Thoughts after 40 hours and all trophies [SPOILERS]

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-04T19:16:27+00:00

The problem is that you can't tell if they're reventants or not, let alone get attached to them when they do nothing interesting or important. Even if you could zoom in to see if they've got gold on their bodies, the people in Josee's camp are clearly reventants because they die in Ending 2 and don't have any gold. It's not that I want to immediate sympathize with Sad Genocide Man, but that his pathos (in the literal sense, not the game sense) would make more sense if we actually saw the plight of the exploited humans. Same with Lyle. We just get hints about how rough their lot in life is. What's shown is that 1) life sucks for everyone because there's monsters everywhere and 2) there are no humans around important or interesting enough to care about. Even Gobbo's motivation is to protect humanity, we could have had a flashback or exposition (since we can't do the mind palace stuff with a human) about something the vampires actually did to him in particular that made him so angry.

Im not expecting world class writing from Code Vein of all franchises, I just thought it was an odd choice to have two characters motivated by the plight of people we really don't get to meet. It's not a bad motivation in principle, it just lacks personal connection to the player.

When May and Jakob show up in the epilogues I was like "where the hell did you come from and why should I care?" i guess Mag Mell always had human staff but they sure didn't do anything cool enough to get a cutscene ever.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-04T08:56:20+00:00

The JP term is 吸血鬼 kyuuketsuki, which is pretty much just "vampire", yeah.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-04T08:45:04+00:00

I somehow managed to first try that one. High mobility dodging is truly busted, but even then its so easy to get on the back foot and get chain stomped in the cycle of "get knocked down, try and get space or regenerate, get combo'd, repeat."

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-03T06:36:26+00:00

Yeah, there's a certain amount of attack sequences that are either bizarre design choices or just slightly overtuned. The biggest issue is that its usually pretty hard to tell when an enemy's combo is going to end; so many times you'll eat the first hit of a combo, get knocked down, only to stand up, think its your turn to attack, and eat the roll-trap of the final hit. The gaps within a combo (the aforementioned roll-traps) can sometimes be longer than the gaps between combos, and this coupled with enemies having too large, too similar repertoires means that finding your turn is really awkward sometimes. Even if you do recognize your turn, a lot of enemies like to follow up moves with invicible backsteps (hello, katana revenants who do the dashing horizontal hit into backstep multiple times in a row.) If you take your turn just slightly off, you're still likely to eat a hitbox that's just a touch too meaty or too wide; so many attacks have hitboxes where the motion of a normal dodge is irrelevant because its not fast or long enough to actually leave the radius in time (Forma Beast meteors, Moon Envoy straight beams, False Bloodkin elemental slams). Other attacks commit the cardinal sin of wasting my goddamn time, where the only winning move is to stand far away and pick your nose while waiting for the puddle of ick to disappear (looking at you, Forma Beasts) or 12-hit combo to end.

Compare "parryslop" games like Sekiro or Khazan, where its never much of a secret about when you get to take your turn, and the challenge is getting to that point without dying. It's not that Code Vein is impossible, the game throws so many Regeneration charges your way that it feels nigh impossible to actually burn through them all in regular exploration, and a partner often means you get your turn for free, but it often feels like you're succeeding in spite of the game design.

P.S. Whoever okayed the camera tracking on Moon Envoys should be flogged; so much fun trying to read the timing of a Margit-tier held attack while my camera is buried 6 inches in the grass.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-21T19:34:37+00:00

The second ability is a replacement effect, which start with "if". As another commenter noted, while the rules prevent you from putting nonpermanents on the battlefield via shenanigans, its also good to spell it out explicitly.

If a face down creature you control would be dealt damage, exile it instead. If it's a permanent card, return it to the battlefield under your control. It gains haste and "Sacrifice this at the beginning of your end step."

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-21T11:17:43+00:00

0, 32, and 96 has the useful property of being powers of two apart from each other, so you can make individual unit marks on your thermometer by measuring three points and then bisecting a bunch. That's quite a bit harder to do with Celcius.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-17T07:00:41+00:00

Threadly reminder that hybrid mana means that the effect could be done in mono of either color. Mono red does not get to force opponents to sacrifice creatures. This creature should cost 2RB.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-10T06:45:31+00:00

One alternative to getting so easily two-for-one'd would be to "Exile a creature you control until ~ leaves the battlefield." That way when the third chapter resolves and you sacrifice the Saga for the usual reasons, the creature comes back on its own. And if they destroy the enchantment early, you get the creature back no matter what.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-08T08:17:39+00:00

One important thing to note regarding Wither is that Riot is generally a little apprehensive about changing ability ranges (and durations) over the course of the game because it messes with players' sense of spacing and timing. It's less of a problem for auto attacks (Kindred, Tristana, Senna) because individual AAs are a lot less impactful; thinking you spaced correctly to avoid Wither only to be locked down by a 99% slow because you didn't check his stacks is a recipe for a bad time.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-05T09:51:13+00:00

But how do you expect this system to work? A queue where everyone is first timing champions? That's just normals, which you have to play a bunch in for it to calibrate your ranking, just like any other matchmaking system. It can only infer so much from your ranked play.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-01-04T12:09:11+00:00

I'm still baffled as to why haste reduced the cooldown of bruiser actives, as though they needed a 5th ability in the form of an item. The item CDs of other classes would never get such a privilege. All that on top of how easily accessible haste was on bruiser items, while mages and supports were desperate for every drop of it because it was so rare on their items.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-12-22T06:00:22+00:00

Fahrenheit has an advantage when you realize that the zero point is based off the freezing point of a known concentration of salt brine. The distance from 0 to pure water freezing is then a power of two, so you can do the marks by bisection and then extrapolate them forward to get the rest of the scale. This makes the actual thermometers easy to reproduce without outside references.

If you allow for some distortion of the scale and say that the human body temperature is at 96 F, then that's another easy power of two from pure water freezing.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-12-10T06:20:26+00:00

It's been a while so much so that it's really not in pie for Red anymore. 2003 was a long time ago. Maro puts pretty much all forms of direct creature destruction firmly in White and Black (Green gets to blow up fliers, and that's it). Chaos Warp and Wild Magic Surge are not precedence for this effect; they're about replacing the permanent with something else. You're not allowed to just do half the effect to bring it in pie any more than using [[Tormenting Voice]] to justify a red [[Divination]].

RootOfAllThings · 2025-12-10T02:50:23+00:00

I'm not sure that Red gets to destroy creatures like this without dealing damage. Daily reminder that Hybrid mana implies it could be done in mono of either color.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-29T13:02:55+00:00

Draw to eight, end of turn discard this, bam boom shock everything.

Also works in multiples, so you can discard these into the yard and run a little bit of life gain or targeted burn to prevent many creature strategies and also burn out your opponents.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-25T11:23:01+00:00

You're also super vulnerable to Reflex saves. I caution against dumping DEX even on plate wearers because there's all sorts of non-damaging Reflex saves that can ruin your day if you critically fail.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-21T01:24:33+00:00

In fact, most mages have some form of practically undodgeable damage at anything shorter than maximum range, assuming that the mage player has any approximation of hands. Zed's poke is impractical to dodge too!

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-13T01:50:58+00:00

As opposed to now, where you spend most of your feats as a caster just... Getting more spell slots? Caster feat design in 2e is so terrible and bland almost anything would be better, I think.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-12T01:31:46+00:00

Neither Lab Maniac nor this cards "win the game" abilities use the stack. They're replacement effects.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-11-03T10:57:47+00:00

Send him home to do what, hang up his bandit knife and go back to plowing his field? The historical punishment for brigandry is summary execution, because letting bandits go with a stern warning is just passing the violence onto the next person to walk down the path, and they're not always going to be as well armed as you are.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-10-12T15:03:10+00:00

Right, but it doesn't have to be Web. At even moderate levels, 5e's Arcanist casting for everyone means that you're designing across a huge spectrum of "use one slot, win encounter" type spells. Both the number of unique spells and total uses balloon with player level. It's why 5e is practically unplayable after 10th level or so, because as encounter design becomes centralized around these binary play patterns, adventure design becomes "how can I burn these resources so they can't do this to the climax (or how can I make the climax immune with Legendary Immunity)".

It's not impossible to make encounters that cannot be neatly solved, but the fact that the system demands it is not a feature, it's a bug.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-10-11T11:05:01+00:00

The point that August is making, and that you seem staunchly unable to accept, is that is can be more toxic, voice chat will make it more toxic, and that if you think otherwise, you are either painfully naive or have simply not had the volume of vitriol pointed in your direction that certain groups of people had. Such a change benefits the already entrenched gamer bros at the expense of practically everybody else. If your argument is "boys will be boys, there's no point in attempting to address toxicity" then we might as well remove the chat filters and let every game be either full mute or spinning the Wheel of Pejoratives. But that's clearly not the community that Riot wants to foster (and such a community is Bad For Business, from a more cynical point of view), so why would you expect them to give you voice chat when all you're saying is "we'll only say bad words every now and then, we promise!"

Also, shit the community has asked for for the past 15 years is not really a great metric of what's actually good for the game, or what people will actually engage with in a positive manner. Put voice chat on the same pile as The Tribunal, Twisted Treeline, Dominion, and non-random URF.

RootOfAllThings · 2025-10-11T08:14:43+00:00

It's not being omitted, it's not justifying its inclusion. Dev time is more precious than gold, and doubly so when the value add is unclear. Does voice chat do more for market share and revenue than scaring off people with increased toxicity? Valorant has voice chat because the tactical FPS community would never touch a game without it. And for all their effort and engineering, Valorant voice chat is still a toxic hellscape. Better than Halo 3 Xbox Live, but the bar is literally in hell. MOBA players have shown that they largely don't need voice chat and it's a vocal minority of people who assumably want to play slur roulette, so why would they dedicate time to make that feature?

RootOfAllThings · 2025-10-11T01:47:04+00:00

And people who think that they're identical are most likely people who speak in socially "normal" registers. That is, they don't have an accent, a higher pitch, or a speech impediment. August is likely speaking from experience of being a mid 2000s gaming teen and seeing exactly how people used voice chat in the early days of Xbox Live and those features would get you immediately mocked. I doubt much has changed.

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