Online dating is where I learned that there are a distressing number of attractive "centrist" women in Seattle. But, it begs the question: Is that why they're still single? And if so, I am proud of this city.
i see a lot of "God, Family, Football. In that order." type of stuff here
Allegedly a voice of reason.
+1
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
Can you imagine being a kid born on a Mars colony?
Talk about some bullshit
“You mean there’s a whole other planet with trees and animals and big tiddy goth girls and warm weather? And I’m stuck here???”
“Yes, now hush up and eat your slurry. You have the night shift on the generator bike tonight.”
"If we work hard enough maybe we can go back to Earth"
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe
+2
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I’m in a panel about frustration and games that don’t respect your time or meet your needs, and the consensus is, yes, sometimes things are just not for you, and you need to be okay with that.
Also, success with “hard mode” shouldn’t be an aspiration if you won’t have fun or can’t endure the commitment.
I put together an opening monologue for my Chicago Shadowrun campaign. I need to know whether I am straining the borders of taste here or whether this is serviceable:
Chicago, 2080.
Anyone who knows Chicago knows that it is two cities.
The neighborhoods where you draw the lines have shifted over the decades, and the industries that drive the divide have come and gone, but this division persists as stark as ever.
It's a divide that has been with the city since the first industrial revolution, when the Union Stockyards were built and Packingtown was established to the South so that all the impoverished immigrant laborers who spent their days slaughtering and butchering and packing the meat could have a place to sleep at night where the factory owners didn't have to see them.
From that day forward, Chicago has been slowly, perpetually feasting upon itself; cannibalizing its own lower half.
Two centuries ago it was the Germans and Irish, and then the Bohemians and Lithuanians and Slovaks. Less than a century ago it was blacks and Latinos, and today it is the metahumans; the so-called orks and trolls and dwarves. But fundamentally it has always been the same. Each group displaces the last, but each group takes their turn in the same place under the same wheel that has always ground down the people of Chicago.
There is a polarity to the city; a pull on both ends, a force tugging on its top and bottom that preserves a distinct separation between those who benefit and those who suffer. Perhaps it's because Chicago has always been at the center; the crossroads, the beating heart. Perhaps it can't help but reflect in itself the essential structure of the country it connects along with its essential corruption. But even when the United Canadian and American States became just a shadow of what the US once was, Chicago never changed its nature.
When the Containment Zone walls went up they weren't changing Chicago; they were just adding concrete to a barrier that had always been there. When the bug infestation was quelled and the walls started to come down again, then, it should be no surprise that the divide they represented remained as stark as ever, even as the Megacorporations pushed back into the territory to return once again to extracting any bit of value the people of Chicago had left.
The CZ remains an immensely dangerous place for the people who live there, and the outside world fears the people of the CZ. Travel into and out of the CZ is still only through heavily regulated checkpoints. Any nominal government the city of Chicago had left has dissolved, and all the infrastructure and governance of the city is now up-for-grabs to whatever corporate entities can hold them. Insect spirits are still a common sight and the city has gained a reputation, at least among the people who live outside the CZ, for harboring violent gangs and extremist groups.
All travel into, out of, and throughout the CZ is now strictly controlled by the militaristic Chicago Transit Authority, now a subsidiary of Lone Star Security. The CTA has begun revitalizing the L system and running various bus routes, but their grasp over the broader part of the city is still tenuous. While some L stations operate as CTA security stations, many remain in disrepair, are under the control of various government-declared gang factions, or house dangerous uncleared insect nests. Random stops of vehicle traffic in CTA controlled wards are common, but there are still many places where their reach is limited.
In the years since the establishment of the CZ the bulk of the economic activity of Chicago has been shifted north to Evanston, which now hosts sky-scrapers to rival those that the Loop once had. The CTA operates the purple line on a regular schedule in order to ship workers from the CZ up to Evanston where they can work minimum wage manufacturing and service jobs, and then ships them back at night. As a result, the population of the CZ has begun to crowd around functioning transit stations and left large swathes of the CZ largely abandoned.
O'Hare airport remains an international transit hub, and has been fortified as a center of corporate military power, housing a vast arsenal with controlling stakes held by every one of the Big Ten Megacorps. It has become one of the largest military bases in the world and the central artery through which the weapons trade flows, though the balance of power between each of the Megacorps and government entities operating there leads to an atmosphere of constant tension.
Tonight the five of you have each found yourself, for various reasons, waiting at a bus stop together.
Winky
In the "When the Containment Zone walls..." paragraph, I think you're leaning in too hard. You need to take your foot off the gas a bit:
- cut "... they represented" and the repetitive "as stark as ever" (which you already used in the 2nd line of the piece). Revise to " ... walls started to come down again, it was no surprise that the divide remained. Megacorporations simply pushed... "
- the phrase "pushed back into the territory to return once again" is awkward and repetitive. Consider simplifying to remove two of the three 'going back' type phrases. That sentence could instead read "Megacoroprations simply returned to extracting..." or "Megacproprations pushed back into the territory, extracting..." or Megacorporations simply resumed extraction of..." or similar.
This will help transition the tone from history to relevant setting detail as you zoom down from the conceptual to the local.
More suggestions:
- Stylistic choice, but consider revising "All travel into, out of, and throughout" to "... in, out, and through"
- Move the O'Hare lines to appear before the explanation of the CTA, returning to a bus stop after a digression about the airport is jarring and makes the airport section feel irrelevant and out of place.
- Revise either "The CZ remains..." or "O'Hare airport remains...", it's repetitive.
- Condense "...and has been fortified as a center... housing" to "... now fortified as a center of corporate military power and housing a vast arsenal, with... "
- Consider replacing "military power" with strength, might or similar power synonym in the O'Hare section - it's repetitive when 'balance of power' occurs later.
- should sky-scrapers really be hyphenated? Feels too steampunk.
These are all great edits, thank you!
+1
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SixCaches Tweets in the mainframe cyberhexRegistered Userregular
tbf elon musk's mars colony is way more likely to result in critical workplace injuries in the name of looking like his favorite movie than some sort of space slavery debtors prison.
por que no los dos?
fuck gendered marketing
+2
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
tbf elon musk's mars colony is way more likely to result in critical workplace injuries in the name of looking like his favorite movie than some sort of space slavery debtors prison.
por que no los dos?
Psyche! Elon Musks favorite movie is Shawshank Redemption.
0
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited January 2020
So I've started on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for the like, third time in the past eight years. Both previous times I basically managed to get a little past the tutorial before being stymied. This time I'm determined to persevere.
So when this game came out, I distinctly remember people asking "hey guys, should I play The Witcher 1 before starting this?" and being told "NO! The Witcher 1 is like WATCHING A LOVED ONE DIE OF CANCER compared to this MIRACULOUS GEM OF GAMING." As much as I, personally, had actually liked Witcher 1 despite its rough edges and jank, everyone seemed to agree that this was some incredible paradigm shift forward. We got the start of the compare-everything-CDPR-does-to-Bioware jag, where dudes were all "I hope the people at Bioware start PUTTING THEIR PETS IN OVENS IN DESPAIR after seeing what a REAL ROLEPLAYING GAME LOOKS LIKE."
But about ten hours in, here's the thing: ehhh
So on the plus side, Witcher 2 is as well-written as the first game. It's also a genuinely beautiful game, with greatly improved character models and (particularly) animations to go with the often achingly beautiful environments and welcome, liberal use of bright light and bold colors. Oh, and you can customize Geralt's hair, which is cool and makes me legitimately happy. The full ponytail I got for him is a much better look than the stringy roadie-for-a-metal-band look he had in the first game or the elaborate half-ponytail/half-topknot thing he starts with in this.
On the minus side is literally almost everything else.
- This won't be an issue for most of y'all, but it's incredibly hostile to someone with vision problems. The first game had a big, chunky interface that maybe wouldn't get much love from some cackling wieners on a stream or a Quick Look but that I could actually decipher. Witcher 2 tosses all that out in favor of minimalist UI elements hidden at the corners of the screen (fuckin' great for someone with a limited field of view), translucent or transparent menus with tiny, sans-serif fonts, and most explanatory text (eg, inventory submenus) replaced with indecipherable icons.
- Some of this is clearly a result of the console-ization, which rears its head in other ways. Instead of mousing over things like a sensible game, you now kind of lumber Geralt up to things, have him walk into tables and walls, while spamming the interact key in hopes that the game understand you want to open the chest or pick up the thing on the table or whatever. Menus don't accept WASD input but you also can't use the mouse for everything so you have to keep moving your hands around to select things and then confirm them. Geralt himself just feels way more awkward in general. Turning around 180 degrees feels like backing out of a parking space.
- All of the control issues are even more noticeable when you're trying to navigate one of the game's ill-advised stealth sections. We've all had that moment in a Deus Ex or a Splinter Cell or whatever where sticky cover betrays us and we end up gluing ourselves to the corridor wall in full view of the patrolling guard instead of crouching behind the barrel we were aiming at, but in this, Geralt just...takes a leisurely five seconds to turn around and then does a run animation at the thing you're trying to duck behind.
- To meditate, which is to say, to access a central feature of the game that is the hub from which you heal, advance in-game time, brew and drink potions, and level up, you have to hold down left control while clicking an icon. Why. WHY
- Combat is more frenetic, with a new emphasis on blocking and parrying, but it's not necessarily better. It's not really scratching the itch the way Sleeping Dogs, Batman, or Spider-Man do, but it's also not easy and fluid and fun to watch the way the old AssCreed were. It's hard to tell when enemy attacks are landing and I often fail without really knowing why I failed, and then try again and succeed without really knowing why I succeeded.
- When you die there's a big YOU DIED loading screen that takes like seven seconds jesus fuck.
- There's an incredibly unnecessary and unwelcome proliferation of "RPG elements," which is to say, worthless timesink nonsense and half-baked subsystems. Talents are on a complicated tree/web thing but also have multiple levels in and of themselves (but you can't see how many possible levels a talent can have, or what they'll do) but also can be "evolved" with "mutagens" that come in innumerable flavors and convey minor, badly-communicated set bonuses and also there's crafting because witchers are well known for their item crafting in the fiction but you don't actually do the crafting you just get plans for things and carry timber and herbs to a craftsman and pay him so why couldn't you just buy the fucking stuff in the first place but also items have color-coded rarities now like it's a fucking MMO because that was definitely what the first game was lacking.
- There is a vendor trash tab in the menu. Why not just...make a game that doesn't have vendor trash?
- The game does not do a good job introducing any of this. The Witcher 1 takes an inverted-funnel approach, starting off narrowly and widening out; it begins with a very narrowly-scoped, self-contained prologue (bad guys assault Witcher HQ) that systematically teaches you the basics. "Geralt, fight this guy! Geralt, Dave is wounded - craft a potion to heal him!" Then you exit that prologue (after an hour or two, which feels like a reasonable amount of time) and go to the first chapter, a rural village, which is more expansive but still manageable. You get a couple of basic starting quests that don't require you to venture too far afield from the village inn that serves as your HQ, and you gradually expand outward as your facility with the systems and familiarity with the environment grows.
Witcher 2 just...drops you into the middle of things, picking up in both story and narrative terms from where the first game left off, which would be fine except that the gameplay is a drastic, ground-up revision where basically none of your knowledge from the first game is useful. Its prologue chapter is a protracted multi-hour affair with sub-quests and side objectives that, instead of teaching you basic game mechanics, leads you by the nose from one big QTE setpiece to another: aim a ballista! run from a dragon and use this one button to dodge its breath! sneak out of a dungeon! Time that could have been spent teaching you all these insanely proliferating subsystems is instead spent whacking the keyboard when a blue X appears to make Geralt roll under some dragon breath, a skill that will have absolutely no bearing on the next umpty-ump hours of gameplay.
Then you conclude that lengthy, unhelpful prologue and arrive in the chapter 1 town, which is also a small village, but instead of a small-scale plot and a limited number of managable quests you immediately get four or five major objectives dumped in your lap and twice as many smaller side missions - but even the smaller side objectives are multi-stage affairs that require you to obtain specific books or crafting recipes (from vendors whose stock is apparently randomized, so they might not always have the thing you're meant to get!). It's overwhelming.
- This is a much more subjective, aesthetic complaint, but while the game is visually sumptuous, it completely abandons the first game's commitment to a tangible, down-to-earth-feeling world. Witcher 1 took you through a procession of crumbly castles, country villages, cramped medieval ghettos, cornfields, forests etc that all looked and felt like real places, like real castles that you can actually visit. it was committedly, aggressively mundane. People lived in little 400-square foot thatched huts near a copse of scraggly trees that looked like the trees in your very own backyard. Castles and mighty fortresses were two or three stories tall and made of visibly rotting masonry. It actually felt pretty visually consonant with the TV show, which is of course obliged to film in actual replica medieval villages and rotting Hungarian castles and so forth.
Witcher 2 starts you out besieging a JRPG castle with mile-tall buttresses and a drawbridge the width of a football field before sending you to a forest that looks like the forest moon of Endor. It's a jarring stylistic change and a big departure from the naturalism of the previous game, and combined with the addition of all these elements pilfered willy-nilly from other video games like loot drop rates and crafting and vendor trash, the overall effect is that the interesting rough edges about the series and its world have been sanded down to make it a more generic mass-market RPG. It feels like I could be in Azeroth or Tamriel or...Amalur..ville...or a hundred other places.
So today I spent an hour convinced that an Ubuntu update had broken something, causing me to lose WiFi
This is complicated by the fact that the machine is an old iMac, containing a completely unsupported airport extreme card (I don't use this, I use a supported usb WiFi stick)
A ton of terminal voodoo to blacklist the broadcom kernel modules that I thought might be getting loaded in place of the actually required WiFi drivers
Some futzing with permissions and groups to work out why the network manager interface wasn't working as expected
Finally remembering that the airport extreme is on a removable module, dismantling (which is non-trivial, with an iMac), and pulling it, so that the machine only sees one wireless adapter
No effect, still no WiFi
Turns out the problem is that the usb hub I've been using is broken. Plug the USB WiFi adapter directly into the machine and it's fine
So I've started on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for the like, third time in the past eight years. Both previous times I basically managed to get a little past the tutorial before being stymied. This time I'm determined to persevere.
So when this game came out, I distinctly remember people asking "hey guys, should I play The Witcher 1 before starting this?" and being told "NO! The Witcher 1 is like WATCHING A LOVED ONE DIE OF CANCER compared to this MIRACULOUS GEM OF GAMING." As much as I, personally, had actually liked Witcher 1 despite its rough edges and jank, everyone seemed to agree that this was some incredible paradigm shift forward. We got the start of the compare-everything-CDPR-does-to-Bioware jag, where dudes were all "I hope the people at Bioware start PUTTING THEIR PETS IN OVENS IN DESPAIR after seeing what a REAL ROLEPLAYING GAME LOOKS LIKE."
But about ten hours in, here's the thing: ehhh
So on the plus side, Witcher 2 is as well-written as the first game. It's also a genuinely beautiful game, with greatly improved character models and (particularly) animations to go with the often achingly beautiful environments and welcome, liberal use of bright light and bold colors. Oh, and you can customize Geralt's hair, which is cool and makes me legitimately happy. The full ponytail I got for him is a much better look than the stringy roadie-for-a-metal-band look he had in the first game or the elaborate half-ponytail/half-topknot thing he starts with in this.
On the minus side is literally almost everything else.
- This won't be an issue for most of y'all, but it's incredibly hostile to someone with vision problems. The first game had a big, chunky interface that maybe wouldn't get much love from some cackling wieners on a stream or a Quick Look but that I could actually decipher. Witcher 2 tosses all that out in favor of minimalist UI elements hidden at the corners of the screen (fuckin' great for someone with a limited field of view), translucent or transparent menus with tiny, sans-serif fonts, and most explanatory text (eg, inventory submenus) replaced with indecipherable icons.
- Some of this is clearly a result of the console-ization, which rears its head in other ways. Instead of mousing over things like a sensible game, you now kind of lumber Geralt up to things, have him walk into tables and walls, while spamming the interact key in hopes that the game understand you want to open the chest or pick up the thing on the table or whatever. Menus don't accept WASD input but you also can't use the mouse for everything so you have to keep moving your hands around to select things and then confirm them. Geralt himself just feels way more awkward in general. Turning around 180 degrees feels like backing out of a parking space.
- All of the control issues are even more noticeable when you're trying to navigate one of the game's ill-advised stealth sections. We've all had that moment in a Deus Ex or a Splinter Cell or whatever where sticky cover betrays us and we end up gluing ourselves to the corridor wall in full view of the patrolling guard instead of crouching behind the barrel we were aiming at, but in this, Geralt just...takes a leisurely five seconds to turn around and then does a run animation at the thing you're trying to duck behind.
- To meditate, which is to say, to access a central feature of the game that is the hub from which you heal, advance in-game time, brew and drink potions, and level up, you have to hold down left control while clicking an icon. Why. WHY
- Combat is more frenetic, with a new emphasis on blocking and parrying, but it's not necessarily better. It's not really scratching the itch the way Sleeping Dogs, Batman, or Spider-Man do, but it's also not easy and fluid and fun to watch the way the old AssCreed were. It's hard to tell when enemy attacks are landing and I often fail without really knowing why I failed, and then try again and succeed without really knowing why I succeeded.
- When you die there's a big YOU DIED loading screen that takes like seven seconds jesus fuck.
- There's an incredibly unnecessary and unwelcome proliferation of "RPG elements," which is to say, worthless timesink nonsense and half-baked subsystems. Talents are on a complicated tree/web thing but also have multiple levels in and of themselves (but you can't see how many possible levels a talent can have, or what they'll do) but also can be "evolved" with "mutagens" that come in innumerable flavors and convey minor, badly-communicated set bonuses and also there's crafting because witchers are well known for their item crafting in the fiction but you don't actually do the crafting you just get plans for things and carry timber and herbs to a craftsman and pay him so why couldn't you just buy the fucking stuff in the first place but also items have color-coded rarities now like it's a fucking MMO because that was definitely what the first game was lacking.
- There is a vendor trash tab in the menu. Why not just...make a game that doesn't have vendor trash?
- The game does not do a good job introducing any of this. The Witcher 1 takes an inverted-funnel approach, starting off narrowly and widening out; it begins with a very narrowly-scoped, self-contained prologue (bad guys assault Witcher HQ) that systematically teaches you the basics. "Geralt, fight this guy! Geralt, Dave is wounded - craft a potion to heal him!" Then you exit that prologue (after an hour or two, which feels like a reasonable amount of time) and go to the first chapter, a rural village, which is more expansive but still manageable. You get a couple of basic starting quests that don't require you to venture too far afield from the village inn that serves as your HQ, and you gradually expand outward as your facility with the systems and familiarity with the environment grows.
Witcher 2 just...drops you into the middle of things, picking up in both story and narrative terms from where the first game left off, which would be fine except that the gameplay is a drastic, ground-up revision where basically none of your knowledge from the first game is useful. Its prologue chaper is a protracted multi-hour affair with sub-quests and side objectives that, instead of teaching you basic game mechanics, leads you by the nose from one big QTE setpiece to another: aim a ballista! run from a dragon and use this one button to dodge its breath! sneak out of a dungeon! Time that could have been spent teaching you all these insanely proliferating subsystems is instead spent whacking the keyboard when a blue X appears to make Geralt roll under some dragon breath, a skill that will have absolutely no bearing on the next umpty-ump hours of gameplay.
Then you conclude that lengthy, unhelpful prologue and arrive in the chapter 1 town, which is also a small village, but instead of a small-scale plot and a limited number of managable quests you immediately get four or five major objectives dumped in your lap and twice as many smaller side missions - but even the smaller side objectives are multi-stage affairs that require you to obtain specific books or crafting recipes (from vendors whose stock is apparently randomized, so they might not always have the thing you're meant to get!). It's overwhelming.
- This is a much more subjective, aesthetic complaint, but while the game is visually sumptuous, it completely abandons the first game's commitment to a tangible, down-to-earth-feeling world. Witcher 1 took you through a procession of crumbly castles, country villages, cramped medieval ghettos, cornfields, forests etc that all looked and felt like real places, like real castles that you can actually visit. it was committedly, aggresively mundane. People lived in little 400-square foot thatched huts near a copse of scraggly trees that looked like the trees in your very own backyard. Castles and mighty fortresses were two or three stories tall and made of visibly rotting masonry. It actually felt pretty visually consonant with the TV show, which is of course obliged to film in actual replica medieval villages and rotting Hungarian castles and so forth.
Witcher 2 starts you out besieging a JRPG castle with mile-tall buttresses and a drawbridge the width of a football field before sending you to a forest that looks like the forest moon of Endor. It's a jarring stylistic change and a big departure from the naturalism of the previous game, and combined with the addition of all these elements pilfered willy-nilly from other video games like loot drop rates and crafting and vendor trash, the overall effect is that the interesting rough edges about the series and its world have been sanded down to make it a more generic mass-market RPG. It feels like I could be in Azeroth or Tamriel or...Amalur..ville...or a hundred other places.
At least on your last complaint, Witcher 3 does such a better job
So many places where they just lay a fuckin board down over some mud, because everywhere is covered in mud
here's a screenshot entering the most prosperous and largest city in the game world
It's bright and colorful but everything is so used looking, it's wonderful. There are old bridges people have done patchwork jobs on to fix, there are rotting beams and collapsing towers, all the peasants are gross and greasy, I love everything about how it looks.
When you go in the city and up, as you get to newer and newer construction, you find whitewashed brand new buildings that look picturesque, but the walls and outskirts of the city are hundreds of years old, and they look like it
Posts
Yes but have you ever watched the anime remake of Dune, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hmmmmmmmm. I have seen 75% of it and I need to take some time to work through this comparison.
i see a lot of "God, Family, Football. In that order." type of stuff here
hello vishnub
2. Both have flat faced dogs in battle.
3.
More of a well wisher
isn't iggy supposed to be a boston terrier
wat
Mine basically grows back instantly so it's hard to tell.
i tend to get my five o'clock shadow on a delay and then it's like BEARD
I have embraced the beard.
Or rather the beard has embraced my face. It lives there now.
Interesting.
Talk about some bullshit
“You mean there’s a whole other planet with trees and animals and big tiddy goth girls and warm weather? And I’m stuck here???”
“Yes, now hush up and eat your slurry. You have the night shift on the generator bike tonight.”
Oof.
Biggest mood
Yeah he is but they are all a part of the Flat Faced family of dog species.
"If we work hard enough maybe we can go back to Earth"
Also, success with “hard mode” shouldn’t be an aspiration if you won’t have fun or can’t endure the commitment.
These are all great edits, thank you!
I terraformed Mars yesterday and it wasn’t all that difficult except @nexuscrawler kept dropping asteroids and comets and shit on me.
por que no los dos?
It’s Elon Musk
If there’s one thing his Mars colony will have its big tiddy goth girls
See also
So when this game came out, I distinctly remember people asking "hey guys, should I play The Witcher 1 before starting this?" and being told "NO! The Witcher 1 is like WATCHING A LOVED ONE DIE OF CANCER compared to this MIRACULOUS GEM OF GAMING." As much as I, personally, had actually liked Witcher 1 despite its rough edges and jank, everyone seemed to agree that this was some incredible paradigm shift forward. We got the start of the compare-everything-CDPR-does-to-Bioware jag, where dudes were all "I hope the people at Bioware start PUTTING THEIR PETS IN OVENS IN DESPAIR after seeing what a REAL ROLEPLAYING GAME LOOKS LIKE."
But about ten hours in, here's the thing: ehhh
So on the plus side, Witcher 2 is as well-written as the first game. It's also a genuinely beautiful game, with greatly improved character models and (particularly) animations to go with the often achingly beautiful environments and welcome, liberal use of bright light and bold colors. Oh, and you can customize Geralt's hair, which is cool and makes me legitimately happy. The full ponytail I got for him is a much better look than the stringy roadie-for-a-metal-band look he had in the first game or the elaborate half-ponytail/half-topknot thing he starts with in this.
On the minus side is literally almost everything else.
- This won't be an issue for most of y'all, but it's incredibly hostile to someone with vision problems. The first game had a big, chunky interface that maybe wouldn't get much love from some cackling wieners on a stream or a Quick Look but that I could actually decipher. Witcher 2 tosses all that out in favor of minimalist UI elements hidden at the corners of the screen (fuckin' great for someone with a limited field of view), translucent or transparent menus with tiny, sans-serif fonts, and most explanatory text (eg, inventory submenus) replaced with indecipherable icons.
- Some of this is clearly a result of the console-ization, which rears its head in other ways. Instead of mousing over things like a sensible game, you now kind of lumber Geralt up to things, have him walk into tables and walls, while spamming the interact key in hopes that the game understand you want to open the chest or pick up the thing on the table or whatever. Menus don't accept WASD input but you also can't use the mouse for everything so you have to keep moving your hands around to select things and then confirm them. Geralt himself just feels way more awkward in general. Turning around 180 degrees feels like backing out of a parking space.
- All of the control issues are even more noticeable when you're trying to navigate one of the game's ill-advised stealth sections. We've all had that moment in a Deus Ex or a Splinter Cell or whatever where sticky cover betrays us and we end up gluing ourselves to the corridor wall in full view of the patrolling guard instead of crouching behind the barrel we were aiming at, but in this, Geralt just...takes a leisurely five seconds to turn around and then does a run animation at the thing you're trying to duck behind.
- To meditate, which is to say, to access a central feature of the game that is the hub from which you heal, advance in-game time, brew and drink potions, and level up, you have to hold down left control while clicking an icon. Why. WHY
- Combat is more frenetic, with a new emphasis on blocking and parrying, but it's not necessarily better. It's not really scratching the itch the way Sleeping Dogs, Batman, or Spider-Man do, but it's also not easy and fluid and fun to watch the way the old AssCreed were. It's hard to tell when enemy attacks are landing and I often fail without really knowing why I failed, and then try again and succeed without really knowing why I succeeded.
- When you die there's a big YOU DIED loading screen that takes like seven seconds jesus fuck.
- There's an incredibly unnecessary and unwelcome proliferation of "RPG elements," which is to say, worthless timesink nonsense and half-baked subsystems. Talents are on a complicated tree/web thing but also have multiple levels in and of themselves (but you can't see how many possible levels a talent can have, or what they'll do) but also can be "evolved" with "mutagens" that come in innumerable flavors and convey minor, badly-communicated set bonuses and also there's crafting because witchers are well known for their item crafting in the fiction but you don't actually do the crafting you just get plans for things and carry timber and herbs to a craftsman and pay him so why couldn't you just buy the fucking stuff in the first place but also items have color-coded rarities now like it's a fucking MMO because that was definitely what the first game was lacking.
- There is a vendor trash tab in the menu. Why not just...make a game that doesn't have vendor trash?
- The game does not do a good job introducing any of this. The Witcher 1 takes an inverted-funnel approach, starting off narrowly and widening out; it begins with a very narrowly-scoped, self-contained prologue (bad guys assault Witcher HQ) that systematically teaches you the basics. "Geralt, fight this guy! Geralt, Dave is wounded - craft a potion to heal him!" Then you exit that prologue (after an hour or two, which feels like a reasonable amount of time) and go to the first chapter, a rural village, which is more expansive but still manageable. You get a couple of basic starting quests that don't require you to venture too far afield from the village inn that serves as your HQ, and you gradually expand outward as your facility with the systems and familiarity with the environment grows.
Witcher 2 just...drops you into the middle of things, picking up in both story and narrative terms from where the first game left off, which would be fine except that the gameplay is a drastic, ground-up revision where basically none of your knowledge from the first game is useful. Its prologue chapter is a protracted multi-hour affair with sub-quests and side objectives that, instead of teaching you basic game mechanics, leads you by the nose from one big QTE setpiece to another: aim a ballista! run from a dragon and use this one button to dodge its breath! sneak out of a dungeon! Time that could have been spent teaching you all these insanely proliferating subsystems is instead spent whacking the keyboard when a blue X appears to make Geralt roll under some dragon breath, a skill that will have absolutely no bearing on the next umpty-ump hours of gameplay.
Then you conclude that lengthy, unhelpful prologue and arrive in the chapter 1 town, which is also a small village, but instead of a small-scale plot and a limited number of managable quests you immediately get four or five major objectives dumped in your lap and twice as many smaller side missions - but even the smaller side objectives are multi-stage affairs that require you to obtain specific books or crafting recipes (from vendors whose stock is apparently randomized, so they might not always have the thing you're meant to get!). It's overwhelming.
- This is a much more subjective, aesthetic complaint, but while the game is visually sumptuous, it completely abandons the first game's commitment to a tangible, down-to-earth-feeling world. Witcher 1 took you through a procession of crumbly castles, country villages, cramped medieval ghettos, cornfields, forests etc that all looked and felt like real places, like real castles that you can actually visit. it was committedly, aggressively mundane. People lived in little 400-square foot thatched huts near a copse of scraggly trees that looked like the trees in your very own backyard. Castles and mighty fortresses were two or three stories tall and made of visibly rotting masonry. It actually felt pretty visually consonant with the TV show, which is of course obliged to film in actual replica medieval villages and rotting Hungarian castles and so forth.
Witcher 2 starts you out besieging a JRPG castle with mile-tall buttresses and a drawbridge the width of a football field before sending you to a forest that looks like the forest moon of Endor. It's a jarring stylistic change and a big departure from the naturalism of the previous game, and combined with the addition of all these elements pilfered willy-nilly from other video games like loot drop rates and crafting and vendor trash, the overall effect is that the interesting rough edges about the series and its world have been sanded down to make it a more generic mass-market RPG. It feels like I could be in Azeroth or Tamriel or...Amalur..ville...or a hundred other places.
This is complicated by the fact that the machine is an old iMac, containing a completely unsupported airport extreme card (I don't use this, I use a supported usb WiFi stick)
A ton of terminal voodoo to blacklist the broadcom kernel modules that I thought might be getting loaded in place of the actually required WiFi drivers
Some futzing with permissions and groups to work out why the network manager interface wasn't working as expected
Finally remembering that the airport extreme is on a removable module, dismantling (which is non-trivial, with an iMac), and pulling it, so that the machine only sees one wireless adapter
No effect, still no WiFi
Turns out the problem is that the usb hub I've been using is broken. Plug the USB WiFi adapter directly into the machine and it's fine
Troubleshooting!
Classic nexus
At least on your last complaint, Witcher 3 does such a better job
So many places where they just lay a fuckin board down over some mud, because everywhere is covered in mud
here's a screenshot entering the most prosperous and largest city in the game world
It's bright and colorful but everything is so used looking, it's wonderful. There are old bridges people have done patchwork jobs on to fix, there are rotting beams and collapsing towers, all the peasants are gross and greasy, I love everything about how it looks.
When you go in the city and up, as you get to newer and newer construction, you find whitewashed brand new buildings that look picturesque, but the walls and outskirts of the city are hundreds of years old, and they look like it