What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[AlanBruce]

Good to hear. I'm personally waiting on the Leviathan DLC to drop and then I'll play them together - doing the Leviathan one first so I have Echoes of the Fallen left over to actually use Leviathan's abilities during. Though I have to say, missed opportunity on their part that the DLC doesn't involve making Jill and Joshua playable. Even more so than the Leviathan moveset, getting to play as other characters would've been a big draw for me there.

The idea of playing as Jill, Joshua and even Dion was mentioned several times by the community. However, the game’s director has clearly stated that this is Clive’s story, so we will always play as Clive.

That isn’t to say we haven’t met amazing characters along the way- like the aforementioned companions. But unless they release some game in the future like FFXVI-2, for example, we’re only playing as Clive.

[Sapphire Guard]

Spoiler: Disco Elysium: Complete

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That was... superb. I had high expectations. Think with RPGs you can end up with skewed expectations that if you level grind enough you can save everyone... but no. Level up all you like, you can't talk everyone down.

I botched the ending, because I didnt have enough rhetoric to keep Ruby from killing herself once I broke her machine. Titus, Elizabeth, and half the Hardie boys went down. Kim trusted me so he fought back... and we found the killer, some random lunatic we never even suspected. It breaks every rule of storytelling and it's brilliant.

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

[Zevox]

The idea of playing as Jill, Joshua and even Dion was mentioned several times by the community. However, the game’s director has clearly stated that this is Clive’s story, so we will always play as Clive.

That isn’t to say we haven’t met amazing characters along the way- like the aforementioned companions. But unless they release some game in the future like FFXVI-2, for example, we’re only playing as Clive.

Like I said, missed opportunity on their part. The main game is Clive's story, sure. Add-on DLC didn't need to be. Clive already has the entire game for his story, it would make perfect sense for DLC to focus on others. Kind of felt to me like they were setting up for that even, with

Spoiler

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Jill's expressed interest in leaving Valisthea entirely to see the rest of the world once the conflict over the crystals was done, particularly combined with her being the only survivor of the main characters. Of course I suppose that could be setup for a sequel too, but direct sequels in Final Fantasy do not have a good track record, so I'd honestly rather a small DLC expansion personally.

[tonberrian]

Playing Owlcat's Rogue Trader game and having a lot of fun. I haven't played a 40k game before (though i do own Mechanicus and look forward to playing it later). Haven't really interacted with 40k in general before this aside from a handful of wiki dives. I'm looking forward to the dlc and the rest of the game.

[Batcathat]

I finished Song of Farca yesterday and my initial positive impression held up. The story was pretty good (eventually I'll probably replay it, to see how much can change with some different choices), the gameplay was a bit repetitive but enjoyable enough that it didn't really bother me and the graphics were good, if fairly simple.

If I have one complaint, it's that the dialogue system (where you combine different facts you know to draw conclusions) was usually very forgiving, letting you retry it until you got it right, except that sometimes even the "wrong" choice progressed the game, but with unfortunate consequences. I don't mind a game being unforgiving, but the fact that up until that point the game had taught me that I could retry made it a bit confusing.

[Zevox]

So I've completed the God of War: Ragnarok DLC, Valhalla. Or as it would perhaps more aptly be called, The Therapy of Kratos.

As this is a roguelike/roguelite (I don't care which) mode for the game, Valhalla here is a gauntlet that presents challenges taken from the mind of the person who enters it, in order to help them master themselves. In Kratos' case, this means a lot of dealing with his past. For gameplay terms, that means fun stuff like enemies from the original games, mostly fighting like they did back in the old games (the Centaurs are clearly mostly reskinned versions of whose deer-warrior people from Ragnarok, but others are recreated much as they were). You also earn a fourth variation on Spartan Rage, "Legacy," which lets Kratos again wield the Blade of Olympus. Story-wise, the mode has Kratos struggling with a proposition put forth by Freya, and invited to Valhalla by someone else they don't reveal right away but who won't surprise you if you played Ragnarok. Think I need to go into a spoiler block at this point though.

Spoiler

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Freya's proposal is that Kratos join a new council she's putting together to govern the Realms in the aftermath of Ragnarok, as its God of War. Kratos is of course hesitant, as he has a lot of hangups around that particular title. The invitation to Valhalla comes from Tyr, who serves as Kratos' mentor/therapist here (alongside Mimir to a degree, of course), as well as the final boss of each run. His fight steadily gets harder with each run you complete (changing his weapon, using ones from different parts of the world each time), up to a final fourth form that is legitimately fairly challenging and quite fun to fight. Not as hard as Sigrun in GoW 2018 or Gna/Hrolf in Ragnarok, but pretty solid nonetheless.

Once you know this much, there's no major surprises. Kratos has to work out his **** before he can eventually accept that it's okay for him to claim the title of God of War once again in order to help Freya and the people of the Realms. I had expected/hoped that it would end with a literal fight with his younger self, and there is a scene where he confronts his younger self that briefly got my hopes up for that, but alas no, that's entirely him talking things out to himself. Still, there's lots of well-written conversations about Kratos' feelings, conscious and otherwise, regarding things that happened in the original trilogy. Good stuff, this series' writers know what they're doing with this character, as anyone who played the recent games knows already.

And the gameplay remains quite fun, even if the roguelike elements never feel quite as fully realized as in something like Hades - there's just nothing quite like the branching builds you can get out of the divine favors in that game, no matter which perks you pick up for each of your weapons. I'd say maybe they should've limited you to using one weapon at a time, but then the armor buff enemies can get that requires use of a specific weapon to deal with couldn't be used, so eh.

It's quite good all in all, for sure. Though at this point it feels like they have to intend to close the book on Kratos after this. Sure, you could write more stories about him, but after the character arc he had in the Norse games and it concluding like this, it feels like he's best retired to supporting character status for any future games. There's no way to top this with him, ever.

[LibraryOgre]

My comfort game is, apparently, GalCiv3, playing as the Terran Resistance, with a starting place near the edge of the galaxy.

[Cespenar]

Got my toes into Rogue Trader as well, spent probably a whole hour to pick 3-4 people's feats at a level up. Felt like I'm back at the D&D 3.5 days, with a mixed bag sort of feelings.

Eh, at least there don't seem to be that many trap options, compared to 3.5.

Also, that aside, the game seems to be good.

[warty goblin]

Prodding gently at a number of things.

Halo Infinite, aka Halo Combat Evolved (Backwards). Because it's extremely OG Halo, which is good, because Halo is good. There's some necessary concessions to our blighted modern age in here, like irrelevant and kinda boring open world bits and the most tacked on upgrades known to humanity. But because the upgrades don't matter, you can ignore them, and the open world nonsense works much better as spacing for campaign missions than stuff you really do. Getting in fights and saving marines on the way from A to B is fun and feels dynamic. Just wandering around picking off map markers is an ennui simulator. Bottom line, shooting is top notch, open world is unnecessary, story is Space Magic Nonsense that sci-fi like this eventually and inevitably decays into, all blue particle effects and endless vaguely important sounding words getting promoted to Proper Noun status.

That decay would also be why I have no enthusiasm for Mass Effect 4.

Miasma Chronicles. This is an enjoyable little stealth tactics game. The combat is fine, with fewer, more challenging and deliberate encounters giving it a more novel like pacing than one usually sees. The world buying and writing are good too, characters have detectable personalities and desires. Even the early game mutant frog monsters have an apparent culture and seem more intentional than homicidal frogmen need to be.

[Form]

Spoiler: Disco Elysium: Complete

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That was... superb. I had high expectations. Think with RPGs you can end up with skewed expectations that if you level grind enough you can save everyone... but no. Level up all you like, you can't talk everyone down.

I botched the ending, because I didnt have enough rhetoric to keep Ruby from killing herself once I broke her machine. Titus, Elizabeth, and half the Hardie boys went down. Kim trusted me so he fought back... and we found the killer, some random lunatic we never even suspected. It breaks every rule of storytelling and it's brilliant.

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

Spoiler: Disco Elysium, lore & the pale

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There is apparently a book set in the Disco Elysium universe, though it's hard to acquire. I did find this this video talking about the lore and the pale, which you might find interesting as well.

In my first playthrough I got Cuno in my party near the end as well... by making the worst possible choices. I mean, take a child with you to confront the killer? Sure Harry Raphael Ambrosius Cousteau, that seems like a fine idea. Somehow this turned out to be the right choice??? Cuno really goes to the bat for you when you have to face the rest of your precint.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

Halo Infinite, aka Halo Combat Evolved (Backwards). Because it's extremely OG Halo, which is good, because Halo is good. There's some necessary concessions to our blighted modern age in here, like irrelevant and kinda boring open world bits and the most tacked on upgrades known to humanity. But because the upgrades don't matter, you can ignore them, and the open world nonsense works much better as spacing for campaign missions than stuff you really do. Getting in fights and saving marines on the way from A to B is fun and feels dynamic. Just wandering around picking off map markers is an ennui simulator. Bottom line, shooting is top notch, open world is unnecessary, story is Space Magic Nonsense that sci-fi like this eventually and inevitably decays into, all blue particle effects and endless vaguely important sounding words getting promoted to Proper Noun status.

That decay would also be why I have no enthusiasm for Mass Effect 4.

I know that Star Trek does sometimes do technobabble space magic nonsense, but it usually strives to stay within a lane of plausible, human scenarios. It's managed to remain relatable and semi-grounded for over fifty years and still tells interesting stories to this day. It baffles me that sci-fi games can't take inspiration from it and keep their narratives from spinning off into fantastic tripe. I mean, Mass Effect 1 was a Star Trek RPG with the serial numbers filed off and it eroded away. Andromeda didn't even try! It started in on the magic in the prologue.

I guess I'm just saying I agree. I know on a long enough timeline a series is bound to pick up a writer who believes too heavily in Clarke's Third Law, but maybe that's an argument for not having an eternal march of sequels to every IP.

[warty goblin]

I know that Star Trek does sometimes do technobabble space magic nonsense, but it usually strives to stay within a lane of plausible, human scenarios. It's managed to remain relatable and semi-grounded for over fifty years and still tells interesting stories to this day. It baffles me that sci-fi games can't take inspiration from it and keep their narratives from spinning off into fantastic tripe. I mean, Mass Effect 1 was a Star Trek RPG with the serial numbers filed off and it eroded away. Andromeda didn't even try! It started in on the magic in the prologue.

Star Trek has the substantial advantage of being strongly episodic, and rooting most of its conflicts in ethics, politics, or the environment. The Enterprise shows up and has to stop bad thing from happening without violating the Prime Directive, or gain enough understanding to negotiate a settlement, or stop a space problem from doing a bad thing. These are all generally very character rooted things.

Videogames don't have that luxury. For one thing the main character in most games is somewhere north of 99% character free. Yoi can't have an interesting conflict about how to solve a problem without violating a character's ethics when that character is basically a cardboard cutout - the player can have an interesting debate about how to solve the problem, but that's not narrative. They also have to make the plot solvable what the player can actually do in game, which is walk places and kill things. Mass Effect does add talk to things, but because it's an RPG, it (probably correctly) assumes that players want to shoot some fools, and therefore needs to provide a steady stream of fools to shoot. Preferably culminating in a boss fight and/or sick loot.

So you need a plot that can be resolved by the player walking to the right place, and shooting the correct thing in its glowing weak point. From that, I think the descent in blue particle effect proper noun space magic nearly writes itself. You need a game, so there's got to be some obstacles to just going to the bad guy and shooting him, so here's some other places to go, full of dudes to shoot. They need a reason to be there, so they're guarding something, maybe some sort of weapon or information you need to defeat the bad guy - objective, proper noun and space magic all in one! The bad guy needs to be doing something bad that can only be stopped by shooting him, so why not a doomsday weapon? More proper nouns and space magic!

I find it notable that ME 1 and Halo 1 both mostly sidestep the worst excesses of "commander, get the Cypher to the Conduit before Lord Vile activates the Converter, or else the Archon will destroy the Nexus!" sort of story. I suspect that this is because they're the first games, which allows them to use information as an objective much more readily than later titles - figuring the Reapers out is satisfying, but you can only play that card once. Also they're just free to introduce stuff in a way that later titles aren't by dint of being first titles. The Flood are a great end of the second act twist, but you can't really introduce secret space zombies multiple times.

[Rynjin]

The first 3 Halo games sidestep it pretty handily. The big Maguffin with the Ominous Proper Nopun is also...the title of the game, so it doesn't seem as out of palce. "Fire the Halo to destroy the Flood. It's what it was built for."

4 onward, being written and developed by an entirely different, significantly less talented team on the other hand...

[Cygnia]

Trying to farm the last follower skin in Cult of the Lamb before the new update drops next year so I can get the achievement and take a rest afterwards. Trying to decide what to play in my Steam queue next...

[Errorname]

I find it notable that ME 1 and Halo 1 both mostly sidestep the worst excesses of "commander, get the Cypher to the Conduit before Lord Vile activates the Converter, or else the Archon will destroy the Nexus!" sort of story. I suspect that this is because they're the first games, which allows them to use information as an objective much more readily than later titles - figuring the Reapers out is satisfying, but you can only play that card once. Also they're just free to introduce stuff in a way that later titles aren't by dint of being first titles. The Flood are a great end of the second act twist, but you can't really introduce secret space zombies multiple times.

I am so sick of Sci-Fi writers using "the [noun]" as a naming scheme for everything. It's not like it's never worked, I like Bungie games well enough and they're lousy with it, but it can really try my patience sometimes. Feels like everyone's doing it now.

[Anonymouswizard]

Got my toes into Rogue Trader as well, spent probably a whole hour to pick 3-4 people's feats at a level up. Felt like I'm back at the D&D 3.5 days, with a mixed bag sort of feelings.

Eh, at least there don't seem to be that many trap options, compared to 3.5.

Also, that aside, the game seems to be good.

I believe they reworked the biggest trap option (+1 Wound was never worth the opportunity cost), otherwise the biggest mistakes you can make are picking up specialised Proficiency too early and building a party that misses and important skill. I believe most serious flamer weapons are Act 2 onwards, and you'll see pretty much no melta or plasma in Act 1.

[Batcathat]

I am so sick of Sci-Fi writers using "the [noun]" as a naming scheme for everything. It's not like it's never worked, I like Bungie games well enough and they're lousy with it, but it can really try my patience sometimes. Feels like everyone's doing it now.

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

[warty goblin]

I am so sick of Sci-Fi writers using "the [noun]" as a naming scheme for everything. It's not like it's never worked, I like Bungie games well enough and they're lousy with it, but it can really try my patience sometimes. Feels like everyone's doing it now.

I think it's a thing where doing it once or twice, with a name that actually makes sense and is for something that genuinely matters to the story is generally fine. The Reapers? Cool, functional name for the omnicidal robots. Halo? Perfect for a giant space donut with religious overtones.

It gets a lot less interesting when it's for every last rando bit of plot junk you need to pick up. And one of them is probably like the Conduit or the Catalyst, which is just dull at this point because dear me have I brought a lot of Catalysts to a lot of Conduits.

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

I've always liked silly fantasy names for stuff. Done right and you can get some world building or sense of character in there. Done badly, at least it can be slightly weird.

[Rynjin]

I believe they reworked the biggest trap option (+1 Wound was never worth the opportunity cost), otherwise the biggest mistakes you can make are picking up specialised Proficiency too early and building a party that misses and important skill. I believe most serious flamer weapons are Act 2 onwards, and you'll see pretty much no melta or plasma in Act 1.

I decided to go Heretical (since nobody else is apparently) and was annoyed that you get an Inferno Pistol early...which is bugged and can't be equipped. Its special property is that you don't require proficiency to wield it, but it requires proficiency to wield. =(

[ArmyOfOptimists]

I've always liked silly fantasy names for stuff. Done right and you can get some world building or sense of character in there. Done badly, at least it can be slightly weird.

Oof, color me the opposite. I've grown significantly less tolerant of lazy fantasy names, especially if they're the type to insert random apostrophes. They don't even sidestep the issue of placing "The" in front of everything. You go from chasing "The Conduit" to seeking "The K'hnduyt."

Unless you're Tolkien or willing to put in a Tolkien-sized effort of creating a language or culture, stick to real words. Besides, it's how real people tend to name things anyway. We don't make up silly names. We use a proper noun or an acronym for a phrase. Rarely, we'll call something by its creator's name, but that's about as far as we go.

[Errorname]

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

I'll take a good fantasy name over "the noun" any day for most things. Would much rather call your aliens "Sanghelli" or "Eliksni" than "the Elites" or "the Fallen", personally

Oof, color me the opposite. I've grown significantly less tolerant of lazy fantasy names, especially if they're the type to insert random apostrophes. They don't even sidestep the issue of placing "The" in front of everything. You go from chasing "The Conduit" to seeking "The K'hnduyt."

I don't think "the Noun" is any less lazy though

[warty goblin]

Oof, color me the opposite. I've grown significantly less tolerant of lazy fantasy names, especially if they're the type to insert random apostrophes. They don't even sidestep the issue of placing "The" in front of everything. You go from chasing "The Conduit" to seeking "The K'hnduyt."

Unless you're Tolkien or willing to put in a Tolkien-sized effort of creating a language or culture, stick to real words. Besides, it's how real people tend to name things anyway. We don't make up silly names. We use a proper noun or an acronym for a phrase. Rarely, we'll call something by its creator's name, but that's about as far as we go.

Unless it's a word for a specific thing a culture doesn't have. Then much of time that culture just adopts some other culture's word for it. I'm not a fan of long, complicated words that mean 'sword' because English has had a word for sword as long as it's been English, but if the aliens have a planet-eating machine called a Churg-un, it's entirely reasonable for the humans to call it a Churg-un as well.

Also "the K'hnduyt" has at least the potential to be cool. A conduit is just a pipe you run cables through, even as construction supplies go its downright dull.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

I don't think "the Noun" is any less lazy though

Sure, but it's at least less annoying. To me, anyway.

Unless it's a word for a specific thing a culture doesn't have. Then much of time that culture just adopts some other culture's word for it. I'm not a fan of long, complicated words that mean 'sword' because English has had a word for sword as long as it's been English, but if the aliens have a planet-eating machine called a Churg-un, it's entirely reasonable for the humans to call it a Churg-un as well.

Maybe? It's 50/50 if we do that in real life. For example, we use "anime" a lot these days, but I remember back when a lot of people called it "Japanimation." We don't call Germany "Deutschland" and so on, either.

In sci-fi it always makes me wonder why those specific words aren't being translated by the universal translator I assume we all have, too. Unless it's a truly alien concept, you'd think we'd get some sort of translation out of it. Their word might be "churg-un", but that translates as "planet eater" so why don't we hear that?

[warty goblin]

Maybe? It's 50/50 if we do that in real life. For example, we use "anime" a lot these days, but I remember back when a lot of people called it "Japanimation." We don't call Germany "Deutschland" and so on, either.

There's sorta rules about it. Countries generally get transliterated in some way or another. Place names can go either way, though river names have been historically extremely durable, to the point that one of the arguments for the complete genocide and removal of the original inhabitants of, IIRC, the Shetland Islands by the Norse is that all the waterway names are Norse. General things can go either way, depending to some degree I suppose on how alien a concept it is to the inheriting culture. Potato is a loan word from Spanish, where it's a portmanteau of two North American words. Maize is very seldom used in place of corn, a much older word that originally referred to wheat, which isn't miles away from maize-corn in use or cultivation.

In sci-fi it always makes me wonder why those specific words aren't being translated by the universal translator I assume we all have, too. Unless it's a truly alien concept, you'd think we'd get some sort of translation out of it. Their word might be "churg-un", but that translates as "planet eater" so why don't we hear that?

They same reason they're written in modern English, and not the substantially different 28th century Future English/Chinese/Reformed Neo-Martian that they should be in: a weighted combination of audience readability and flavor, generally weighted towards readability. But using a non-English word generally forces the audience to pay attention, so it works as both emphasis and a device to encourage engagement with specific concepts. You can translate 'grok' just fine, but by not translating it, you have to engage with the context and figure it out. This is generally more meaningful because it takes more effort, and allows the word to have a much richer, more cultural definition than a simple translation would provide. Tanith Lee does something similar in Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which have fairly rich set of what slang. She does provide the exact definitions, but by using the slang throughout the actual text it works to map you into the rather alien headspace of eternally bored immortal teenagers with nothing better to do than insult each other and commit serial suicide for kicks.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Re: alien words I tend to like them but there's definitely a balance, and it takes a modicum of talent to pull off. The Elder Scrolls games calling their evil god-like spirits 'Daedric Princes' instead of 'Demon Lords' is nicely flavorful, and help makes the setting distinct. In contrast the Enduring Flame trilogy has alien names for things like camels and termites, which leads to kicking the reader out of the story when the context clues indicating which was which gave out two books and several real-life weeks ago, and one has to stop and think: 'Wait, which mundane critter has this alien name? Did the bad guy just bury the city under a mountain of evil corrupted camels, or evil corrupted termites?'

For games specifically, alien names also make it easier to Google if you get stuck on something. Generic names are more likely to bring up a flood of unrelated things.

[Rynjin]

Enduring Flame was such an odd sequel trilogy. There's something about it that just slid off my brain when I read it because despite reading it a lot more recently than the Obsidian Trilogy literally the ONLY things I remember about the series is that it's the literal thematic inverse of the first series (High Magic now good, Wild Magic bad) and the bear scene near the start of the first book.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Enduring Flame was such an odd sequel trilogy. There's something about it that just slid off my brain when I read it because despite reading it a lot more recently than the Obsidian Trilogy literally the ONLY things I remember about the series is that it's the literal thematic inverse of the first series (High Magic now good, Wild Magic bad) and the bear scene near the start of the first book.

Yeah the main characters aren’t very distinct, they’re basically just Kellen and Cilarnen with hawk names, but less interesting and with some traits swapped. Plus the entire third book is very tacked on.

[MCerberus]

I would like to nominate Destiny as the king of angering Scifi vaguery. It's so annoying because when they decide to actually name things we get cool stuff like semi-rogue AIs being named to purpose as historic figures or the incredible titles the hive have.

Anyway, tried another Shogun 2 campaign, still my least favorite Total War.

[Zevox]

Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is out as of today, so I spent the day playing that. Quite happy with it so far. Most importantly to me, the netcode is infinitely better than the original game's - though I knew that form the beta last month, but still, it is the most important thing for me.

On the single-player front, I was surprised to find out that it not only has its own new story mode, but also the entire story mode from the first game, and you can import data from the first game so it remembers how much you'd cleared already (and then some, apparently, since it thinks I cleared the DLC character missions that I definitely didn't since I never bought the DLC for the first game). So I'm actually re-playing the story mode of the first game before going into this one's, since I remember almost nothing of it since it was almost four years ago. It's fun, aside from boss fights it actually plays like a beat-em-up rather than a fighting game most of the time, which works very well; more fighting games should really do that with their story modes.

Looks like unlocking all the alternate cosmetics in the game is going to be quite a grind, since each character needs to be "leveled up" by playing them to get them, and there's 500 levels to go through each. Granted, there's only two things to unlock past level 300, and just from a couple of hours of online play I'm at level 30 with one character already, so it's not glacially slow, but still. Nonetheless, there is a lot of alternate colors and weapon skins to unlock, and you can spend an in-game currency you also earn through leveling characters up to get particular pieces early if you wish - and they're not all that costly, either, so if you really wanted a particular color or weapon for a character that would take a while to unlock, it wouldn't be much trouble to grab that way. As far as systems to unlock stuff go, it seems overall reasonable. Unless leveling slows to a glacial pace after a certain point, but thus far it seems like every level requires the same amount of xp, and you'll generally gain a level and a half from winning a match online, and some smaller amount from a loss (I didn't get a good sense of how much).

I am going to probably take some time to decide on a main though. Today I was playing Belial, who is definitely a front-runner for that, quite fun gameplay-wise, I love his theme music, and his personality is quite amusing to me given how rare it is to see a male character portrayed this way (he's basically an Incubus and his dialogue is 80% innuendo). His main competition, I think, will be Zeta (my old main; spear-wielding warrior woman) and Zooey (dragon-summoning guardian woman). Though I do also want to try out others, most notably Yuel (fox lady) and Grimnir (pretty-boy wind god). So, this could take a while compared to how long deciding on a main takes me in most fighting games.

[Eldan]

Spoiler: Disco Elysium: Complete

Show

That was... superb. I had high expectations. Think with RPGs you can end up with skewed expectations that if you level grind enough you can save everyone... but no. Level up all you like, you can't talk everyone down.

I botched the ending, because I didnt have enough rhetoric to keep Ruby from killing herself once I broke her machine. Titus, Elizabeth, and half the Hardie boys went down. Kim trusted me so he fought back... and we found the killer, some random lunatic we never even suspected. It breaks every rule of storytelling and it's brilliant.

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

Spoiler

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Did you only take a photo of the Phasmid, or did you also talk to it? It's one of my biggest complaints about the game that you can fail the interaction to talk to the Phasmid, because it's kind of the emotional climax of the entire game. (Actually, as people have talked about before, there's three connected emotional climaxes of the game: Dolores, who represents Harry's past, and talks about the future, the Deserter, who is stuck in the past, but arresting him gives Harry a second chance to take up his police job again, and the Phasmid, who is a being with no past and no future who exists in an eternal burning moment.

Cuno is one option. If Kim gets shot and you also never made friends with Cuno, you have to go alone.

Anyway. There's no sourcebook, sadly. The setting came out of a several-decades long homebrew game campaign. Apparently, it started as a D&D campaign, set thousands of years before the present age of the game setting, played by a small Estonian art collective. Then, they advanced the timeline a few hundred years every campaign, until they arrived in the present. They never wrote most of it down.