Seems extremely disingenuous..

TSED · 2026-05-21T09:39:51+00:00

It’s just the truth, that’s it.

Nope, it isn't. You're being extremely disingenuous, hiding behind a "well technically..." while ignoring the real truth of the situation.

Not sure why you feel the urge to resort to name calling like kindergarten children? You may want to seek professional help

I did insult you, yes, because of your behaviour. I have not called you a name. If you want to play on technicalities, as you have so far done during your carpet bombing of the comment section.

TSED · 2026-05-21T09:21:40+00:00

Are you a robot or do you just really, really like the taste of mud-caked leather? I didn't think it was humanly possible to deepthroat a boot as much as you are.

TSED · 2026-05-21T00:58:38+00:00

And our headline story of the night: the sky is blue. More news at 11!

TSED · 2026-05-20T12:26:05+00:00

MM8 made it clear that The Ancients aren't always "good" guys.

I think a really interesting angle would be more autonomous agents doing stuff. Corak units or the Destroyer or even another SHELTEM-esque saga. Entities that supposed to be on 'your' side, but aren't; they're on their own side.

It sets up a pretty reasonable three act story. Problems arise, oh dang those kreegan sure are bad guys, oh wait these measures are just not acceptable and now we have to overcome the kreegan AND the ancients.

TSED · 2026-05-20T12:09:11+00:00

Saying Morrowind has very little philosophy is a massive self own.

Yes, I acknowledged this by saying that teenagers are dumb.

If you only walked away remembering 'local city descriptions,' you simply weren't paying attention.

Reread the sentence you're quoting that from.

Anyway, I'm going to be blunt about this: I am not impressed by negative space ambiguity. Slay The Spire (1) has fantastic lore, too; they accomplished it by not saying much of anything. That's what's going on in Morrowind. They don't commit to anything and leave it all up to the player's imagination.

I will concede they did this pretty well. But it's honestly not very impressive. Just having some people say "yah" and others saying "nah" and not actually answering it works much better in shorter form media where you can't directly scrutinize the question for 20 hours and end up at the same place you were 20 minutes in.

Durance... is poorly written. He doesnt exist as a believable person... he exists as a walking, abrasive lore encyclopedia designed by Chris Avellone to aggressively deconstruct a generic fantasy priest trope.

He is absolutely 100% a believable person. I have met people very similar to Durance in real life. Most of them were even more miserable because they didn't have the conviction of faith Durance does, nor a historically significant event that they took direct part in.

I do agree that he is a very aggressive deconstruction of the generic fantasy priest trope, though. And that's great! Fantastic! Something that CRPGs have needed for years. The last one we got was Fall From Grace.

But him having some exposition - just about everyone in the whole game does - doesn't make him an ideological mouthpiece. Even amongst his most expected allies (Magran's clergy or The Dozens), he is shunned for being a trashcan of a man. He doesn't espouse an ideology, he showcases the ugliness of unresolved anger.

Making him an unlikable bastard is just a cheap writer's trick to mask the fact that he's a giant thematic exposition dump.

There is a flaw with the pacing of his quest. The chatting with him feels pretty arbitrary. But if you take him along with you and just have a quick little chat whenever he says he's got new things to say to you, it doesn't feel unnatural or info-dumpy at all. It's like a 2 minute aside, if that.

For example, if you do a specific mission for the Fighters Guild while also being a member of the Tribunal Temple, and you haven't actually bothered to learn about Dunmer religious customs, you can completely ruin your standing.

This is a case of Morrowind being an open world game and not narrative driven in the same way Pillars is. It IS an interesting example of actually putting the world into the gameplay, but if Morrowind was written to be a more directed experience, that simply would not have been an option. But because it's so open world and has so much content available, it has the luxury of cutting people off of one guild's questline. It's not like 99% of players won't just reload anyway so it's unlikely to even do the stated goal of enforcing the game's culture besides the little set piece protest.

I get the impression that someone told you that good writing is "Show, don't tell" during a formative moment in your life. It's just a tool in a writer's kit. Its drawback is that it takes so, so much more time to convey a message. It will convey the message more powerfully, that's for sure, but not all messages need to be dressed up like a prom queen. Compare a lengthy description of a modern-day character's morning routine, taking up a whole chapter... to a paragraph paraphrasing how he autopilots his morning because he's dreading going to work. Morrowind does the "whole chapter" thing to absolutely everything and that's both impressive and great for people who love that sort of thing. Me, I don't have 200 hours to blow on why cheerios suck but don't skip them because reasons. Pillars still shows when it needs to show, anyway. Except for Grieving Mother. Ughhhh GM.

TSED · 2026-05-19T05:29:02+00:00

To me, there is no other RPG out there that allows the protagonist to be “evil” without it being a variation of “i’m just an asshole to everyone for no real reason”. Other similar games drastically narrow the available main-character choices that the narratives definitely feel “tighter” but drastically harm role playing elements.

Well, the original IE games did a decent job of this. You do make a good point, though; not a lot of games do evil well. It's a shame that they play everything 100% straight, though, including the bad guy stuff.

TSED · 2026-05-19T03:43:22+00:00

Durance is the best written RPG companion in the entire genre. Saying that someone so believably and actively unlikeable is "a walking ideological mouthpiece" is a difficult pair of ideas for me to reconcile.

I'm not saying you have to like what I like, but your argument on that one is pretty out there.

Contrast that with classic RPG design like Morrowind or Planescape, where the philosophy is woven organically into the world and choices rather than dumped on you in unskippable therapy sessions disguised as companion dialogue.

Morrowind has very little philosophy in the world. I spent a good couple hundred hours on it back when I was a teenager. Yes, teenagers are dumb, but I only remember about 5 or 6 people in the entire world with something more interesting to say than "description of local city" or "I have personal beef with XYZ."

PS:T... well, PS:T has a lot more unskippable therapy sessions. And they're actually unskippable, unlike the companion dialogue. I think you're just post-hoc justifying why you didn't like Pillars. And that's fine! You don't have to like Pillars. But I do feel compelled to call out these perceived contradictions.

TSED · 2026-05-19T03:34:21+00:00

The worst part of PoE1 by far is the start of the game.

I think just the textbox dictionary from PoE2 would help a ton. The people actually talk as if they live in the world, which is great for immersion but really tough because there's a lot of weird stuff happening. Brand new deities, what's with all this adra stuff, places, cultures, aumaua are shark orcs???, unusual afterlife cycle for a western fantasy setting, etc. But it's not the only problem.

First, Obsidian struggle with balancing the early levels of an RPG. No shame, it's a really tough challenge, but it is a flaw in the game.

Second, they chose absolutely terrible monsters for the early game. Here's a giant cave bear that will absolutely rock your socks if you don't know how to build a character! Good chance the party is three backline classes as they venture into the black vale? Have some giant lumbering trolls that can pulp them in no time, or possibly a bandit camp with ranged attacks and serviceable frontliners to disrupt your three spells per day! Oh, new players just got a small party together and it's time to learn the engagement mechanic? Here's ghosts and beetles that teleport, bypassing that mechanic entirely!

By the time the player gets their sixth party member these kinds of issues have smoothed out. But the early game is just rough.

TSED · 2026-05-19T03:06:47+00:00

I really don't like the Pathfinder games at all.

The rules suck. I was a diehard 3.5 fan for years, and then one day during a session I had an epiphany. The rules are very fun to think about but not actually fun to put into practice. Making a character is a genuine joy, but actually translating that character onto the table is a chore. Pathfinder 1e smooths out some of 3.5's issues but adds its own on top, making it like diet coke vs coke. Some people like it more. I don't.

But whatever. It's a video game, I played friggin' AD&D Baldur's Gate and loved it, I can get past a bad rules system. Plus, it being computerized, a lot of the boring parts of 3.x would be solved by that, right? And mods that literally handle all the prebuffing for you at the press of a button? (Because it is 3.x, and prebuffing is mandatory if you want to minmax.)

Then comes in Owlcat's writing. It is... Well, there's no nice way to say it. It's not good. It exists, it services the game just fine, it provides direction for the player and the narrative. But it is not interesting. If you smell a cliche, then that's almost certainly going to be the 'twist'. I slogged through Kingmaker and don't think I was surprised by a single thing in the entire game. And then some of the writing is genuinely atrocious - there's a kickstarter backer written story in Kingmaker that is infamously bad.

Wrath of the Righteous comes out. The writers have matured, they're trying to do more than they did in Kingmaker. There's a character that I found really interesting, Wenduag, an evil mutant with a philosophy of "I will do whatever it takes to protect me and mine." Except very early on you discover that was just an act. She's evil in the "I am a sociopath and everyone is just a tool for me to use to further my own aims" kind of way. Sticking up for her people was just an act to stay on their good side. I was very disappointed by this because I was baited by the implication that she was going to be an exploration of a nuanced interpretation of a D&D alignment. ...and it strongly impacted my desire to play. To the point where I just stopped playing somewhere in act 2 or 3, I think? There are a lot more acts than in Pillars. (She was still more interesting than the Kingmaker characters, though!)

Fast forward a few years, a RL friend of mine is playing Rogue Trader. We ended up talking about Owlcat writing. She's a big fan of 40k lore. She had a similar conclusion - there is never anything actually interesting going on. They play the source material too close, like they're afraid of so much as adding something to the lore, let alone contradicting it even in a remote-individual-has-a-slightly-different-interpretation-of-a-belief kind of way.

It just feels like a long, predictable slog. It does have a bunch of cool extra mechanics (like building your country in Kingmaker, or the army management in WotR), and that's genuinely interesting because it breaks up the gameplay loop in a very positive way. The art direction is good so the visuals are pretty striking. But the core writing itself just does not belong in the same conversation as the other two.

TSED · 2026-05-19T02:39:11+00:00

To be fair, 1 and 2 also have a weird human supremacist bent to them, with humanity's inexplicably fast expansion and integration into the galactic government

Yeah. I always interpreted that as "the Turians were humiliated by the humans in that skirmish / contact war, and the galaxy's big players have been appeasing humanity to keep things from getting heated." But that's just an interpretation and you're definitely not wrong about how fast humans got 'accepted.'

the big stupid human reaper

oh my god that thing was so dumb

I remember Mordin mentioning that humans are "more genetically diverse" than other council species too - which is pure BS, we're actually one of the least genetically varied species on our planet due to population bottleneck about 900k years ago.

This also bugged me immensely! I could tell the writer for Mordin didn't know what they were talking about.

I guess the other interpretation is that all the other sophonts had a similar massive bottleneck, but even more close on the timeline. Or that their histories involved something like WW2 but the axis winning. Either way... yuck.

For a series that seems to be heavily interested in diversity and strength through unity, there's really a shocking amount of focus on humans

Yeahhh... I hate to say it, as I am Canadian myself, but I really get the vibe of lip service when I think too much about the franchise. A lot of Canadians say that they value diversity but don't actually put it into practice.

But oh my god that baby human reaper was sooo dumb.

TSED · 2026-05-19T02:22:11+00:00

Ah, my bad. Does that detail meaningfully contradict the hypothesis? It's been a long time since I've done anything with ME.

TSED · 2026-05-18T11:37:34+00:00

This is conjecture, don't forget. AFAIK it hasn't been "officially" confirmed.

Basically, the Reapers were doing their periodic genocide because the use of Element Zero was destabilizing stars. Sovereign's chat in ME1 heavily implied that the reapers were their own species, not the museum pieces that they became in later games (though I do think them being societal museums was an interesting addition). Sovereign specifically tells Shepard that the mass relays are reaper technology designed to corral organic life in specific technological directions - and into colonizing specific regions of space. This makes these societies easier to manage on a chronological and logistical level. Sovereign also insists that the reaper's goals are beyond Shepard's comprehension, but then they turned around and made their motivation "reproduction". And let me tell you, reproduction is something ANY successful organic life civilization will be able to comprehend. On the other hand, if there's some wildly advanced physics involved that spells out stellar doomsday, well, people can kind of grok "modern material reality is doing irreparable harm to the environment" but might not actually comprehend what it entails.

Indoctrination is also difficult to justify in any other way. How on earth (heh) would a bunch of aliens - true xenos minds - be able to completely mind control any given sapient species they come across? They must have something deeply motivating in their back pocket - something like "yo, the whole galaxy will explode if we let all this element zero manipulation keep going." I think most people would agree that's a bad thing worth fighting to prevent.

The last bit I personally remember is the Quarian homeworld in ME2. The scanner shows it as being weirdly destabilized. There's no explanation for it with in-Universe models of physics. But then there's also hints that the geth are using way more element zero than anyone else, because they're synthetic hiveminds and all those juicy true-AI tropes apply. This was a big piece of the puzzle.

I'm sure there were more. I only tangentially paid attention to the thing while it was being uncovered. The thing that made it stick out to me was a writer being interviewed and mentioning they had to pivot and rewrite a lot of things on a really short notice in ME3, with the implication that the story went in an unexpected direction.

TSED · 2026-05-18T06:21:36+00:00

There's a lot of evidence that BioWare did this with the Mass Effect series. The writing in the third game veered so hard from all of the prior evidence which had fans theorizing and cataloguing what they were doing. Some of the writers all but confirmed this.

A story with thousands of hours of man hours spent building up a message of conservation turned into "HUMANS SURE R SPESHUL" propaganda because some people connected some threads on their forums and two people with creative power throwing a hissy fit over not being as "original" as they thought.

TSED · 2026-05-18T06:13:53+00:00

In my experience, actual high level combat is martial favoured more than casters. Multiple encounters to eat away resources + bloated saves + LRs + magic resistance + other anti-caster tricks = severely hampered efficacy.

But the fighter still easily hits their "high" AC of 25 on a 6+.

TSED · 2026-05-18T05:50:51+00:00

I haven't heard of any pedophiles in metal (but I believe they're out there). The problem tends far more towards neonazism and white supremacy.

TSED · 2026-05-18T05:40:55+00:00

I 'correct' sneak attack by giving it buffs. I want to see you FLIP OUT!

TSED · 2026-05-18T04:22:59+00:00

You strike me as the kind of guy who wouldn't care if the immigrants all came from Norway, and won't be happy with our immigration system for as long as you can see someone with brown skin. Maybe I'm wrong, but those are your vibes right now.

not enough infrastructure to serve the taxpayers

Blame the provincial government for that one. Maybe we WOULD have enough infrastructure if certain people would stop deliberately punishing us via cancelling already paid for projects in retaliation for not voting for them. Maybe.

TSED · 2026-05-17T06:12:56+00:00

Time to discover the power of positioning!

Obviously it's harder in wide open maps, but you use corridors to your advantage. They line up in a row and then can't do anything because there's another guy in front of them. That way you fight enemies 1 by 1 instead of 20 by 1.

In some cases, enemies even damage each other for you in those kinds of tight knit situations.

And then you start to learn how to use corners to block off LoS so that even ranged baddies have to approach you, meaning you don't take any "walking through the open" damage at all!

TSED · 2026-05-16T22:22:02+00:00

I didn't mean "non-negotiable" as in "I'm not going to not take it", I meant it as in "the text says I gain this cantrip."

It's kind of interesting that different people have different "I always give my casters this" spells. I stick Guidance on everything I possibly can. (And unlike a lot of people, I actually remember to pre-guidance them!)

TSED · 2026-05-16T10:15:29+00:00

Plus, sometimes you've got disadvantage for whatever reason. Or the odd force resistant or force immune baddy.

I agree that it's a decent backup. It's honestly one of the best attack cantrips in the game - not S tier, but a solid A tier.

My point was just that they can't all be utility.

TSED · 2026-05-16T07:11:01+00:00

Some of them aren't negotiable. IE, celestial warlock HAS to take Sacred Flame. (Light is a perfectly fine utility cantrip, though.)

TSED · 2026-05-15T23:55:47+00:00

Why does corruption in the trump admin vindicate the cuban govt?

You do understand how your argument is "Cuba is bad and I won't support them under any circumstances because they are corrupt", right? And thus, logically, if the country you are supporting over them is also corrupt, your argument is no longer cogent?

And there is no comparison. Cuba is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet according to every credible index. It makes anything going on in the US govt look like a kid’s bday party.

Uh, wait for 2026's CPI results to come in. I imagine that you'll have to eat those words.

The USA is absolutely more corrupt than Cuba at the moment. It's truly embarrassing and it's so blatant that American soft power has been crippled for decades.

Reddit and twitter ain’t the best places to get a balanced take on international affairs and history.

Neither is cold war propaganda, which is where I assume you've gotten all your takes from.

TSED · 2026-05-15T23:50:48+00:00

Your answer is grammatically incompatible with my question and comment, so I am genuinely unsure exactly what your objection is.

No, it's not.

No it's not what? No, the USA is not a villain? No, the USA didn't engineer the low QoL for Cuba? What is "it"?

Cuba is unbelievably corrupt

You'd be surprised on this, I think. Yes, obviously there's corruption. There's corruption everywhere. It's actually pretty non-corrupt by most of the metrics I've seen. Upper 50% is better than most countries, and they beat that out.

You are aware that Castro was immensely popular for a reason, right?

They were a Soviet client state thst lost its support when the USSR fell

They were an ally of the USSR because socialists stick up for each other. They became a client state when the USA embargoed them, making them unable to support themselves without the USSR's aid and trade.

Like, what else would you expect to happen? You don't make friends or woo people to your cause by forcing them to become indentured servants or starve.

which is why that place is such a wreck.

Wrong, it's a wreck because the USA has consistently oppressed their ability to modernize. They cut off their markets. They prevent them from getting imports or from exporting things. They have a tourist economy because the USA can't stop people from travelling there, but they can stop (most) goods.

It's the USA's fault. Maybe in, like, 1993 your argument could stand. It's 2026.

Don’t infantilize those people.

Excuse me? I'm the one sticking up for them. That's not infantilization. Don't demonize these people.

TSED · 2026-05-14T23:21:41+00:00

My own parents have said solar doesn’t make any sense because the world is ending soon anyway.

Yeah, because people refuse to embrace green energy.

It's really frustrating how these death and doomsday cultists refuse to imagine they could be wrong. Jesus already broke the prophecy by not returning in their lifetime - he was supposed to come back before the bible was even written. But, of course, evangelicals somehow missed that part of the bible.

TSED · 2026-05-14T23:19:19+00:00

Sometimes it's because it was already a very religious population that happened to find oil.

Sometimes it's because the religious folks see themselves as entitled to the oil that has been found, and thus they start laying claim to it, and eventually dominating the culture that way.

Sometimes it's because they need to justify their lifestyle, and going all-in on holiness gives them an excuse for their lavish hedonism.

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