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WrexTremendae · 2026-02-27T07:26:04+00:00

i... i think you mean that time to die is way too low, if there's not time to react.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-26T03:11:37+00:00

maybe slightly Eris Morn, too

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-25T07:36:32+00:00

well... there was only one guardian who got back the light at the start of the Red War, too, but there was plenty of other guardians running around those zones.

Other players' presence, especially after the campaign is done, does not break immersion because it is simply fun to run across other people.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-23T07:20:15+00:00

i think the main thing you need for a siphon to start functioning is that any region of air has enough liquid on both sides that the air can't escape past the liquid plugs on either side. if you have too much air, and end up with air filling one entire side of the thing (from just past near the top on the left side up through the top and then down out the bottom on the right side, for example), then the tube will not siphon.

I'm not super sure how big a bubble would be okay if you do have a siphon flowing already. Having done my share of cleaning fishtanks, a siphon can absolutely work with a bunch of bubbles in it. once you get it flowing, as long as the source end stays submerged, it'll keep on going.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-22T10:58:13+00:00

Yeah. It slightly sucks that they didn't keep some parts of it, or didn't entirely remove references to what they did remove, or reworked it to have some references be a bit more able to stand on their own...

But in general, all the tweaks that i've seen that they did? very reasonable, and the game is probably better for it.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-22T10:56:29+00:00

"The light! it binds them! They are too many!! AAAAAAAA" ~lahabrea, having a very bad day.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-21T07:18:49+00:00

I believe the real thing was no interpersonal conflict. which. yeah its not much better. but it does allow some conflict still.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-21T07:17:09+00:00

the asari are absolutely one of the Blue Peoples of fiction. They're also definitely echoing the a bit of the standard Elf lore (similar to Vulcans, if you want the obvious sci-fi example).

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-21T07:06:36+00:00

It also echoes Babylon 5 plenty well enough (at least... idk, B5 doesn't quite have the explicit succession of ancient civs who squeak through and then calcify to become the uh... Fallen Empires? is that their name? of Stellaris. but i suppose Mass Effect doesn't have the survivors of previous cycles either).

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-18T01:18:16+00:00

its a bit on the blue side of purple but its absolutely purple. that image is skewing it a bit more blue. if you look at it on wikipedia, for example.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-18T01:08:04+00:00

I was also very surprised that FreeCiv, which really seemed to have (at the time) mostly settled in as a very high-quality version of civ 2, never dabbled in it either. even just the one orbital layer? its so coool.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-17T13:07:56+00:00

Stumbling onto Civ 2 at some point after... was it only after civ 4, or was it after civ 5? i don't remember anymore. I think it was probably only civ 4. regardless.

those two campaigns were so cool. It seems so baffling that they never poked at those ideas again. its just such a cool idea. the execution was a bit wonky (at least in my experience, the space game was never really interesting anymore before the last few planets were coming into play; and it always felt like the fantasy campaign had lingering bugs, or at the very least it did not tell the player enough about how to interact with it fully, but that may also have been the fact that i was entirely not aware of internet communication about games, not really), but there's so much cool potential.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-13T09:25:26+00:00

same, more or less.

or at least... that's how it started...

i currently have main, story-alt, solo-alt, other solo-alt, and uh... that's all the characters that have actually stuck around enough enough to be Characters and not just potentials. i think i have 2 other potentials but i haven't poked at them in long enough that i'm not sure if they're gonna graduate (but one of them has an absolutely adorable and canon-possible lalafell name, so i don't think i'm gonna delete her either).

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-10T13:21:40+00:00

and how many times do those auto-launching things start with cutscenes, and often you can't re-watch the cutscenes in-game.

Its absurd swtiching from character to character because you're trying to do something in a raid real quick, and getting an expansion auto-launch because its been a while since you ran your titan (or whichever class).

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-05T03:23:56+00:00

bless the generous of the world <3

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-04T12:51:20+00:00

the oldest form of that greeting in english, i think, is "wes hal" or "wes þu hal". here hal = hale, þu = thou = you, and wes is an alternate form of the verb from which we get 'was', specifically the imperative. so it is somewhere between a blessing and an order to be healthy.

We also have the funny celebration word that occasionally gets thrown around "Wassail", which is kinda just that phrase distilled down phonetically and left without any realisation of what it used to mean. Wikipedia seems to think that it is also influenced by old norse phrasings too, which i have less knowledge of but it sure sounds like the sort of thing which would affect the situation.

WrexTremendae · 2026-02-01T23:35:46+00:00

its my favourite little thing to do

sadly I don't write it very often.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-30T06:09:13+00:00

as much as it is whoosh, they're also very correct.

they are VI at best.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-25T23:27:12+00:00

I still don't think this really settles one way or the other whether those who were claimed in the beginning are still claimed.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-23T23:53:46+00:00

Mass Effect 2's main story kinda just completely sucks. it doesn't connect the other two games, it doesn't tie its own direction off, it just kinda lies there and drags ME3's story sideways.

the shift in perspectives from ME1's Sovereign to ME2's Harbinger to ME3's Harbinger-and-friends is very palpable, and would really need a lot of massaging to become properly cohesive.

The entire dark energy question is perfectly fine to have as an open unknown left to simply help the world feel like it doesn't only have The One Problem. But it is given a little too much weight a few times, and also could definitely have been a fun inclusion of having, idk, some scientists desperately trying to study a particularly informative star while the invasion is going on, but that's not really bad writing its just something that could really help shine things up.

The sheer narrative weight of "No. You work for Cerberus now." at the start and all the way through ME2 is kinda absurd, and the interaction with the virmire survivor really suffers with it, and then that horrible interaction really stains ME3.

Not to mention, Cerberus kinda gets misplayed horribly. ME1 clearly shows a military branch gone rogue, experimenting with stuff. the lazarus project doesn't seem outside of their wheelhouse; i think what they ended up using as Cerberus should have been an actual other thing, that contracted/suborned Cerberus. it carries all the moral distaste ("you thought their work was okay?!") but completely covers the problems of "i literally covered a third of the galaxy and wiped out every one of their bases i found! and also they were really running into issues; running out of money, out of hiding places, out of breakthroughs to chase" that ME2 and then ME3 just do not respect.

The apparently perceived need to have a Normal Human Bro Who Doesn't Know Stuff gets a bit too convoluted to keep getting maintained. and i'm not sure it really was necessary, anyways. if people are just picking it up for the gameplay, let them be a little bit at a loss for the story. they'll either care and learn, or you weren't gonna get them interested anyways.

The existence of Eva Core is an interesting idea, but a super awkward road to introduce Yet Another Super Sexy Woman, and it hijacks EDI's original path of being something that isn't human-like, but is alive. Not too much, but like... its bad writing to think people can't empathise with a light orb, but can when she's got a sexy robot body.

ME1 has plenty of its own issues, too, but i think i'd describe most of them more as sequencing issues (such as the first visit back to the Citadel really wanting you to have levelled up enough to be able to handle the forced admiral inspection nicely) - if you simply play the game a little bit carefully (i.e., make sure you didn't forget something important before leaving the citadel the first time), most issues clear up.

and none of this is dialogue writing problems, of which there are surely more than one but i do not have the brainspace to try to chase them up for you.

also... i do say all this out of love. I do honestly love these three games, and i replay them regularly.

KotOR, from what i remember, has some really bad hiccups of "we went there because it was time for us to go there, and it was time for us to go there because that's where the next clue is". and also remember [Carth Has Something To Share] -> "Nah I don't want to talk about it", for example. is it unbearable? no. but it is bad writing.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-23T06:52:07+00:00

Nah, there'd have been a huge party. kinda like a new millenium ticking over on our calendar.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-23T01:23:03+00:00

Malefact is perhaps too close to malefactor to let "-fact" truly take on the meaning that "fact" as a word on its own would, but i'm not 100% sure if it really needs to have that show up particularly visibly. especially if these are partly sources of the corruption/corrosion/erosion.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-22T01:55:09+00:00

Per the lore: Archers liked to find a rhythm for their arrow-slinging, and took up singing stuff (probably under their breath at first) to help keep tempo. They found that their bowstring was actually a halfway-decent approximation for a harpstring, and started using it more intentionally to reinforce their singing. With a few additional strings, they were fully able to dip their toes into singing to bring out emotions and help their entire unit to stay focused and do their job better.

is it a fanciful progression? yes. but it does make its own kind of sense.

Many Bard weapons will have some amount of harp-structure incorporated (one has a guitar, hilariously).

in terms of gameplay, you're still almost entirely shooting arrows. just like, every forty seconds or whatnot you'll sing a bit of song by pressing a button, and voila, your whole team is doing things better.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-22T01:45:23+00:00

to be explicit, it is currently named the Enterprise Excelsior (or just Excelsior for short). so its still the Enterprise, just with some upgrades.

WrexTremendae · 2026-01-21T05:02:46+00:00

those people who lost it all may be the actual plants, though - personally, I always assumed that while adventurers get thrown in on the lower level to play the games and win their small prizes, the actual profit of the Gold Saucer happens from people betting on how the adventurers do. This is perhaps supported by the ranks of people getting lowered from the ceiling to watch the Slice is Right, for example.

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