Didn’t quite achieve what I hoped for, but I like the result anyway.

@SirViolentDeath @belghast Yeah. Kreia is interesting because she's both asking challenging questions and also, often, demonstrably completely wrong.

She's also got a point exactly often enough that you can't simply write her off as an amoral scold. It's sort of designed to get people to have strong opinions on different sides, which is also what The Last Jedi did well. The two are very similar-- they're flawed in a variety of ways but also have a lot of things to say that are both borderline or outright heretical while also coming from a place of deep understanding of the setting.

@SirViolentDeath @belghast

Related, Star Trek figured this out a long time ago, with Next Generation. We're seeing a lot of it recently with four wildly different Star Trek shows all happening at once, and each of them is trying something very different (and making a different set of people angry).

It's experimental, it's interesting, and it's evolving the IP. I think there's going to be a clear winner or pair of winners out of the current crop of shows, but the ones that aren't beloved ran so that the ones that are could fly.

@SirViolentDeath @belghast Mostly, as Bel knows, I like stirring the pot. Star Wars is an old IP and there's only so long you can tell the same story over and over with it. It has to change and evolve or it will become a stagnant relic, and in so doing it's absolutely going to make people angry.

As a result, anytime Star Wars makes a lot of people angry it's almost certainly doing a good job of evolving. The worst thing it can do is release something that just... doesn't inspire much of anything.

I'm pretty against an IP doing the "let's get the gang back together for One More Adventure" more than about once or maybe twice, and frankly Star Wars has done it in the main media and in the EU far, far too many times. It leads to making the setting feel small and cramped, where there's no room for anything except for The Only Characters That Matter.

The best Star Wars right now is in the TV shows, because they're experimenting wildly on the fringes. Not everything is a banger, but it's doing what it should.

@belghast @SirViolentDeath I might have some strong opinions about Star Wars.

Friends! I has a sweet baby smushyface skyscale friend!

#GuildWars2 #GW2

@thundermouse That a demo exists at all in this day and age is honestly very surprising but it means it’s super easy to at least check out.

I have some Opinions about the poor reviews and what the root of them is but they’re almost entirely divorced from the actual game design and execution.

Spent about two hours with Forspoken last night. Definitely will be playing more. It's got a Marvel movie vibe to it, and is playing with isekai tropes. Movement and combat are both pretty fun thus far. The early-game is a bit cutscene-heavy, but that's hardly unique to Forspoken.

Elephant in the room: the dialogue is fine to good? It's going for a particular vibe and absolutely nails it in my opinion. The dialogue and especially the delivery really nail both the character they're trying to portray and the genre conventions of the two major influences driving it. Given that the influences (marvel movies and isekai) are from two different cultures, it's a surprisingly good threading of the needle to hit both.

@mvu The big ones in recent memory are Secrets of Grindea, Cult of the Lamb, and Tunic, all of which are spins on the concept but doing their own thing.

There’s also stuff like Hyper Light Drifter, Unsighted, and possibly Iconoclasts which are somewhat adjacent but hit similar notes.

@mvu It might be! Or, at the very least, a new successor spirit that's picking up the torch, even if it's going in a new direction.

It does make it hard for me to be excited about the upcoming sequel, in much the same way that OT Star Wars fans get judgy about the prequels, whereas the newer, younger generation of SW fans love them.

I also remember the outrage over the Wind Waker art style, which I think ultimately is the best Zelda art style there's been, partly for how well it holds up and partly for how much sheer personality it was able to have.

That having been said, I've played, like, two games that come close to Zelda, and perhaps that means we'll see more now that the elephant in the room has moved on.

That said, I do think that the other big Nintendo property, Mario, has proven to be incredibly flexible while still retaining its signature feel, and studying the differences is important. Certainly there's an art to transitioning a long-running series.

@mvu I understand your perspective, but ultimately I can't say I agree. It was missing far too many of the key aspects that make a game Zelda for me to feel like it still had the vibe.

What set Zelda apart was that it was the thing that inspired copycats for decades. It's possible they were simply out of ideas, hence the reboot, but the release of Link Between Worlds says otherwise-- that game was brilliant and creative while still retaining the vibe.

I also can't really agree with visual style, as Zelda has transitioned through at least five major different visual styles over the past 35 years without losing anything.

That having been said, I recognize that many people loved the game. It was a good game! It just destroyed Zelda for me, and I like to be allowed to mourn that without being told I'm wrong.

I think it's a well-crafted game! In almost any other context I would have enjoyed it, barring some of the same critiques about a seeming lack of progress after the first hour.

That it was branded a Zelda game, with the expectations that left for me, is what wrecked my appreciation of it.

There's no real doubt in my mind that the next game in the series will be like BOTW, and perhaps the series needed to be rebooted from brass tacks into this new system for some reason, but I'm not interested in it, and it's a LOT more than just sour grapes about weapon durability.

So, in BOTW, I go from a game with an expansive map and 15-20+ interesting new tools that the game continually unlocks for me (see: Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, etc) that change my perspective of the space to less than half of that, with fewer unique interactions, most of which are introduced to you immediately upon starting the game (bombs, climbing, glider).

Pair that with a system that creates a possibility space in which you have no weapons (due to weapon breakage), the *other* interesting part of past Zelda games, the sprawling dungeons with interesting combat, *also* goes out the window because it's apparent that the game can't assume you ever have a weapon. As a result, combat feels like a treadmill because it never goes *quite* far enough to say "well, there's going to be a lot of fighting in here, better be prepared with backup weapons!"

End result is a game clearly marked Zelda that lacked, for me, any of the things that endeared me to the series for the previous decades.

Breath of the Wild takes most of that away. You gain seven new abilities throughout the course of the game, four of which occur in the first twenty minutes or so and are the main ones you use for the entire rest of the game. After that, there is _nothing_ else for you to find and unlock.

Worse, things that previously counted as unlocks and traversal tools (such as, say, the Fire Rod and Ice Rod) are instead relegated to disposable weapons. Knowing that they're disposable and that none of the dungeon design can, by extension, rely on you having them means they cannot be tools to unlock the world.

Instead, you get climbing. Climbing can be cool, it's neat to overcome the frustration of "there's a barrier here" by simply... going over it. However, climbing also had little in the way of interesting mechanics. You have a stamina meter, you can eat some food to restore it via a pause menu option, otherwise that's it.

Oh, hey, it's the Breath of the Wild discourse again. Someone asked why it's such a hot-button for me, and I think it's been long enough (and this is a different enough place) that I can talk about it a bit more.

Breath of the Wild basically wrecked Zelda games for me. I can see from its stunning popularity that it is the future of Zelda games and as a result I'm basically done with that series, despite it being a series of games I've grown up with almost since I was physically capable of holding a controller.

The core conceit of the series for much of its history is that it's basically a metroidvania -- you've got a sprawling map and you're constantly passing places you can't access, sometimes without even realizing you can't access them, and as you progress through the game you get new tools and new abilities that let you access places you couldn't before and traverse the map in new, sometimes more efficient, sometimes more creative ways.

Hey Folks! After a few week delay due to our games of the year show, we finally get around to talking about how Wizards of the Coast is trying to kill Dungeons of Dragons and how folks are rapidly abandoning the Open Gaming License.

Also some talk about housing in #FFXIV, Middara having a great tutorial, and Marvel Midnight Suns.

AggroChat #419 - Coastal Wizard Decimates Foot
https://aggronaut.com/2023/01/22/aggrochat-419-coastal-wizard-decimates-foot/

#WotC #DND #DungeonsAndDragons #MTG #VideoGames #Gaming #AggroChat

@breetrulove Of all of the “lifetime sub” games that were a thing back in the late 2000s, I feel like LOTRO has been by far the best bet. It’s definitely a lot smoother and better-flowing than it used to be, especially for my Loremaster.

@tankingmage I do like shared bank space. Storage feels very stingy with how much random stuff you accumulate!