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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Unless you’re willing to put in some kind of response that basically says “I’m not going to respond to that” (and that’s a sure way to break immersion) this is effectively impossible to do well, because the writer has to anticipate every possible thing a player could say and craft a response to it. If you don’t, you’ll end up finding a “nearest fit” that is not at all what the player was trying to say, and the reaction is going to be nonsensical from the player’s perspective

    LA Noire is a great example of this, although from the side of the player character: the dialogue was written with the “Doubt” option as “Press” (as in, put pressure on the other party). As a result, a suspect can say something, the player selects “Doubt”, and Phelps goes nuts making wild accusations instead of pointing out an inconsistency.

    Except worse, because in this case, the player says something like “Why didn’t you say something to your boss about feeling sick?” and the game interpreted it as “Accuse them of trying to sabotage the business.”










  • A bunch of my favorites have already been listed, so I’ll just mention the one that wasn’t: Antichamber, a first person puzzle game that’s probably somewhat like Portal in terms of how it requires you to rethink your assumptions about how space works, but it’s a very different game, both mechanically and in tone. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s a mix of weirdly unsettling elements (although it is by no means a horror game), a design that’s actively trolling you in ways that will make you laugh, and mechanics revelations that will have you scream “Wait, I could have done that this whole time?!” It’s one of those games that I wish I could delete from my memory and play for the first time again.


  • I saw someone say that the playerbase is generally chill because the dwarves are the toxic ones, and the more I play the more I think there’s something to that. It’s hard not to feel silly complaining about friendly fire, or a slow rez, or the rest of the team not building the pipelines, etc, when your dwarf is already complaining about it. Combined with the fact that Ghost Ship has gone out of their way to identify all of the toxic monetization practices of the industry and do exactly the opposite, which also goes a long way towards keeping people who want to play chill games for fun over salt factories.


  • Eh, I don’t think using the Fat Boy is inherently toxic. Yeah, you’re a lot more likely to hit friendly fire than basically anything else the Engineer does, but you can’t really say that friendly fire is toxic behavior without saying nobody should ever play Driller.

    You absolutely can use it as a toxic player, but it’s usually not that hard to tell if someone is being a dick or trying their best.