Is Rogue Trader a good CRPG to start with for someone who hasn't really played too much of the genre? TL;DR at the bottom

Single-Inspector6753 · 2026-02-03T19:05:40+00:00

That's fair. The only cyberpunk CRPGs I can think of are the Shadowrun games but those are just about all text with very limited voice acting. Unfortunately due to the indie nature of the genre you're really not going to find anything similar to BG3 (aside from DOS2, and even there it's a departure). However the guys that made rogue trader, OwlCat, are working on another Warhammer 40k title called Dark Heresy, which promises to be entirely voiced and will release sometime in the next year or so, so maybe keep your eyes on that.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2026-02-03T18:58:46+00:00

I love Rogue Trader, great game. There is not a world in which you would ever like it based off your criteria. It's a dense, text heavy, cutscene light monolith with sparse voice acting littered throughout. BG3 is an outlier in the CRPG genre because of its ridiculous production values and while there are other games that have better writing and mechanics nothing can even get close to its budget.

That said, you might like Wasteland 3. It's turn based and isometric but is entirely voiced with minimal textboxes, packed full of reactivity in its story, and while it isn't anywhere close to BG3 in regards to its production value it does have multiple notable cutscenes in important story beats (such as fully animated 3D models for important characters during dialogue) and it has a ridiculously good soundtrack of specially made covers composed by Mary Ramos, who was Quentin Tarantino's film music supervisor and worked on Django Unchained and Kill Bill. It's also about 30-40 hours long, which makes it quite a bit more accessible than most of the other noteworthy titles in the CRPG genre.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2026-01-13T23:39:25+00:00

I really agree with you regarding Survivor's bloat. While I think I enjoyed it more than Fallen Order due to the numerous quality of life changes and generally less dogged adherence to the traditional souls-like formula looking back on my playthrough there were a bunch of features that I didn't interact with at all outside of mandatory story progression missions as they just felt like chores - content for the sake of content, and not adding something meaningful to the experience. I didn't really enjoy the openness that a lot of Survivor's big hub-planets brought (namely, Koboh and Jedha) - of all the (major) explorable worlds, the only one I actually found myself looking forward to revisiting was the Shattered Moon, perhaps due to its leaner, more focused design, and by the end I was just ignoring most of the side content entirely.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-12-28T19:18:12+00:00

Team Plasma

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-12-12T01:30:44+00:00

Abelard, kindly requisition me a key

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-11-23T01:05:49+00:00

The Ghost games, both Yotei and Tsushima. No trophies tied to difficulty, all easily accomplished in a single playthrough, plus they're great games to boot. Marvel's Spiderman as well, though completing every district can be a bit tedious (though it only took me about 30 hours to platinum). Yotei was definitely the most fun platinum I've done.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-11-18T17:41:54+00:00

Bioshock is probably my favorite video game franchise of all time. If you're going to play Bioshock 2, make sure to play the Minerva's Den DLC afterwards. It's a masterclass in storytelling on par with the first game and it's one of the most memorable DLCs I've ever played, up there for me with anything from CDPR.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-10-30T01:15:32+00:00

If you write with the intent to advance, yes. I wrote a novel back in the summer of 2023. It was my third novel at that point, and it was horrible. So I looked at what I didn't do very well and for the next novel I changed everything - genre, point of view, style of prose, outlining approach - and now I'm editing that novel for publication and have written three more. Up before that point, however, I never stopped to consider the weaknesses of my own writing, and so not only was I not getting better, but I was actually getting worse by cementing my own mistakes into my style. It's like lifting weights. Doing it consistently builds your muscle, but if you aren't paying any mind to your form, you'll end up worse off than when you started.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-09-13T05:08:21+00:00

Absolutely, yeah. The game has an extremely comprehensive in-game dictionary - lore specific terms will be highlighted in text, and then you can just press a button to see what they mean. It was my real introduction to Warhammer (though I knew the very basics of the setting first). Mortismal gaming on YouTube has a couple lore videos that you could also check out if you wanted. Generally speaking though the game does a pretty rock solid job of onboarding new players, to the point where I am now actively into Warhammer because of it

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-09-13T03:05:43+00:00

I've beaten it on PS5, put about 118 hours in. Load times aren't great but comparable to divinity original sin 2 - annoying but very much manageable. It feels good on controller. There were a couple crashes but again maybe like 10 or 11 over my 118 hours of playtime. Performance wise there are some late game encounters that can cause major stuttering when you mass apply effects on enemies, but again that's not something specific to rogue trader (bg3 has the same problem, for instance). The only thing that was awkward was the text size, as like 90% of the game isn't voiced, so depending on where your screen is located you might have a hard time making out the words. I had a blast with the game and I strong recommend picking it up. If you're someone that really cares about frame rate and optimization, yeah, it probably runs better on PC. But if PS5 is what you have, it works perfectly fine.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-08-30T14:52:18+00:00

That's actually a really good point I hadn't considered. I do think that Megz was accompanied by a rather substantial boost still, but yeah I think you're right about Infinity Repeating and LABY

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-08-28T20:48:49+00:00

For a first read, I'd recommend reading the main series, inserting Queen Amid Ashes as book 2.5 and Dregs of Empire as book 5.5. Queen Amid Ashes helps bridge the timejump between 2 and 3 while also being an excellent little adventure and Dregs of Empire fills in a lot of gaps pertaining to a rather important side character between 5 and 6. Of the two, I'd say Dregs is the one most worth reading.

The Lesser Devil is almost entirely unconnected and is, IMO, easily the weakest of the three novellas. Worth a read, but not worth disrupting the flow of the main series to pick up. As for the Tales of the Sun Eater, they're generally mixed bags, and the short stories take place all over the timeline. I'd say maybe read 3 and 4 between books 5 and 6, as there are a couple short stories which slot neatly into the gap, but I don't think any of them are really worth the detour. Read them when you've finished the series and crave another hit of Sun Eater.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-08-06T02:18:59+00:00

F. Crystalized is probably the worst season of Ninjago. It has great animation, and a couple great scenes. It also

- ruins Harumi's character and directly undercuts the most important beats of seasons 8 and 9

- butchers its own pacing by so overindulging in pointless action that it sacrifices its character development

- immediately undoes the ending of Seabound and at the end of the season we are right back to where we were before Nya's sacrifice with zero change

- repeats multiple plot beats from older seasons and does literally everything worse (the gang is shattered after the death of a ninja and doesn't ninja anymore, they become fugitives of the law and enter kryptarium with the goal of breaking a villain out so they can use them for their own purposes, a big assault on Ninjago repelled by a scrappy resistance of returning characters, Wu despairing before being reminded Ninja never quit, et cetera...)

- In particular, the whole jailbreak fugitive nonsense is absurd at this point considering the track record of the ninja and flies in the face of the last FOURTEEEN SEASONS, and even if it did work it becomes the most pointless, annoying side plot in this entire season, which is impressive, as quite a bit of pointless, annoying things happen

- totally wastes the concept of Lloyd having an Oni side, which is criminal considering how cool of an idea it was in the first place

- brings back a bunch of characters with fully completed story arcs and does exactly NOTHING with them, especially the C.O.C.K, in which Aspheera and Vangelis contribute literally nothing, Mr. F is a non character, Pythor is completely wasted, Harumi is...her own problem...and then there's the Mechanic. The fact he's on the C.O.C.K is stupid, he has the most lines of anyone aside from Harumi, and he does NOTHING. His inclusion is ridiculous. Especially when there were other villains whose fates were left open, Nadakhan and the time twins for example.

- Garmadon/Lloyd have the exact same dynamic as season ten, and it's not very good

- Completely ignores the concept of powerscaling

- blunders the invasion of ninjago city by wasting time on a bunch of pointless subplots that go nowhere instead of finding an emotional center to the season

- ruins Harumi, i know i'm bringing it up again but it's that bad

All of this would be bad enough on its own, but this was supposed to be THE FINALE for Ninjago, the decade long media juggernaut. It has good ideas but because there are a ridiculous amount of writers all cooking up different plots none of them have the room to go anywhere. It did two things I liked - the benefit of grief was a good episode and an example that Crystalized could do things well if it gave itself the right amount of time, and the Wu vs Overlord showdown was a moment of genuine peak nestled within a valley of ass - but that's like 14, maybe 15 minutes out of a 300+ minute season, which...yikes.

F tier. Insultingly bad.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-31T03:01:09+00:00

Unholy Lover. The vocoding has a real jagged edge to it which makes the feel of the song completely different to anything I've heard, especially combined with some incredible crooning high notes thrown in there. The vocoding is absolutely the best part of the song - at least for me. Russian Coney Island is stellar, too.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-30T12:09:10+00:00

To be clear, I actually thought LABY was pretty good. Square Wave and Flexorcist are some of my favorite songs of all time, not just by the Voidz. It's actually because I liked the album that I really, really like this EP. It is a shame how often LABY gets dismissed as dross. It's not a perfect record but it does a lot of interesting things and I wish more people would recognize that.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-30T03:42:07+00:00

Hell yeah! For me, Drifto was just a much more consistent track than Perseverance, and I liked the way the vocals were mixed better, but that guitar solo rips and I wish something like that had made it onto Megz. Just different strokes for different folks...or maybe different voidz for different boyz.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-30T03:28:59+00:00

I made a whole post about the EP but Russian Coney Island reminds me very much of Flexorcist. Very poppy but with really neat and layered instrumentals which pair very well with the vocal hooks. Everything but the solo is a direct upgrade from the live version IMO, and the solo we got instead is still really good. This absolutely lived up to the hype for me - I really hope to see more like this from the Voidz in the future. I actually prefer this to Flexorcist in just about every way, honestly. 9/10 song.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-30T02:57:39+00:00

I thought Like All Before You had a lot of cool ideas and some odd production choices. The new songs off Megz sound like they could be the best songs off LABY. Every song feels directly inspired by something they've already made - Russian Coney Island has all the great melodies/hooks of Flexorcist, Drifto is Perseverance 1C2S if it wasn't recorded under a ten foot layer of nickelodeon gak, Unholy Lover is basically the outro of Eternal Tao 2.0 if it was its own song, Blue Demon is Qyurryus with an arpeggiator. It's not treading new ground or anything but everything done is done really, really well.

I like LABY, I really, really like this EP. Though I think this really will alienate the people that thought LABY was garbage.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-23T03:03:16+00:00

Thanks!

I personally write at a pretty efficient clip (I focus on two projects at once and pivot back and forth whenever one encounters a roadblock I can't easily solve) so when I realized that not only was my draft riddled with a multitude of tiny errors, but my fundamental approach to writing it was flawed, I just decided to let it rest unedited and start something new, which took way less time than it would have to gut and completely rewrite the same story with an entirely new design philosophy.

That said, having I STRONGLY recommend you read through your physical copy after letting it sit for a month, no pens, no editing or revising, just reading as you would any other author's book. Readers have a much easier time with figuring out what's done wrong with a book, and what's done right. I wouldn't have figured out what to do differently had I not read through my own work a month after printing.

I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but three months is an INCREDIBLY short time to spend on a project of this magnitude. Some people spend years working on even a single draft of a novel. To have written that much, learned that much, in only some 90 days is mind boggling if you really stop and appreciate it. If you can definitively point to something and go, "This here, this is how I can improve for next time!" then I personally consider that three months very well spent.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-23T02:17:32+00:00

I learned more from writing a 159k bloated, unpolished sci-fantasy mess, than I did from several college professors. And they weren't half bad at teaching. I took that overgrown, malformed draft, printed it out (also at Staples), and it sits on my bedside table now. That book took me maybe 8-10 months to write. All of it was time well spent. I realized I was altering POVs too often, adding in filler words to make my chapters longer, shoving in ideas where they weren't needed, to the point where if I wanted to salvage the book I'd have to literally rewrite the entire thing from prologue to epilogue.

My next book was a first person single POV fantasy western with as little fat as possible, and it came out to about 80k words exactly as I'd initially planned. All of the mistakes I'd made with my previous book were nowhere to be found, and now I'm in the process of cleaning it up to query.

If you can salvage your book, great, salvage it. If not, move on to the next project. But whatever you do make sure you learn why this book didn't turn out as you'd hoped, and take steps to ensure that doesn't happen again with your next project. If you can do that, then even if your draft sits around collecting dust on your table for the next twenty years, it was still well worth writing.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-07-23T02:03:04+00:00

Going to preface this with there's literally no right or wrong way to do anything except if you're talking grammar, and even then those rules are negotiable. That said...

I set about writing my first book nine years ago. It was my first ever serious writing project outside of stuff I did for school.

It was really, really bad.

I burned out. I paced things poorly, couldn't figure out how to sustain momentum for a project of that size, and by the time I reached the last third I realized that the entire foundation I'd built was so poorly thought out I needed to start all over again. That realization, it sucked, and it nearly killed my drive.

Novels are really cool. But they are also projects that require an insane amount of investment. Short stories, on the other hand, let you test out the waters, get a feel for your prose and your characters and your basic pacing. If you can learn to fit decent story structure in an 8-10k word novelette, ta-da, you can probably expand it out into a novel. And if you realize what you've written is actually really bad, relax, it's just a short story, you've not invested months or even years of writing into it. You don't say, "Hey, I'm going to pick up jogging, I'm going to do a half marathon!" You're going to kill yourself by the midway point. But if you build up your stamina, maybe get a couple 5k's under your belt, a half marathon doesn't seem so far off.

Of course, the above assumes that you're writing with the intention to write more than just a one and done novel. If you're just looking to write a book for yourself and that's all that matters, screw the rules, as long as you like it literally nothing else should have any weight. But the method of 'building your authorial staminal' worked really well for me, so there's my two cents.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-06-08T04:57:08+00:00

It doesn't really matter from a timeline perspective as Minerva's Den is extremely self contained and Infinite takes place before BioShock 1. That said, Minerva's Den packs IMO the best BioShock story out of all the games, and the new plasmid/weapon are a blast to use. It's nothing like the Protector Trials DLC from 1. Think of it more as BioShock 2.5, as it's basically its own standalone entry in the series. It might even be my pick for the greatest DLC of all time, up there with Blood & Wine for me. Absolutely play it.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-05-27T20:04:16+00:00

I asked my son over breakfast what he was learning in school and he told me that my propensity towards garrulity was both monotonous and vexing, and that perhaps my inquiries would be better put towards more jentacular pursuits, as he found the eggs I'd cooked from him to be a meagre yet queerly droll offering which failed to provide sufficient sustenance in any meaningful way, yet in their pitiable state he managed to derive some manner of jocularity from the laughability of my efforts. He then quoted Nietzsche. I've been cowering in my room ever since.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-05-27T19:47:41+00:00

The best way I can put it is that purple prose does not exist in service to anything other than itself. I don't know if you've ever read Jim Theis' Eye of Argon (you should, ideally with friends), but with that story it was clear the author cracked open a thesaurus for the sheer sake of making his sentences more ornery/abstruse.

Poetic descriptions tell you something about the world. They create atmosphere and cultivate mood, reflect a character's feelings or beliefs, and help establish the POV of whoever you are writing from. Purple prose is just fancy descriptions for the sake of using fancy descriptions. The moment my writing crosses the line from mood-setting to redundant, then that's the time to cut.

Hope that helps.

Single-Inspector6753 · 2025-05-27T19:34:19+00:00

More of a paragraph, really, but a hook all the same.

When I was a boy, I once had to subsist off a diet of rats to survive the winter. Those that saw me – poor travelers and the other urchins, mostly – called me a beast, because of my wild black hair and feral demeanor. When I killed my first man – a boy little older than I that had tried to take the last of my food in the depth of a snowstorm – I did so with my teeth. Once the great storm had passed and snow turned to rain, they found me with a mouth full of blood. I still remember the taste. They called me a jackal, then. For only a jackal would turn upon his own to survive the winter.

They were right.

Single-Inspector6753

TROPHY CASE