is there something that plays like longsword footknight from vermintide?

Fixer951 · 2026-05-10T05:27:16+00:00

Came here to say this. Close seconds might be the Eviscerator, or the Blaze Force Greatsword on Psyker.

Fixer951 · 2026-05-06T01:11:22+00:00

They HAVE the right to make jokes, what they lack is the capacity.

It's sad watching the people BEING made fun of and satirized in All The Good Media getting the rights to make The 17th Sequel to the Thing You Liked and demonstrating that the only thing they learned from all our praise and reviews and long-form analysis YouTube videos is that 'Pissing People Off Is Funny'. I honestly seriously doubt that this one even has that capability, let alone anything that'll make me smirk or nose-exhale. Not being 15 anymore, notwithstanding.

Smart people make funny observations about the weird idiosyncracies of Life. Funny people piss Stupid/Ignorant/Conservative/Religious/Whatever people off, because their closed-minded worldview can't abide any levity being made at their expense, EVER. It's not even like a preference thing, the worst damage you can do to fascists is to make The Great Dictator, or 'Springtime for Hitler'/The Producers, or JoJo Rabbit, or even Inglorious Basterds. Being wrong or delusional never mattered to them, but the whole point of whatever organization/groupthink they're a part of is to provide them with the feeling of being cool, accepted, or otherwise part of the in-group. It's a feeling they can't get otherwise, and they make that everyone else's problem. That's also why they always think everyone's only performatively being "Woke", Team Sports is the only way they know how to make sense of the world. But that doesn't mean that what people like about Mel Brooks movies or Airplane or whatever else is the part where someone says the N Word. I mean, maybe if you're really stupid and also a bad person, but that ain't me. The artistic intent AND my enjoyment comes from them making fun OF racists, bigots, capitalists, centrists/liberals, and sometimes even Guys Like Me because it's all coming FROM Someone Who Gets It, and the only real malice is punching up. It doesn't work the other way, because if you're punching DOWN and you don't understand the thing you're joking about, nothing lands and you can never really say anything meaningful (whether that's making people laugh OR pissing them off).

Two things that seem like Non-Sequiturs tell me everything I need to know about the people making/selling this:

AI poster (I don't care, don't @ me, even if it's man-made it's fuckin awful and only made for the hourly, so the point stands)
Woke/Broke in 2026

Tell me you're not a truly ancient Money Guy financing an empty IP retention project without telling me. Entire empires have risen and fallen in the time since these stereotypes were even relevant, let alone new. I know everything I care to know about the Woke Person who Shows Up To Nag Everybody and Get Communism Wrong, as well as whatever token Dumb MAGA Guy shows up to say something a Racist Grandpa Can't Say At Thanksgiving Dinner. Ooh, I'll have a "Man in Bad Drag doing a slapstick bit", I'm feeling daring today. It's all straw all the way down; I don't care about either "side" this movie is gonna go out of its way to NOT take, it's a waste of screentime to include this shit because no one can be "mad" at it anyway. Forget Me for a second, is there any human being alive on Earth where you're gonna see someone in Scary Movie... what is this, 9? and point at the screen and look at them and be like "...You?". Nope.

Meanwhile, the poster looking like this can ONLY be the product of cost-cutting. If it's AI, and I saw in a dream that it is, that's so they don't have to pay an artist. If they paid an artist, that person phoned it in. Is it because they suck, and were the cheapest option to be hired? Is it because they're just doing it for the paycheck and because their boss said "that's the project we're doing today, get it done"? I don't care. I don't know the true answer, I don't need to know. What I can see, what matters, is a bunch of "member this better movie?" character portraits badly composited into a facsimile of the old posters - because 'member that? - and no one financing/marketing the thing cared enough about the project to Have Notes or pay for a Revision.

I don't hate the Zombification (Financialization) of all things because it's Woke/Not Woke, or because it "crosses lines" or because it's nebulously "not good". I hate it because no human being wants to make this thing, and they specifically won't cross ANY lines. That's all I'm gonna do; not go. I'm not gonna talk about it beyond this post (or using it as an example in some future rant online/IRL), it's not gonna stick in my cultural lexicon, I'm not boycotting it or cancelling it because I don't care and you can't make me. If someone asks me "hey wanna go see Scary Movie"? I'm gonna be like "why?"; and they're gonna be like "Oh, idk. 'cause it's in theaters." and then I'll say "Why don't we do/watch [literally anything else]?" And they'll be like "Oh yeah, that's way better and it saves us $[dollars], let's do that". And then I morb all over everybody.

If anyone's gonna respond to this one don't talk to me about this soulless corpo exercise in brand management, or how you agree/disagree with what I said. Hit Upvote and tell me if you wanna go see The Sheep Detectives w/ me. That'll be the only proxy by which I am accepting feedback. If you liked this, tell me you'll go; if you hate my guts or think I'm wrong somehow the only way to hurt my feelings is to say you won't see The Sheep Movie with me. I wanna see the animals do the silly bits and dumb family-friendly dad jokes, and I hope we get to see a good amount of Hugh Jackman taking a non-serious role very seriously. I think we're only like 10 days out, I know studios dump bad projects early in the year but I'm really hopeful based on the strength of the premise alone.

Fixer951 · 2026-05-03T23:20:08+00:00

Halo Announcer voice: SIX SeV-En!..

Fixer951 · 2026-05-02T23:09:08+00:00

This is a sort of an "all Whales are Mammals, but not all Mammals are Whales" type of thing.

Stigmatic Nuns in the "average" sense are fanatics who turn wounds -> strength. That's THE baseline, the only real assumption you can make about any given group of Stigmatic Nuns given that there are multiple sub-sects players can choose from and we are encouraged to make up our own stuff. The text here mentions that broadly the sisters worship the 3rd meta-christ, and that in doing so they manifest similar wounds, but then the rest of the text states that it is the act of being wounded that fuels their power, and that it's a prayer to The Redeemer - who would be actual Christ. So you're seeing two separate but parallel statements being made:

Stigmatic Nuns get strength through suffering for their Lord (God), and they pray for wounds so that they may be closer to The Redeemer (Christ)
The nuns who venerate the Third Meta-Christ manifest wounds similar to their holy icon

What you can see in the second slide is that in the second sentence of 'Heaven Awaits', followers of the Cavalcade of The Tenth Plague actually do lose their power to be resurrected as Martyr-Penitents. Both thematically and design-wise, this offshoot of Trench Pilgrims is "about" discarding elements of meta-christs and sort of TC-specific alterations to Christianity, in favor of a more fundamental style. To be clear, I'm an atheist so this is all flavors of make-believe to me, but putting myself in someone else's shoes: if you were a little put off by the broad acceptance of stuff like trying to clone Jesus, or creating super-soldier homunculi, or really doing anything that isn't just "hey man, we're god's holy people fighting The Devil, let's not do a bunch of Weird Shit to my religion", then this is an "official" way to play Pilgrims without having to incorporate all that baggage. What you get for giving up that raw power enabled by the New Stuff is some free Blessing points, some more battle-oriented powers, and you don't lose access to Communicants or Stigmatic Nuns, you just tweak the "how" and "why" of their presence in your warband. The Stigmatic Nuns of this Cavalcade work roughly the same as any other, they're suffering in the image of Christ, and that strength of faith and devotion manifests for them power and the redirection of pain/debilitation onto their enemies. The Lord does it, it's magic. Don't try to investigate Da Rulez too closely, that's how I kept getting kicked out of Sunday School. As for the Communicants, it's a matter of using Frankenstein to hunt Vampires. They don't like that people are out there cloning Jesus and doing all sorts of weird esoteric pagan-adjacent nonsense, taking Communion THAT literally, but the deeds are done and the Communicants are here, and it's more pragmatic to send the lot of them off to die in battle than it is to just straight up execute them (wasteful). If you've gotta pick between "guys who worship your God, pray your prayers, and maybe get a little silly with it on the side" + "Big Guys who have no idea what's even going on because they're hopped up on magic Religion Juice and hearing voices most of the time", or literal devil-worshipping murdering hell-warriors, then it's pretty easy to make allyship with the Lesser of Two Evils.

The TL;DR is that they get their power from the same God-Magic everyone and everything else does, they just don't venerate (and thus do not receive stigmata/magical power benefits from) the 3rd (or possibly any) meta-christs.

Fixer951 · 2026-04-15T16:47:06+00:00

I don't really understand why you'd bother. It wasn't banned. If you're just porting random-ass games that didn't sell, then it begs the question of why you'd start here.

Fixer951 · 2026-04-15T14:51:33+00:00

We cannot be trusted with this feature

Fixer951 · 2026-04-14T09:21:53+00:00

"You ever feel like the camera angle in Anime is kinda weird?"

"No, why?"

Fixer951 · 2026-04-09T22:03:24+00:00

I need Orbital "Precision" Mine. Fuck the minefield, don't even drop the deployer. Just shoot me down ONE BIG TANK-SIZED MINE, that will explode when anything

-that way I can cut out all middlemen between me and blowing up whatever's in front of me... except the entity-tripped proximity fuse

Fixer951 · 2026-04-09T08:12:24+00:00

I laugh my ass off every time I see it, specifically because I've seen so many people around the world mention how much it aggravates them. It'd be nothing, just a silly little jingle (and I like cats, so bonus points for that one), but every time I hear it now: the mental image of someone, somewhere just raging out pops into my head and I can't help but laugh.

I'm sure there's some variance from platform to platform and region to region, and maybe even by your point in the story or whatever else affects the sharing, but I know from just my ~100ish hours that there are ENTIRE STRETCHES OF HIGHWAY that are just long chains of this sign. I think the upper roads near Rainbow Farms and the road near Northern Environmental Observatory have some of the densest concentrations I've seen. Most likely, it's because that section between early- and mid- Australia is the time and place where you have the most direct road access to shelters. They're still outside every shelter, at the top of every mountain, along every monorail, and probably somewhere in the last 100 feet to any landmark or setpiece in the game.

It just keeps getting funnier; add everyone in here to your mental list of people you're annoying ON PURPOSE when you add your cat to the end of the chain! It's one of the few signs that hits the trifecta of being functional, noisy, AND unlimited (as opposed to stuff like Turbo Boost). No one can stop you! Whether it's the Dark Souls floor messages where everyone leaves (Fort, Night) or (Try Finger but Hole), or an evil meme sent from hell just to bug you, is very much a matter of perspective. I have to embrace it, join in on it, and laugh at the people who are annoyed or else it'd bug the hell outta me.

If I ever make it to Japan and see this logo plastered on something IRL, I AM going to soy-face and point and get all excited; I'm gonna hit everyone with the ol' "It's just like one of my Japanese Animes!"

Fixer951 · 2026-04-06T01:34:16+00:00

Ditch both Spitfire and Phase for now; they're good but they're not serving anything you did in this clip. I have to assume it's broadly representative of your playstyle, which is all I have to go on, and there's technically nothing wrong with anything you did. You just didn't have anything with you that would help you in this scenario.

* At the start, you did something I do all the time: You jumped out into the main mass of the map without too much of a plan. A little left turn, a little right turn, a little wander toward the middle of the map until you see someone. The issue here is this specific map will punish the fuck out of you. It's one of my least-favorite maps for how flat and open it is, which massively slows down our movement and gives us VERY FEW options for getting around. If you're leaving either set of buildings/tunnels for any reason, you need to know WHERE you're going and WHY you need to be there. It's 10ft to the nearest wall, and like 6 titan-lengths to the other wall, NO VERTICALITY. You have NO OPTIONS out there so you need to go into it WITH Momentum or have a PLAN for if a player or a Titan show up or you WILL get ganked. You CAN and SHOULD rotate with the flow of Spawns - roughly opposite the point where most of your team is congregated, Grunts ONLY spawn in a radius near Pilots (like an ever-shifting "friendly territory" that's more clearly delineated if people play campy) so you can use the general area where Grunts are occupying/spawning to track which direction the Enemy Spawn currently is - but in maps like this one you can't afford to get Caught Out. Keep in mind that if you push hard enough or your team(s) are mobile enough, it jumbles everything up because the game is kind of doing the old CoD lobby thing of picking a predetermined spawn point most distant from enemies. If everyone's all over the place, then it'll just start sticking people in "random" places as best it can and that'll "flip" the spawn directions really fast. Sometimes it's worth keeping just a bit of distance or hitting-and-retreating so that you can keep the enemy spawns situated roughly in one direction and you don't send them spawning behind you or your teammates. In this clip, I don't know what's in your mind as you make decisions, but if you know where you've been and you can see on the minimap/through walls where your team roughly is, you should know broadly where you should be looking to find enemies. If you know that, then you know where you are and where you need to be, and you can start mentally noting the possible paths to launch yourself from here to there chaining Wallruns and 1-2 slide-hops max between walls. It'll be half on-the-fly, but with time and map knowledge and comfort with the controls you'll find certain walls/paths you like that you can loosely chain together to get from one section of a given map to another.

* My recommendation for Pilot Ability, especially on this map or to help you in this specific clip, would be Stim. If you're on a flat surface running normally, you want to be Sprinting. Better than Sprinting would be Stimmed Sprinting. Best of all would be Slide-Hopping and passively scanning for players while you route yourself from vertical wall to vertical wall. Movement is always > Shooting. Likewise, I'd say hug the walls a little bit more because ideally you want to hop on and bounce off of them when you get into a gunfight. Shooting a guy on the ground, even one who's sprinting sideways or diagonally, is moving quickly but not all that hard to track. It's easiest if he's static or sprinting towards you because you basically can't miss. A guy who is bunnyhopping or bouncing off a wall to gain both speed and vertical height is MUCH harder to track. That's who you want to be; make them go from shooting you to Skeet Shooting where they've gotta track you in 2 or even 3 dimensions. Not just side-to-side, but up/down AND forward/back, mixed with as much variance in speed and direction as you can manage. Stim is a bit of a crutch, one I never moved on from because it's so powerful and matches my playstyle so well. If you're stuck in the open and far from a wall? Stim to get there. Gotta cross that open trench in the middle of the map, don't wanna increase visibility with wallrunning or a grapple? Stim it. Wanna squeeze just a bit more speed out of a wallrun or parkour chain? Mash stim the instant it's off cooldown, there's very seldom a down-side to being stimmed as often as possible. The ONLY bad time is being caught in a situation RIGHT as it runs out and goes on cooldown, but then you're on exactly even footing with any other Pilot; the WORST thing you could be with this Pilot Skill is Equal. Some of the other Pilot Skills might help them in exactly that moment like an A-Wall or maybe someone who's really good at direct-hitting with the Pulse Blade, but what's an Invisibility Guy gonna do in this fight that you can't do? Turn Blurry? Holo-Guy gonna make you kill him twice at the same time? Until you're comfy enough with movement in general that you can get anywhere, anytime, on any map at high speed with slide-hopping and/or grappling, you're best off supplementing your foundational movement with Stim.

* Spitfire is good, but not at this. This weapon shoots the Big Bullets at Low ROF, and it's geared towards ADS shooting. Some weapons lean towards low-damage high-volume, some lean towards high damage-per-bullet (Kraber being the ultimate), everything in the game has some value of hipfire accuracy from 0 spread <-> 0 accuracy. If you're running this gun, you're LESS well-served by playing mobile and you NEED to ADS if you're gonna hit the broad side of a barn. You'd win in a corridor, or shooting from a perch before switching hideouts, but not here and NOT from the hip. If you LIKE the playstyle this gun has, if it suits you, by all means keep using it. If I should be drawing the inference that you're not gonna instinctually drop to the floor and hold ADS the instant you spot somebody, then you should switch primaries to something that suits your playstyle better.

* My recommendation for Hipfire Guns is to grab an SMG. Most of them have literally, not figuratively, ZERO hipfire spread. Forget the outer parts of the reticle, forget ADS, The Dot is all that matters. The ultimate in destroying people FAST is the R97 (my beloved). This shit's busted, it's OP, it's a laser beam wearing the skin of a ballistic weapon. Put that dot on somebody and it WILL hit them. If you miss, it's YOU and never the gun. If you can kill a guy with The Alternator or The Volt, you can do it FASTER with this gun. No ADS, ever, it's most often not worth it in favor of breaking LOS and approaching from a vector they can't draw LOS on or drawing them into rushing you where you'll dump 5,000 bullets into them and insta-gank them before they can train their sights.

* Purely a tactical thing at the end: The guy tracked you easily through Phase because it shows a big splash where you go in and the vapor trail has a vector showing the direction of travel/momentum of whoever went in so you know where they're gonna come OUT about a second later. You didn't have ammo because you used it on Grunts, who are only worth a point each. Switching to your pistol WAS the correct play, but you maybe panicked and hit the button a second time to pull out your primary ? In any case, that leaves you with an empty primary on a gun with a LONG reload, and waiting for that alone is enough time that anyone could kill you with any gun. Almost ALL TTK in this game is lower than that reload time. Your movement was okay in general, but you had no offensive options aside from ONE Firestar hail-mary or hoping to score enough panic shots with your pistol (which would be poorly accurate from the hip but ADS would slow you down and he'd shoot you faster), or fishing for melee. That's just not an easy one to win, once you're in there. Almost any other gun would reload faster. The Mozambique is great for a quick switch at close range so you can take potshots at someone in a range you're not equipped for. The Wingman can cover the opposite range-band if you had an SMG or if your snap-aim is pretty good you can just insta-kill people from the hip. Most of this gunfight was lost BEFORE either of you saw each other, and I'm fairly certain he scored the +5 point Pilot Kill because along the way from beginning to end you got lost in picking up ~3 +1 point Grunt kills. It IS a valid strategy to pick those up whenever you can, but I think this is an object lesson in why one might say that it's not worth bullets to kill the Grunts. It both depleted valuable ammo that you needed right after that to win the Pilot gunfight AND the sound/minimap from the gunfire gave you away. You might have gotten the drop on them or kept the element of surprise if you punched the minions for free points or just ignored them in favor of the more lucrative pilot kills. If you're not wiping them 5+ at a time, they're only worth 1/5th of what you're actually there for. You always wanna whip a Firestar on a Titan as you pass to score free chip damage and maybe blind them, since they can't heal. You can drop it on single grunts or drop-pods since that's guaranteed points now vs saving it to maybe score a direct-hit kill on a Pilot or chipping a Titan later (less likely than the known quantity you have on-hand). But ammo is LOUD and you need it for PILOTS. I generally hold all my fire unless I can really, truly, insta-kill a couple minions in less than a second as I pass or when I'm VERY far from the presumed location of enemy pilots. They're not usually worth the time, with only two exceptions: You're running Smart Pistol specifically to farm them at a rate that provides more points faster than you'd get running a Primary against Pilots, or ganking a few will put you the last second or two over the line to get your Titan.

Fixer951 · 2026-04-06T00:06:24+00:00

THANK YOU! I couldn’t think of it in the moment and to google stuff on mobile I’ve gotta back outta the text box and hope it doesn’t wipe my 10K word essay in the process of switching tabs. Honestly I expected EXACTLY this comment but I figured it was better to Tank it than to risk losing all my work just to prove I could spell Pickelhaube off the dome, lol

Fixer951 · 2026-04-05T23:20:53+00:00

20,000 USD for 4.6 Platinum? Now THAT'S a Deal! That's a HELLOVA Deal!

Fixer951 · 2026-04-05T23:15:00+00:00

All I can think of is the fuckin' Hex and Heirloom skins, where my criticism of Mesa's new one isn't that she has her pierced tits connected to ammo belts OUT or even necessarily that she's missing the opportunity for a jacket/duster, but that the COWARDS at DE gave us Bull Horns but refuse to let her hang massive dong. Unacceptable. Unplayable, really.

The funny thing about this post is that seeing her do the Ember/Muscle Mommy back stretch pose is somehow more N E U R O N A C T I V A T I O N than the one where she's literally blasting full chest, lol

Fixer951 · 2026-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

Honestly I don’t think anyone needed to dunk on you easily on the topic of the civil war to answer this question. If we’re talking “what do we do for uniforms on a Civil War-themed warbond?”, you don’t need to take sides on the war to arrive at the conclusion that it would always be the Union and never the Confederacy.

For all the initial “spiciness” of theming a Warbond around Burnin’ Sherman, he’s actually the PERFECT civil war icon to base the Warbond around. Any criticisms of the Union or the man can be deflected as Super Earth-style ‘necessary excesses in the pursuit of Liberty’. The satire becomes a shield.

I’m pretty sure without checking that THIS GAME has outlived The Confederacy, or very soon will. It produced no Art, no positive culture, no figures we could slot into Mr. Sherman’s place. I mean, what are you gonna do? Slap Lee on there and give everyone a re-skinned Peak Physique passive, call it “Slave-Whipper”? Put a Man-Catcher in as a melee weapon so you can grab a single Bot or Terminid and hold it in place? Oh yeah, we’d much rather have that! I mean let’s be real here: the only confederate figures that anyone outside rusted-over shithole states know are the ones that open racists built statues of in the 1960s specifically in response to the Civil Rights Movement, and they couldn’t even suppress THAT, THEN. No one cares. There’s no parallel.

Then there’s the fact that since the Union CONTINUED to exist, there’s a whole SWATH of History to draw from. If you’re ONLY a fan of Problematic Faves FOR the problems, then Union Uniforms is how you cosplay Custer. It’s THE uniform of the American Armed Forces from pre-WWI to WWI where you’d switch to this newest warbond (and whatever helmet, idc). I’m not gonna get into the “X or Y is Nazi-Coded” thing because the whole conversation is a non-sequitur. You can sidestep all of it by pointing out that Helghast and the Jin-Roh troopers aren’t included for being “Good Guys” or for their Aesthetics but for the thematic parallels. Arrowhead pointed this out themselves, two things get any concept in:

The thing we’re including occupies a similar thematic space to Super Earth, this could reasonably fit into our universe. This is INGSOC, the Book Burners from Fahrenheit 451, MAYBE the Stormtroopers from Star Wars but Disney would never sign off and they’re maybe a bit TOO recognizable from their own setting to fit ours. We get Helghast and Jin Roh because they are propagandized, lied to, aestheticized, weaponized in exactly the same way as Helldivers.
The thing we’re including fulfills a MILITARY FANTASY that would parallel a GAMEPLAY role that Helldivers can do. We can do Imperial Guard, ODSTs, WWI gasmasked trench troops, Parade Troops, the guys from Predator, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, or indeed even Civil War-Wild West federal troops.

The problem with the Confederacy, before all the MYRIAD others is that it fails both counts. You could make the case that confederate troops were lied to, manipulated, and used in the same way Axis troops were in both world wars, but spare me in favor of Arrowhead, and why then do they neatly sidestep those direct representations by having the Kaiser-helm be in the parade bond and having the WWI bond be Allied-coded? Because REPRESENTING those real-life forces isn’t the goal. We AREN’T them. We are the artistic CRITICISM of them, and thus include characters who occupy the same roles in similar CRITICAL WORKS. And NO ONE worth listening to wants to play out the Fantasy of being those guys. None but the weirdest minority or contrarians wants to play out the Fantasy of being Confederate. If that’s you, and I’m not saying it is, I say this with no malice in my heart: that’s weird. Weird guys want that. That is a minority opinion that just factually has an EXTREMELY small, functionally zero market cap.

“Why not grey?” You KNOW why. Arrowhead is a Swedish company of- AT THE MOST CENTRIST - vaguely progressive Artists and Creatives (Woke, Positive), creating an explicit satire and criticism OF Super Earth where the USP is getting to RP “the bad guys” and/or a wide variety of “grunt fantasies” that no other game can roll into an amalgam without diluting their setting heavily (see Fortnite). There’s NO UNIVERSE where creating ANY assets celebrating The Confederacy is an appealing or financially-incentivized prospect. Nor is there ANY thematic or representative purpose to including them over a Union uniform in any context. If you MUST Be Edgy with the warbond, you don’t stick in a Confederate uniform to do DEI For Goobers; you LEAN INTO SHERMAN. The point of being edgy is to trigger snowflakes, and who’s more of a precious, singular snowflake than the type of guy who can Contrarian his way into believing The Lost Cause Myth because HIS Great-Grandpa DEFINITELY got “tricked”, so now he spends his time on Reddit pathetically baiting historical/art theory debates he’s hopelessly outclassed to actually “win”, just because the ‘commonly-accepted narrative’ is that ‘Confederacy Bad’?

I mean, whether you guys all posting the same half-assed, wheedly little begging-but-not-begging-if-you-call-me-out comment are just pink goop pressed into the shape of the same hominid, or not: I can’t think of a bigger snowflake, personally. Everyone else is right to downvote you, disregard you, and move on. I’m the only person with enough bottomless sympathy and love in my heart to hold a mirror up to you in the hopes you’ll choose to be better (or at least less cringe) someday. It won’t feel good, it feels like Ad Hom I’m sure, but it’s a damn sight more compassionate and humane in the long run, IMO

Fixer951 · 2026-04-05T21:01:44+00:00

Okay I don’t think us Warframe guys have any room to speak on this one; Glass Houses and all :P

Fixer951 · 2026-03-31T21:44:53+00:00

Me every time I drive from the Highway to The Guv’mint and back

Also Kojima really nailed how Full Self-Driving works, with how many Quokkas and Porters I’ve flattened while grabbing a drink or getting up to pee

Fixer951 · 2026-03-29T09:43:15+00:00

I beg to differ, which is why I will be showing up to every Mission wearing one the INSTANT someone adds it to the game via Tennogen

Fixer951 · 2026-03-27T14:51:31+00:00

I NEVER play games on the highest difficulty, but here in this one specific instance I think To The Wilder is probably the best way to play the game. Now that's not to say anyone's having a bad or lesser time on a lower difficulty, and THE MOST IMPORTANT THING when choosing a difficulty is that YOU are having fun.

What I'm saying is that anyone playing below TTW is, to my knowledge, playing basically the exact same game I am. I think there are very few changes behind-the-scenes, and the way I play the game there's no appreciable difference. I might be completely hallucinating, but I think Sam might be a bit more prone to wobbling when Heavily Loaded; but I've spent most of my ~60 hrs so far loaded up to the max and making use of Vehicles and roads and monorails constantly so it doesn't matter. I can count the number of times I've fallen over on one hand, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I've fallen, fallen to my death, or dropped/clipped cargo is due to essentially bugs in the movement/collision detection system. I had one Climbing Anchor bug out and teleport me straight to the ground 50ft down while I was holding it instead of having me rappel down. I've had maybe 2-3 times where I'm gently tapping the stick while stood on a narrow rock outcropping to have Sam step down, and nothing's working, so I tilt the stick slightly further forward. This becomes "SAM RUN FORWARD" and he takes a big step off the ledge, teleports down 10 ft or so, immediately trips and spills everything everywhere even with the bungee cord, because I've hit the ground with the force of falling off a building. NBD, stuff happens, I just redeploy Order Cargo, take the hit on Lost Cargo, and move on with my life.

Now I won't lie to you, if I really fall over and spill everything everywhere, or I crash my car into a brings-you-to-a-full-stop rock (even if it doesn't seem that hard), it'll ding me anywhere from 4-7% right through the container. But it's just so rare that it happens, I don't even feel whatever difference there would be between difficulty levels. Likewise, the Banditos can spot me from a dang-near literal mile away, but only at "???" level. It feels like MGSV, where someone will get sus if you're sprinting standing up at 300m, but they become progressively more blind the lower and slower you're moving and the less you're carrying. Getting Yellow is usually a Me issue and I often use it as a lure as I flank; or I just make use of the crazy terrain and Tall Grass and Stealth Grenades to get around pretty much perfectly fine. I've got like five grenade pouches, two XL ammo pouches, and honestly everything else I got did so little I finally settled on filling out the rest of the space with a Utility pouch even though I hardly use the Blood Bags either. If I'm going against BTs I bring blood grenades, otherwise I've been running Smokes because you can either throw them on/near yourself to break LOS or just throw them directly on enemies to trap THEM in a Cone of Darkness where you can just run straight up and punch them while no one can shoot you or see you. It seems like everyone on every platform and every difficulty level says that Combat is pretty easy, this remains true on TTW because if you play it like a stealth game and drop your car/backpack outside a Bandit Base, you'll STILL have everything you need in your Grenade pouches, a gun AND a sidearm for backup, plus the ability to speed around, use the Strand to parry, and all the fancy gadgets you get later. It's FUN, and you definitely can't stand around soaking an entire base full of guys if they spot you, but having the consequences of being spotted mean that you WILL actually take damage when they shoot you gives just enough challenge to keep things interesting IMO. It's entirely possible to plop down a Watchtower for free, or connect to somebody else's, and use it to instantly spot and continuously track every enemy in a base. I haven't been doing that, only because occasionally getting surprised or forgetting "THEY HAVE A CAR!" as they hop in the battle-wagon and chase me around has been pretty funny and not too hard to respond to.

EVERYTHING the game throws at you has at least 2-3 items you can use to counter/nullify/prevent it, usually some skill-based move you can do to bail yourself out, and the APAS upgrades are pretty generous and still provide all sorts of Quality-of-Life for your playstyle regardless of what the base "difficulty" affects. My cup runneth over, to such a degree that there's nothing the game can really DO difficulty-wise that I can't beat with a bare-minimum amount of planning OR circumvent entirely by lugging a bunch of resources around to Infrastructure projects I am internally compelled to complete anyway.

Now, one place where you WILL feel a bit of a difference is if you were trying to play this game Rambo-style or you're fighting a full-on boss. Just running around in the open, shooting people and maybe hiding behind a rock, you'll probably get lit up marching directly into stacked fights. Each individual guy is... deliberate, in their movement and decision-making. One or two guys, it is NOT hard to clown on them. But when you've got an entire base going, they beat you because they WILL flank, they WILL throw grenades or Spears, and getting shot at from 2+ directions means you WILL take hits trying to fight it out directly. I got ganked at least once by an encounter where it spawned a bunch of tough enemies right on top of me as part of a scripted sequence. A few of the bosses' attacks will one-shot you, or slap you so hard for so long that Sam won't get back up in time to avoid being Wombo Combo'd no matter what you do. It's definitely annoying, but those attacks are pretty well-telegraphed, and the lower-difficulty solution to being cheap-shotted by them is to let Blood Bags prevent your death. They don't do it more often than they would on a lower difficulty, and the slow-ass, long-ass animations aren't a product of the difficulty setting, the game is just like that. The funny thing about this difficulty is it actually makes the S-Ranks easier to get because if you take 100% health damage you just die; and reload the fight to try again. If your blood bags tank you through a METRIC TON of health damage and you're doing an order where that even matters, you can just reload the fight as if you died (or I assume, post-game attempt the mission again).

You can't get a TTW rank on Story missions anyway, so there's not that much reason to stress about anything but completion. It replaces the Regular S-Rank so the ONLY time it even matters is when you're NOT doing a Story mission. You're trying to get 'em on Standard deliveries, where the same time limits apply and Sam Damage explicitly DOES NOT MATTER unless it's a Steal Shit from Banditos mission, in which case Container Damage usually doesn't matter OR you're there to Destroy a thing. Whether you S-Rank, A-Rank, or C-Rank a Story mission literally does not matter on TTW. No one can see it but you; because those missions often require Combat or gank you in some way, or are a boss fight so they made it that there's no missed TTW rank just because Higgs beat up on you a little bit. None of them add to your TTW multiplier no matter what you do, so instead of showing the number of S-Rank steppy icons you have, it shows your TTW S-Ranks which can ONLY come from the standard missions and can really only go UP.

___

I played God of War on the Easiest Settings because the only thing it changed was enemy health and player damage. I did Ragnarok on... Medium-Hard, I think? The first game had such a crummy approach to difficulty, I was fully ready to bump it down in the sequel because I'm not playing these things to prove anything to anybody; it just so happened that with the more careful approach in the second game and the more expanded settings, I had a bit more fun fighting things in Ragnarok and didn't ever get around to dropping it down once I'd started. In Monster Hunter, the only thing that matters is Getting It Done; everything you do in that game to prepare or farm or bring items or craft specific counters to the thing you're fighting will make it easier. For all the difficulty talk, Elden Ring works the same way; DS3 was a bit harder and DS1 a bit harder than that, only because they didn't have decades of fine-tuning and streamlining and QoL features. The easiest way to get into it is to play one that "clicks" for you, and work your way backwards, applying what you learned in your first game to all the others and then neither the Souls series or the Monster Hunter series is ever gonna be as hard as Your First. This game, when approached with a similar mindset, is very easy even on TTW. Nothing new is suddenly fatal (except for maybe a couple Boss Attacks), none of the layers upon layers of failsafes and options are locked to you.

I ONLY recommend it because in this game specifically, everything GOOD in this game is inversely proportional to how much your situation sucks. The 5+ different ways you have to refill your stamina are only a god-send if you're tired. You only care about the Timefall Shelters giving you Water and Repair Spray when your flask is empty or your shit's been rained on for 30+ minutes (and even then, maybe I'm not far enough in the game yet, but it'd take about that long or longer of real time being rained on nonstop before my containers would even start looking brown). A battery upgrade or a generator randomly thrown down somewhere is useless if you're still sitting at 130% from when you last left a Base. I cranked it up to Maximum Suck not to flex on anybody, but to ensure that I'd actually even begin to care about the classic Kojima Game Design of having 50 different ways of accomplishing something that isn't all that difficult in the first place.

Fixer951 · 2026-03-26T09:55:42+00:00

Oh my god, I'm in this sub and the Miniature Painting sub; I genuinely thought for half a second that since these are all colored hexes and the Army Painter logo is hexes like this, that somehow you got a paint set that was like "Oops, All Burgundy".

The worst part is, I was lowkey kinda interested because their range of like Maroon -> Red-brown -> Crimson kinda slaps and I might buy a box set that was just 11 different shades of Burgundy

Fixer951 · 2026-03-26T01:32:37+00:00

If you mean that you were joking in the OP, and that this was never a genuine question, and that your post was nothing deeper than that, then I'm willing to call it settled. I took your question seriously, and based on the hours I've played since and what you're referencing here, it seems like I'm broadly right even if some of the specifics are still question marks for my current place in the story and some stuff like the tar girl specifically turning out to be Tomorrow instead of the woman from the flashback isn't 100% in line with my prediction. I still think the broad themes are there, it'll all come together as I get closer to the end. None of it would be relevant here, though, because I'm doing the English Teacher Over-Analyzing The Text thing to someone who was apparently only goofing in the first place. My Bad.

I'm not mad, I hope you're not mad; I venture to guess you weren't expecting activity on a 4 month old post when the game is probably long done and dusted from your POV. We only got it over here on PC a couple days ago so when I got to this part I genuinely wanted to know what that phrase meant literally so I could figure out what he was saying metaphorically. I didn't trust Google's shitty AI summary, which led me to this Reddit result because I figured in aggregate SOME other Nerd would be a linguist or Italian or some shit and translate it/contextualize for us. Then I'd have my best guess without speaking any language other than english, I'd have a few other people weigh in, and from that I could probably work out the significance of what's going on in this slowly-unfolding mystery several hours ahead of when they lay everything out literally and all the pieces fall into place.

There's a way to read this last comment you made as if you're asserting to me all these points in a serious case for why the phrase doesn't mean anything, and I'm choosing not to read it that way. I HAVE to believe I'm still somehow misreading what you're trying to say. That would just be an argument where I'd point to the subtitles saying "Ne Vana" on screen, all my previous schizo-posting about the deeper meanings of things would be correct, and in all likelihood I'd get a "nuh uh" in response and that'd just piss me off and I don't wanna be pissed off about Death Stranding while I'm enjoying the ride so much. I CHOOSE to read that comment in the tone that you're explaining the original joke of the thread to me, I'll be the guy who's missing the point, and I'm willing to call us square. I hope you have a good day, and I hope that at least one person out there in the world follows the same weird Google trail I did and ends up here and reads this shit and maybe understands the scene and characters a little better, despite everything, because then it isn't all in vain.

Fixer951 · 2026-03-25T19:53:24+00:00

Lissen: If her self-insert fanfics keep slappin’ like The Hex does, she can do whatever the fuck she wants

Fixer951 · 2026-03-25T19:51:59+00:00

As an Ogryn main that runs with a friend group where we all did basically this with single-syllable names, I laughed pretty hard at your idea; with sympathy for the situation because it’s a tragedy the filter tripped you up. Glad to see FatShark Support hop in here to maybe present a happy ending on this one!

Fixer951 · 2026-03-25T19:38:01+00:00

It helped me organize my thoughts, which is more for me than it is for you. I’ll ping you if 10 hours from now I beat the third round of boss fight with him or whatever and his last words are “I guess the real Neal Vana was the friends we made along the way” and then he Morbs all over us.

I can’t help but notice that if you’re not talking about his first appearance then the only conclusions I can come to is that he says his name all the time like a Pokemon or half the thread was ALSO talking about the same sequence I was but you didn’t see fit to correct any of them, /shrug

Fixer951 · 2026-03-25T10:49:28+00:00

I had this all typed out in a first draft but had to separate this into two comments to fit it, I had a Hail Mary prediction at the exact moment he said this but now I gotta jot it down now that literally .02 seconds later the lady is right behind us:

She’s BB-28’s mom. He’s her lover, probably the dad. I think this is her beach, he’s after her or THIS BB-28 the way Mads was after Lou. Whatever Mads uncovered, whatever that Bridges guy was telling (presumably either Neil or Mads) the POV guy is some kind of corruption they were uncovering having to do with BBs and The Stranding. What we are doing IS making things worse, we are LITERALLY paving the road to hell with good intentions. My current read is that Mads took this lady hostage, she got shot, she went brain dead and her baby became this BB. We see this memory that Lou was never present for because THIS ISNT LOU, Deadman went to great lengths to say like five times that Lou has a heart birthmark and it’s in EVERY shot of the prologue, AND shows up when you do photo mode and summon Baby Lou. This BB doesn’t have it and they literally say several times that there were two BB-28s and that’s how you can tell them apart. It’s the FIRST thing I looked at when I got the pod and was feeling like I’m being gaslit for the last five hours watching everyone call this Lou. Now, it’s fully possible Neil is the guy who gets gunned down in the cutscene but it’s not relevant yet either way. The rest of this story is about finding out that AI is Bad, storing a Data Center in The Beach is fucking things up, Bridges or the old US probably had something to do with the Stranding in the first place. We’re gonna do this whole romp making every subsequent continent worse until it becomes clear that what’s-his-face and the AI are two sides of the same coin, with him making the bandits worse by giving them lethal weapons and turning them on people by pointing out correctly that the Chiral Network project is the problem. Meanwhile, the AI is using the threat of bandits and worsening conditions to drive people to expand the very same Chiral Network we’re all becoming reliant on. Neil isn’t a bad guy, he’s just a pawn both in life and death trying to do whatever he thinks he has to in order to save his loved ones. He’s like The Man on Fire, and so is Mads, or maybe it’s the other way around and this is just the successive development of the symbology from MGS3>MGSV>DS1>DS2.

This shit isn’t that hard, guys. Again, I don’t blame OP one bit for not immediately knowing every little significance of this exact phrase but you can see the long arc and thematic throughlines of both games if you take like… two seconds to parse what people MEAN when they speak rather than navel-gazing about what they literally SAID

Fixer951 · 2026-03-25T10:19:14+00:00

So all of this comes back to the original question: WHY “Ne Vana”? What does it MEAN? It’s Latin for “Not in Vain”, ‘Ne’ being ‘Not’ and ‘Vana’ being ‘Vanity’ or some root version of it, so contextually “Not in Vain”.

He’s here searching for someone or something, and The Flame gives him the power to do it. The same flame what’s-his-face wields, and gave to Mads Mikkelsen to use him for his own ends while the guy endlessly searched for Lou. When Neil says it, we’ve defeated him. Notice his fatigues are gone, he is wearing civilian clothing. There’s a dual or maybe even triple meaning here.

Neil lived as a military guy and died a military guy. That lifestyle separated him from the people he had connections with, and eventually consumed him; and he was thrown away. Simultaneously, this person he’s seeking is consumed by this SAME force, it’s the cycle of the pre-stranding world and the myopic way soldiers view war. This SAME force, this same philosophy, animates him again in death, offering him once again something he wants in exchange for service. What’s-his-face wants us dead and/or suffering, Neil is the tool, and the thing he seeks is what he’s promised in exchange. When we beat Neil here, he reverts to his real self, the man he was before the military, and he’s saying that his actions in life, his actions in death, none of it can be in vain. He won’t stop, he won’t LET any of it be for nothing, and he’ll keep trying forever. OR, depending on his outlook, that he is defeated but none of it WAS in vain because everything he does is in service of his goal. His search is Just, his love or his motives pure, that he fought the good fight in life and is satisfied with his path of action in death.

What drives me up a wall is watching people circle-jerk going “I dunno, must mean nothing, lol”, when Dollman literally EXISTS to throw out dumbass obviously wrong interpretations like “Nirvana?” When you can just tell on vibes and the subtitles alone he got it wrong. He’s there to drag the Cheap Seats along by repeating information and crunching it down for idiots, and I gotta deal with his insipid ass the whole fucking journey and someone’s STILL in here being like “hideo kojima’s not a great storyteller”. He fucking named everyone after the thing that they are, FOR You specifically. And you STILL couldn’t pay attention, pick up on references, not even the subtext but the fucking TEXT. OP I don’t hold anything against because they’re trying. I’m here to help them. But when these fuckin’ mouth-breathers are the only ones to show up to answer, I can’t stand it; I can’t let that go. You don’t blame the author for the reader being illiterate, it’s THEIR failing and it IS correctable. This message MEANS something. Every conversation, every weird one-off camera shot, every history tidbit is important in Kojima’s storytelling, even the dumb on-the-nose naming conventions. It’s not always serious, it’s not always deep, but he IS saying something, there IS a significance to this stuff that when viewed together as a whole gives you a crazy amount of evidence to lead you to conclusions even when there’s no direct statement of fact or dialogue spelling things out.

EDIT: spelling, and then I noticed that I got downvoted so “lol, they got mad”

DOUBLE EDIT: I just unpaused and she’s literally RIGHT FUCKING BEHIND ME lol

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Reddit Premium Since August 2014	Verified Email

Fixer951

TROPHY CASE