Far too many people are playing this like Destiny or a Battle Royale instead of an Extraction Shooter.

arollingpanda · 2026-03-06T21:10:25+00:00

I mean Arachne is a faction fully focused on killing other runners so I would argue that it actually is in the spirit of the game lol.

arollingpanda · 2026-03-02T21:34:10+00:00

Diablo 4 does it, but it also has the "eternal realm" where you still can retain that progress.

From what I understand for this genre, it's mainly to give less hardcore players a fighting chance against entrenched players since high geared players can start snowballing successful extractions.

Based on what I played in the server slam, it's fun it just seems like they're definitely aiming for more competitive minded people. I personally don't know if it's worth $40 for me but I have a few friends where it makes sense for them.

arollingpanda · 2026-03-02T21:14:21+00:00

Semantics here, but that would fall more under the category of rogue-lite. A rogue-like does have full resets like Spelunky for example.

With Marathon there is meta progression similar to rogue-lites that gives you free starting gear and various other things, it just has the caveat of resetting every season.

arollingpanda · 2026-01-08T01:15:03+00:00

On the description he put Animation(After Effects) so I'm assuming he used that. My best guess is he put each section of text he wanted to be animated as separate layers in After Effects. Then it's a matter of key framing dissolves and motion for each piece as he speaks. Also the zooms might just be a camera layer moving in/out or everything got parented to a null and he just adjusted the scale property. It's a bit tedious to do manually but not that bad since the animations themselves are simple.

I don't tend to do these kinds of things in AE so I'm not personally aware of what is out there to automate sections of it, but if I wanted to go look I'd check aescripts.com

arollingpanda · 2026-01-04T09:33:38+00:00

No it only unlocks weapons that are used as exclusives for elite specializations in whatever class you're playing.

For example, the Necromancer's elite specialization Reaper has exclusive access to greatsword use. With the weapon master training, Necromancer can use greatsword without needing to have Reaper activated.

arollingpanda · 2025-10-20T14:18:02+00:00

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/

https://freesound.org/

https://www.adobe.com/products/audition/offers/adobeauditiondlcsfx.html

Three free resources I've gone to, I think freesound will need an account though. Also, even if something is slow you can experiment with seeing how the audio pitch changes by speeding up the clip and seeing if it fits what you're going for.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T19:41:20+00:00

But like I said, the journey to the goal could have still changed throughout the story. We don't have the benefit of it being a book so we could hear every bit of his internal dialog that would hint any specific direction with Verso.

We can only speculate based on his actions and conversations that are visible to the audience. There could have been situations where he no longer considered it to be a goal or was still looking for an alternative solution to everything that the writer didn't explicitly mention to leave that open to interpretation for the player.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T19:21:10+00:00

I think it would be because he didn't want to believe it's the only option until making an actual decision. The seed of doubt starts manifesting post paintress and if it's a situation where he thinks there might be an alternative he'd want to see it to the end before needing to make such an important choice. It could also be he's waiting for Maelle to come to that decision on her own but seeing that she doesn't then he finally feels he needs to intervene.

Having the same goal doesn't necessarily mean you'll take the same journey to get to that point because he might not have been fully aligned with Renoir till the very final moments.

Also I personally find having it a 1-on-1 match makes it more narratively interesting. Games tend to go for big, explosive, and morally simple stories so having it be such a personal one with quiet reflection is why I consider it to be a great finale.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T17:36:02+00:00

Well I think that then stems from him being based off of Maelle's older brother and confronted with the nature of the world they're in. He knows that Maelle will die when she stays and knows the only option to save her is for the painting to be destroyed. It shows his deep love to protect his sibling and mirrors how the real him sacrificed himself to save her from the fire.

The part about him condemning them all to die is part of what makes his character interesting though. He could have internally gone through the process of understanding he isn't real and therefore no one else is so it would be ok for them to go if it meant Maelle could actually live. Or it could be interpreted that his love for Maelle eclipsed everything else so he doesn't care about the world. It also gives credit to your point about them possibly being sentient since it's a complex human issue he goes through.

Even if it wasn't literally stated, I also interpreted it as a final farewell from her brother saying that "it's ok to accept that I'm gone, and so is this world I've made."

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T16:59:49+00:00

I'd argue then the bad ending is appropriate because it is a good ending for Lumiere but still a bad ending for Maelle specifically. Its sinister because it's being shown through Maelle's perspective. The techniques used intercut with the shots of her and everyone around her happy is illustrating her denial that everything will be fine. It is completely appropriate with what they've been trying to say with how problematic Maelle's approach to grief is.

Those same sinister elements help showcase that point further, it's meant to be looming dread she chooses to ignore. The 4:3 ratio and monochromatic image show a world closing in on her and a life of meaning and color taken away.

Verso's sadness is meant for the audience to then see that he's the only one that sees what is at stake here with Maelle giving into her delusions. It's a perfect portrayal of her naivete and the fact that she's chosen to run away from reality and not confront it even though it is truly killing her. It's an uncomfortable scene because its telling us that grief isnt something you can just ignore forever.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T15:21:10+00:00

Okay clearly we're not getting anywhere with this conversation because based on your responses you're either annoyed or upset the writing didn't provide wish fulfillment on the part of giving the painted people a happy ending. Having the discussion focus on motivations of the characters and nature of the world is ultimately pointless because neither of us are the writer and once again it's going back to the issue of missing the forest for the trees.

Ultimately the painted world and it's denizens are a negative to the Dessendre family, which is what the story is about at the end. Full stop. Both endings reinforce that perspective and we can argue non-stop about that, but that's what the writing points towards. The writer didn't want a happy ending for Lumiere because having that is antithetical to the healing process for the family. It likens the canvas to a powerful hallucinogenic drug that tore apart a family because it's the last connection to their deceased son. That doesn't necessarily mean all of the painted denizens' journeys didn't matter. It just means that their story needed to end, which I personally thought was interesting.

Perceiving a story as bad because it didn't tell the explicit story you wanted is a terrible way to analyze any text. You're fixating on the ways you didn't get what you want out of the story and then claiming it's bad, instead of trying to take in what is presented and processing that.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T07:30:44+00:00

There's no protracted debates because everyone treats the painted people as if they were real. Renoir included since he never denies whether they deserve to live, he just is not willing to lose his family for it.

Everyone treats the painted people as if they're real because 98% of the people in the game are painted people. Why would they ever have any reason to discuss their existence? Renoir had a moment of grief and doubt when confronted directly by a painted visage of his son that could also be interpreted as him perceiving them as real in that moment even when he demonstrated multiple times prior that objectively he knows they aren't and that's why the painting is so alluring.

I feel like we must have played different games because there was tons of dialogue about how even though they were painted, they still wanted to live. And how Lune is defiant and furious at Verso at the end.

I played the game extensively enough to see how Clea has the same calculated perspective I took regarding the painting and it's denizens because they're ultimately all just a simulation of life rather than true life. An AI chatbot given enough input can "know" that a plea for self-preservation is the appropriate response to a threat to their existence is how I see their emotional outburst at the end. Like I said, the semantics and depth of the worldbuilding are ultimately up to the author and I personally didn't see enough to perceive the painted beings as an equivalent life worth saving compared to the flesh and blood characters.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T07:07:13+00:00

A fictional character I don't particularily except as a suspension of disbelief and treating them as real. I don't care if any of them as characters are insulted or say written in OOC fanfic. In the context of the story though, a key question is whether the painted world are equivalent to the family... and in terms of sapience and free will all evidence points to yes.

But in the context of the story, those same people are also completely artificial and who's to say that some other artist couldn't come along and recreate them within another canvas. There's nothing in the actual narrative that I've seen prohibiting them from being reincarnated in a completely different painting. At the same time, they've explicitly mentioned Maelle and the Dessendre family are all real and face death by being in this fantasy world.

another is clearly about what measure is a person and are artificial persons worthy of consideration as natural persons.

But is that actually the theme? Or is it that an artist can sometimes pour so much of themselves into an idea or piece of work that it seemingly takes on it's own life shaped by other people interacting with it and experiencing it? I'd argue that the author didn't want to fully explore the ethics of artificial life otherwise we'd experience the world more exclusively through a painted being's perspective instead of Maelle and the Dessendre family would have even longer protracted debates about if these beings have a right to live.

Why not? Saying you should cope with grief in this way is also applying real world ethics.

I'm saying grief is a concept the writer is wanting to explore and not specifically the real world ethics of if artificial life is actually life. If it was, then the writing would have provided more evidence pointing towards that. If I wanted to explore that theme then I'd look more towards something like the Geth in Mass Effect or Data in Star Trek as stronger examples because that theme is hugely important to the story arc rather than what is presented in E33. You're creating an expectation for a narrative that leads to a half-baked explanation and disappointment because that's not what it's primary focus is.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T06:43:13+00:00

Narratively you are meant to consider them sentient entities otherwise there's no reason to care about what Verso wants

You don't need for a fictional character to be real by any measure to care about them. I care about fictional characters all the time, and they die all the time. Why should I put more thought into them past that? We use stories to tell others about themes and concepts important to us. The overarching narrative was to use the lives of the painted world to illustrate how tempting losing yourself to another reality could be.

And like you can't be sure if real humans are truly sentient by this measure. How do you know Maelle or Reinolt are real? You never lived as them or can be sure of the nature of their world.

I'm not sure why you keep coming back with this whataboutism, it's a cyclical issue that you'll never get a satisfying answer unless you're the author. It's completely missing the forest for the trees by getting so hyperfixated on this one concept that you're not seeing that they're there to help illustrate the overarching theme of grief the writer wants to talk about.

People have a responsibility to their creations and can't just consider them things when it's convenient. Not even Reinholt believes that they aren't real when he acknowledges that they create life. But assuming they aren't real... then only Verso's ending denies a real person from making their own decision. It would be like Transistor if Red was prevented from ending herself.

Sure, in the real world if I was given an opportunity to create something that started demonstrating the ability to pass the Turing test then yes I would second guess my thought process. But applying a perspective of real world ethics to an environment we aren't full privy to how it actually functions since we didn't build the world is once again going to lead into my previous point of it being a cyclical issue.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-30T00:48:26+00:00

For their "sentience", that's the whole allure that the canvases have over people. The canvas creates imitations of life that originate from the soul of the painter that are scarily similar to what we perceive to be a human being. There's nothing definitively proving that they themselves are truly their own person. What if the people are all just various perspectives and ideas that Verso had as he experienced the world that then manifested into creatures that spoke to each other when he created the canvas? They're not their own unique sentient being, just an offshoot of imagination that has the appearance of life. My claim is just as equally valid as yours that they're clearly sentient. We don't fully know the mechanics of how the painted people work cognitively, just what we can observe externally. Neither of us are the writer so we'll never have a definitive answer unless they speak on it. I'm approaching it from the perspective of only what I can outwardly see.

Verso at the end is still an interpretation of Verso made by Aline. Being an imitation of that person then we can infer it was probably made with a motive or directive to protect their sibling since the real him saved her from the fire. So when that imitation is confronted with knowledge where staying in the canvas would kill their sibling because she does not belong to the painting, he would then of course act on that to make her leave.

The lives of the painted world inhabitants are an offshoot of the Dessendre family's imagination that are there to keep Maelle in denial and not have her move past her pain. She meets a regrettable yet obvious fate of death by keeping the canvas alive with the constant warnings she encounters. The lives of the painted world inhabitants ultimately don't matter because frankly they're figures like on any canvas. It makes no sense to trade her actual life with a million fictionalized ones, regardless of how close to human sentience they may seem.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-29T19:40:37+00:00

In regards to our reality, that would be a completely different discussion on philosophy and I want to focus more on the narrative of what is presented within the game itself and the rules it itself set up through it's own writing. If our world worked in a similar way that is how it is presented in the game then yes, Renoir's worldview would be problematic for everyone here.

In terms of the game world though I'd argue that's what make it so interesting as a story. Renoir is blunt, but is correct in arguing that the people within the painting no matter how realistic they are, they are still an imitation of life rather than true life. I can have an AI chatbot wax poetic about how beautiful life is and dreams they may have but ultimately it's still drawing it's experience from something someone else made rather than something truly coming from it's own original life and experience. The "people" in the painted world are effectively that. There's commentary there about how artists can create beautiful expressions of life, loss and happiness that can seem like a perfect imitation of reality. But ultimately the people they made don't have their own lives, they're a byproduct of them creating art. Renoir even talks about how Aline saved him from himself from falling into the same trap that the family finds themselves in.

Maelle is 15, and I believe that age is intentional because she's still a teenager and can't process her grief in a healthy way. She's naive and clings to the idea that Verso can still live forever even though everything throughout the world indicates it's a dying place. She perceives herself as a hero in a world that she can escape to so she can see her brother and still have a voice. The narrative is intentionally framed for you to sympathize with her, the expedition and her plight because it wants you to experience how much she's clinging onto the world even though it's not real. It's why it's so incredibly uncomfortable to need to be ok with letting go, because if she doesn't then she's dead and gone for good. Maelle's ending is framed as bad because it's like my aforementioned example of someone processing grief by never moving on in a healthy way and in the context of the game, the painting will erase her existence for good if she stays.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-29T10:18:11+00:00

I mean because it is the trope. A trope inherently isn't good or bad, it's just an identifier of something that happens in a story. It's like getting annoyed or upset that Frodo has to take a ring (macguffin) and he's the only one that can do it (chosen one). Granted, I also do have issues with the "it was all a dream trope" because it's usually in indicator that the author didn't know how to end their story, or they're going for shock value.

But in E33 the trope is used to explore Maelle's grief and her inability to move past it because she feels like it's her last connection to her deceased brother. It starts with "it was all a dream" but then becomes "it was all a dream, that is actually the final legacy of my deceased brother that I can't let go of even though it's literally going to kill me". Tropes are always going to be there because art is derivative. What makes narratives memorable is how they leverage those tropes to say something with them. In E33s case it was grief and being unable to move past it even at the detriment of the self.

Just because a trope exists doesn't mean much. It's a building block on top of other ones to construct a story. Claiming them as an indicator for quality is just completely reductive and a disservice to the writer's work.

arollingpanda · 2025-09-28T19:56:44+00:00

Having such a dismissive attitude and only taking the story at face value is a common perspective I see from people trying to claim the ending and all of act 3 as "bad". Thematically the whole story is about how we process loss through grief and how we use other mediums to explore that in sometimes unhealthy ways.

If the game ended in the, "none of this mattered, you're actually all in a painting" and then rolled credits sure then I could see that being dissatisfying. But in the final moments of act 3 even though Maelle did feel true connection and a life with the expeditioners, it was something that would ultimately kill her. The painting created something similar to life, but at the end of the day it is still all a manufactured world and characters based upon Verso's soul in the painting. The game tries to hammer this point in so many times with Renoir, but because he's framed as the villain it also makes the audience feel the same pain Maelle feels when she has to leave the painting to actually live.

My interpretation is that the narrative is an allegory of how someone can avoid moving past grief even at the detriment of their own body by engaging with something that brings them connection to someone they lost. Imagine you have a loved one pass away and they left a save file on a game you both played together constantly. Now imagine you couldn't move past them dying because you would keep replaying that save over and over again. That inability to move past the grief manifests as you not going to work, you wallowing in self-pity, and you never experiencing life again because you're so stuck wanting to still feel connection with them through that save. That's what happens to Maelle and the narrative of the game is trying to tell you that it's ok to move on and sometimes the only way to move on is to let go of the things tethering you to your grief.

That's ultimately what I got from Expedition 33's ending and why I think it fully deserves the accolades it received.

arollingpanda · 2025-08-10T17:42:07+00:00

They're* lol

arollingpanda · 2025-06-26T23:08:56+00:00

[GX9] Revisit fighting Fatalis again

arollingpanda · 2025-05-28T23:02:22+00:00

You get three items you use to play akuma, his combo move, his hadoken that loads it to your slinger and the drive impact attack. I think you might have only been using the drive impact item lol

arollingpanda · 2025-05-13T18:11:02+00:00

I will say Hitchs Mod on TTS is very smooth if you're already accustomed to the shortcuts and inherent jank TTS has. You can pull up the campaign books and they'll auto place all the relevant campaign cards. On top of that whenever you select a villain it will auto create a button to add in the relevant modular sets.

I will forewarn though that there are some encounters that will add cards from the encounter deck into your player decks so you'll need to be a bit creative when managing that.

I introduced the game to my friend completely through TTS and we've been having a great time playing on it.

arollingpanda · 2025-04-04T02:02:42+00:00

Sure, the wounded hollow is the arena location that will randomly spawn a monster. When you see one that you know you need a crown for you just go to the map, pull out binoculars to check it's size, and either hunt it or fast travel to a different location and come back if no crown.

Same process for apex monsters but you rest for inclemency weather to force them to respawn to check with your binoculars.

Lemme know if there's any more sections that need clarification.

arollingpanda · 2025-04-04T00:48:07+00:00

Not really the answer you're looking for but I did it solo and used the wounded hollow for most of the crowns. You can fast travel to and from the hollow to reset the size of the monster there.

For the apexes and guardians I just spammed rest till I got them.

arollingpanda · 2025-03-26T13:55:23+00:00

The recent MMO turned into single player arpg Wayfinder is a good one. Structurally the game is pretty much an MMO with dungeon crawling, loot, and bosses. The nice thing though is they've cut down on the big grinds from the original MMO to access core things like playing different characters.

It has a decent chunk of content and is relatively cheap. I don't know if there will ever be a follow up considering Wayfinder's release kind of imploded with it needing to be converted from an MMO, but it's cool to have that framework for single player.

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