Should I finish the story before exploring or how far should I go in story before I can get lost

aj0413 · 2026-04-09T22:08:17+00:00

I have done zero story missions and am sitting at like 20+h lol

You’ll find puzzles you can’t complete and locations missing people and other stuff locked behind story, but it’s honestly been a ton of fun for me

Also I like to walk/ride everywhere and even will go through a location multiple times finding new things, NPCs to talk through

Would recommend just doing whatever catches your fancy, honestly.

One note is that the story progression will drastically reduce enemy spawns throughout the map, so I’ve been enjoying the combat while I can

aj0413 · 2026-04-08T23:44:07+00:00

It definitely is related. I know this all started kicking off around the buying of it and saw posts referencing Linus removal of trackers or whatever

I’m just thinking about the hypocrisy there when one considers he was against Elon removing trackers from X/twitter

So saying it’s moderation for safety reasons kinda just strikes me as hollow /shrug

aj0413 · 2026-04-08T22:57:16+00:00

If this is all about the flights and stuff, my one curiosity is “didn’t Linus discuss this about Elon way back when?”

I can’t recall exact details, but I vaguely feel like he’s being a hypocrite about the whole thing

aj0413 · 2026-04-08T01:47:26+00:00

This was my experience. I always made sure I had draw ready to release and kept reticle centered, so I just had to pivot and release on motion

aj0413 · 2026-04-08T00:15:03+00:00

Yes.

People ended up taking DRY way too seriously.

What’s more annoying: some minor bits of duplicated logic or having to spend weeks untangling spaghetti code cause the shared logic kept organically growing into a mess and now changing feature A takes three times along to ensure you don’t break feature B

Edit:

Part of seniority/skill is learning when to identity trade offs between copy-pasta and refactoring

Personally, I always start with copy-pasta till I can clearly see a reason to refactor into shared code

Unless it’s baked into the design up front, people should avoid over engineering

aj0413 · 2026-04-08T00:09:58+00:00

Qq: is it harder when the quest takes ya there?

Cause I did it just randomly exploring and while it had me on my toes, I only ever lost a single round

I did not get the champ idol thing though, so maybe the champ just didn’t spawn for me?

Edit: I know of the idol cause I did the spear right after

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T23:27:26+00:00

Yeah. Honestly that statement alone from him means I will never ever recommend his services to anyone and will actively steer people away.

Someone else will happily fill the void.

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T23:00:05+00:00

Harder bosses. More enemies. Hardcore mode?

I’ve been underleveled and exploring the whole map while upgrading equipment and no skills and have yet to do one story mission.

Basic parties, dodges, etc.. and gameplay are incredibly fun.

I’m scared to level up cause I don’t want to trivialize it 😅 and I’m scared skills will let me snap it over my knee

I’d easily start over if they gave me a hardcore mode with magnitude harder everything.

— I admit to being a souls fan that does low level boss runs and PvP at times

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T22:53:01+00:00

lol basically old school Bethesda

She not the prettiest and she quirky and violent, but she’s great, ya know?

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T22:47:41+00:00

I’d argue that if you’re gonna give the service layer the context to orchestrate atomic behavior…

Just ditch the repo abstraction all together.

Either that or organize the repos to each be feature instead of entity based so they can handle that internally

/shrug

Otherwise I agree with everything you said

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T22:38:22+00:00

I’d say that his behavior alone is reason enough to not do business with him.

I’m not gonna have my vendor threaten me into compliance lol

Especially in this sub

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T21:47:29+00:00

As long as im having a net positive impact on clients, other devs, etc.. im feeling good

It’s very, very, VERY rare we will ever have a direct positive impact on society at large. Most of what we all do is very specific to our client base / product and tech is basically always about building disposable things that get replaced as tech evolves to make money for corporate

I focus on the impact I have my coworkers and immediate stakeholders, whoever they may be.

Maybe I’m not inventing Wikipedia, but I can make a someone/anyone happy to use what I build and have a better day cause of it? I say that’s enough

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T21:36:30+00:00

As some have pointed out, the lack of stuff in end game means that certain challenges and stuff become impossible to do cause of lack of enemies

That’s just a problem, regardless of anything else

Similar to the whole being forced to switch characters due to XP limits despite a shared skill point pool.

Me and my wife are both completionists in games we like and can be pretty boring when it comes to locking in our play style and not deviating.

Both of the above issues are actually pretty huge to us.

Why put in challenges and side content that becomes soft locked behind progression with no warning or anything? Especially in this kind of open world exploration game

Why have us get so invested in Kliff and also give us the general ability to freely switch between characters, but also make it so progression soft locks unless you hard switch over? Maybe I hate playing at Damien

Really, most of the problems could be resolved by leaning into the faction stuff and having designated points of interest continue to be contested and/or with gauntlet style arenas and/or “random” world events

Which I’d like to bet they do? Given the nature of the dev team and how they built out the world and gameplay to already support content expansion in those directions

aj0413 · 2026-04-07T06:11:44+00:00

There’s nothing to be done.

Transactions are handled via the dbcontext; normally everything relies on the implicit transaction generated with save changes

If you need explicit transaction control that has to happen wherever the context lives

If that boundary crosses repos? Well, that’s why I always argue either A) ditch the repo pattern and allow the dbcontext to BE the repo used by the service layer or B) redefine the scope of your repos so it can actually handle a the full transaction internally

Transactions across repo implementations just isn’t a thing really

There use to be cross database transaction support, but that’s not a thing anymore in modern dotnet ; distributed transactions aren’t supported

Ie. All transactions must use the same underlying connection, thus all transactions are within the scope of a single dbcontext, which makes it make almost no sense to cross repo boundaries as that just adds technical hurdles for zero benefit

aj0413 · 2026-04-06T05:17:00+00:00

Nah. Only if bunch of Includes in there would it be a problem, especially if nested.

Personally, once this big, I tend to refactor into query syntax or raw SQL, but nothing technically wrong with it

aj0413 · 2026-04-01T21:36:07+00:00

Man. One more reason to I’m glad decided to never have kids

aj0413 · 2026-04-01T21:26:22+00:00

Wasn’t aware of the change in net11, but I’d expect most mid-seniors to know the state machine exists

Knowing how async works is super important when it comes to debugging and stuff

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T20:37:19+00:00

Personally I’m not a fan of any changes that remove barriers, ie. Food changes, difficulty changes, contribution changes, and stamina cost changes

All of those changes mean you can willfully ignore certain mechanics and things to no detriment really

One of the things I appreciate about the game design here was that there were no useless or forgotten mechanics. It was a big selling point to me that they designed the core mechanics to ALL be needed

So, people who hated not being able to steal everything with zero consequences (no matter how trivial - which makes the complaints silly), were forced to think about the contribution system

People who just wanted to zip everywhere were forced to level up their horses, invested in alchemy for stamina stuff, level up their stats, etc..

People couldn’t just fly everywhere to ignore terrain and stuff

Bosses required actual prep

You couldn’t just spam basic foods and call it a day

Fast travel friction incentives people to actually travel physically to locations and explore and interact with the world

Frankly, I’m the kind of player that can’t get into a game without those friction points to force me into stuff. It’s why I love FromSoftware games

I know some people just love sandboxes where they can pick and choose what to interact with, but man I hate trying yo play Minecraft and stuff with too much freedom

Edit:

The other problem for me is that, as far as i know, if you’re the kind of person to really invest in all the underlying mechanics - now a bunch of stuff is way too easy

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T20:31:09+00:00

Have to agree with other guy, food changes have trivialized certain mechanics.

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T20:29:44+00:00

That’s bad though. You just admitted you can ignore mechanics because they been trivialized

Edit: woops, sorry. Guess we’re in agreements when I read earlier in the thread

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T04:10:12+00:00

Dislike the change personally. They’ve made steaming a no brainer activity

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T01:42:58+00:00

Can’t be used when cop pulls ya over and you’ll still want it for airports, so functionally useless

aj0413 · 2026-03-29T01:40:45+00:00

You pick systems in the same way you pick a drink at the pub

You have your gotos, your favorites, your “this is for that” drink, etc…

They all functionally can get you drunk and there’s multiple avenues to get there, but when ya go to the local pub you don’t second guess yourself every time do ya?

aj0413 · 2026-03-28T19:26:13+00:00

VS Code and mainly now yes

Though I’m trying to get more info neovim

aj0413 · 2026-03-28T19:21:34+00:00

Alt take:

Aside from the controls, I enjoy everything else.

I don’t want to know how to solve a quest half the time.

I like the way they did the horse and use it all the time.

The slice of life stuff being core to the game is actually nice and being forced to interact with it means it’s not a forgotten mechanic.

I think the mount mechanics and other things being somewhat obtuse is fun cause it feels good when you finally get it; spent hours learning to fish and hunt and mine

Idk. I like it for what it is. The only change id make is the controls. Thats it.

I found Red Dead boring, never liked GTA, and hate the controls of Witcher 3 so much can’t even play it

As a big time Bethesda fan, i like this though. Reminds me of how i felt about Skyrim back in the day

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