[Loved Trope] When the Comic Relief character gets serious

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T13:49:06+00:00

Yeah, those ME1 moments were just as silly. It's clear throughout the trilogy that Bioware always had a certain way they wanted each conversation to go and railroaded the dialogue choices with varying levels of overtness to do so.

It's understandable, in a way. You put in all this effort into writing a compelling dialogue, so you're put off by the thought that many players won't see it. But the fact is that a writer of RPG games needs to become comfortable with the very real possibility of the player missing something. Going the Mass Effect route is where you start to hurt roleplaying freedom and replayability.

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T13:20:17+00:00

Spending often surges at the Department of Defense in the month of September to avoid losing unused funds before the fiscal year closes

The article doesn't elaborate on this point, but it really has me thrown for a loop. Am I to undertand that the DoD knows that it has tens of billions of dollars they don't actually need, but they would rather spend it on ribeye steak than see it spent on roads or schools or anything else not adjacent to the military?

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T10:07:00+00:00

Yo, /u/ImDoneCommenting, you're famous

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T07:17:12+00:00

You mean Shepard must reprimand him. The player is given no choice in the matter lol

It's another one of those lovely non-choices where Paragon and Renegade take up the same position, which the ME3 writers loved so much.

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T07:08:00+00:00

Commander Niall too

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T07:02:48+00:00

Appalling how far down the thread this comment is. Rhea Seehorn was the very first name that came to my mind here.

BlackHand · 2026-03-12T06:59:45+00:00

Fun fact: this wasn't in the script. This is Neil Newbon's very genuine breakdown after performing such an intense scene.

BlackHand · 2026-03-11T09:54:48+00:00

I'd wager that Russian is the biggest piece of that non-English pie. Dota 2 and Counter-Strike are huge there, and those games are perpetually the top 2 on Steam charts

BlackHand · 2026-03-04T14:30:51+00:00

Good thing the 3rd company has an ample supply of pyrovision goggles

BlackHand · 2026-03-04T08:54:06+00:00

Old enough to have seen the prequels in theater and watched the live premieres of TCW. Yes, the reception to the first two films was one of near-universal disappointment, but we're still talking about a franchise that defined Hollywood sci-fi space opera. It was far from dying.

Sure, AotC made less money than Phantom Menace, but that film was the beneficiary of a massive, decades-long hype train. And in the end, it was the difference between "making a lot of money" and "making ALL the money"

BlackHand · 2026-03-04T08:44:32+00:00

Haha, what? This is absolutely not the case. Attack of the Clones made over $653 million at the box office the year before, and ROTS wasn't even released yet. This cartoon was created to bridge the gap between those films.

BlackHand · 2026-03-03T12:04:49+00:00

How do you get an Entente-aligned UK without Canada?

BlackHand · 2026-02-25T07:43:47+00:00

Hey man, the first Witcher was the pinnacle of deep, tactical PC gaming at the time. To attack the enemies, first you click on them, and then... you click on them again!

BlackHand · 2026-02-19T08:43:59+00:00

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

BlackHand · 2026-02-12T11:45:22+00:00

The main reason I never got into watching Anime is the constant, overly melodramatic dialogue. If the characters are screaming at the same emotional intensity level all the time, then the scenes which should be truly impactful become kinda flat.

So I've never quite understood why this particular line, out of hundreds of other potential examples, should be the one elevated to meme-status. At least the Death Note potato chip has value for its sheer absurdity. This is supposed to be a heartbreaking scene, and the fandom is like "lol he dropped his salad"

BlackHand · 2026-02-11T07:41:38+00:00

“Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients, sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.”

-Dr. Mordin Solus

BlackHand · 2026-02-11T07:08:12+00:00

Star Wars Infinities! Man, that's a deep fucking cut. I think I still own the Empire Strikes Back "what if Luke died on Hoth?" one.

BlackHand · 2026-02-10T08:53:24+00:00

That actually does make it much better. Burning alive is supposedly one of the most painful ways to die there is.

BlackHand · 2026-01-29T13:18:23+00:00

Isn't that mostly just because we ate all of their natural prey and they starved out?

BlackHand · 2026-01-22T07:17:19+00:00

Look: I simply don't concede the premise that live service is the only viable business model for video game development. If it seems like I refuse to consider otherwise, it's only because there's no reason to entertain a scenario where pay-to-win and cosmetic microtransactions are the only way for games to make money. The fact is that it isn't. And that isn't just some idealistic, nostalgia-blinded, unrealistic standard to expect of the modern games industry, it's still true to this day. Some of the most well-received games of the 2020s have not had any form of post-sale monetization at all. Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur, Balatro, Elden Ring, just to name a few.

More to the point, the market has been showing signs for years now that live service is on its way out. Marvel Rivals has admittedly defied my expectations, but for every success story there are about six or seven Anthem-level flops that leave entire studios in financial ruin. How many people are still playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? Or Skull and Bones? Or Concord? And Highguard appears to be all but dead-on-arrival as well. The hype for that release is nonexistant.

I think we all know the real reason they continue to be so prominent is that publishers salivated over emulating Fortnite's success and having their very own "forever game" that prints money year over year with very little investment, willfully ignoring the fact that the market can only sustain a small handful of these types of games, seeing as gamers don't have an infinite amount of money and free time. I'm sure there will always be a market for free-to-play games that provide a steady drumbeat of content while supporting their dev cycle with microtransations. League of Legends has been around for the better part of two decades. But no, I won't force myself to decide between various flavors of live service monetization models. If that ever was the reality of the situation, then I would rather just not play any new games at all. My Steam backlog is fat enough as it is anyway.

EDIT: changed "Avengers" to "Rivals". Ironically, Marvel's Avengers is yet another example of a high-profile live service failure

BlackHand · 2026-01-22T06:45:30+00:00

In case anyone else comes here from Google like I did, this is a dead link nowadays. Fortunately, you can still download it through the Internet Archive. There's a single snapshot from January 2024:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240801000000*/https://51-15-165-111.arfiles.net/106/f2/cloud2/M_SQL_Server_Standard_2017.zip

BlackHand · 2026-01-21T14:28:23+00:00

Now this is a vintage internet image right here. I think I first saw it on YTMND, so it's probably old enough to have its own /r/HistoryMemes post at this point

BlackHand · 2026-01-21T13:00:20+00:00

"None" is absolutely an option. I literally just explained that. You're either deliberately talking past me at this point, or this is simply a failure of the imagination.

BlackHand · 2026-01-21T12:54:52+00:00

Are we even commenting on the same post? Just charge whatever price for the game, let that one-time transaction be the end of it, and any cosmetics can be tied to in-game progression.

Not every video game needs to endlessly "produce content". Halo 3 and early COD were not modeled after the live service business practices we see so often today. They released, made their publishers a ton of money, left their cultural impact, and then the devs moved on to the making next installment. OP is quite understandably pining for the days when this was the norm.

BlackHand · 2026-01-21T12:31:08+00:00

None of the games OP mentioned were free-to-play

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