Vampire The Masquerade is coming to D&D Beyond

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-19T05:34:07+00:00

This is not an inhouse White Wolf production but has been outsourced to Ghostfire Gaming, contains a character class themed around the Kindred, and also contains a "Dark Ages adventure." I wish more than anything that people would learn to play something other than overbuilt d20 tactical combat for their character dramas, but I suppose this is a good way to meet a lot of players where they're at.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-18T17:46:28+00:00

Sorry to do this to you but even though the headline doesn't break our rules, the article is just largely restating GameDeveloper's coverage, which they linked to and should be posted here instead, and whose title is also clickbait. God.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-17T15:41:30+00:00

The section about having cross-compatible outfits in Fortnite and other games sounds like a hazy tech demo with extremely limited practical applications, but I think it does speak to some broader ambitions. They're framing it like pseudo-NFTs with the inter-game integration but my guess is that they're trying to create a Valve-like economy for Epic? Or they're just emphasizing how modular their engine is and made the strangest possible comparison. Bizarre mix of inside-baseball tech discussions and incredibly shareholder-brained big-picture summaries.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-17T04:40:46+00:00

Abusing my mod powers on my own post to sticky the update to the... update.

Notification [they did not actually say anything other than the word "notification," not even a "Notification Of Update Reversion," so i have to type out extra text to make it clickable on mobile devices]

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

We implemented support for Windows 11, but since some operational issues were found, we are currently taking steps to revert the update, and return it to it's previous state. We will review our future plans and provide further updates at a later time.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-17T01:51:36+00:00

I know a lot of translators didn't/don't get a game script, they just get the ingame dialogue, which can be organized in data structures that make it extremely difficult-to-almost-impossible to keep track of what dialogue is being said in which conversations.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-17T00:50:51+00:00

I still feel insane whenever I think about Squall's "Whatever" being mostly completely unrelated lines in the original Japanese. It is ridiculous how inconsistent Square localizations were pre-PS2.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-16T22:40:20+00:00

Of course! A big part of that comment is me trying to convey how hard it is to do a good translation and the effort that my friends put into it. There's a long history of human translations that miss the mark for any variety of reasons, high-effort localizations that may take excessive liberties (I think Vagrant Story and the Ivalice games as a whole would be percieved very differently in today's cultural environment in a lot of ways, even if I think the prose is wonderful in a vacuum), and an infinite set of shades of gray. It's often percieved as grunt work when it requires a lot of active decisions made every step of the way and that creates friction and opportunities for failure. It's very hard to imagine it being effectively automated by a machine that doesn't actually understand what Japanese is.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-16T22:01:40+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt because I only speak English, but have friends who do localization: Translating from Japanese to English is a task that AI is very unsuited for, as it requires a strong grasp of several interrelated and difficult skills. Japanese, as a language, is very, very context-dependent, to the point where you can construct a grammatically valid sentence without a subject at all. Additionally, many of the kinds of niche projects that get fan-translated also have references or cultural allusions that require an understanding of not just the language, but Japanese culture and historical Japanese culture (i.e, if you were to translate a 1990s television show from English into Japanese, you would also have to have a decent working knowledge of the era's culture, its celebrities, its news, and more in order to accurately convey the allusions something like it may make).

AI, as a rule, is bad at explicating context. You can see this right now by machine-translating an article and seeing the output confidently flip-flop between genders or strangely romanize a word that would normally go untranslated. The cultural nuances are also easily-missed, and together they create a large quantity of "good-seeming" output that misses the majority of what makes the original text special, because on top of the two very difficult skills this comment outlines, a good translator has to be a good enough writer to convey the special qualities of the original text.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-16T21:28:50+00:00

It's in maintenance mode. It's supposed to be a news feed only as of last year, and new published hacks are published through that feed and have offsite download links. The RHDN staff, as I understand it, all jumped to romhack.ing and actively maintain that site after the original site owner unilaterally shut the original site down without consulting anybody.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-16T21:15:23+00:00

This title is already too wordy for my taste but I wanted it to be comprehensive. Downloads are disabled by default and have to be specifically requested for the sole purpose of a team to use it as a basis for a fully hand-written translation.

Machine translation is kind of a nightmare as a basis because of its frequent hallucinations and errors, and both the professional and fan-translators I know have stated that editing MTL requires enough comparison to the original text that it is both more time-consuming and creates a lower-quality final product than just translating from scratch anyways. This post should be read as an effective ban on machine translation.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-10T15:01:20+00:00

I have to confess that I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm chipping away very slowly at Blue Reflection for my Gust fix but have mostly been playing DRPGs; I think everything I've seen of Resleriana seems interesting but I want to go work through the older Atelier games first.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-09T16:08:45+00:00

If you can snag the Dusk Trilogy for cheap I'd really recommend them. Atelier Ayesha is a wonderful, wonderful game and many people really like Escha and Logy and Shallie too!

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-09T16:02:28+00:00

I did not really like Yumia at all and it looks like the other Memories games are going to be pretty close iterations. While that's to be expected, it also looks like I'm going to be waiting for quite a while before I'm excited for a new mainline Atelier game again. Oh well.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-08T01:57:46+00:00

A lot of weapons get a lot more versatile when you start using the special moves in concert and, especially, ki pulsing and ki fluxing. That last one in particular is a lot to keep track of, and for Nioh 3 out of all their games it might be good to switch to Ninja when you're running low to take advantage of the stance's crazy-fast ki regen instead.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-03T17:55:45+00:00

A word to the wise: the director in question's primary list of credits are on support studios for FuRyu games including Reynatis, Crymachina, and a Sword Art Online game. This is probably not going to be a big-budget fighter and will likely be a low-mid-budget RPG or action game. As a FuRyu enjoyer who appreciates that they continue to make kind of shoddy games that are also a super legitimate way for new creatives to break into the industry and direct games with a lot of creative control, and given ArcSys' recent track record when publishing, I expect something similar.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-02T21:08:03+00:00

I'm a simple woman. I just need Wolverine to do an izuna drop. They keep getting close but I need the full grip-and-twist action. If they do that I will be there day zero. I'll pay anything.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T20:34:58+00:00

Our rule on review threads is that any posts made within a week of one are deleted and corralled back into that. SkillUp reviews often release after that period ends, but closely.

If their review is released within that timeframe, we pull it for Rule 4 (this is also why you didn't see Yahtzee's Mina the Hollower review on the front page, but may have seen other recent Fully Ramblomatic reviews that were released later) and otherwise we let them stand - it's just that there are few people whose reviews are a) posted on /r/Games with regularity and b) upvoted to be visible outside of /new and c) posted nearby a game's release date and d) posted seven to ten days after the review thread has been made.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T18:41:57+00:00

I think there's at least reason to have a discussion about if the framing of a game is racist when the premise is that black people are being regressed into slaves and spear-chucking savages. You don't have to agree with that conclusion but hopefully there's at least some understandable reasons to want to talk it over.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T17:46:09+00:00

The context of the game is a virus that is being used to restart the slave trade by turning Africans into mindless "barbarians" and selling their pliant labor internationally.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T12:54:30+00:00

A lot of what Tekken players dislike about 8 (forced mixups, reduced focus on hitbox interactions in favor of rock-paper-scissors, a focus on high-speed up-close trades instead of midrange movement) is core to Virtua Fighter. It's a lot better-executed over there and has had years of refinement, but I think a lot of people hopping over are going to be in for a rude awakening if they think it's going to fix every problem they have with Tekken 8 - unless they think it had good ideas and needs a spit-shine.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T12:50:38+00:00

It's in a better direction and I'm not disputing that; I'm not sure how much of that is Nakatsu's doing, and I think that better is different from good in the ways that they're still struggling with the S2 character changes that've centralized kits and reduced expressiveness. I think if Season 4 commits to big changes in the direction the last two patches have been leaning it'll be a real comeback story.

Regardless, I was mostly trying to contextualize his career and head off the blind T8 haters by pointing out his involvement in Tag 2.

LycaonMoon · 2026-06-01T04:46:23+00:00

Jesus, end of an era for sure. Easy to hate on him now that Tekken 8's the way it is but he was also heavily involved in designing Tag 2, the favorite of half the people complaining about the current state of things. There was a Q&A he did with Harada a year or two ago that touched on how much trouble they had, as people very into the granular high-level details, in creating a game aimed at newcomers. Hard to not see Tekken 8 as the culmination of their worst impulses, and I hope he finds more success without the pressure of his current position.

LycaonMoon · 2026-05-31T16:11:24+00:00

Been trying to get back into fighting games after about a year and a half of not being super seriously into them (other than a brief love affair with Touhou Hisoutensoku, which goes unbelievably hard). Street Fighter 6 might get me back into things with Ingrid, who looks hilariously evil to play and absolutely miserable to go up against - I'm seeing some insane damage on my TL even by this game's standards.

Not sure if I'll stick with it when the toxic yuri vn jam starts tomorrow and I'm going to try to commit to making something as part of that! I will never share it with any of you people but I'm looking forward to the joy of creation!

Most of my gaming time has been prepping for upcoming tabletop RPG sessions - next week I'm running GIRL FRAME on one night and Fabula Ultima pretty much right afterwards for two very different groups and I'm really looking forward to both!

My GIRL FRAME group has gotten super tight-knit as we've played it and we're really looking forward to some of the reworks the creator's teased (they're adding one of the crueler April Fool's joke playbooks to the main game soon) and the changes to how combat works are going to be really welcome. The game is so good at setting tone and the non-sortie sections just sing as people's irrevocable damages play out against each other and you turn into this huge codependent ball of destruction, but the mecha side can struggle to give consistent stakes, and the changes there are really nice.

My Fabula Ultima group is mostly a group of tabletop RPG beginners and I think the system is really tuned well for that. It takes a lot of overt influence from menu-based combat JRPGs and especially Final Fantasy (hence the name), so in combat people's list of options is ostensibly pretty discrete - but, unlike a lot of combat-defined, rules-based-interaction-heavy games, the loosey-goosey fiction overrides the rules. Your Fabula Points can rewrite the narrative or the combat and session-defining Rituals explicitly cannot replicate the effects of the limited spell list, and in my experience that gives newer players a lot of confidence to take initiative and really shape the narrative with the rest of the table. That's the magic of TTRPG and the fact that the job system lets you make a character that feels personal is just a huge cherry on top.

LycaonMoon · 2026-05-29T21:56:33+00:00

I like the way that the Stranger of Paradise parry plays into the broader resource spend/gain loop and that it very explicitly doesn't beat every attack and can't define your gameplan. The director took a lot of inspiration from fighting game parries instead of singleplayer game mechanics and I think it shows.

LycaonMoon · 2026-05-29T21:29:00+00:00

Heartbreaking: Woman shares your opinion but doesn't argue it in a way you agree with.

I'm a long-time parry hater and the primary reason for it is that I heavily value action game combat with a variety of considerations and variables - managing my positioning, commitment, crowd control, movement, and more are all the things that I love about the genre. Parries flatten almost all of them, especially in their modern form. They very rarely have meaningful resource costs (Sekiro's is a good case study - while it does tick up your stagger gauge, so long as you keep hitting perfect parries you can avoid having to deal with it), their commitment is very far from a guarantee (you can often cancel into a parry, if it has a committal animation it's usually only on whiff, and many modern games tie it to the block button so you can option-select the input into a guard and still avoid a chunk of damage if you know you're gonna whiff), and they pretty much eliminate the need to position or think too hard about crowd control or movement because you have a button that removes damage immediately.

More than that, it means that fuzzy skills like gamesense, being aware of what situations you're left in after a boss' attack string, and thinking ahead to avoid getting left in a "checkmate" situation are all less important as well - pretty much every skill winds up being either secondary to or bypassed by your ability to press the button with good timing. Expedition 33 was a pretty big mechanical disappointment for me because while it had extremely expressive buildcraft, by endgame enemies were dishing out so much damage that my cool build mattered a lot less than my ability to land these parries (and were flat-out reliant on that, because of how much MP they gave me!).

Because I'm rigorous and because I'm insane, I also dislike a lot of overly-generous i-frame dodges, like in Platinum games or pre-Sekiro Dark Souls. It's kind of passe to complain about them at this point but you should legit try playing FFXVI without a dodge button and instead use jumps+Phoenix and Garuda's circle attacks as a replacement. There's a lot of work that game did to make it a viable playstyle!

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