. At this sheer scale of game dev, there are many complexities and inter-dependencies. Work finally became significantly less tedious and more doable when BW and DICE added more features to FB. Time was running out though, and another delay was a no.

The team spent many hours in November and December piecing together a “narrative playable” version of the game to be the holiday period’s game build for BW staff to test that year. Feedback on the demo was bad. There were big complaints on story, that it didn’t make sense and was illogical. Originally the PC became Inquisitor and sealed the breach in the prologue, which removed a sense of urgency. In response the writers embarked on Operation Sledgehammer (breaking a bone to set it right), radically revising the entire first act.

The other big piece of negative feedback was that battles weren’t fun. Daniel Kading, who had recently joined BW and brought with him a rigorous new method for testing combat in games, went to BW leadership with a proposal: give him authority to open his own little lab with the other designers and call up the entire team for mandatory play sessions for test purposes. They agreed and he used this experiment to get test feedback and specifically pinpoint where problems were. Morale took a turn for the better that week, DK’s team made several tweaks, and through these sessions feedback ratings went from 1.2 to 8.8 four weeks later.

Many on the team wished they didn’t have to ship for old consoles (clunky, less powerful). BW leadership decided not to add features to the next-gen versions that wouldn’t be possible on the older ones, so that both versions of the game played the same. This limited things and meant the team had to find creative solutions. “I probably should’ve tried harder to kill [the last-gen] version of the game”, said Aaryn Flynn. In the end the next-gen consoles sold very well and only 10% of DAI sales were on last-gen.

“A lot of what we do is well-intentioned fakery,” said Patrick Weekes, pointing to a late quest called “Here Lies The Abyss”. “When you assault the fortress, you have a big cut scene that has a lot of Inquisition soldiers and a lot of Grey Wardens on the walls. And then anyone paying attention or looking for it as you’re fighting through the fortress will go, ‘Wow, I’m only actually fighting three to four guys at a time.’ Because in order for that to work [on old gen], you couldn’t have too many different character types on screen.”

Parts of DAI were still way behind schedule because it was so big and complex, and because some tools hadn’t started functioning until late on. Some basic features weren’t able to be implemented til the last minute (they were 8 months from ship before they could get all party members in the squad. At one point PW was playtesting to check if Iron Bull’s banter was firing, and realized there was no way to even recruit IB) and some flaws couldn’t be identified til the last few months. Trying to determine flow and pacing was rough.

They couldn’t disappoint fans again. They needed to take the time to revise and polish every aspect of DAI. “I think DAI is a direct response to DA2,” said Cameron Lee. “DAI was bigger than it needed to be. It had everything but the kitchen sink in it, to the point that we went too far... I think that having to deal with DA2 and the negative feedback we got on some parts of that was driving the team to want to put everything in and try to address every little problem or perceived problem.”

At this point they had 2 options: settle for an incomplete game, which would disappoint fans especially post-DA2, or crunch. They opted to crunch. It was the worst period of extended overtime in DAI’s development yet and was really rough: late nights, weekends, lost family time, 12-14 hour days, stress, mental health impacts.

During 2014′s crunch, they finally finished off features they wished they’d nailed down in year 1. They completed the Power (influence) system and added side quests, hidden treasures and puzzles. Things that weren’t working like destructible environments were promptly removed. The writers rewrote the prologue at least 6 times, but didn’t have enough time to pay such attention to the ending. Just a few months before launch pivotal features like jumping were added.

By summer BW had bumped back release by another 6 weeks for polish. DAI had about 99,000 bugs in it (qualitative and quantitative; things like “I was bored here” are a bug). “The number of bugs on an open-world game, I’ve never seen anything like it. But they’re all so easy to fix, so keep filing these bugs and we’ll keep fixing them.” For BW it was harder to discover them, and the QA team had to do creative experimentation and spend endless late nights testing things. PW would take builds home to let their 9 year old son play around. Their son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse and accidentally discovered a bug where if you dismounted in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would vanish. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else ever had or will ever like the horse.”

MD had a knack for prioritizing which bugs should be fixed, like the one where you could get to inaccessible areas by jumping on Varric’s head. “Muscle memory is incredibly influential at this point. Through the hellfire which is game development, we’re forged into a unit, in that we know what everyone’s thinking and we understand everyone’s expectations.”

At launch they still didn’t have all their tools working, they only had their tools working enough.

DAI became the best-selling DA game, beating EA’s sales expectations in just a few weeks. If you look closely you can see the lingering remnants of its chaotic development, like the “garbage quests” in the Hinterlands. Some players didn’t realize they could leave the area and others got caught in a “weird, compulsive gratification loop”. Internet commentators rushed to blame “those damn lazy devs” but really, these were the natural consequences of DAI’s struggles. Maybe things would have been different if they’d miraculously received another year of dev time, or if they’d had years before starting development to build FB’s tools first.

“The challenge of the Hinterlands and what it represented to the opening 10 hours of DAI is exactly the struggle of learning to build open-world gameplay and mechanisms when you are a linear narrative story studio,” said Aaryn Flynn.

“DA2 was the product of a remarkable time-line challenge,” said Mike Laidlaw, “DAI was the product of a remarkable technical challenge. But it had enough time to cook, and as a result it was a much better game.”

Read the chapter for full details of course!

#dragon age #bioware #video games #SW:TOR #mass effect #I've seen plenty of this info discussed in articles/thinkpieces and on online communities over the years #but it's nice to read it first hand #some very insightful stuff here #these behind the scenes looks are very valuble #a lot of DAI's elements make sense given the context and what was going on in the background and the tech challenges they faced etc #be kind and respectful to devs folks they're human beings #also in general this book is really interesting and easy to read #funny in places too #it has lots of other chapters on lots of other games including Stardew Valley #I def recc buying it #anyway hope this post is useful/interesting to someone!#oh and as always support good treatment of game devs #crunch culture in the industry is harmful and exploitative

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retphienix · 3 years

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youtube

I Have A Lot To Say So I'll Read More This.

The short of it?

I'm glad I played Joker- I played it because I wanted to know how DQM evolved when it reached the DS and I got my answer.

It's mediocre. Not bad exactly, I enjoyed playing it, it adds some REALLY appreciated features to the DQM series and if you were playing it at release it had online play which plays well with the post game content which I haven't touched by the time I wrote this:

-but there are some engine/console specific things that made it a drag and there are some parts of the game that are just weaker than the previous games which is amusing since the previous games were simple GBC titles.

And finally, I don't really recommend playing through Joker 1. Can't speak on the sequels, but Joker 1 was a pretty middling experience for me so I'm the wrong person to get a positive recommendation from.

And since the opportunity presents itself: If you like monster RPGs and haven't tried it- go emulate Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 for the GBC, it's really good and also if you emulate you can fast forward the GBC era grind if that's your taste- really a win all around.

On to my rambling:

I debated on writing, rewriting, rewriting, and better presenting my thoughts on this game and the series as a whole but nah, Joker ain't getting that, I'm ramblin'- lol

I will split it slightly between "The ending" and "The game as a whole" though.

Ending:

1:07 - This is slightly a 'game a a whole' thing but honestly it's funny to me that you unlock a permanent repel in this game by doing the main quest. I entered this dungeon feeling strong enough to beat the game, so I just avoided 90% of encounters entirely.

5:00 - I genuinely got a laugh out of Sparkpug's whole deal in this finale. Not story wise, that's fine, no complaints- I mean that Sparkpug is clearly built to be a monster that can carry an ineffective team. He's clearly meant to be bred a few times and a god tier member of a potentially inexperienced player's team- but I literally never used him after the intro.

So during this scene it's supposed to be like "I'm a demi-god monster, you can't possibly beat me" and I'm thinking "Dude, you're like level 10 and shit tier, you can't win, this is hilarious."

Obviously it's a real boss fight and not 'face the monster you once had' but I was having fun roasting him behind the scenes of this recording.

45:00 - What an entirely unexpected change of pace.

Like, I had it spoiled for me by a screenshot that Dr. Snap becomes a monster or something- but I thought maybe he was always a monster or something, and also I got a bad look at him.

HE TURNS INTO A BODY HORROR BEAST, THAT'S NUTS.

Genuinely a highlight of the game.

52:00 - I fucking laughed what a meaningless exchange where the payoff is saying "He was stupid!", it's honestly just silly and dumb but not necessarily bad just dumb lol

55:00 - Not a great 'you won' victory lap. Like at all. Kinda feels like they should have just made this all a cutscene where I appear back at town and see that Solitaire is the leader now etc etc.

I kinda don't understand why it's a victory lap at all? Because all anyone says is "They picked a weird successor to Snap >:(" or "Snap went to the island? I bet he was stopping the calamity :)"

If you have 2 lines of dialogue prepared, maybe don't make a victory lap???

1:00:00 - What a fucking stupid payoff lol

Like sincerely, Solitaire does NOTHING the entire game! She's meaningless from start to finish! And the 'surprise' is that she's the new commish??? And she got the position because she's a rich spoiled brat??? Like LITERALLY that's why????????

What a stupid fucking ending lol

Now her proposed evolution of the contest is fair enough, I mean it's childish as hell, but to be fair- more contests is a fine idea especially since prior games and this game demonstrated the public's interest in watching monster fights. And the goal being to fight her as the final fight is fucking egotistical and stupid- BUT- it does play into the fact that the player didn't get to fight her the whole game so it's whatever?

1:03:00 - This is both the best and worst lol.

This game has no story, like at all, it's fucking empty front to back, and only explodes with like- 1 event at the very end.

This moment is a montage of memorable moments with your 'best friend' Sparkpug. It's cinematically very nice to be honest! Even includes a moment I don't remember at the arena which probably didn't happen lol.

So visually it's cool- I dig seeing the camera zoom out as we run across the beach, and the flashback moments intersplice over us making our way to the scout memorial- that's very well done.

The content is empty lol

As I said there's no story, these moments are nothing lol

And that's that.

All said the ending was a very nice challenge to face with my team- I had to abuse items like mad but I MADE IT! It was a GOOD fight.

The rest I've already said.

On to the game as a whole:

I have issues with this game, but there's good too. It's really like 4 steps forward 6-7 steps back it's weird, it's really weird.

Positives are neat!

> First and foremost- TRAITS!

Monsters in Dragon Quest Monsters have always had a problem with keeping their identity for long. The way I'd explain it to an outsider to the series is that Monsters DO have special stat variance and intended movesets and all that jazz- but the breeding system completely and entirely destroys that relatively early into the game.

While a monster might normally have really high defense and low other stats while knowing buffing magic- breeding, EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY, will have that same monster come out with 9 billion attack and all ice magic.

Monsters in DQM have a habit of becoming canvases for the breeding effects rather than their own mons- and this is undeniably a downside. It makes the game feel unique, it doesn't 'hurt' it, but when by mid-game monsters are more easily identified as sprites rather than strengths and weaknesses or even types (family) it's a slight downer on the series.

Traits fix this a lot by making every specific monster have unchangeable traits which offer things like "immunity to x type of damage" or "higher crit chance"- it's small, but it gives each monster more identity.

> Second and secondmost- SKILLS!

The older games didn't use trees, it used each individual spell as a potential pass on during breeding.

Each monster could have 8 spells, and when you breed two monsters you pass on all 16 spells to the offspring (they don't learn them all at once, they learn them as they level up) as well as the natural spells the monster would learn by level up.

So in the older games it is really easy to end up with a refined and overpowered list of 8 spells on each of your monsters.

Now spells are tied to Skill trees and your monsters can have 3 skill trees total (which are passed on as OPTIONS when breeding).

All to say skills do a lot for removing the "Master of all, weakness of none" spell lists that the older games made trivial to make, now you have to limit your builds and be more specialized- also they added skills like "Attack up" to add more variance to a build- instead of having spells you might just have high stat buffs as skill trees.

Overall I think Skills are an improvement because coupled with Traits it makes each monster feel much more specialized and unique and less like a sprite with no identity.

> Breeding is improved.

This is very much because of skills and traits- again- but also the system is just improved in general. Instead of being told "That's a monster you haven't had before!" and judging your decisions based on the name of the offspring breed, now you get to see a small sprite of the resulting monster to help you decide- ALSO instead of getting 1 result for every combo (to the point where you have to back out and choose Monster A + Monster B and Monster B + Monster A as separate options), you now get up to 3 results to pick between for every breeding opportunity.

It's just better.

> The engine is impressive.

At least to me. This is a DS title using (from what I read) a rework of the DQ8 PS2 game's engine- it certainly looks like it.

Combat models are nice, using moves looks nice, overworld exploration looks nice- it looks nice.

Now for some negative and general nonsense- all of which is more often than not 'weird'.

> I gotta be unfair and say "The Story" first and foremost.

DQM 1 and 2 are not intense story games. They aren't.

But they both knew how to handle their story well for what they wanted to tell, I can and will praise both for their narratives because they know what they are and do it well.

DQM:J does not. It's fucking bad.

Basically: The overall story doesn't exist- you're told to be a spy, but that comes up 1 time towards the end of the game and LITERALLY doesn't matter at any other moment INCLUDING the one time it comes up.

You have NO meaningful objective from the start up until near the end of the game. You show up and have no goal- so you get told to get some crystals with no meaning behind it (not even a lie because they are clearly evil- not even a lie to motivate you! NO MEANING IS PRESENTED! JUST DO IT! TO DO THE CONTEST I GUESS! WHY? SHUT UP!)

So 90% of the game time you're not doing anything meaningful. So what about the islands? Any small narratives to keep things moving?

NO!

NOT AT ALL!

So you go 90% of the game having no real objective, just kinda wandering forward mindlessly- and then the game suddenly goes "Oh! Guy who seemed sus! He's evil! He's gonna unleash the calamity that you were 'kinda but not directly' working towards with your dog! You know, that plot point that's kept vague and paid 0% attention to the entire game? Yeah it's happening! Aaaaand you're done! GG!"

Basically there's just nothing going on in this game, it's all background noise until the last 10% of the game. And that's lame.

DQM1 had a light story- but from the very intro cutscene you have a clear objective which makes every action you do seem relevant as you are working towards that goal.

From the start of the game you know "My sister is gone! The king says a magic wish can get her back! I'll go do that!" and then you do!

DQM2 has a much better story!

You have a goal from the start (The kingdom is physically dying and you have to save it by getting a new plug!) AND it has stories for each world you visit!

THAT'S MILES BETTER! THIS GAME COULD HAVE DONE THAT FOR THE ISLANDS!

Anywho. Story is lacking and empty and lame especially when DQM2 has a similar format but does every part better- you have a clear objective you're working towards AND side stories to keep the light narrative moving!

WTH!

The spy plotline doesn't matter! It could have been used to build suspicion on who's the good guy!

The islands are so empty of story!

DQM2 has a fun mix on how a rival character works which makes every world interesting to see how they get involved!

This game has a rival that does NOTHING!!!!!!!!!

It's just such a step back from the previous games, it's weird to see DQM 1 land a solid simple story and DQM 2 build a great format to expand the story going forward- and then DQM:J just slams its head into the dirt and wipes out.

> Game's slow.

The engine switch is a good thing overall, but it makes combat slower (a lot), adds loading screens to combat (primarily), and they didn't bother speeding up the grind from previous games.

Because of the grind still existing which isn't a problem in and of itself- the game becomes SLOW AS HELL because the engine makes that grind take longer.

Also world exploration is slow which is to be expected when moving from 2d to 3d, but this is countered by adding things to the world to find or do- and Joker tries but it's still noticeable. The world exploration isn't a problem, it just stands out alongside the combat being slow as hell.

The engine change was a great thing- but it feels like they should have put more work into speeding up combat to counter the slowdown of load times and flashy animations.

A GOOD WAY TO FIX THAT MIGHT BE XP!

> Music ain't great in my opinion.

DQ has amazing music. This game has some weak renditions in my opinion. The CELL HQ theme song is a pretty good poster child for the worst there is, but just in general even the better music is lacking compared to the chiptunes of the GBC or the better mixes of the main series.

Maybe it's unfair, it's a DS game, I don't know, I just know I ended up just muting most of the game because it didn't sound great. I played the GBC games OSTs instead for a large portion of my playthrough. I listened to videos instead for the bulk of the game.

It's just not pleasant to me, sorry to say.

> XP!!!!!!!

I'm being a spoiled ass on this but yeah!

XP SUCKS IN THIS!

There aren't good placed to grind until you beat the game! (apparently)

The first level blatantly has too low xp which makes you grind before you can tackle the boss of the island- and the late game has you mindlessly grinding low xp rewards in order to be ready to face the final boss.

It's WEIRD!

Why is it so low!

> Tech is weird!

I could ramble on this alone but here's the short version:

DQ has a unique fantasy world aesthetic that each game has explored in its own way. It's basically "swords, magic, monsters, and charm- things feel light but aren't afraid to get scary sometimes :)"

This game... doesn't.

This game has fuckin' tech watches, jet skis, TOWER PCS????

This ISN'T dragon quest on a world building level.

It's like, contemporary modern world but with slimes.

And that could be good I guess, but it feels so fucking weird to see PCs right alongside swords and axes and a dracky.

Like... why?

It's a poor aesthetic according to my tastes. Maybe I'm an ass for that. The tech is weird.

All to say, in a poor rambling "I gotta get this out of me" kinda way, is Joker was fine.

I enjoyed breeding. I enjoyed seeing the engine. I enjoyed the unique additions like a 'hero monster'.

But I also had to grind mindlessly on a slower game.

I had to endure a story that forgot to show up until the very end.

I sat there thinking about replaying the older ones the whole time.

It was fine.

It's mediocre.

I'm glad I played it.

I'm done now :)

#RetPlays #Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker #Dragon Quest #Dragon Quest Monsters #Dragon Warrior Monsters #DQM #DWM #DQM:J #DS #Nintendo

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swluminekin · 5 years

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JSE Theory: Convergence of the Egos (and other thoughts)

(I apologize if this is a little discombobulated and rambly as it is my first actual Ego theory that I’ve done in months. I do try to put in references to my evidence and thoughts, so bare with me and be gentle.)

Anti’s whole discussion at us is constantly talking about circles, going over and over. “How many times must we go through this?” “Again and again, over and over.” “F***ing circles!”

Also with “time is broken” and with the game Observation (played back during the month of May-hem 2019) basically being about timeline/universe convergence or really a convergence of any sort. As well as the events that happened on the JSE Discord server (more on this later), it indicated that something is happening. We know the egos know about each other. But a convergence of some sort isn’t out of the question. In Observation two separate timelines met, but we saw that even more meetings could have happened.

But what does this mean? What does a game about converging timelines, universes and stories mean for us?

It’s been theorized that Marvin is bringing everyone together with his magic. It’s been theorized recently that Henrik’s PhD is in computer science and/or theoretical physics (if we follow Avengers logic, it’s possible to have more than one). It’s been told/theorized that JJ is our actual time traveller (remember the JJ Powerhour/pumpkin carving video? “When am I? Oh jeepers - it’s much too early!”) knowing that he’s from the 1920s and 1930s silent film era. We’ve been told that Chase is our protagonist and that Jackie is our hero (referring back to Jack’s Ego Art Week posts). What could this mean and what is going on?

During Henrik’s clip from Oct. 19th, we see him looking at two computer screens. One of them holds the date March 25th, 2017 (as pointed out by a community member: one video on this date was a Google Feud during which was asked about killing a virus). But why would this be important? It’s also recently been noticed that the day before (March 24th, 2017) on Instagram, Seán posted a picture of himself sitting by a river wearing the original Chase hat staring at something (a phone?) - two and a half weeks before we got the Chase Brody Power Hour video (April 11th, 2017).

Why? What is going on and how important is this?

Well, again, Chase is our protagonist. Knowing that we had a reveal before we actually knew who he was does put an interesting spin on the story telling, moving Chase’s first actual appearance to earlier than we thought. Especially since it seems like Henrik was focusing on the next day, something was important here (was it the Google Feud video or something else?).

Adding Instagram into the fray, this means other appearance dates are also moved up - not as significantly as Chase’s, but still by a day or two (Jackie to July 9th, 2016, Henrik to September 14th, 2016, and JJ to October 29th, 2017). But, yeah yeah, you know the drill… Time is broken. It shouldn’t really matter…

Right?

Hm.. Seems to be a bit of a pattern still. Time being broken… Quantum time travel… A time traveling person from the past… A magic man who probably has a time spell of some sort...

While we’re at it, why not get all of these people affected by time together when most, if not all, of them are at their lowest - when they have nothing else to lose. Move them from their lowest times and gather them to fight their common antagonist, their “virus” - the cause of their fears becoming reality. Have everyone come together - converge - to fight their enemy.

Seán has pretty much confirmed at this point that what is going on right now with the egos is they are being brought together - almost Avengers style. We don’t know who is doing it - it could be Marvin or it could be Anti (an almost glitch-like “whoosh” noise was heard at the end of both Chase and Henrik’s videos). It may even be both, considering that we heard the sound effect after Henrik’s computer glitched as he was working on what has been believed to be a “time travel formula” (it was noticed he was dividing by infinity which is usually involved in quantum time travel). We also heard the effect as Chase was transported from the forest park to parking garage, missing a few items (perhaps the “glitching” part of it caused the phone and whiskey to vanish?).

Henrik is frantic - he seems to be running out of time. He’s trying to solve a problem, doing everything he can to figure it out. When was the last time he was this frantic? Kill Jacksepticeye| Bio Inc. back on August 3rd, 2017. He was trying to save Jack and it’s commonly believed that this was when Jack went into a coma - due to Anti - before Henrik disappeared for nine months and leaving the other egos (namely Chase, which is also during the time we start seeing more of Seán) to do the recordings.

What if, contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, the good doctor wasn’t on vacation? What if he was trying to figure out a way to… change the past, let’s say? What if he was figuring out a way to quantum time travel so that way he could prevent Jack’s coma from ever happening due to a certain “virus”? Of course we know, thanks to the glitching on the screen that Anti caught on and is probably wanting to make sure Henrik only succeeds when he wants him to (remember the “test failure” glitching in Henrik’s post when Anti was messing with the Ego Art Week posts?).

And of course Marvin, picking up on this and watching everyone, wanted to get him to safety? Wanted to get ALL the egos to safety. We’ve seen Anti in the car with Chase (looking at us because he wants us to feel powerless). We saw the glitching in the screen when Henrik was looking for the answers he needed.

Marvin knows they’re in danger and he probably pulled them away from what could hurt them - keeping certain items (i.e. a phone with internet capabilities, perhaps?) away from teleporting with them. Keep them away from the glitch and perhaps a solution can be found.

Oh… And one other thing.

Going back to the point about the JSE Discord server. (screenshots below, thank you to my friend @septicuniverse for grabbing them before the chat vanished - let alone still having them months later)

There was a theory going around. The “X No Evil” theory - I was one of the ones who posted on this. It was believed that Marvin was “hear no evil.”

Well… It’s hard to hear through a crystal ball. You can usually only see, not hear.

That being said, Marvin also said “This doesnt seem right.” Perhaps they were meeting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Especially with all of us watching. (which was the chat channel’s zalgoed name in caesar cipher offset 6 - and, good one since there are were 6 people in that room and there are 6 egos technically 7 but that’s been talked about before)

Among the community that knows about this event, it is known/believed that Marvin and Jackie were the ones that knew something was wrong. They knew we were watching (as I mentioned in my thoughts about Anti’s “gloating,” all of the egos know about us). They didn’t want to reveal anything to us, Jackie even going as far as to try and tell all of them to shut up. Things had gone wrong and if Chase’s reactions were anything to say, they had started off at one time frame and jumped to another.

Chase “couldn’t see.” Not to mention he had asked “what do you want from me?” to no one in particular. This hearkens back to the Dark Silence video (May 14th, 2018). The children laughing, haunting Chase… He was in a dark hallway with only a lighter to his name. He couldn’t see until he saw the red-lit doorway with Anti standing in the frame. “Where are they?” “What do you want from me?” There is also the connection to the third video from Stories Untold (May 7th, 2018), where at the end of the video, during a black screen, Chase is asking for Jack to “wake up.” That was the last words before the chat disappeared: “You need to wake up!”

Henrik, at the same time, seems to notice something went wrong with Chase. Perhaps some of his calculations went wrong for the time/quantum jump? It’s hard to tell. He’s trying to keep in touch with Chase, keeping the father grounded as the other seems to be freaking out jumping from timeline to timeline. At the same time he’s finding something about to happen right before the communications close, hence the “No, no!” But we don’t know what he saw, or what was about to happen.

There’s so much more that can go into this theory than I can put together in one mind set. Especially things about Chase seeming to go backwards in time. I do know one thing though:

Time is broken, but it’s time to fix things. It’s time to converge in one time, in one universe, to fight back and set things right.

#jacksepticeye #jse theory #jacksepticeye theory #jacksepticeye community #jse community #ego theory #jse ego theory #chase brody #henrik von schneeplestein #marvin the magnificent #jameson jackson #jackieboy man #antisepticeye #Sean McLoughlin #convergence theory #piecing evidence and dates together #shut up scarlet

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fabulousquel · 5 years

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GreedFall: Tips + My Review

So I picked up this game out of curiosity because I’m currently working on an RPG style historical fantasy that draws inspiration from a similar time period. I wanted to see how someone else handled the ‘flintlock’ genre and told a story with elements of this era. I am in no means a pro game reviewer but I completed the entire game yesterday and I have a lot I want to say.

There are some spoilers in this, so if you’d like to avoid reading them, don’t read the "Story” section.

Tips:

Do your companion quests early and as soon as they pop up. There are some incredible lore bits and development of your character as well as your companions within them. Also if you sideline a companion for too long, they might leave your party in ways that might surprise or unsurprise you.

Certain dialog options will give you more quest content. For example, you’ve caught a criminal and you are given the choice to kill them on the spot, or capture them for trial. If you kill them, your quest line ends there. If you decide to trial them, another quest line opens up and you get a lot more flavor.

You can essentially just follow the main quest line if you want to speed-finish the game, but you lose a lot of context and additional dialog options if you do so. You will also wind up fighting the final boss at a much lower level, thus making the fight harder, but not impossible. They may have made this an option for people coming back wanting a challenge or to try a different build. But in my opinion, they should’ve made the side quests a mandatory thing because it’s a huge disservice to the context of the main story without them.

Don’t forget to give your companions gear upgrades- especially if you’re playing on more challenging modes.

If you want to avoid bloodshed and sneak into a camp, make sure you put on a chest piece of that faction.

Put some skill points into Stasis no matter what build you roll with.

The Soundtrack:

It’s amazing. The snare drums going off in combat sequences create a very distinct and powerful mood. The zone music is very well orchestrated. It’s now up on spotify as well!

Combat & Talents:

Of the RPGs I’ve played, this most reminded me of a combination of Red Dead Redemption, Final Fantasy with the option to semi-turn style with spells & traps, and a very versatile talent tree system that is really...fun. It’s the first time in a while that I felt I could make an effective solid build and playstyle around what I wanted to do most. Combat takes getting used to but I set up my keybinds to be a lot like ESO and I adapted very quickly. I went shortsword / gun tactical and it was immensely satisfying.

The Story:

[SPOILS AHEAD]

The difference between historical fiction and historical fantasy is that a historical fantasy does not seek to retell history accurately, but rather take inspiration from it. How heavy this inspiration goes varies from story to story. This is how I approached interpreting the story, even in its very realistic parts. As I played through, there were several themes that became very clear to me. Keep in mind that I played through the game with De Sarde taking the Neutral Good alignment choice in most dialog options.

The Elephant in the Room: Colonialism. This is one of the big criticisms I see with the game, and truth be told, it is a point of criticism for myself. The game treats the colonizing factions exactly like colonizers of real history, and it’s a subject that still rightfully touches nerves. One faction seeks to profit, another nation seeks to convert, and another seeks to experiment on. While there are subgroups of these factions that are more extreme than their leadership- the leadership seems complacent about it until condemning evidence is brought up. While extremely problematic this is, it is very true to what has happened in history surrounding colonialism, and places you in one uncomfortable situation after another in a frighteningly realistic way. It makes your decisions as De Sarde in some instances painful but it can be satisfying to see how your actions affect justice in these matters.

Some critics have said that De Sarde’s choices do not always condemn truly objectionable events enough. I agree that more depth could have been added. But in my playthrough, De Sarde’s role starts out as a truly neutral party looking for truths, and they gradually became more adamant on stances as the game progressed. By the end, my De Sarde was about to 1v1 Theleme, and drag out the Bridge Alliance governor. So I am unsure if this is a perspective coming from those who haven’t completed the game in its entirety with all side quests which influence reputations more & seem to flesh out more dialog options.

Humanity Has a Sickness This was written both physically and metaphorically in how humans are as susceptible to committing atrocities as they are to growing ill. Throughout the story as De Sarde, you play almost a detective in uncovering the truth about the people you were raised to believe were benevolent. De Sarde does not take these accusations of corruption lightly, but they also treat it very seriously. Piece by piece, De Sarde learns more about each factions true intentions, and the lies, corruption and greed that intertwine. But at the same time, the story attempts to reveal the potential for all people to ‘do better’ and change- and some of this is seen when you use De Sarde’s charisma + intuition dialog options. This theme especially became clear in the arc when De Sarde finally gets to speak to the god of the island, En on mil Frichtimen, who expresses to him that the malicor (sickness) is a result of them poisoning their own land with their lack of care or concern for it. En on mil Frichtimen urges that the colonists need to listen and learn from the Islanders’ ways if they wish to heal the sickness.

Where to Draw the Line at “For The Greater Good” I feel like this is a theme that crops up with any story involving Utopian ideas. GreedFall does a good job of backing up each faction’s actions with their point of view, whether it is morally misguided or not. This truly emphasizes the human element in the mix, underlining that no perspective comes without its flaws. As De Sarde, one thing you are constantly faced with as a detective is defining a line of where something has gone too far. It is sobering and somewhat frustrating to watch factions step over a line that could have easily remained morally sound. But it is also equally satisfying to see how much influence you can have in swaying others to make a different choice. This theme becomes the summit of De Sarde’s character progression when he is forced to make the choice of taking your dear cousin, Constantin, out of power, or joining him. And when you’ve done all the side quests there are in the game, the decision becomes far more meaningful than this just being the final boss fight.

This theme also seems to come full circle by the end of Petrus’s quest line, when you discover your true origin- how your mother was kidnapped from the island in a rash attempt to bring a healer to the continent. This realization that everything you’ve known has been a lie and kept secret from you...all for the “greater good”.

Things I Liked:

I appreciated how much love and care went into the worldbuilding- especially with the native Islanders. From what I understand, a linguist was hired to write a language for them that was a mash-up of Flemish, Breton, Gaelic and Irish. I appreciated that they brought forth inspiration from the Gauls and Celtic nations of the Iron Age in Western Europe before they were subjected to Christian Missionary activity.

The art & atmosphere was amazing. While there are a few clipping issues with hair, even big AAA games have them. The level of detail put into the game art wise is just very visually pleasing.

The devs did a good job in making a fantasy world that was LGBTQ+ friendly, and giving us diverse character customization. Anyone from any faction had a diverse set of features.

Things I am Critical of:

While I understand that there is a point of growth to watch De Sarde go from neutral to invested in a cause, I really do think they should have been given less complacent responses earlier in the game. I understand limitations but I don’t think it helped with handling colonialism in a truly neutral way.

I wish you could start the game as someone from a faction of your choice, rather than only the Merchant Congregation, especially considering how your origin is written.

IT’S DEPRESSING. A lot of the game is depressing... which maybe makes all the little things you do that shine some shred of goodness still in humanity all the brighter. But it definitely hurt my soul in places and back to point #1, I wish I could have been more aggressive with De Sarde earlier in the game.

Recycled assets: there were quite a few of them- mostly noticeable with buildings in the main cities, which is probably what marks the difference between an AAA game and a more independent studio.

Potential Triggers:

There’s a lot of heavy subjects in this game including religious abuse, manipulation, some body horror (though it’s not super grotesque), one instance of suicide that I know of, xenophobia, and general violence.

Features I Wish it Had:

You can’t ‘jump’...but you don’t really need to. I still wish I could though.

For all this beautiful scenery, I wish they gave us better screenshot taking options.

Different fights for the different Coin Arenas and a meta achievement for completing all of them.

I wish I could play it with friends.

More armor options!

I wish the companions had better and more in-depth romance options. They fall a little flat in diversity of personalities.

Final Thoughts:

I personally enjoy diving into stories that we should be morally critical of, and I like it for what it reveals in the best and worst of humanity. Colonialism has done and continues to do irreversible damage to peace and prosperity among people and nations in real life. Spiders picked a topic that nearly everyone has been affected by in one way or another and it’s understandably a heated subject. Some folks do not want to dive into such deep subjects, just as there’s some stories I cannot stomach comfortably. So I respect and understand that.

Overall, GreedFall exceeded my expectations but there’s definitely some hiccups. It’s a fun game if you’re into a detective-style RPG, political intrigue, history, and interested in exploring this sort of setting. While I think the story could have been written better in places, I was satisfied with the outcomes I triggered, even if that satisfaction took a very slow build up to. It left me feeling hopeful? That perhaps people still have a chance at treating each other better than they do.

#greedfall #review #just thoughts #big post

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jaredhollyheiditruth · 5 years

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Solicitation of Minors, Part 1 (Chai)

The second issue facing and affecting Jared Knabenbauer (whose name I’m SURE I’ve misspelled elsewhere!) are the accusations against Jared of seeking out minors to “groom” while using his star status and blogs as recruitment tools. While my blog on the Heidi/Jared breakup and fallout was as neutral as I could make it while still addressing the facts, I will be far more aggressive in this post because of the implications herein and the fact that this issue involves serious criminal allegations.

As someone that grew up with a child molester, as someone that was targeted by a rapist, I understand the importance of treating an accuser’s claims seriously.

It is my belief that all accusers should be taken seriously. They should be heard, listened to, and feel valid and safe in making those allegations, and the proper authorities should investigate all claims made to the fullest extent of the law.

However.

The accused has rights, as well, and no accuser is above scrutiny. There is a very bold line between taking an accuser’s claims seriously, and believing them outright without any doubt, question, or expectation of evidence. Our legal system is built upon the Presumption of Innocence, that any accused is presumed innocent of the accusations against them until they are found guilty. It is not Jared Knabenbauer’s responsibility to prove that the allegations against him are false, and his silence is not an indicator of guilt! The first thing a criminal defense lawyer tells you is to keep your mouth shut with regards to any criminal allegations because despite your best intentions, you may inadvertently say things that can be twisted and used against you in court. Sadly, in today’s social media-charged society where people share details about everything from their vacations, to their grocery shopping trips, to the contents of every single meal, being silent is often treated as evidence of guilt.

First, I want to make clear the allegations against Jared. Jared is being accused of swapping nude photos and engaging in sexual conversations with minors. This, in and of itself, is not a crime.

Yes, you read that right.

To elucidate, it is a crime to knowingly transport, ship, receive, distribute, sell, possess, solicit, or access any visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

In other words, if someone posing as an 18 or 19 year old sends you nude photos of themselves, but they’re only 16 or 17, you’re not guilty of a crime as the law is written, because you have to knowingly receive images of underage children, simple as that. The reason for this is because our legal system is based upon a concept known as Mens Rea, or “guilty mind.” It means that an individual’s intent has to factor into whether or not they deserve punishment for an act they’ve committed.

This is entirely different from the concept of Ignorantia juris non excusat, more commonly phrased as “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Ignorantia juris non excusat applies when you are committing a crime but do not realize it’s a crime.

For example, you cannot fire a handgun at a target in your back yard and avoid legal penalties because you didn’t know it was illegal to discharge a firearm in a residential area. The fact of the matter is you did a thing that the law says you can’t do.

Jared’s situation is different, because the law itself requires the accused to know the age of the person they’re interacting with when they do it, otherwise you cannot prove they knowingly interacted with a minor. This is the reason Chris Hansen’s team on To Catch a Predator take care to explicitly make sure their targets see and acknowledge the “age” of the decoy, because they’re unlikely to get a conviction on the basis of “We thought the decoy’s age was obvious!”

Think about it. If the law didn’t require the recipient to know the images contained minors, a person could easily set up a blog with a bunch of “barely legal 18 year olds,” post pictures of 16 year olds, and then anyone that went to the website would be guilty of accessing child porn. Odds are, if you’ve spent any time at all looking at porn on the internet, you’ve probably stumbled across a picture or two of a late-teens minor that either lied about their age or just uploaded a pic from their phone without even caring about the legality of it. Do you think you should be charged with a crime just because you trusted an adult website to fully and carefully screen every single model and some slipped through the cracks?

And, before I go on to the allegations, I’d like to point out that there have been many people that have confirmed that Jared did, indeed, engage in age checking and state multiple times that he didn’t want kids in his blog.

There’s also the fact that people admitted to having to omit or lie about their ages because Jared was known to boot people that were underage.

At one point, a user by the name Brenn recalls a time where they revealed to Jared that several minors had been posting to his blog, and Jared’s response to finding out about that was to nuke the entire blog.

I should note that, when Jared was informed about minors posting to his blog, he only had two possible options if he wanted to avoid violating federal child protection laws.

1. Report the blog to the FBI and implicate the users as distributors of child pornograpy.

2. Delete the entire blog.

He chose the latter option.

Now, with all of that said, let’s look at the allegations. Rather than do this as a timeline, I will address each accuser one at a time. There are only three, so this won’t be hard.

On April 4th, an individual going by the Twitter name Chai sent an email to NormalBoots, a media company specializing in video game-related content with whom Jared worked, along with many other individuals, including Holly Conrad. In this email, which Chai titled “Regarding ProJared’s Sexual Grooming of Minors,” Chai detailed his interactions with Jared, which he further expanded upon with a full-blown statement to Twitter that reads thusly:

However, as is typical with Twitter, people pressed Chai. They wanted to know more. This was when Chai admitted outright that he had absolutely no evidence to back up his claims.

I apologize for the poor quality of these screenshots, but shortly after posting his statements, Chai went to great lengths to bury his statements, though archived samples and screenshots taken by others still exist.

In addition to admitting he had no evidence to support is claim, Chai took time to answer a few other questions:

Now, the fact that Chai has no evidence of his claims is, itself, no reason to immediately dismiss them. Not everyone keeps extensive screenshots of interactions they make online unless they’re planning on savoring or using them later. In fact, as I said before, the authorities should take those claims with absolute seriousness and investigate them, and we the public should be willing to hear Chai’s words openly. However, further digging has resulted in new information that makes Chai’s claims and testimony a bit harder to swallow...

On November 2017, Chai posted an extensive blog entry detailing a head injury he suffered on November 9th, 2015. This would have been just five days after he turned 16, his date of birth having been confirmed by an archived copy of his old Twitter profile, seen here:

In this blog, posted in 2017, Chai describes suffering a head injury during gym class, and the severe, terrifying symptoms he underwent - symptoms I doubt I would be strong enough to endure - in the months and years that followed. The blog itself is very extensive, taking up several pages, and would be cumbersome to quote or paste here in its entirety. However, the entire blog can be found directly via archive by going here:

https://archive.fo/CEpgE

A full-image snapshot of the blog can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/sIJ7FlY

According to Chai’s own blog entry, the sheer misery of his experiences during those first few months must have been excruciating torture.

It’s probably a blessing he claims he has no proper memory of that period of time.

Now, the experience Chai describes suffering from during that period of time is, without a doubt, something I would never wish on anyone, even my worst enemy. However, if you do the math, that means that Chai cannot properly remember anything that took place between November of 2015 and May of 2016. When did he claim to have sent Jared that first nude along with a tagline of “16 no more?” Oh, that’s right...

So, allegedly, the first nude image Chai claims to have sent to Jared, wherein he states that he’s 16, occurred during a period of time that he can’t properly remember, and what memories he has exist as “snapshots.”

However, let’s continue giving Chai the benefit of the doubt. Let’s speculate in his favor for a moment and say that sometime after he wrote this blog, he started to remember things from that period, and somehow, those memories were clear and unaffected by the significant traumatic brain injury he suffered in late 2015. Chai describes the life he was living between late 2015 and August of 2016.

He was in and out of the hospital, sometimes for days at a time.

He was in constant pain at all times, and would suffer from seizures every few minutes that caused incontinence, falls, and fainting spells.

Such severe fatigue that he was sleeping for 16-18 hours per day.

Such severe depression, pain, and spasms that he was effectively bedridden.

Hallucinations, both auditory and verbal.

Hearing voices telling him to kill people, which got louder and louder each day.

Severely bad short term memory and large gaps in long term memory.

Inability co concentrate

Loss of coordination that prevented writing.

Slurred speech and psychosis.

He states that in August of 2016, he was “somewhat better” and was able to stay awake for 8-10 hours per day, but that the psychosis (that is, the violent thoughts) was getting worse, to the point he told his mother that he’d kill her if she didn’t take him to the hospital. He spent several days in the hospital before having a massive headache that temporarily crippled him, and explains that after this headache, the voices had miraculously disappeared entirely, as had the spasms and headaches. From there, he explains that his life got better and his symptoms rapidly healed over the ensuing year or two that followed.

Now, I don’t tell that story to humiliate or embarrass Chai. If anything, anyone that had lived through these events deserves nothing short of praise for their strength. I tell this story because, when you think about it...something doesn’t add up. Regarding that blog, there are two possibilities:

1. That the blog is truthful, and contains a description that best fits Chai’s recollection of the events surrounding a very unfortunate and painful accident. If this is the case, it means Chai is a strong individual that survived pure hell and came out the other side with a smile.

2. That the blog is a lie, which would imply that Chai invented the entire ordeal in order to garner sympathy from those that read it.

Now, we can’t access medical logs or contact any hospitals due to patient privacy rights, nor would we have any right to pry into Chai’s private life, which is why I’ve limited my digging only to information that has been submitted to the internet by those it concerns. However, no matter which of these two scenarios is the truth, Chai’s testimony hits a brick wall.

If it is true, then it means Chai’s memories of most of the year 2016 cannot be considered reliable. By his own admission, he is only able to recall bits and pieces of events that took place during that time. Furthermore, I think we can all agree that if you were living that sort of life, it would be overwhelmingly difficult to find the mood and motivation to go online and start trading nudes and engaging in sex talk with someone, to say nothing of the difficulty of finding time to do that and study while you’re only awake 6-8 hours per day and spending much of that in and out of the hospital, and even if he did manage it, we can’t rationally place much (if any) faith in the integrity of his recollection of just how those interactions with Jared went, especially in the absence of any corroborating evidence what-so-ever.

If it is false, it means that the story - either in part or in whole - has been falsified for the purpose of garnering sympathy for Chai from those that would read the blog. While this act alone could simply be considered deplorable for the level of deception involved, it would also establish that Chai has a pattern of lying to the public in order to get them to feel sorry for him, meaning it’s not ethical to believe his claims without some evidence to corroborate them.

Either way, the blog does say one thing for certain: Chai’s claims about his encounter with Jared, based on the timeline of his cognitive injuries and the fact that he cannot provide a single shred of evidence to corroborate them, cannot reasonably be accepted as reliable, because either he wasn’t in any condition to participate in nude-swapping and sexting, or he’s remembering events that might not have happened, or he’s lying about the entire thing. We can’t prove which of these possibilities, if any, is the truth, but there’s far too much there to simply dismiss outright.

Update: Direct references to Chai’s surname have been removed from this blog at the request of third parties not directly related to these incidents.

#jaredhollyheiditruth chaiandcharlie

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sorio99 · 6 years

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Deltarune Chapter 1: The Official Undertale AU

At 6:00 AM PST, on Halloween 2018, the official Undertale twitter account released what is essentially a demo for the next game by Toby Fox, deltarune. Between the baffling intro, the odd relationship with the original Undertale, and the implied involvement of a certain missing doctor, everything about this game was shrouded in mystery.

And I loved it.

(Spoilers and Review below the cut)

Part 1: The Story

At first glance, most people assumed this mysterious new game would be a sequel (or possibly prequel) to Undertale. After all, it involves a number of shared characters, the titular rune was prominently featured in Undertale, and even the name “Delta rune” is an anagram for “Undertale”.

However, the relationship between the two is much stranger, and the plots are largely unconnected.

After creating an avatar and having the game unceremoniously throw it in the garbage, you play as Kris (that lovely person up there), the human child of Asgore and Toriel, and younger sibling to Asriel Dreemurr. Right off the bat, about a million questions are raised, especially since later conversations indicate Kris has at least been living with the Dreemurrs’ since they were too young to know their species, but we’ll come back to that.

Toriel drives you to school, though still get there late, and Alphys (who is your teacher here) puts you in a group with Susie, the only student to show up after you, to work together on a group project. However, when she realizes she doesn’t have any chalk, she sends the two of you to go get some from the school’s broom closet. You catch Susie eating chalk, she threatens to eat your face but doesn’t, and you head off to the broom closet.

Then things get weird.

After that, it sort of follows a plot line similar to the original: you fall into another world, there’s a bunch of monsters you can either fight or spare, and you just have to keep going up and to the left to fulfill a prophecy & get to the exit, all while dealing with ambiguously evil characters who are more silly than dangerous. It is, however, a bit shorter, with only about ten unique enemies and only three areas in the whole game. But hey, it is technically just the first chapter, so what do you expect.

Of course, what really makes an Undertale is the characters. Since you’re in a different world for most of the game, the returning characters from Undertale don’t have much of a presence outside the very beginning and very end. Instead, we focus on a handful of new characters, all of whom are pretty well-rounded and developed, with the exception of Kris, our silent, somewhat-ambiguously-gendered protagonist. Susie, in particular, goes through a pretty nice character arc, going from someone who’d casually threaten to rip your face off and eat it, to an actual antagonist at one point, before eventually working her way back to being a good guy and someone you can actually be friends with! It’s definitely the strongest arc in the game so far.

There’s also Lancer!

He’s a villain.

And not a skeleton.

Just trust me on this.

Part 2: Presentation

Just to get it out of the way, the music is fantastic. Of course it is. It’s an Undertale spinoff and, more importantly, it’s made by Toby “Radiation” “I could shit out a better soundtrack than most of you will ever even imagine” Fox.

I will however say that I prefer Deltarune’s sound design in general to Undertale, though. Don’t get me wrong, Undertale still has the better OST (for now at least), but Deltarune’s sound effects JUST beat it out in my books. In particular, I felt like the text sounds for most of the characters was, on average, less annoying than in Undertale. Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Undertale’s voices, but some of them could get a little ear-grating, especially for characters who talked a LOT throughout the game. Here, with the exception of one returning character (where the irritation was kind of the joke anyways), all of them work really well. There’s even a tiny bit of voice acting from a couple of the more important characters! So, big thumbs up there.

More pressingly, however, are the visuals. In case it wasn’t obvious from the above screenshots (aside from that second one of Lancer, maybe), the graphics have gotten a MAJOR glow up since the last game. Temmie Chang, aka “Most Precious Meme”, is still the main Artist for the game, and Undertale is by no means a bad looking game. However, in general, the games’ art went from “Beautiful and sometimes even breathtaking” to consistently “HOLY SHIT MY EYES ARE NOT EQUIPPED TO COPE WITH SUCH SHEER BRILLIANCE!!!”

You think I’m exaggerating, but I legit dropped my jaw at a lot of this game’s visuals. I mean, just look at this one End-game animation!

I think this one short scene has more detail and frame than Asgore’s overworld sprite got in the entirety of Undertale.

On the slight downside, however, we no longer get the full-body monochromatic battle sprites from Undertale, as enemies appear in battle almost identically to how they appear in the world. Still, with this much more detail in overworld sprites, it’s not even a slight loss.

Speaking of battle...

Part 3: Gameplay

Yep, the gameplay has gotten a major overhaul over the past three years. First, as the screenshot should make obvious, you have a team now! Yep, in addition to Kris, you can get up to three additional party members over the course of your adventure, including Susie!

In general, what you can do in battles with Kris is mostly the same; you can Fight by hitting the button at the right time, Act in certain ways to make the enemies not want to fight you, use an Item really quick, or Spare an enemy who you don’t want to kill. You also have the option to defend, which will lessen the damage you take if you get hit during the obligatory bullet-hell attacks your enemies dish out.

Where things get really interesting, though, is the team mechanics. You see, every character is different, and everyone but Kris can use magic (although some of Kris’s ACT commands kinda seem like magic?). However, only Kris can directly ACT, with other party members only being able to preform certain set spells. So, instead, Kris can command the other party members to perform actions, or Kris can ACT while the others defend, use items, or attack. If you use a Team ACT, the other party member(s) involved won’t be able to do anything else that turn, but said Team ACTs are usually more powerful or potent as a result. The whole thing can set up for actually strategic choices in battle: In Undertale, since most enemies only had one or two ways to spare them, the most strategy you could use on a Pacifist play through was “Which enemy should I deal with first?” Here, you have to figure how you’re going to handle each encounter. Do you have Kris ACT first, then have another party member spare that monster in the same turn? Or do you act WITH that party member, and next turn be able to spare at least two monsters?

In addition to the battle system being reworked, there were a number of smaller, quality of life changes:

You now have three item categories: Items (your standard consumables), Gear (your armor and weapons), and Key Items (your cellphone and a couple other important things).

You can sell at pretty much every shop in the “Dark” world, which makes sense, since you’re mostly selling food, armor, and weapons-things people in this world would need to survive.

Each character in your party uses a different kind of weapon, but all of them use the same armor, and you can give them all two pieces of armor each, so you can stack defense and get extra boosts!

Choices are mostly presented in a cross pattern, so you just have to pick a direction and confirm to choose that option.

THERE IS NOW A RUN BUTTON AND IN THE OPTIONS YOU CAN CHANGE SO YOU AUTO-RUN AND THE RUN BUTTON IS JUST A WALK BUTTON!

And speaking of which, YOU CAN ACCESS THE MENU FROM WITHIN THE MAIN GAME! THANK YOU!

You can also have up to three save files at once, although I’ve heard each file has some minor differences in flavor-text across the game, so be on the look-out for that.

Overall, I feel like I honestly prefer the game play to Undertale. In fact, with the exception of the story (which is mostly underdeveloped because, again, this is basically just a very long demo), I honestly prefer most of Deltarune to Undertale. While it isn’t technically a sequel, per se, it does do what any good sequel should do: use the original as a starting point and just improve almost everything. It’s almost like the Bioshock Infinite to Undertale’s Bioshock, if that makes sense.

(Would that make System Shock 2 Homestuck? Am I over thinking this?)

Now, with the actual review out of the way, we can get to the main event.

Part 4: Co̞͞n̤̠͎̙̥̗n̸̰̜̳͚͓͇͍e̸͈͉̳̺c̭̮̬̖̭̗̳͠t͍͓͘i̖̺͙͇̟̫o̢̰̜̦n͈̮̼͈͎͖̦s͈͝ ̹̙̦͈̯̜A̡̟̥ņ̥͙̗d̛͙̤̦͈̹̪͚ ̺T͍̞h̡̜̝̟̬e͏̱̹̲ͅ ͕̯̰͍̜͇͍D͝oc̜t̸̺̱̯͙̠o̷̱r͈̟̣̤̯

As I mentioned before, this game isn’t technically a sequel to Undertale. None of the events of Undertale seem to have occurred in this universe, including (seemingly) things from before the game even began. This becomes especially apparent after you leave the “Dark” world and can explore town, talking to various people. Character relationships are almost universally reset, there is no mention of the “Underground”, and considering Asriel is still alive and in college, it’s safe to say there is no Flowey in this world. It could almost be passed off as a complete alternate continuity, or even a reboot, if it weren’t for a few...

oddities.

Yep, among the returning characters, Sans makes an appearance, having apparently just moved into town and never having met you before. Despite having apparently met Toriel the night before in the grocery store, and having a business relationship with your teacher, Alphys. Plus, there's the fact that what used to be Grillby’s and the Bone Brother’s house both look WAY too close to there original versions (no other building looks that similar), the fact that of ALL the returning characters, only Sans looks the exact same (no redesign, visible aging, or even new clothing), and the fact that some of Kris’s dialogue choices seem to reference things that haven’t happened in this universe, and other characters notice them acting...different.

Plus, you know, there’s Chapter 1′s ending.

Yeah.

(Plus, as you might have noticed at the top of this part, there’s a monster who is the only one in either game who looks similar to this Gaster Follower)

All of this seems to point to something much more sinister going on. And, for those who haven’t seen it, the tweets leading up to the demo’s release might just explain why.

Now, we aren’t quite sure who this is supposed to be, but judging by their vocabulary and how they type, it’s a pretty safe assumption we’re being chatted to by our favorite former royal scientist. And, sure enough, most people are assuming that this entity is at least some version of Dr. W. D. Gaster. Why is he doing this? What does it all mean? Why was the Delta Rune even slightly relevant to the plot of this chapter aside from there being three prophesied heroes?

Well, I suppose only time will tell.

Until then...

L̴͙̖̠̕è̘̝͚̯̩̘ͅt͔͎͖̝͎̼͘͢ ̷͎̮͘ù̴̹̘̮̰̙̮̮̘͝s̵̷̫̠͎̯͙̥͟ͅ ͍͍̤̟͇͕̺ͅh̨̼̼͕̠ą̶̛̦̫̼v̺͞e̸͎̭̱͍̭͞͠ ͖̩̳͕͔͚͚̝̱s̘̭̩͜͟ơ҉̥͖̯͟m̞̠͈e̷͔͖̭ͅ ́҉̤͔͎̫̣̥̱͚̲ḿ̶̩̼̙̪̻̝̥͟o̗͇̩͇̠͍͟r̡͖͇̤̗͔͈̕͠e̶̝̠͔͈̭̟ ̷̫̬̺̮͔̣F̢̗̘̟̯͈̜͖͕͈͞Ų̴͍̜͚̘̠̞͈͇̀N҉̡̣̺̝̩̘͓ͅ.̷̩̹͓̯͝

S̛̪̦͉͎̙̀h̴͇͈͡á̤̣̫̬l̷̬̤͓͈͟ͅl͚͚̙̦̙̣̱̺ ̳̗̩͍̱̤̦͈̣w̡͔é͔̝̹̻̜͎̞͝?͜҉̣̣̥̫͎͎ͅ

#undertale #deltarune #delta rune #deltarune spoilers #delta rune spoilers #tagged both ways because i'm not sure which is the correct formatting #and no I will NOT stop doing this. ever

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tuwasduwillst · 6 years

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ch4 (pt 1)

is that fire or is it like one of those public school yearbook picture backgrounds from the early 2000s (idk what they’re like now)

why am i even getting to see this, where did it come from

also i know that he was specifically saying this isn’t his first killing game because i understood what he was saying in Japanese and he said 殺し合い. hm. it’s obvious from context anyway, but still.

i guess i’ll find out more whenever the game feels like showing me more. back to Shuichi!

he went to the dining hall right away the next morning, but the mood’s pretty bleak. there are only two people that seem to have lighter moods this morning.

Gonta isn’t a cannibal! ...probably.

haha, why did Shuichi react that way to what he said...

speaking of Gonta, though, he’s not in the dining hall right now. Kiibo says he’s probably still sleeping.

Himiko is actually also relatively energetic this morning; she tries to rally the others to be more lively. she’s obviously still depressed about what happened, but she’s trying to live positively for the sake of her friends.

Gonta shows up and tells everyone that there are more letters on the rock or whatever that thing is he keeps looking at.

this world is mine? this world is fine. this world is pine. this world is vine? this world is online. this world is--oh wait, if i found this rock in Japanese at the same point i might be able to actually piece it together.

...that doesn’t feel fair, though, so i won’t. also, i’d probably end up spoiling myself on everything accidentally while i looked for this exact rock.

my game just crashed! it loves doing that.

back to where i was... they don’t know what’s up with the writing. Monokuma and the two remaining cubs show up with some prizes:

i know where that brush is probably used! not sure about the other things, though. since the card key is somehow a motive, most of them don’t think they should mess with it, but--

you better be careful with that thing.

he runs off before anyone can stop him and Kaito goes chasing after him. the others tell Shuichi that they’ll also go track Kokichi down, so he should focus on the other two items (and the newest flashback light) for now.

oh, wait, i do know where the blue thing goes! i think. first the brush, though.

fifth floor!

:o oooh...

Tsugumi’s lab is up here!

and i guess she and Shuichi are going to have some non-alcoholic cocktails for no reason!

she says she used to make them a lot at her old job. hmm.

yeah, do it, Shuichi! cosplay with Tsumugi!

Shuichi says he’s in the middle of investigating right now, but Tsumugi just says he can do it later, then.

:D! Shuichi’s lab is up here, too! what a cozy little area~

Maki says she gets a bad feeling from this place, though. the music is all weird too.

haha. a detective could easily be a criminal, given all they need to know to be effective at their job. oh! Maki basically just said the same thing.

on the other side of the room there are some files about various murders that detail the tricks used in each one.

Shuichi starts getting kind of depressed about how his talent’s only useful after people die, but then Kaito shows up. the three of them chat for a bit--Maki warns Shuichi that he’s done so well that the next culprit might aim for him, Kaito says he’ll ~protect his sidekicks~, and also apparently Kaito lost track of Kokichi. Kaito did find the flashback light while he was chasing him, though.

there’s still the other place to go to, so Kaito goes to the dining hall to wait for Shuichi to be finished.

are they flying bugs? are they actually bugs at all?

no answers there yet, either.

robot lab!

it’s very sci-fi in here, which Kiibo doesn’t like.

the game automatically goes to the dining hall after that, where everyone remaining (sans Kokichi) is gathered.

nevermind, Kokichi’s here now too. he claims he couldn’t use the card key, so he just gave up.

he goads Kaito into using the flashback light once he notices it’s there and then they all get another memory... thing.

which i tried to screenshot, but it didn’t work. oops. it was the news thing about the meteorites from before + some people rioting or something.

oh, there are the people again!

they also remember something called the “Gofer Project” that was supposed to save humanity or something, but Kokichi says he heard it failed (which some others also remember hearing). they can’t remember anything more than that.

Kaito’s reacting to Kokichi saying a bunch of things about how he wouldn’t be surprised if they were all dead and this was the afterlife or if some weird virus spread because of the meteorites or something, considering the other weird things here.

there definitely is a lot of weird stuff here, and honestly, i’m not expending the effort to figure out what’s going on. the game will tell me whenever it wants and speculating isn’t going to get me anywhere; i don’t trust that it won’t come up with some kind of ~twist~ after what it did to Kaede.

anyway, free time happens after that!

orphan assassins are pretty common in fiction! it makes sense, i guess, orphans don’t really have anything they can do about their situations and they don’t really have anyone that will object to them being trained as assassins...

she talks about how the training was a bit--how they tortured them and taught them how to die, because that’s what they had to do if they failed a mission.

Maki mentions something about how “that girl” would replace her if she ever failed, but she apparently didn’t mean to say that much, because she tells Shuichi to forget what she just said.

aw, that’s the only bit of free time i get. i was going to hang out with Tsugumi because i feel bad that i completely forgot about her in the last chapter when i was trying to figure out how many girls were left... i guess i’ll just have to do it the next chance i get.

😒

aren’t you two technically siblings or something... i don’t really know how the bears work. then again, Korekiyo was a normal human and he was in love with his sister, so whatever.

a waste of time, that’s what.

oh, they’re doing sit-ups this time! c:

...well, two of them are, anyway. Kaito eventually gets up and says he has to use the bathroom. Shuichi notes that he doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry; Maki asks if he wants her to go check on him, since she finished her 100 sit-ups already. Shuichi points out that he’d be in the boys bathroom, though, which apparently didn’t occur to Maki.

Maki decides that now is a good time to ask Shuichi if he liked Kaede. she thinks it’d be weird for him to like someone he’d only just met. Shuichi asks when it wouldn’t be weird to like someone, then. Maki doesn’t have an answer for that. she tells Shuichi to forget she asked about it, which Shuichi isn’t very happy about.

Kaito wanders back before they can talk more.

no!

he convinces them to redo their sit-ups, though only Maki can redo them all in the end.

the next morning, Shuichi runs into Maki again. she doesn’t apologize for asking what she did and upsetting him, but she does say that he assumed she didn’t actually care and that he shouldn’t have done that.

Shuichi also runs into Himiko. i guess he’s going to watch her train in the dojo now?

what

seriously, why do i ever talk to Miu. i should know better by now.

haha, Shuichi’s wondering if she’s on drugs or something... who knows. possibly.

let’s go to the dining hall!

Gonta wants to fight Monokuma. everyone else thinks that’s a terrible idea.

including Kokichi, though he thinks it’s just pointless; he says it wouldn’t stop the killing game and starts talking about who great/exciting it is and how if no one else kills someone he’ll do it, etc.

hey! you can’t just punch him like that! i mean, you can and you did, but you shouldn’t. one, he’s super tiny, that’s not even fair. two, you shouldn’t just hit people because you don’t like what they’re saying, you brute. :/

Kiibo gets him to back off by saying violence is unacceptable and can lead to murder.

um... are you okay

surprisingly, Miu steps in when Gonta says he definitely has to fight Monokuma if people are going to be fighting like this. Miu says that she’s going to ~save everyone~, so he shouldn’t be reckless like that. she claims she’s going to bring them to a world where the killing game doesn’t exist.

oh, yeah, she’s been messing with that world computer or whatever. good luck with that! hopefully no one kills you now because you let them know about it. well, vaguely. she didn’t spell it out or anything. also, hopefully that thing doesn’t do something terrible instead.

things are weird and awkward in the dining hall now after what happened! let’s leave.

that was Himiko’s training! it was mostly posing and stuff, but hey, at least she’s doing better.

after that, free time! but before i do that for real, i wanted to see what Kokichi was up to, so:

haha.

i reloaded after that, since i already have all of the little friendship pieces for him or whatever.

time to see Maki again!

oh, i see. :o Shuichi’s relieved to hear that.

haha.

apparently Maki volunteered to take that girl’s place, because the scouts wanted the other girl first and Maki knew she could never be happy there. aw.

aww, she played house with the other girl! that’s so cute!

Maki, Champion Dad

(she just tells him to be quiet and stop imagining whatever it is he’s imagining.)

next up, Tsumugi! to make up for forgetting her before.

...but that’s why, you’re so plain that i actually forgot about you and then i felt bad...

Shuichi tells her she’s not plain (and he means it), but she says she is. weirdly enough, she seems to take pride in how plain she supposedly is...? she doesn’t like Shuichi explaining away things like store clerks not noticing her in a busy store.

once that’s over, it’s nighttime. Kaito seems to be feeling off again.

and so they do!

...the way the shine is in Kaito’s hair is so weird...

Kaito asks Maki what her favourite bloodtype is, which confuses her and makes Shuichi tell him he’s bad at asking questions. Kaito tells Shuichi to ask Maki something, then.

Shuichi does actually have something he’s curious about--he wants to know why she introduced herself as a Child Caregiver. Kaito says he asked that way too suddenly and they should ask her about her favourite spaceship instead, but Maki starts replying to Shuichi’s question.

she talks about the orphanage and how she used to look after the younger kids. that wasn’t a lie, then.

one day some dudes started showing up and offered to donate a lot of money to the orphanage if she went with, so she felt like she had to go.

it was extremely difficult and draining at first, but eventually she just got used to it. she still wonders what she would’ve been like if she’d just stayed at the orphanage.

after Maki shares that, the three of them just talk together about whatever comes to mind. ~they’re having fun~

gee, i wonder what Kokichi is up to

he’s having some kind of secret meeting with Monokuma about a way to make the game more ~exciting~... i guess he’s having fun too, in his own way.

the next morning, Shuichi eats breakfast!

okay, geez, you really don’t need to be like this.

i had a sword, so i get to hear about Maki’s failed katana mission. apparently she was mistaken for a cosplayer.

both Shuichi and Kaito say that the story is cuter than they expected. it wasn’t cute for Maki, since she was worried about the whole “funding for the orphanage” thing, but she’s not upset about them saying that.

speaking of Maki! time to talk to her again.

oops.

it’s kind of okay, though, because Maki thinks she died happy saving someone else, and she lives on in Maki’s memories.

Shuichi feels bad that Maki’s stuck as an assassin and wishes she could live a normal life. he offers to investigate the assassin cult, but Maki tells him that people use assassinations to deal with complicated situations. ...so he can just do his best as a detective and maybe find ways to solve those kinds of problems without assassination. then she might have to quit.

~friends~

ooh, money. i don’t really need a ton of coins or anything, though...

i decided to hang out with Himiko after that. i don’t know who the next to die will be; i might as well try to hang out with everyone left at least once if i can...

it’s kind of inconsistent due to her change in personality (she’s back to being lazy again), but that’s okay.

later, someone is at Shuichi’s door! he thinks it might be Maki or Kaito looking for him.

it’s Miu, though. she says she’s got a way for them to leave, so he should head to the computer room on the 4th floor. ...well, she’s more vulgar about it, but that’s the only important thing she’s saying.

that light was green before :/a

what the heck

didn’t you guys already put something on your heads in your flashback memories or whatever, though... are you just going to continuously go into weird computer programs or something... that doesn’t seem like an actual solution to any problems. also, what if someone does something to you while you’re in the “other world”? also also, seriously, what does this actually fix. how is this a good idea in any way.

Miu says that she didn’t even make it. Shuichi asks her who did and Monokuma pops up--apparently he did. Miu says she stayed up all night making sure nothing dangerous was left, though, so it’s completely safe.

after hearing Monokuma created it, most of them want nothing to do with it. Kokichi says there might be ~secrets~ in there, or something Monokuma left for them.

Monokuma confirms there is--if they get their hands on whatever it is, they’ll instantly know what’s going on outside of the academy.

now people want to go. eventually all of them agree to go, some more reluctantly than others (Tsugumi’s the last one to agree, with Shuichi and Himiko also being some of the last to give in).

this is going to be too tiny to see, but Kokichi’s got a little “c:” face right now and it’s cute.

this seems like it could easily go wrong.

wow, this has been tested so well

oh gosh, they’re so cute!

Maki’s super cute too~

TINY

you could just put them all in your pocket--HE JUST SMACKED KIIBO RIGHT IN THE FACE

which lets them know they can feel pain, i guess, but geez. ...actually, why can Kiibo feel pain, he’s a robot. how is that useful for him in any way.

what do you even do here, though...

:O i can run around as Shuichi.......

Miu’s got some extra stuff to explain: objects are unbreakable, they can’t be injured (though they can be hurt), and everyone’s got equal strength here to make things fair. also, to leave, you use the phone. you have to use that phone and it’s only in this room.

...so if objects don’t break and the only way to leave is via that phone, could you hypothetically bar someone in a different room and they’d never be able to escape? if they can’t break down the door or whatever’s keeping them in there and they can’t log out, they’d just get stuck, right? that seems like a legitimate concern. i’d be too afraid to leave the room with the phone, tbh

map! the salon is where the phone is.

there’s also another map that shows the rest of the world. it’s surrounded by a wall of nothing, basically. Kokichi asks Miu if she made the maps (not Monokuma) and she says she did, but Shuichi thinks something seems off about her response.

Kokichi starts to go running off so he can explore. he can’t really be stopped; Gonta decides to watch over him and make sure he doesn’t do anything weird.

once they’re gone, everyone else decides to go check out the roof.

it’s snowing and apparently it’s also cold.

i understand, Tsugumi

let’s check out the shed on the roof!

and some rolled up carpet, which he also points out.

not really relevant to this or the game, but there was an incident a while back of a kid dying in a rolled up gym mat and no one could figure out how it happened. i think they ultimately determined he just fell in and couldn’t get himself out, but people thought it was suspicious...

anyway. i tried to look through the binoculars, but it wouldn’t let me look everywhere i wanted because i accidentally got to the border. u_u

speaking of the border, it makes Kiibo think of the wall at the school.

time to go to the river~

...she’s referring to Shuichi and apparently all of the other girls agree with her... why... Shuichi did nothing to deserve this reputation...

well, whatever. he’s getting a sign so it can be used as a bridge. it can’t break, but if it falls into the river, they won’t have a way back across.

Kokichi and Gonta show back up just in time to cross the river.

the squiggly line represents a loading point.

makes sense.

chapel! Miu is apparently deciding where everyone goes when they split up. she tells Kaito to go to the roof and he protests until Kokichi implies he’s too delicate to do it, basically, at which point he’s 100% for searching the roof. u_u

Kokichi is sent to the salon, where the phone is. Gonta, Tsugumi, and Shuichi end up also going along to search the mansion. (Kokichi tells Gonta to come with, Tsugumi wants to make sure Kokichi isn’t abusing Gonta somehow, and Kaito tells Shuichi to come to the mansion.)

Maki seems pretty upset that Kaito didn’t ask her to go to the mansion. he’s oblivious, though, and asks Shuichi if he did something to upset her. u_u

MIU, NO

now Miu, Kiibo, Himiko, and Maki are stuck over there...

since there’s nothing they can do to fix it right now, the other five go investigate the mansion like they planned on doing originally.

hmmm.

that’s never a good sound.

no one has any idea what it is, though, because they can’t see anything that would’ve made that noise. Kaito’s the only one from this side that didn’t come outside and react to it, though.

there’s the board for the bridge, since the others are still stuck on the chapel side.

apparently something happened with Miu and her avatar isn’t moving.

they decide to all log off; Maki goes to the roof to look for Kaito (telling Shuichi he’s cold for not getting him in the first place). she doesn’t find him up there, though.

:/a

being completely honest here, if i could have him do that i would. not that i dislike Kaito, but i hate that ~*MANLY MACHISMO*~ stuff and it’s just baaaaaaarely balanced out by him believing in the power of friendship and whatever else.

i think Kokichi is fun and interesting, which matters more to me in fiction than someone being a helpful and good person. oops.

idk why Shuichi’s upset, it’s not like Kokichi said anything terrible to him.

you do you, Kokichi.

...except maybe don’t strangle him, because i don’t think he’d appreciate that much.

anyway, Shuichi has logged off now! and i’m going to split the post because while it’s not lagging yet, it’ll probably start up soon.

(next part)

#game: drv3kh

6 notes · View notes

izurukamucutie · 7 years

Text

1001 Plot Holes: Results

While I don’t personally agree with all the points added, I believe that if it was poorly explained enough that people didn’t understand or it made them unhappy, it counts for something. So, if you disagree with a point talk to the credited person - not me.

Some of these are also similar but talk about different problems with the same part so they were also included. (For example, there are several discussing Ai!Chiaki’s backstory/making, the masterminds plan not making sense, and the brainwashing)

There are some bullets with no credit. That means the person made several points in a row or one post with several points, so I put the credit to the last one in their sequence.

Some small grammar/spelling edits have been made. Some have also been cut/trimmed for length.

I also added ones that weren’t submitted to the game but were posted on tumblr. Some were submitted to people randomly (if people wanted to be anon, they couldn’t really participate here.) Other were ones brought up by several people and were known, but just didn’t ever get posted to the game.

They didn’t tell us who the 13th Branch Leader was ~ aeroflyingsky

The 77th class woke up like nothing happened at all. It invalidates SDR2′s story and even Despair arc. If there are no consequences after waking up, what’s the point of having them be ultimate despair in the first place? ~ i-just-want-naegi-to-be-ok

How did Seiko have any time at all to make the freaking cure for the poison,

How did Kirigiri get the cure and know what it was for?

How did Mikan even revive Kirigiri? She had, like, a giant syringe and that was it ~ danganronpashsltrash

Seiko could NOT have made an antidote [for Kirigiri]. Making antidotes can take months or more if you don't know the exact chemical compound of the poison. I also doubt it was a common one. Even if you do know the poison well and how to make the antidote it also takes time to 'cook' the antidote (like boiling, letting it sit, straining, etc) and that takes hours or days and it needs to be done in proper, sterile conditions or it could become contaminated. It also needs to be given in the right dosage for the amount of poison and factored for body weight/type or some antidotes can be just as dangerous as the poison. The amount for Kirirgi =/= Seiko’s amount. AND antidotes (despite what movies say) are not 100% effective. There will always be some damage even if the antidote is used before poisoning. Kirirgi still should have been critical for days with serious damage. ~Med student @dr3discourse

Junko used Mitarai’s anime in zetsubou-hen to brainwash the 77th class even though zetsubou-hen takes place during the dr:0 timeline, meaning that she could have used a SHSL NEUROLOGIST who is her RIGHT-HAND MAN and would DO ANYTHING FOR HER and was even DIRECTLY RELATED to the FIRST MUTUAL KILLING and IZURU KAMUKURA. ~ ycshiya

It was said that they destroyed their own bodies but Komeada was the only one shown with a physical injury ~ dapplemii

Why was Monaca even in the killing game? All she did was go to space and had no further involvement. There was literally no reason for Monaca, Fukawa and Komaru other than to throw us off into thinking the traitor was Monaca ~ duckzono / shutupaboutthetentacles

The Warriors of Hope were only shown for a minute with no explanation to how they survived dr:ae (especially Nagisa). They also weren’t shown in Kibou-hen. They need a happy ending too! ~ weirdly-obsessed-fangirl

Why no one in Future Foundation, especially Munakata, noticed the sudden lack of money caused by, you know, BUILDING AN ENTIRE UNDERWATER FACILITY WITH FUCKLOAD OF MONITORS UNDER THEIR OWN HEADQUARTERS? ~ viedzma

What was the purpose of the Yukizome torture scene and having her brain played with by Ikusaba, if we were later shown how simply seeing the Despair Video was enough to turn everyone into despair? There were many explanations they could have given, but it was never addressed and it was shrugged aside. ~ coquetteblossom

by extension to the point above, if Yukizome needed her brain to be played with the first time why did the suicide video work? Why did it work on Naegi? ~ wimallidge

Naegi said that without Enoshima the 77th class would have been normal, an ironic statement the episode before Twilight Syndrome where three of the characters committed or were complicit in murder, but then in the finale Mitarai said that before his actions they would have led peaceful lives. ~ blackflirtlarping

What happened to Makoto’s parents? In DR:AE they’re shown “dead” in a monitor by the kids and yet when they go to the location in question there’s no one there. Komaru tells Makoto it’s still a mystery what happened to them and that they’d find them. I was hoping since DR3 would be wrapping up the Hope’s Peak Timeline, we would find out what happened to them for real. ~ unnoticedkohai

DR3 contradicts all of the other games and DR0 when it comes to how Junko recruited the ultimate despairs... (Explanation and DR1 screenshots here) ~ alexa-rynay

The gap of 6 months during komaeda’s suspension. He suddenly comes back with more knowledge than even his classmates. Kodaka may fix that 6 month gap during SDR2.5 but I doubt it since it’s 2.5 and not DR3.5 but who knows? ~ carry-me-senpai

The pacing between episodes of the despair arc was really bad. Sometimes it was supposed to be months and then some episodes its only been a few days. Its hard to follow. &

Did dr0 even happen? They completely skipped over it even though they kept showing the characters from it. ~ crazypietalk

Why did Ryota not want people to see his NG code? Full analysis. ~ komaesa

Fact that they introduced all those lovely characters in dr3 just to kill them off for literally no reason. Tengan was a shitty villain and mitarai didn’t even upload the hope video. ~ theguyontheleft

Juzo saved Naegi from committing suicide, but wouldn’t the video affect him too?

How did all of the victims get to their positions when they die? Ruruka and Yukizome work, since Ruruka’s just on the ground and Yukizome could use the table and what’s in the room to climb up to the chandelier. But how did Gozu string himself up like that, smash his helmet, AND manage to stab himself? And how did Seiko embed herself in the wall?!

Why did Yukizome’s chandelier only break at the time that everyone looked up? No other weight other than her body was on it, so either something else had to be added to make it heavy enough to break the chain, when there wasn’t, or it would have snapped when Yukizome first got on the chandelier, which it didn’t. ~ backstreetbassoonist

Why did Cure W work on Kirigiri hours after she ‘died,’ but it didn’t work on Bandai only moments after he died? ~ korekiyothefolklorist

Mukuro calls naegi a loser when it’s said that she was in love with him and she canonically betrayed Junko for him. (also explained here) ~ thewitchoforigins

What was the point of all those shown deaths in the opening? I mean, some of them make sense, but most don’t tbh. ~ panta-overlord

The 77th class was never actually shown bonding with chiaki besides episode 2. It felt like the friendship was forced rather then genuine due to the time skip. this also makes their brainwashing seem less believable and forced. ~ galaomegas

Enoshima shows concern for naegi possibly fucking up her mutual killing when in reality she didn’t show any concern ?? at all ?? it was kirigiri who she was worried about which is why she went the extra mile and erased her memory of being shsl detective. ~ naegiapologist

Togami survived a building collapsing on top of him,

Hagakure did nothing,

Komaru’s message to Makoto didn’t have any purpose ~ non-suspiciousname

Enoshima had her random personalities from the end of DR1, when it was explained in the game that she went crazy being alone in the school that “she didn’t know who she was anymore”.

The police couldn’t trace her blowing up a Taxi car when she even left her rare designer bag as a bomb. ~ bananarangcumberdongisonmydash

How did Junko get into Hope’s Peak Academy in the first place? It said in Zetsubou-Hen that she was placed there by the board of directors. WHY? WHAT EXACTLY WAS THE PLAN FOR THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS TO GO AROUND THE SCOUTING SYSTEM’S BACK AND BRING JUNKO ENOSHIMA TO THE SCHOOL?

How did Mitarai learn all those brainwashing skills in the first place?

Oh, and my favorite so far: WHY WAS THERE A BEAR IN THE CLASSROOM? ~ ananimefanforever

How THE FUCK DOES DESPAIR STILL HAVE WORKING PHONES AND TVS AFTER, WHAT? MONTHS?? YEARS??? OF DESPAIR AND VIOLENCE?? ~ drborderline

Most of the DR2 cast (and Mukuro) disappeared into the background for episodes at a time due to the cluttered nature of despair arc, which while probably one of the better options available still kinda stings. ~ thedang25

Makoto said that Monokuma was recorded in advance. knowing that Tengan was participating in game and couldn’t operate Monokuma without suspicion, it was probably true. Then how exactly Monokuma was able to talk with Monomi? as far as i’m concerned, talking with other people would require, like, coming up with answers in very short span on time… ~ viedzma

If Yukizome had been despair since Zetsubou-hen, why would she commit suicide from the despair video in mirai-hen? The only reason the other victims committed suicide after seeing the video was because they were forced into despair by it.

How is Komaeda alive and healthy at the end of DR3 when he, had cancer and dementia , his comatose body went through the mental trauma of dying, really violently, miraculously managed to awake from said coma despite his illness predetermining an early death for him ... (more here, linked for length) ~shaiapitou

How did they get out of the NW program and remember Hajime? If their memories of the NW program were erased, then they shouldn’t know him. But if they weren’t, then they continue to live on with the fact that they killed each other. ) ~ atramentousashes

Tengan’s Motive Makes No Sense; an analysis. ~ komaesa

The plot ’twists‘ were extremely predictable. Kirigiri surviving, who murdered Izayoi, and Monaka being related/being Gekkogahara, and more were all called by fans episodes in advance (In Monaka’s case, as soon as the character designs were released before the anime even began) ~ izurukamucutie

If Mikan got her memories back while in the video game, which drove her to kill Ibuki and Hiyoko, how was she still not despair when she got back into reality? ~nagitoesdoritos

In SDR2, Sato was said to be in the main course and friend with Ibuki, Hiyoko and Mikan. In Dr3, she is in the reserve course, taking away a lot of the impact on the class (Fuyuhiko is sad because of his sister but for the rest, they just lost a random girl) and a lot of the potential impact in the segregationist system of Hope’s Peak (an Ultimate murdering a Reserve Course student without facing ‘official’ punishment)

The brainwashing technique is super inconsistent, sometimes it leads to despairgasm (Mikan), sometimes you can act 100% like normal and being Evil (Chisa), sometimes you almost seems psychotic and unaware of your surrounding (the SDR2 kids), sometimes your body isn’t controlled by your brain anymore (the reserve course student who killed himself)

AI!Chiaki’s origin story is a pile of bullcrap. We never see her meet Chihiro, Izuru talks like if HE was his creator at some point, but it’s eventually revealed then she was re-created from everyone’s memories (why was she so different from real!Chiaki then?) ~ all-my-lovely-fics

I never understood how Tengan asks Chisa "Oh, did you watch the Despair video?" and shes like "No" and he believes her. Like, how would she know what's on the two disks unless she's seen them? ~ Anon at dr3discourse

How in the hell does Kirigiri not have a scar from the poison. Everyone saw that she was bleeding from her eye and her skin was purple.

With that knowledge, why didn’t Seiko save anyone with her medicine if she had that with her the entire time? ~ doodlede88

How fucking long Juzo survived after having a spear impaled through his arm

...then being stabbed with a flaming sword through the middle of his chest (yea it would've cauterized the wound but he definitely would’ve died from shock)

...then CHOPPING OFF HIS FUCKING HAND like how the fuck did he even do that Munakata had both of the swordnd a you can’t damage the bracelet so beating his hand off wouldn’t have worked and finally

....then walking at least three city blocks from one side of the building all the way to the breaker room while bleeding profusely and like also wandering around looking for Naegi and the “can’t die, won’t die” squad? (counting as 3 points since each alone should have killed him)

Did we ever find out is Asahina was actually okay after getting shot in the leg?

Also, how did [Asahina] get out of the building? ~ ding-dang-ronpa

What ability did Izuru exactly use to wake up all of class 77?

How is Hajime able to be both himself and Izuru at the same time? ~ noxiatoxia

(For episode 8 of Z arc) Where the hell Komaeda’s umbrella went

What Komaeda saw when he followed Tsumiki into the passage

How he knew about the human experimentation

Why Komaeda knew about Junko and Mukuro

Why Komaeda knew that Junko was a threat that needed to be eliminated

Why he knew that Mukuro would be there, be a threat, and would need to be distracted by Pekoyama

What Komaeda was doing on a plane

How Komaeda returned to the school after apparently being stranded

Where he obtained the gun and why he had it on him at school

Why the scene with Kamukura occurred at all ~ flagfighter (click text for more in-depth analysis)

Mikan stated that Junko was her beloved because she treated her with love, but the interactions between them in dr3 depict anything but ~ trashy-hope

Since the despairs were shown to have the ability to make complicated machinery and Hajime obtained the highest Mary Sue status, there was literally no reason they couldn’t have built a robotic body and uploaded AI Chiaki into it, therefore saving the entire cast of DR2 ~ kozikitty

Ater falling into despair, Mikan’s personality radically changed. How come no one else’s did? ~ babygangstas

Also, why did the countdown in the mirai-hen opening always include an extra person? ~ awkwardlaunch

Izayoi’s death was pointless and probably could’ve been avoided if he and Ruruka had actually checked the secret doorway first. ~ allhailthesupernaturalbooty

Yukizome can help Chiaki make friends, but god forbid helping Mikan with bullying.

How does Hajime having heterochromia make any sense? It’s cool but-

DR:Zero is almost completely missing. Timeline?

Sato doesn’t have a last name.

What’s up with Bandai? Like A+ character development with him. What’s with that voice? ~ knavishkitsunekasami

How did NG Codes even fucking work? like we know Tengan died for good, plus he never had a chance to monitor things. how did they work. how did they just sense that stuff was happening. some might be understandable, like maybe a high-tech bangle near your hand can tell when its opened, or when a punch is thrown, or when its) opening a door. but how is it supposed to sense that your fucking shadow was stepped on? that you saw violence? that you moved to the right? (In DR1 and SDR2 nearly every mechanic of main plot points was explained please don’t write this off as “anime logic lol” ~ chabashira-tenko

Are we really supposed to believe that Ruruka didn’t know how to make candy with alternate sweeteners that wouldn’t harm Seiko, even though she is the Ultimate Confectioner?

And that Seiko was able to make a drug that turns dogs giant and an antidote for a poison that she had only seen active once or twice with a set of drugs from her bag in less than 3 days, but she didn’t know how to make a sweetener that didn’t mix badly with her medicine?

And even if we accept that, how exactly is it that neither of them noticed that the whole “betrayal” thing was a misunderstanding? given that they both saw the giant dog and the boy who just so happened to be looking for a laxative? ~ lemonscentedpages (more in post)

WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH TOWA CITY IN GENERALwhat happened to the captives? to the kids with monokuma helmets? ~ dottymemequeen

I know everybody hates him but where’s haiji in all of this. we know he’s alive. and he was a prominent part of DR:AE, so don’t just pretend he’s not here. ~ kokichi-ohma (more in post)

Out of all the things that happened in dr3, I'm still confused as to how they surgically implanted luck into Izuru. ~ Anon at dr3discourse

I'm confused how did Kamukura/Chihiro/whoever tf created AI Nanami know that she had a mole on her right titt ~ Anon at dr3discourse

Why was asahina the only survivor in a separate branch?

Why was asahina sent to naegi’s trial as a proxy? Sure she’s his friend but why not send a professional?

What happens when monaca runs out of air in space? How is she even surviving up there?

What happened to Leon’s cousin?

WHY WAS FUYUHIKO HURT MORE FROM THE DEATH OF CHIAKI THAN HE WAS BY HIS OWN SISTER? ~ shslaoiasahina

so ya’ll know in future arc episode 2 when naegi wakes up and find asahina’s ‘dead’ body right? and ya’ll know that the ‘blood’ on her was actually *megumi ogata voice* ‘t0mato sAUce?’, which naegi woke up to find all over his hand? can someone please explain to me how the fUCK naegi smelled his hand like that, which was like…covered in tomato sauce, and not think ‘hmmmm this blood smells an awful lot like tomatoes lol’ like i call bullshit on the idea that any brand of tomato sauce can even vaguely resemble blood even for a second, but naegi literally lifts his ‘bloody’ hand to his face and doesn’t realise that he is fucking covered with fuckin tomato puree like what in the actual fUck ~mediati0nal-field

(In refrence to the above) NOT ONLY THAT: THE BLOOD ON HIS HAND IS GONE NEXT EPISODE ~shslaoiasahina

Why didn’t we get to see their special relationships with junko?

What happened to the junko land idea did she just drop that entirely?

How did asahina deal with yuta? Like sure it’s implied she knows what happened but naegi was the only one to say anything about it and then the topic is dropped.

In episode 6 or something naegi and asahina make a plan to just escape the building and they never get back to that plan or mention it again so its like they just wasted a good 3 minutes explaining something that wasn’t even relevant.

No one thanked asahina for how much she risked for naegi’s safety.

Why wasn’t asahina more concerned about the fake ketchup death? If i was her I’d be questioning that constantly.

How were the other 4 twilight syndrome girls even involved with twilight syndrome?

Why did mahiru fall into despair when chiaki died but not when sato died? They were so much closer to then than they were to chiaki like wtf.

Why did munakata think that killing everyone was going to stop the mutual killing? ~ pkpeachbomber

The bracelets need a sixteenth person to be set off in a way that makes sense,

Monokuma’s first appearance needs a sixteenth person to make sense,

Tengan’s motivations and plan make no sense when put together. ~ theleavesshaveeyes (Further explanation for each in the link)

What about the creators of New world program? We barely got anything at all about that!! It didn’t even show how Fujisaki, Matsuda and Gekkogahara created New world program or even how they met!!

In the end we’ve learned NOTHING about the real Gekkogahara! ~ xenonkunai (Further explanation in link)

When did Ryouta meet his classmates? In Kibou Hen everyone was so friendly with him and supportive but Impostor, Komaeda, Izuru and Mikan were the only ones who knew about him. ~greedy-doppelganger

How Ruruka got that hexagonal explosion in the floor

How everyone can be so okay with the FSHSL therapist TALKING THROUGH A COMPUTER???

How did Monika get that ketchup and gag knife into the building

WHERE DOES THE FOOD KEEP SPAWNING FROM??? MAGIC??

How Munakata got around the building without opening a door ~ goth-albino-ange

What was the reason for wanting to reopen Hope’s Peak Academy? Is that really more important when the whole world is still a complete mess and needs to be fixed? Especially now that a majority of the main heads leading Future Foundation are all dead. ~ princeasimdiya12

Even if we accept the fact that the rest of the 77th fell into despair by watching Nanami die,Komaeda falling into despair should not have been a thing??? cause like, he didnt even get a chance to know Nanami like the others did and yes, she and Chisa were the only ones who were nice to him but that doesnt change the fact that it feels very forced to make him fall into despair too.

HOW WAS HE ON A PLANE WHEN HE IS SCARED OF PLANES????????????? ~ komaeda-nagito-hope (trimmed for length)

In Hope Side, the 77th class are wearing their pre-Hope’s Peak clothes and it makes them look younger than Naegi.

Also, it feels like there’s a whole episode we missed between Future arc Episode 12 and Hope Arc.

Then, Despair Arc was more focused on Chisa, and Junko than the 77th class. PLUS it’s just to tell us: actually they were brainwashed, lol. Which contradicts SDR2! Because if they were brainwashed and Naegi saved them, it’s a fucking miracle! If they were actually manipulated and Naegi decided to save them anyway, that’s heroic treason!

Kirigiri was hinted to be alive since her ‘death’ but while she could have had a good role in Hope Arc and before, she just appears in the end like a flower and in perfect shape. ~ baka2niisan

They could’ve done so many things with Matsuda but just give him a pointless 5 second cameo to remind people about Danganronpa zero and what point we are on the timeline. So we have to assume that after Chiaki died, the events of Danganronpa Zero took place but that kind of doesn’t make sense. The class 77 students and Chisa weren’t doing anything for the past few days or weeks? Nothing happened a few weeks after the overseas location shut down? Junko was still able to get away with stuff for a few more weeks? ~ kaminagirl

We saw the SDR2 kids in despair in the first few episodes. Most of them had visual changes. Most were taller and were visibly older and most of them had changes like Gundam's face tattoos, Peko, Saionji, and Souda had new haircuts/longer hair, and other had whole new outfits like Teruteru, Nekomaru, and Owari. These were how they looked around the time the were captured by the FF. So how come in Hope arc when they came back the not only do they look like they did in high school they have the very same outfits they had on the first day of freshman year (which was 3-6 years ago)? ~ izurukamucutie

WHERE WILL MUNAKATA GO? Still a mystery…. ~ danganhonhonhooonn

According to junko (and syo i believe) the tragedy happened 1 year after the 78th class was inducted... but in dr3, it happened like right after they arrived?? um? ~ Anon @ dr3discourse

And when the hell did mukuro get close to naegi [in that time?] ~ cheinsaw @ dr3discourse

in sdr2 ch6 Hinata finds out from various emails that the future foundation saved the 77th class WITHOUT knowing they were the remnants of despair. in fact its stated that FF has no leads on the remnants.so whats that fight scene between Peko and Kuzuryuu etc. and Munakata and co.? they couldn't have fought the remnants because they were in their custody, and why would they fight the 77th class? they took them in! ~ cy-an

Nanami being a human contradicts several parts of SDR2. Read here! ~ mawgito

The type of brainwashing DR3 had would not have had the effect that the anime/games have shown. Read here! ~ nantendogamegirl

junko walks around with a bunch of brainwashed reserve course students and no one but munakata is suspicious

[Junko] builds an entire underground murder maze that is implied to be right around where Kamukura is held and no one notices

dr0 makes it clear jin was suspicious of mukuro but we hardly see her do anything compared to what junko does ! ~ theleavesshaveeyes

When Tengan told Munakata about who the traitor was, why did Munakata pretty much not bat an eye at that? I mean, yeah, he went all out and killed him and things but… did it ever occur to him that he was mastermind? How else would he have known about that?! Why didn’t he tell anyone about that?! I guess, it’s all because he’s edgy… ~ hajim8

Nagito has to bribe hanamura with lascivious pics of an underage idol to get access to the shsl chemist, without whose help he cannot possibly figure out how to drug some talent researchers? This guy can set up a bomb without help but finding some drugs is that complicated? why did he need to drug them in the first place? I understand that he fucked up at school, this has been established, but why send him to fuck off for most of the series? ~ mawgito (trimmed)

My fav plot hole in DR3 is when they tried to explain why Komaeda and Kamukura didn't recognize each other through memory wiping, because, by the logic they used, Kamukura would've wiped his memories of Nanami, which would negate pretty much the entire plot of Despair Arc. ~ Anon@firefly20ffm

the big thing about Kamukura's motivation in DR3 that bothers me, apart from the entire thing, is like? If he wanted to see hope vs despair, why did he go inside the program, knowing he would be erased? He could have just watched from the outside; I haven't seen episode 11 so correct me if I'm wrong and this was explained but like, he went in there willingly knowing he'd be erased, he couldn't even 'see' what was happening, so how could he see whether hope or despair was more interesting? ~ shsluckymushroom@dottymemequeen

They don't even explain how the SDR2 cast learned about the DR3 killing game. Literally all of Hope Arc is impossible since it relies on characters having info they couldn't possibly have. ~ Anon@firefly20ffm

Tanaka fights the devil dog after entering school. (you know, the fearsome pomeranian he references in dr2 ch1? the one he has an earring named after? the one he shouldn’t be able to remember if it happened after entering school? my personal explanation is that the incident he described in dr2 was unrelated to the Expand Pom one in despair arc episode 4. I mean, there were wanted posters written by him plastered around the classroom in that episode - my assumption is that he adopted the fluffy little fucker. but you might want to make that really clear since I know people were confused.) ~ mawgito (more in post, much of it is things already put here)

The scene where Hinata meets Nanami in the New world program wasn't even close to what they showed in the game. Link to screenshot compairisons.

-The tragedy only began because Junko ran into an anime nerd at the right place and time. Ignoring how stupid that is, Junko seemed to already have a plan out for the tragedy before entering the school. So was she just banking on finding someone to help her make brainwashing technology?

And speaking of Junko and her effortless brainwashing scheme that’s EXTREMELY out of characters for her. Despair was the one thing she WOULD put effort into. Her whole deal as a villain was to prove anyone can and will fall into despair, through their own weaknesses so it’s useless having hope. But now, she doesn’t care, she just wants instant despair, ten minutes in the microwave, add a dead kid and presto! You’re in despair. She would HATE that! She didn’t stick the DR1 kids in the room and brainwash them to kill each other did she? Hell why not add them to her army, she would be perfectly capable of it. In fact, she had the power to broadcast over the entire world, why not instead of the mutual killing, she just showed everyone her despair video? Now everyone’s in despair. Oh wait she didn’t do that. She would find it excessively boring, and thus would not do it. During the killing games she set up motives to exploit people and make them fall into despair enough to murder. Sure she’s impatient, but she is NOT lazy. There is a difference.

What was the point of the 74th class investigation plot point? For something that they spent so much time on, it went nowhere. The only information they actually used was suspecting Junko, which (although that in itself is a plot hole. Munakata can find out what Junko’s doing but Kirirgiri the Ultimate Detective can’t?) even taking away from the fact Juzo was blackmailed and had to attest to innocence, he could’ve figured it out by seeing her MARCHING AROUND WITH HER ARMY OF BRAINWASHED MIND SLAVES HOW HAS SHE NOT BEEN CAUGHT YET?

Ruruka and Seiko’s conflict is hard to care about when Ruruka is so blatantly in the wrong, and Seiko didn’t even actually betray her. It’s so one-sided-Izuru in chapter 0 didn’t care about Hope or Despair and was more concerned with “Using Junko like she used him.” He wasn’t trying to test the unpredictability of anything, in fact, he said he already had predicted everything. And of that everything neither hope OR despair won it was the creation of future.

Everyone hated Nagito in Despair Arc where (to their knowledge) he hadn’t done anything wrong right? So why in Hope Arc after all the stunts that he pulled in the simulation everyone’s now on good terms with him? Yeah, it’s cool to see him be forgiven but not out of the blue without explanation. I’d hope for the OVA to fix it but looking at the trailer, it’s not likely.

Speaking of things I wanted to happen but not out of nowhere, the waking up of the SDR2 kids. So apparently Hajime’s cool new talents that he has woke up everyone (I guess now having talent IS incredibly important, and all that talking about how it isn’t was for nothing) how? What specific talents did he use? Or are we just supposed to assume TALENT and boom everyone’s fine and well?

Who’s Chiakis dad? In SDR2 it made sense that Chihiro programmed her, but now we know Chihiro DIDN’T program her, it was memory bullshit so… Who was the dad she was reffering to in her free time events? Also speaking of free time events there’s a scene where she states she’s never tripped in her life. It makes sense if she’s an AI who recently came into existence but actually she’s a human who got well into her teenage years without tripping. Once. Then there’s Hajimes scenes in chapter 6 where he’s angsting about the possibility of Chiaki being remembered by no one. But now she has plenty of people to be remembered by so those scenes were pointless. I can’t be the only person out there who sees how much of a dump the concept of Human!Nanami takes on the character from SDR2 can I?

Since when does Hajime give a fuck about video games? He seemed disinterested in SDR2-Hell the fact they play video games is counter intuitive to the relationship they had in SDR2. Hajime pulled her away from video games to show her the world. But now video games are everything. Hell its the reason everyone in the class worships her in the first place.

What is the message of SDR2 now? Hell what were the struggles of all the characters to come to grips with themselves? Nothing was of their own will anymore. I guess the message is now “don’t own up to your mistakes because you didn’t actually make them but were brainwashed into making them. Now who wants a boat?”

Ryota had no redemption arc but was the only one of the new cast who got a happy ending. Look I get that he was remorseful but he still was taking help from someone he watched beat her sister, made what caused the end of the world and attempted to brainwash everyone with hope. Couldn’t you at least do something to make him deserve a happily ever after? Sorry kid, but crying doesn’t make up for anything ! ~ notkaedekaramatsu

The mastermind’s plan in future arc makes no fucking sense. [...] All of this could of been avoided if he just fucking ask Ryota or just do it himself. Like,why forcing him to upload the video in an extreme way? Not only it’s stupid as fuck but also very hypocritical! Erasing despair by causing even more despair with all of the members trying to kill each other, yes,that’ll definitely erase despair alright… This RUINS the whole future arc for me,because I thought Yukizome made MUCH more sense as a mastermind than this sad excuse of a villain… ~ raeraebow (trimmed for repeated point)

In Side:Despair Episode 4, it's shown that exams at HPA are basically talent shows, with students demonstrating their talents. While this makes sense for some, questions start to arise on how this applies to talents that are either far more abstract, like Good Luck, or just titles, like Student Council ~ mutiple sources

Yasuke Matsuda is the one of the three creators of the Neo World Program and also created the memory-erasing technology Junko used on herself to test it to make sure it would work in the first killing game she set up. Matsuda has played a role in almost every Dangan Ronpa game and (counting SDR2.5) he only had two cameos, both of them happen to be still images of him. His only major role was in Danganronpa Zero, which was the novel he was introduced in. Also The Steering Committee, Isshiki, Ryouko, Yuuto, and basically every character from DR0 are all major players here and they didn’t do anything aside from a few cameos. ~goneintothevoid

Chiaki has the same birthday as Chihiro and that always made perfect sense since Chihiro apparently created her until DR3like…Asahina and Mahiru have the same birthday but they have no connection, so in their world it’s just a coincidence. But Chiaki was supposed to be Chihiro’s creation, which is why they shared the same birthday, but DR3 changes that? so now it just…feels weird to call that a coincidence too?mmmm this probably makes no sense. ~ kitucan

Isn't Naegi still going to be executed? Since at the end of the DR3 anime, the Future Foundation is made to believe the 77th class were behind the FF killing game, the same group Naegi technically conspired with. ~Bakabread@jinjojess

#dr3 criticism #DR3 negativity #dr3 #long post #1001 plot holes #post by me

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cupcakeshakesnake · 7 years

Text

Watching Extremis for the first time

(Spoilers below)

-Who’s narrating?

-If you serve as executioners to everything... then you execute flies and mosquitoes and stuff like that?

-”The destruction of a Time Lord--” STOP RIGHT THERE, AND DON’T YOU DARE TELL ME THE DOCTOR’S GONNA BE EXECUTED.

-Holy shit the Daleks are actually an impressive race, they killed a ton of those Time Lords that are supposedly so hard to kill

MISSY??

-WTF

-”I didn’t expect you.” Well then who’d you expect, some other Time Lord who miraculously survived the Time War?

-Ah, gotta love them Daleks with their gossipy mouths, spreading rumors everywhere.

Why is his suit so worn. I’m concerned.

-”They can’t know I’m blind, Missy. no one can know.”

-HA

-FUCKING FINALLY

-SO IT WAS MISSY ALL ALONG

-CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THOSE HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS, MAYBE EVEN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF THEORISTS OUT THERE WHO GOT IT RIGHT

-”Please, I’ll do anything. Just let me live.” I...

-*phone notification jingle* wut

I DON’T LIKE THIS, I DON’T LIKE THE TITLE OF THAT EMAIL, OR THE COLOR OF THAT EMAIL, OR THE GALLIFREYAN LOADING BAR, OR THE GLITCHY GLITCH EFFECTS

Do all these people have fevers or is the weather just really hot??

-So I’m guessing he uses the shades to aid his vision now?

-Well, as long as he’s not completely in the black I’m fine

-”ve arrrre to com heerre dirrectly frrom the vaticaan”

-The pope???

-what is going on????!?!?!?

-”Pope Benedict. Lovely girl. What a night. I knew she was trouble, but she wove a spell with her castanets.“ wut

-”The Pope doesn't zoom round the world in the Popemobile, surprising people.“

-I am so confused and worried right now

I was kinda losing focus while reading the transcript of this episode and then BOOM, SUICIDE PICTURE FLASHES, WTF

-”Assume nothing. Assumption makes an ass out of you.”

-”I thought you'd moved out from here? “Yeah, slightly didn't work out. Second attempt on the way.”

-”I don't like knowing their names. I only get attached.”

-”Of course not. I have very strict rules about men.“ “Probably not as strict as mine.”

-”Oh, I'm sorry. Here's me thinking that she dragged some poor, terrified man home.“ Poor lady doesn’t know what’s going on, but talk about getting out of a tight spot.

-My favorite scene in the episode so far omg

-Ah yes, Bill’s house pipes that always go VWOOOORP VWOOOOORP.

-”Well, whatever this is, and actually it's not anything yet, it is absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.”

Gotta love how them popes come with a pre-installed church organ sound effect

-I only understood one word that sounded like “Doctor”.

“You’re all going to hell.”

-I love Bill omfg

-”Pope Benedict said that you were more in need of confession than any man breathing. But when the offer was made, you replied it would take too much time. On behalf of the Catholic Church, the offer stands. You seem like a man with regret on his mind.“

-Well, that went down in a bad way...

The very fancy scifi watch hidden under the very fancy fantasy-ish robes

The Doctor suspects Darth Sidious is up to something.

-Nope, nevermind, that was Nardole.

OHHH

-”Warning: I have full permission to kick your arse.”

-”Because I don't like being worried about. Around me, people should be worried about themselves.“ "Yeah, shall I tell you the real reason?“ "No.“ "Because the moment you tell Bill, it becomes real. And then you might actually have to deal with it.”

-This episode is about as religious as Doctor Who gets, in my opinion.

...dafuq

-We all know who this looks like

-The library of Blasphemy, huh? That’s quite some Hogwarts stuff there.

-”Harry Potter!” THANK YOU BILL!

-"The layout is designed to confuse the uninitiated.” "Sort of like religion, really.” I can confirm this true, for reasons. "You happy in those shades? Not dark enough for you?” “In darkness, we are revealed. Bill: When did he get so emo?

-”Well, take a few more minutes if you like. Knock yourself out. Actually do. Do that. Knock yourself right out.” Pffft

That’s one great big hood you got there. But pray tell, how do you see what’s in front of you?

-well shit

-”Without hope. Without witness. Without reward.“ What?

-”You'd be wizard at writing Christmas crackers, you two.”

-I thought Christmas crackers were paper sausages with confetti inside them?

Alright, where’s the orange portal?

oHh my GOD

-FUCKING JUMPSCARES!

-”I think there's someone in there.” "Yeah, we are very slightly getting that.”

wHat TEH FUCk

-”Hey, there’s wifi down here!” “Of course there's wifi. It's a library.“

-”Reading chair with a safety belt?”

-Apologies if I seem to be taking too many quotes directly from the episode(s), but I just love the Series 10 dialogue okay

-THAT GUY SHOT HIMSELF

-”Because you're sending us into the dark, after a man with a gun.“ Not as dangerous if said man is dead...

-WEll Nardole got a little weird there

-Bill: *voice cracks* “nARdOLE”

-Nardole: *sees hand* *voice goes up by two octaves* “HIEWIEW”

That’s a pretty gun, but it wouldn’t do much damage in battle.

-”It would be stupid to go and look.” *goes to look*

-DON’T BURN THE DOCTOR’S BRAIN DON’T YOU DARE MOFFAT

-NOW THAT MOFFAT IS ACTUALLY WRITING THE EPISODES, I AM GOING TO BE DOUBLE WARY OF EVERYTHING

WHAT?!?!!

-WHAT THE EVERLOVING RASSILON FLIPPING A TABLE ON A HARLEY DAVIDSON?!?!?!

THE PENTAGON??

the flipping kind of videogame portal hub is this

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, aliens freak out as a bald head pops outta nowhere from the wall of their living room.

-”Cardinal, it worked. I can see.” Yes!

-”Not well enough, not yet.” Okay...

-”The thing about the universe is, whatever you need, you can always borrow, as long as you pay it back. I just borrowed from my future. I get a few minutes of proper eyesight, but I lose something. Maybe all my future regenerations will be blind. Maybe I won't regenerate ever again. Maybe I'll drop dead in twenty minutes." NO!

-”You know, I've read a lot of books that this chair would be quite useful for. Moby Dick. Honestly, shut up, and get to the whale.“ omfg

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CHILD OF GROOT AND A SILENT

-”This is not a game.” “This is a game.”

-Why is that CERN scientist so excited, and more importantly, why does he seem drunk and why is everyone in the cafeteria so gloomy?

WELL THAT ANSWERS THE LAST QUESTION

Reading a legendary script on Microsoft Word.

-(On an unrelated note, I was saving these screenshots and naming them as each alphabet. The one right above happens to be Z.)

-(Could be some other text program but that’s what I think)

-So the screen was getting blurry not because the BBC didn’t want us to commit suicide but because the Doctor was going blind again

-GEEZ THOSE MONKS ARE CR-REEPY ASSES

-THEY’D DO WELL IN A HORROR GAME

Don’t you dare tell me the whole first half of Series 6 was set in a fake world or virtual reality or something like that

-Were those white things all portals to a virtual world

-At least Bill and Nardole got out safely.

-”Are you okay?” “nOOO - Yes. NooO”

“Could be the Doctor.”

-Let’s hope not

-Let’s really, really hope not.

-”They’re projecting everything.” CALLED IT

-AND THE PEOPLE IN THE HOLOGRAMS REALIZED THEY LIVE IN HOLOGRAMS?!?!

-But what if??

-What if our lives are really just holograms

-(I went on Omegle to get a stranger to think of a random number, but ended up answering questions about English)

-(This one person was asking “what does ‘single out’ mean”)

-”You know, like the holodeck on Star Trek, or a really posh VR without a headset. Through there, those places, that's basically Grand Theft Auto.”

-More and more references each episode, huh, BBC?

I uh... happened to pause here so...

-”Please don’t let me be right.”

-Oh shizzles

WHAT IN THE NAME OF A RANDOM DALEK

-NARDOLE IS NOT REAL??

-WHAT IF BILL ISN’T REAL??

-WHAT THE EFF??????!??!?!

Why did the blood change color?

-’Total communication blackout at the White House’? hat happened?

-Did all the people in the White House commit suicide and how did the Doctor come here?

-Ah, the portal yes...

-cold fraggling shizzles.....

-”The Veritas tells of an evil demon who wants to conquer the world. But to do it, he needs to learn about it first. So he creates a shadow world, a world for him to practise conquering, full of shadow people who think they're real.”

-OUR WORLD IS A SIMULATION GAME FOR HIGHER BEINGS, CONFIRMED

The screen ‘popped’ a bit here - it shook a little as if it zoomed slighly in then back out very quickly, accompanied by a tapping sound as if someone had knocked (into) it. Not sure if others saw this too or if it’s something with the site that I’m watching this on.

-Okay, I’m watching the Doctor explain this shit to Bill, and I’m having about as much of a crisis as Bill here

-And then the Super Mario mention though

-Please don’t tell me the past six episodes were holograms

-”A puppet Doctor for you to practice killing.”

-The Doctor Puppet account was worried about that line, yes

-Was that the email he got at the beginning of the episode??

wHOA chill please

At least the last six episodes weren’t all fake.

-Then when did the hologram-reality start?

-”It means I'm a scary, handsome genius from space and I'm telling you no, she's not out of your league.”

-”I have the feeling that we're going to be very busy. Call her tonight.“ Aww

-I hope Bill actually gets a girlfriend sometime this season

o i g e t o f f

-wHAT

*insert relatable quote about Monday mornings*

Some fast fingerwork there... NO I DID NOT INTEND TO SOUND LIKE THAT

-The guy is becoming uneasier by the second

-I don’t like the whirring sound??

-How are they gonna move her to the box in the middle of the water

It ends here?!

-Oh yeah right... They’re supposed to be a three-parter. Followed by another three-parter to finish off the season.

-Welp, looking forward to the next episode and possibly a lot more things to freak out over!

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fair-fae · 7 years

Note

You know, I'm not a drama person, I don't like it, but it came up on my dash so much that I kind of had to read it. All of that nonsense could've been avoided if you didn't even take it to the public. Judging people for THEIR characters that THEY made and can do WHATEVER the hell they want with them? Oh woo ho good job, you're so popular for taking the "barrage" of it. No. all it did was prove that you're a D-bag and I've got a nice, long list of people to block now and avoid contact with.

Okay, anon. I haven’t bothered setting the record straight with most of this shit, because I know folks like you will continue to believe what you want to believe and hear what you want to hear, just like you’re doing now. But I’ll bite. You’d think all of you getting onto your soapbox about how you shouldn’t judge or attack others wouldn’t keep talking shit about a situation you know nothing about and/or are terribly misinformed about. So I’ll enlighten you with what actually happened.

A while back, the person in question got into an argument with some people on the RPC, trying to tell them that their interpretation of the lore was wrong. Rather than leaving it at that, when he effectively got shut down there, he proceeded to take a screenshot of the conversation and post it on his tumblr, complete with a rant about the people who disagreed with him, their opinions are so wrong and awful, how dare they disagree with him, etc. essentially playing the victim when he was the one to try to badger them for their opinions in the first place. He also left their names, icons, signatures, etc. in full view.I responded and told him he probably shouldn’t be trying to harass any other people about the lore considering his own character concept (thus, you would think, making my opinion on his character pretty clear). Why? Because it’s fucking true.I don’t give a shit about the lore or whether anyone follows it. Probably every single one of my own characters at least bends the lore. But at least have the self-awareness and respect for your fellow role-players to say “yeah, my character breaks the lore” or not get your jimmies rustled every time someone says “oh, yeah, his character is lore breaking.” You wanna break the lore? Cool. Own up to it. And if you do break the lore, don’t try to force everyone else into following it–especially when you can’t even admit you break lore and instead stretch the lore to try so hard to justify your entirely lore-breaking character concept. Don’t try to heckle people for presumably doing what you do but won’t admit. Granted, these people weren’t even breaking lore anyway, which makes his insistence that they were even more ridiculous.So after some excuses about how he was trying to start some intellectual discussion or something and not just drag these people despite featuring their identities and primarily just complaining about them throughout the post, he admitted he should have at least edited out their names and apologized. Great! You’d think that should be the end of it. I didn’t have anything against him at that point, but also had no desire/reason to associate with him, so I didn’t. A couple months go by. Some post comes across my dash. A girl in the community is doxxing her online ex-boyfriend in a callout post about him for unexpectedly breaking up with her because she “thinks” he was lying to her about serious issues and “believes” he was cheating on her. Because I’m a loud and opinionated person, and because that’s some heinous thing to do, I spoke out against it (via a post on my own blog without naming names, mind you, because I’m not going to hijack someone else’s post with negativity or call them out by name). The girl found it, assumed it was about herself, flipped out, and then of course I was the bad guy for saying doxxing isn’t okay. And then the person in question joins in. Not even to discuss the topic at hand, but to dredge up the old drama about how I was so mean to him and he did nothing wrong, etc. A pretty crappy 180 turn for a person who apologized and made it seem like there were no hard feelings, but whatever. Someone saw that he obviously didn’t like me, and seized the chance to try to talk shit and spread rumors because they knew he’d give them the platform. They sent him some anon about how I hate women (lmao). And of course, he published it, with no skepticism or disagreement, only more commentary about how I’m mean and awful. I went to respond, only to find myself blocked. So I went on about my life because it’s not that big of a deal, but hey. The moment you talk shit about me, especially in a venue where I can’t respond, especially facilitating some lies and BS rumors, especially after leading me to believe we’d made amends–you aren’t off limits. You don’t get spared niceness and politeness. Is that mean and petty? Probably.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’ve never claimed to be a nice person.Now, to the horrible, awful thing I did to make this “public.” Fast forward to yesterday. I’d kept my mouth shut and left him alone. In a section of the RPC that doesn’t get a ton of traffic, largely because you have to make an account on the website and then manually opt in to this specific forum, several of us were discussing an absolutely awful person which is an unrelated story I won’t get into. Someone asked something along the lines of, “Are you guys talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy?” I responded with basically “No, we’re not talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy.” And that was it. We moved on with the conversation because he wasn’t who we’d been talking about. His name, tumblr, server info, in game race, class, etc. was all never given. No identifiable information beyond a very brief and tongue-in-cheek description of his RP character comprised of words taken directly from his own wiki, tumblr info, talk of his own character and RP posts.Someone saw the conversation, and based on our intentionally shitty description, was able to accurately guess who we were talking about and send him an anon to tell him about it. You’d think that would be pretty telling about his own RP, and this anon’s interpretation of it. He answered the anon in a long rant about me that featured both my in game name and my tumblr handle. In case you need me to spell this out for you, he went public with it first. I’ll also remind you that I was blocked, so I wasn’t/couldn’t be following him, and I was not properly @tagged in this rant, so I never would have seen it unless someone told/linked me, or someone I follow eventually reblogged it. And I honestly can’t imagine the level of narcissism it takes to write a long personal post full of wangst and victim-playing every time you hear a person had something negative to say about you or your RP character (not even by name–and by picking words from his own descriptions of his character), especially a person you have had issues with in the past and who you openly shit-talked yourself prior. Who does that? Lord knows my blog would be overflowing. Not everyone will like you, especially not people you jabbed at first. Especially not with an off the wall RP concept. Especially not with you trying to pass that concept is lore abiding and just “unusual.” Especially not with you trying to tell other people they’re “wrong” about the lore. Especially not with your character being a squicky, walking fetish and immortal jailbait. And that’s not even touching other things people have told me about this person that rubbed them the wrong way. Move on with your life.However, I found out about the post thanks to the OP himself when he unblocked me just to send me the link to the post and then before I could even read/respond to the post, sent me a barrage of IM’s still playing the innocent victim which is grating enough on its own but also included him straight up lying about ever posting/saying anything about me, insisting he’d done nothing to me, had nothing against me, this was so out of the blue and uncalled for, etc. When I pointed out this wasn’t the case, that I had seen and read the posts firsthand because blocking me doesn’t prevent me from seeing his posts, he began to lie instead about the contents of said posts and pulled some gaslighting bullshit about how I had just “misread” them, all the while either willfully or coincidentally not seeming to understand anything I said to him (I mentioned him publishing the anon about how I hate women at least twice and the response was always “I never said you hate women!!” Well no shit). He kept insisting that I had “gone behind his back” and that if I had a problem I should “say it to his face” despite the fact he’d had me blocked and that I’m not a douchey enough person to try to contact him despite that, and despite the fact that he had “gone behind my back” and not “said it to my face” twice now prior, and had done just that with his post about the folks from the RPC as well.He also insisted that the tumblr post was meant just to innocently “bring the issue to my attention to clear things up” despite me having no way to see it on my own unless by coincidence, and despite him proving to be willing and able to send me IM’s instead, which you’d think could render the need for a public post moot. When I pointed this out, he promptly deleted the post, lest anyone else see through his bullshit to what he was really trying to do.After my initial response to his wall of IM’s, he sent another wall this time with more insults and accusations, and promptly blocked me so I couldn’t respond. So yes, I made a vaguepost, I know, how awful, how dare I. A vague post vague enough that only someone who had seen his post, or who heard about it from him otherwise, would know who and what it was referencing. Until he responded to it himself, that is and unblocked me again to send me more angry messages to which I responded by permanently blocking him instead because this game of blocking and unblocking sure was getting old.Cue his charming friends sweeping in to tell me to eat a dick, making false accusations against my RP partner and I, sending me threats on Discord, telling people I flashed my breasts for money, etc. And the other person? The one who brought him up in the first place who I had only been responding to? Whose name he was given, was aired in the same public post on his blog as mine? As far as I know, she hasn’t gotten any hate, probably not a single message. And I’m glad, because she shouldn’t get any, she doesn’t deserve it. But at the same time, sure seems sketchy that the person who did the same exact thing as me–and who did it first–has not provoked anyone’s ire, not even been messaged. The public post in reply to the anon who named her, even, was aimed 100% at me. Now isn’t that funny. It’s almost like this was an excuse for people who already had beef with me to try to take shots at me and pretend it was justified. It’s almost like all you anon keyboard warriors don’t even know how this started or what actually happened.And now I’m going to talk about something else. You cannot do “whatever the hell you want” with your character. RP is a two-way (or more) street. There is a real person behind each and every character. These people are looking for fun just like you, and are every bit as deserving, and your fun shouldn’t impede on theirs. We are all allowed equal parts of fun.So when people play their weird ass lolicon/shotacon/pedobait characters, who is having fun? What if the other person in the RP was sexually abused as a child and you’re dredging up terrible old memories for them and making light of their pain? What if they’re a parent worried for their child, or worse, the parent of a child who’s already been abused? What if they’re an actual pedophile and seeing you RP this is tempting them, making them think they’re desires are normal and okay? Hell, what if they’re a goddamn ordinary person who finds it creepy and uncomfortable?What if the fetishized, futa ERP avatar is interacting with someone who is trans or nonbinary or intersex IRL? What if it’s triggering them (in the genuine, real sense of the word)? What if the walking affront against the lore character talking about being an Voidsent Half-Primal Garlean Spy in the middle of the Quicksand is ruining everyone’s immersion–particularly when they refuse to play along as others respond realistically IC and try to kill them or arrest them or kick them out? What if the OP af infinitely-stronger-than-everyone-else-around-him character is making the RP unfun for every other RPer involved because their characters can’t do anything but get beaten up or bow to his whims unless they stoop to godmodding or suddenly beefing up their own character?People can and will judge your character. Those judgments are usually best left kept themselves or quietly shared between trustworthy friends. But when your character trespasses on the OOC fun of the role-players around you? Sorry, my guy, people have every right to speak up. And all this nonsense? All this nonsense was a small handful of people who were already pretty nasty showing their true colors and getting told to pipe the fuck down. A pretty good outcome, if you ask me. So, please, block me, anon. My life will be better without idiots like you in it, and the same probably goes for anyone else you intend to block. Your nameless, ignorant, anonymous presence will not be missed–or noticed, for that matter.

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jamesbyerj · 4 years

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Modder to Developer - muppetpuppet

Today we have a special treat. We caught up with Tomas Sala, a.k.a. the esteemed Skyrim modder muppetpuppet, about his upcoming game release and his history in modding. For those unfamiliar with his work, muppetpuppet created one of the first "new world" mods for Skyrim back in 2012 - Moonpath to Elsweyr. [b][b]Thank you for joining us for this interview Tomas (aka [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/3232189]muppetpuppet[/url]). [/b]So, going back to the very start, when and how did you first get into gaming?[/b] I actually started straight out of art school in 2001, we started a studio in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. But at that time there was no self-publishing, I think Steam wasn't live yet and iPhones would be years away. So we rolled into educational and advertising work for hire, making games for anyone and everyone, it took many years to progress into entertainment games properly eventually creating PSVR exclusives for Playstation as games for the Wii, Switch and mobile. [b]How long have you been working in the gaming industry and what roles have you taken up during that time?[/b] I've been working there since 2001 and have always been a multirole person. I'm a 3D artist by trade, but I'm more than handy with a scripting language and nowadays C#. I've also been creative director and game designer over the years. I think that diversity is now coming into its own with The Falconeer. [b] Tomas is the sole developer of the upcoming game "[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135260/The_Falconeer/]The Falconeer[/url]". From the screenshots and gameplay videos, it looks fantastic. For our readers who've not heard of the game, how would you describe it?[/b] Well, it's a throwback to the games I loved as a kid, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)]Freelancer[/url], [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_TIE_Fighter]Tie Fighter[/url] even [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Skies_(video_game)]Crimson Skies[/url], and - of course - a good dose of open-world love inherited from Skyrim thrown in. So basically, you are a pilot or rider of a giant Falcon and you serve as a mounted warrior for your faction, doing air -combat missions as well as open-world exploration. Someone online described it as "what would happen if Gandalf had ridden into Mordor on a giant eagle..... but with lasers", which is a fair description. The actual combat gameplay is very WWI-WWII style close up dogfighting but with giant falcons, dragons and other fantastical creatures. [center][youtube]3viT_KoZ538[/youtube][/center] [b]It's not just the game itself you created. I've been reading the [url=https://www.thefalconeer.com/world/]extensive lore and set-dressing[/url] you've meticulously written to create a cohesive world for your story to unfold in. What can you tell us about the setting of The Falconeer?[/b] Well, I love lore-heavy worlds, for me, it makes exploring an open world so much better if the setting makes sense and has depth. The world of the Falconeer is called the Ursee and it's a bleak yet beautiful icy ocean world. Mankind has always had a hard time surviving on it, and societies have been founded and collapsing for millennia, leaving the seafloor scattered with wrecks and ancient relics. One major faction steering these societies are the Mancer Order, an organisation that has access to a wide array of technologies hidden away in their massive vaults. They manipulate and organise the other factions by doling out these technologies through permits and grants. If a king has the Mancer's favour he'll get steam engines, if he loses it, he might find his competitor suddenly has machine guns. The Mancer order doesn't involve themselves with the daily politics of factions such as the empire in which most of the game takes place, they have a hidden agenda with a long term goal. Part of the different campaigns you'll participate in, inside this world, is to figure the true goal and history of the Mancer Order, and with it the Ursee. [b]In a [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0VJAaZpkfM]video by Digital Foundry[/url] covering The Falconeer, they mentioned that the entire game is created without using any conventional textures, is that true? If so, what made you choose this approach to game design?[/b] Indeed, it's better described as no pre-made textures. So I don't work with a painting or material editor or even something like photoshop to create the material expression of my world. Rather I use procedural tricks and fairly abstracted shaders to do the heavy lifting. So, for instance, the snow on objects is a [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise]Perlin noise[/url] I generate in the game, and I then also use that for lava and water foam. The same goes for the colouring of the world, It's all done with gradients based on lighting and atmospheric parameters and values. It basically means I can create models and paint them fairly simple and have the game itself add a lot of detail and environmental colouring. I've had comments saying this must be because I'm lazy, and I certainly like an efficient art pipeline. But it isn't 100% the case - the effort I put in to create certain effects would be many times less if I'd simply use a texture. Take the clouds, creating those without textures was a crazy endeavour iterated over months. The same goes for the ocean another very advanced effect, stuff that certainly wouldn't have been possible a generation or so ago. The reason I do it is mostly twofold. One, it forces me to adhere to a very strict esthetic, and it keeps everything I make very, very compatible and unified. Giving the game a very clean and stark look while having radically different objects, buildings, vehicles and so forth in it. I both love how that looks and how "together" it makes everything feel. Secondly, it forces me to find novel and original solutions to visual designs, I cannot use "out of the box" clouds, water or lighting, so I have to take a different path to get there. Both the journey of that as well as the end result are usually novel and interesting, which is what appeals to me. [b]The Falconeer uses Unity at its core. What did you consider when choosing the engine for your game?[/b] I've used Unity through my work, so I was familiar with it, which is a huge boon because knowing what you are capable off is quite a good thing to have, especially alone. You don't always want to dive off the deep end. That said I'm quite attracted by Unreal's blueprints and after the Falconeer is done, I aim to dive into that for a bit as well. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581950089-410859194.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581950095-1401396009.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]Some Unity games allow mods (or can be modded with tools like Harmony), will The Falconeer have any scope for user-created content? [/b] It's something under consideration, but modding and even game development are very distinct from enabling the creation of mods for your game. So basically because I'm working by myself it's quite a daunting task, but it is very much on my mind. It's also one of the few aspects I'd consider having external help with, as it's just such a specialisation to create adequate tooling and an open framework from the ground up for your game. [b]In terms of modding, your biggest achievement has to be [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/9782]Moonpath to Elsweyr[/url]. When you released it in 2012, it was one of the only true "new world" mods. That must have been quite an undertaking, considering the Creation Kit had only been out for just over a week at the time. What can you remember about the process of putting it all together?[/b] Well, I remember getting into a bit of a creative frenzy after diving into a few tutorials. At my work, we had just wrapped up a kid-friendly RPG for a local dutch theme park ("[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raveleijn]Raveleijn[/url]"), so there was lots of curiosity on how the big games did certain things. I think there was already a group of people trying to use the existing NIF tools and update them for Skyrim. Being a 3D artist grasping some of the odd quirks and oddities of that format and the tools seemed less of an issue. And within a very short while I had some [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/10312]trees and foliage[/url] imported. I think those were the palm trees and other greeneries uncommon to Skyrim. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581947917-582928013.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581947923-1718214276.jpeg[/img][/center] From there I just went crazy, first with adjusting some of the material properties of default Skyrim objects, such as turning the snow into green moss (just fiddling got pretty good results fast). I think I then set about exploring the library of atmospheric fog and light FX and tweaking those to create a tropical vibe. So initially I released a player home really quick, it's actually a really simple and manageable mod type to start with. What then happened is that the community just jumped on board and started offering voice acting, pointing out bugs and even assisting with my horrible spelling. That in itself was a ridiculous driver to continue, the player base (and other modders) was always waiting at the Moonpath Nexus page, ready with more feedback, more requests and more general helpfulness. I think up to that point I had never had such a direct audience engagement, and it was a complete trip that burned away every free hour I had for about six months until most of what is now the Moonpath was there. [b]I noticed that both The Falconeer and Moonpath to Elsweyr feature airships, would you say that's something a staple in your creative works? [/b] I think the need to fly away and escape has a very literal form in much of the art and games I create, so I'd say that's something that's just a part of me. I'm also a huge fan of tall ships and historic sailing ships in general, so visually I'm always drawn to ships and airships. [b]For Skyrim Special Edition, you entrusted the development of Moonpath to Elsweyr to [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/1240951]Illiani[/url] was this a difficult decision for you?[/b] No not at all, there was a point where I realized I needed to focus on other things and long before Special Edition, I opened up the Moonpath and all its assets to any modder that wanted to use them. The [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/24587]Dev Aveza[/url] already showed what sharing things could lead to (I think it might actually still use my base airship model underneath all their epic expanding they did to it). So no the community was part of creating the Moonpath and happy to see other modders take it onwards to new places. And improving it in many places I might add. [b]How do you feel modding Skyrim helped (or hindered!) your career as a game developer?[/b] It has been an incredible boon because the direct contact with the community is a unique perspective which is hard to get when doing a more classical game dev project. I've also met plenty of people in the industry that played the Moonpath and it's opened many cool conversations over the years. I even met some people from Bethesda who knew it (I guess they kept close tabs on the modding scene in the early days). [b]If you were to work on an Elder Scrolls title with everything you know now, is there anything you'd do differently?[/b] I have nothing but admiration for how Skyrim was made. I've made my own educated guesses on why certain choices were made and understand the lineage of the creation kit, and I think it delivered an unparalleled game world and modding environment. I wouldn't presume to be able to improve on that. I do really like the more "out there" aspects of the TES lore and would love to see that remain centre stage in a new iteration. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581951105-1941102210.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]Important question - when do you expect we can get our hands on The Falconeer?[/b] Hahaha. Definitely later this year, working as hard as I can. ;) It'll be playable at [url=https://east.paxsite.com/]PAX East[/url] (Feb 27 - Mar 1) for those wanting a gameplay taste. [b]Do you have any final words of wisdom for aspiring game devs in the Nexus Mods community? [/b] I think for those who want to use modding as a stepping stone it's good to keep realizing how much a part of the wider game industry modding has become. It's part of game development. And there might be moments where people showing off their mods can get apologetic because it's "just" a mod and they fear people might still see it as something derivative or adapted from something original. But I've never met anyone in the games industry who isn't a huge fan of mods. Mods are such creative original works of art by themselves. So if you make something don't be afraid to show it to any game developer or artist you might meet, good chance they love mods, are gamers themselves or have even modded in the past. [b]Thank you for joining us Tomas, we wish you the best of luck with the release![/b] [line] A big thank you to Tomas for taking the time to speak to us! If there's an author or mod project you'd like to know more about, send your suggestions to [b][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/64597]BigBizkit[/url][/b] or [b][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/31179975]Pickysaurus[/url][/b]. [center][url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135260/The_Falconeer/] Add The Falconeer to your Steam wishlist to get notified when it releases. [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1581950708-1759106569.png[/img][/url][/center] Published first at Modder to Developer - muppetpuppet

#Video Games #PC Gaming

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Lords of Time: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Narrator: “It was not continued.”

Lords of Time

United States

Hollyware (developer and publisher) Released 1992 for the Amiga

Date Started: 3 January 2019

Date Ended: 2 February 2019

Total Hours: 25

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

Summary:

Lords of Time is a fantasy RPG with a science fiction framing story. A character called “Major Thom” tries to find a way back to Earth after an aerospace accident deposits him in a fantasy kingdom called The Realm. The game uses an update of the Faery Tale Adventure engine with an axonometric interface, action-oriented combat, experience-based leveling, and a day/night cycle that force the player to manage hunger and fatigue. Adventure game-style inventory puzzles carry the player across multiple episodes as he uncovers the lore of The Realm. The game has some fun moments, but a horrible combat system and threadbare story ultimately hurt this one.

*****

Lords of Time is a 12-hour game that manages to double its duration by making it unclear what you need to do next. Its open game world is a bit of an illusion because to actually solve the plot, the player has to visit places in a specific order. This results in a lot of backtracking, and because of the relentless spawning of enemies, backtracking in this game–actually, even just “tracking”–is an exercise in frustration. In previous entries, we saw how much random exploration I had to do to advance between points that would have taken but minutes with a walkthrough.

Crossing the ocean as a wyvern.

The same dynamic was at play in the final episodes. I could have won in two hours with some foreknowledge; instead, it took me about five. In the previous entries, I had received the jeweled key to the island keep from the dwarf king and the “Mage Nullification Spell” from the Druid Temple. I saw no reason not to go right for the island keep. I used the “Wyvern Morphing” spell to cross a strait at the north end of the map and fly to the only island where the “island keep” could possibly be located.

There were two sets of mountains on the island. One had a bunch of windows but no entry point.

It looked pretty cool, though.

The second had a large door that opened with the jeweled key. It led to an underground area full of water. Unfortunately, the only paths forward were blocked by locked gates, and no keys I had (nor my lockpicking ability) would open them.

“Sewer-like tang” is an unpleasant phrase.

Sighing, I returned to the mainland and messed around a bit while figuring out my next move. Around this time, I tried a commenter’s suggestion to cast “Portal Activation Spell” on one of the little shrines I’d encountered. It worked. The spell moves the character among four shrines: one on the north coast, one on the south coast, one on the west coast, and one outside Castleguard. These shrines made it a lot faster to move around the map. Between them and “Wyvern Morphing,” I bypassed a lot of the frustration with random combats.

Activating the portal at one of the shrines.

Consulting my notes, I realized that the only lead I hadn’t pursued involved using dragonsbane to deal with the previously-encountered dragon. My notes said that I discovered its cave on Wyvern Mountain, but after crawling all over the mountain for about an hour to no avail, I realized I must have made a mistake. Sure enough, I found the cave a few klicks to the west, at the base of the dwarven mountain.

As I entered, I donned the Druid Cloak, thinking it might protect against the dragon’s breath. I then opened my satchel and grabbed a handful of dragonsbane. The game asked what I wanted to apply it to. I said my sword. It said that the goop just slid off. I tried again and specified my homing daggers. Again, the attempt was fruitless. No other weapon worked either. It turns out that the dragonsbane–for no sensible reason–only works with regular daggers, and I had sold or dropped all of mine. Meanwhile, the cloak did protect me, but the dragon proved immune to every other weapon or spell.

What if I wanted his head?

I made my way back to Castleguard, bought a few regular daggers, and returned. This time, the dragonsbane knocked the dragon out (though it notably didn’t kill him), allowing me to scoot past him into his cavern. In his treasure chamber, I looted a bone, some gems, some gold, and a “slimy key.”

Looting the dragon’s lair.

The slimy key–of course–turned out to open those grates in the caverns below the island keep, but it really doesn’t make any sense that the dragon would have had it.

The game has another surprise up its sleeve when it comes to the slimy key: it only works three times, after which it crumbles away. There are more than three grates in the island keep caverns. If you use it on the “wrong” doors–which of course there’s no way to tell–you enter a walking dead state and you have to reload from outside and try again.

I hope that was the last time I needed it!

Ultimately, I found my way through. The caverns led up to a dungeon full of cells and a torture chamber. New enemies appeared, including slimes and floating eyes. Skeleton keys unlocked the prison cells (fortunately, I’d bought a bunch in some previous session), and from the prisoners I learned that the wizard Kruel was occupying the tower above, and that I could reach him from the “mirror room” via the fourth mirror from the north.

Freeing a prisoner in Kruel’s dungeon.

I couldn’t find anything to do in the torture room, even though there were some interesting graphics of some prisoners in stocks and one on a torture rack. As we’ll see, I should have tried harder.

The level above the dungeon had several cabinets and beds along with wandering enemies. There wasn’t much to do here, but I appreciated the ability to sleep.

In the level above that, I found the mirror room. Following the prisoner’s instructions, I looked at the fourth mirror from the north end of the room, and was sucked through (a one-way trip) into Kruel’s lair.

A flying eyeball and a slime killed me while I took this screenshot.

It was a small area. I was immediately accosted by demons as I entered. Kruel was standing in a little throne room casting spells at me, including “Sleep” and “Paralysis,” but I had plenty of healing and spell point potions to counter them. Confidently, I ran up to Kruel and cast the “Mage Annulment Spell.”

The game told me that the spell uses concepts I didn’t understand. I messed around a bit more, trying different spells, poison, and so forth, but I couldn’t find anything that would defeat Kruel.

How come I don’t have that spell?

I don’t know why I made this assumption, but what I assumed was that my character hadn’t taken “Advanced Spellcasting” at the guild in Castleguard. I mean, I know I had taken it–I had a screenshot and everything–but I assumed that something must have caused me to reload after taking it, and that I had forgotten to take it again. Sighing, I reloaded from outside the keep, flew back to the mainland, returned to Castleguard, and took the course again. I still couldn’t cast the spell.

Now I was lost again. I ended up revisiting several places, including Bessak’s Keep and the king’s castle, just to see if anything changed. Down in Murkvale, I realized I’d never rented the raft or gotten the two raft propulsion spells that makes it move. This all turned out to be a waste of time, and I’m still not sure what purpose the raft serves since you can just wade through the water between the islands.

Well, this was pointless.

After a long time, I decided I must have missed something in the lower parts of the island keep, so I returned to try again. This time, I realized that the figure on the torture wheel must in fact be Bessak, and that the five sticks in the ground south of him, which I had regarded as some kind of fence or barrier, were actually levers that I needed to manipulate to stop the wheel.

Each of five levers had three positions, and it took me a while to find the right combination. I think you’re supposed to watch their effect on the wheel–some of them slow the wheel down, some speed it up–and discern the combination accordingly. The change in speed is hard to perceive. I just made a list of the 3^5 = 243 possibilities and worked my way through them, getting the correct combination when the list was half done.

Bessak crawled off the wheel, thanked me for my help, and said that he’d help me get home. He told me he’d meet me in Kruel’s throne room after he got a “certain spell from the Druids,” taking off before I could tell him I already had the spell.

“Wait! I already . . . bollocks.”

Back I went to the throne room. This time, Bessak appeared in the northwest corner and started casting spells at Kruel. The two locked in their magic duel while I accomplished nothing fighting endlessly-spawning demons and gulping potions. Finally, I ran up to Bessak and the game offered me the ability to give him something. I gave him the “Mage Annulment” spell.

After that, I ran over to Kruel and began attacking him. I don’t know whether my attacks brought an end to the battle or whether I just had to wait a certain amount of time, but eventually Kruel admitted defeat.

The lack of a comma suggests a big change in my quest reward.

Bessak opened a portal and I ran through.

�� “. . . and maybe not let those demons follow you.”

As I entered, Bessak commented that he “forgot to ask what world [I was] from.”

Did he just choose a “default” world?

I thus awoke on a rocky landscape with two suns. Paralyzed, I watched in horror as an army of dwarves riding wolves bore down upon me. And then the game ended on a cliffhanger. A screen offered my final statistics and score.

Maybe I arrived after the events of 2010?

Who is hoarding dwarves?

This entry is pretty long already, but let’s do a quick GIMLET anyway:

3 points for the game world. The backstory is original but also pretty silly, the main quest (simply to return home) is uninspiring, and the world is distressingly static–to the point that doors close and re-lock if you leave the screen and return. NPCs give the same hints no matter where you are in the game. It would have been a lot better if it had been structured as a series of quests from the king that in some way helped The Realm while simultaneously helping you find a way home.

2 points for character creation and development. There’s no creation; everyone plays the inane “Major Thom.” The development system has you acquire more hit points and spell points with experience and training, but combats never really seem to get any easier, and development is thus largely unrewarding.

4 points for NPC interaction. There are scattered NPCs–far less than you would expect in a world of this size–who impart information about The Realm and help you with the quest. As noted before, they’re quite static, and there’s no opportunity for role-playing in your dialogues with them.

The game’s few NPCs are useful but one-way.

3 points for encounters and foes. The small list of monsters is unimaginative, and the monsters themselves mostly indistinguishable except by graphic. The respawn rate really kills the fun of exploration. Puzzles are mostly of the inventory type, although there a couple of exceptions, such as opening the way to the Druid Temple.

3 points for magic and combat, mostly for the magic. The combat system was awful–a bunch of sword-waving, rendered ineffectual if you’re slightly offset from your foe. Magic is more useful for exploration than combat, but I thought some of the spells were original.

4 points for equipment. There are a few weapon and armor upgrades and spells, and I like that some items can be used on others in creative ways (e.g., applying poison potions to weapons) and that “examining” items gives you a basic description. There are a lot of red herrings–I ended the game with wyvern eggs, bones, fossils, jewels, incense, and other items that I guess you were just meant to sell for gold.

It’s a rare game in the era that allows for interactions between items.

6 points for economy. It remains strong to the end. After you’ve bought everything, bribed everyone, and taken all the courses, you can still stock up on healing and magic potions, which never stop being useful.

3 points for a main quest with multiple stages, but no role-playing, decisions, alternate outcomes, or side-quests.

5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are pretty good, particularly when depicting indoor areas. I didn’t care for the constant vibraphone-like music, and the sound effects were sparse, but there were some nice background effects like chirping birds in the forest. The joystick control was sufferable given the many keyboard options.

To me, the indoor graphics are the best-looking part of the game.

4 points for gameplay. It’s geographically nonlinear but very linear in plot. It’s not very long, but still longer than it needs to be. The overall difficulty is moderate. It’s not replayable at all.

That gives us a final score of 37, so I guess I liked it just enough to recommend it–a little. The developer did fix some of the problems with the Faery Tale Adventure approach. Notably, the world isn’t quite as large or empty (though it’s still large and empty), and it has a better inventory system.

The box art would seem to be depicting the end of the game.

Owing to its obscurity today–it escaped MobyGames and Wikipedia, which is unusual for a post-1990 title–I’m guessing it didn’t sell very well. (The failure to develop the promised sequel is another clue.) The best review (87%) came from the September 1992 Amiga Action, which called it a “little gem” and offered a review that repeatedly suggests a greater depth of gameplay than actually exists in the game, particularly in the image captions. It got 78% from Amiga Mania, 53% from Amiga Power, and 45% from Amiga Joker.

Hollyware Entertainment had been formed in 1991 by David Boyles, a former MicroIllusions employee, after the bankruptcy of MicroIllusions. In his history of the failure of MicroIllusions, Jimmy Maher suggests that Hollyware’s raison d’etre was to sue Activision for things that happened during the MicroIllusions era. Certainly, the new developer wasn’t very prolific. Besides Lords of Time, they seem to have published only two action games–Hoi (1992) and Jonny Quest: Curse of the Mayan Warriors (1993)–and the puzzle game Gear Works (1992). Oddly, the company still exists, or at least re-exists, as Hollyware Transmedia, which is apparently working on virtual reality software. I’m not entirely sure how the rights to Faery Tale Adventure made its way to The Dreamer’s Guild in time for Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II (1997), but we’ll sort that out when the time comes.

Developer Steve Postma is the biggest mystery here. He has sole credit for programming, design, graphics, music, and sound effects–the only other names are associated with just the manual and game box. He has no other video games to his credit. I can’t find him now. Where did he come from? Where did he go? Maybe he’ll Google himself one day, see this review, and pop by to answer the most important question of all: why is the game called Lords of Time?

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/lords-of-time-won-with-summary-and-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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iyarpage · 7 years

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20 Best New Portfolio Sites, September 2017

Greetings, Readers! Yep, it’s that time again, that sweet, beautiful time when all the kids go back to school and there is a daily eight-hour window when I can play online games in peace. But instead of doing that, I wrote this article about portfolios you really should be checking out.

This month, what now feels like “classical” minimalism is back in fashion. Sites mostly feel modern rather than post-modern, and we’re partying like it’s about, I dunno… 2005 or so? 2008?

Anyway, have a look!

Cryptogram

To start, we have a stylish one-pager that relies on type, and a very minimal amount of imagery to get the point across. I mostly like the animation used. However, I think the visual static effect that appears when you hover on project names is a bit jarring. On the whole, though, it looks good.

Seventeen

weareseventeen bills itself as a “design-led motion studio”. As you might expect, bits of that motion design are seen in their animated state all over the site, showcased with a simple and decidedly modern design.

One thing I found especially interesting is their image feed. It’s just that: a context-free feed of images that showcase various screenshots of their work, test renders, experiments, and stuff like that.

Rafael Derolez

Clean, modern, dark. That’s what Rafael Derolez went for in his design, and he did it. Add in a dash of animation and asymmetry, and you’ve got a lovely portfolio.

Dennis Adelmann

Dennis Adelmann embraces classic web-minimalism, with tons of white space, large text. I particularly like the presentation of featured project on the home page. It just feels elegant. it feels magazine-like. Hey, just because we’re not designing for print doesn’t mean we can’t borrow a few ideas.

Alexander Coggin

Alexander Coggin’s portfolio is part collage, and part presentation site. The thing that sets it apart for me, is—believe it or not—the custom cursor. The cursor changes based on what you’re doing on the site.

For example, if you’re hovering over a photo in slideshow mode, moving the mouse to the right will turn it into an arrow that points right. And the word “next” will trail your cursor. The instructions make the context a lot clearer. It has some problems with contrast when you move the mouse over dark photos, but if you’re going to use custom cursors, this would be a good example to follow.

Darren Oorloff

Darren Oorloff designs album covers and band logos. These are displayed prominently in a masonry layout, with an industry-appropriate dark color scheme. Let’s just say you get the idea pretty quickly.

Bobby Giangeruso

Bobby Giangeruso’s site feels odd, at first. You see the solid, almost default shade of blue, and the vertically-squished text and perhaps you’re not sure what to think about his skills. Then you see the “glitching” photo, and begin to understand that this is a stylistic choice. Scroll on down, and you’ll get that clean sort of design you would normally expect.

I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about it, but it certainly caught my eye.

Karolis Kosas

Karolis Kosas brings back some of that classic Apple-style minimalism. It’s clean. It’s smooth. It has lots of literal white space. Some of it will look almost blank to people with badly calibrated monitors.

Other than that, it’s a delight to scroll through. It is reminding me to go on a rant about contrast, though.

Tomek Niewiadomski

Tomek Niewiadomski is a kind and wonderful person. I know this because he made it easy to copy and paste his name into this article. Aside from that, his website follows a distinctly magazine-style layout to showcase his work. For a photographer whose work is probably regularly featured in print, this works thematically.

Ponto

Ponto’s unique approach to design is in evidence from the moment you load their site. They…just go look at it. I am not about to try and describe the way they’re using 3D on the web. The rest of the site continues the theme of being elegant, professional, and more than a little avant garde.

Eric Hu

Eric Hu has embraced that post-modern feel, and combined it with a penchant for elegant type. And his site tells you when it was last updated. I find that a brave thing to do, because I wouldn’t dare date my personal portfolio quite so overtly.

Jack De Caluwé

Jack De Caluwé’s portfolio doesn’t do a lot to stand out from the rest, aside from the work it showcases (which I would argue is probably the most important). It is, however, clean, elegant, and overall incredibly well done. Go give it a look-see!

Mesh Mesh Mesh

Mesh Mesh Mesh is our monthly reminder that just because it uses monospaced type does not mean it’s brutalist. It’s also yet one more fabulous example of telling the user a lot without inundating them with information.

Alessandro Rigobello

Alessandro Rigobello seems to rely first and foremost on typography, until you start to interact with stuff. I’m actually kind of partial to the background-animation made to look like old video. It fits the theme of the rest of the site, and provides a unifying theme.

Josephmark

Josephmark (yes, the spelling seems to be intentional) is a digital agency that has embraced classic minimalism in a big way. Animation and motion design is their technique for spicing things up, mostly.

Ever & Ever

Ever & Ever breathes new life into a fairly standard dark theme by rendering the entire team of creatives as statues. It’s a theme that reoccurs in the site, and definitely gives it a “timeless” feel.

othervice

While many designers these days will temper a site’s modern aesthetic by mixing it with other trends, othervice goes all out. It’s everywhere, in the typography, the motion design, and the layout (of course).

While I’m certainly a fan of what can be achieved by designing trends, there’s something to be said for picking a theme, and going all out with it.

Wedge

I have slightly mixed feelings about Wedge. Let’s start with the good stuff: the design is clean, modern, and beautifully laid out. It uses a very familiar style of minimalism, but still has its own personality.

The downside is the cursor. In this case, changing the user’s cursor to a simple circle really doesn’t add any context or help for the user, and so is just a distracting change. For less computer-literate people, it might even be off-putting.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty site. Go look.

Studio Dumbar

Studio Dumbar shows off their print and other design work in a site that mostly just stays out of your way, but spices things up a bit with animation. The style of design closely matches the style of their work for a cohesive experience.

Some might say it’s a bit self-indulgent to have an entire page dedicated to your awards, but if I had dozens of them going back to the ’80s… I’d make a page like that, too.

Norman Behrendt

Norman Behrendt’s portfolio embraces that post-modern, nearly-brutalist aesthetic that has all but disappeared from new sites. Not a fan of the circle-cursor thing as I mentioned above, but here, it only appears when hovering over portfolio links, so that’s better.

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