That’s what I really love about the Witcher and its writing, there aren’t very many characters that I can think of that don’t have many dimensions to them. And every decision you make isn’t good or bad, just different. Even the love interest you can completely turn your back on and for understandable reasons. It’s just phenomenal writing that doesn’t exist in any other game of its caliber imo

I actually haven’t played the other two since they’re both very old games at this point but I do plan to try them out. Witcher 3 seems like it mostly stands on its own and you won’t be missing anything too huge when it comes to the story and characters from the other games. That being said, its a situation where knowing the prior games helps and you’ll understand the relationships better. If you bounced off of the first one though, my recommendation is just to at least read up on the characters and major events of the first two. Maybe watch a game movie if you can find one. I went in completely blind into the third game and it turned out fine so really you can’t go wrong, don’t let the prep for playing the game stop you from actually playing it.

Finally got around to playing The Witness and its a surprisingly good and simple puzzle game, I’m having a really good time so far.

I have many choices but here’s a few that really stand out to me

1. The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine If you’ve played just the base game of Witcher 3, you’ve missed out. I decided after playing the base game and waiting for a couple years that I’d go back for the DLC. I spent upwards of 100+ hours with this game on the hardest difficulty and the story in the base game is long, engrossing, and whimsical. But at the end you aren’t really completely satisfied despite several moving moments. Enter the DLC of Blood and Wine though and now you’re basically in The Witcher 3 part 2. This is where you leave the baggage of the main game behind and play out the best ending to any character I’ve ever seen. It’s full of adventure and new sights to see, its full of interesting characters to meet, and it captures the sense of love that Geralt has for the other characters. I legitimately cried at the end of the epic adventure when you sit down next to Ciri and just… realize that its over. Every good book I’ve ever read makes you really feel an empty heart to see the last page and read the final words on it. It felt just like that and I was sad to leave that world behind.

2. Kingdom Hearts Series Just an incredible game series that appears almost made for children but turns into a very convoluted and at times extremely beautiful story. Whats so wild about it is that the story is somewhat complex but the emotions throughout are so simple, pure, and understandable. It gets to the core of what we all feel and makes cartoons of our emotions and never leaves that space. And the music matched with those emotions is just the purest art.

3. To The Moon Its short, its sweet, it has great music, go play it and bring tissues. Its a sad tale with very simple gameplay but I listen to the soundtrack once in a while to this day and I never stop thinking about the themes of this game. What exists in this game is so thoughtful, thought provoking, understandable, and most importantly human. I can’t discuss the story at all without spoiling it but just go play it. It takes a few hours and I recommend never leaving your seat for the whole thing. You can probably even just watch it be played on youtube without commentary and get 95% of the experience.

Honestly the game play is very dated but nostalgia would go a long way to grease the wheels of this game to make it more entertaining. But I wouldn’t recommend playing on the harder difficulties and I wouldn’t play it on PC period unless you’re okay with some bad glitches. Either way they’re both short games so you’re really not wasting too much time to play them again even if they’re disappointing somewhat. It’s also still very fun to fling people around in both but especially the first game.

There are several sections like that actually in both games where you’re stuck in sequences for way too long. Both games have a habit of having you sit there mashing a button for 20-30 seconds before anything interesting happens on screen and it’s just not great when games nowadays have moved on from anything like this.

Does the Wii version use motion controls? I’m assuming it does. If so, that would make way more sense and I can definitely see how it’d be way more fun to experience that way.

Older God of war games are a really good comparison, especially with the QTEs.

That is assuming that our universe is flat in the 4th dimension…

I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.

From what I’ve read, the money goes to Microsoft. I got my copy via humble bundle subscription (a really good deal btw) so I got lucky. If it were me, I’d be looking for other ways to play it probably

That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.

Minecraft believe it or not. Every few years I come back and install a mod pack and it’s like an entirely new game almost. Plus I love the factory and automation mods. The game just never seems to die.

I swear that Bethesda tries as hard as possible to mess up everything they do. There’s not much hope left for them so we just have to twiddle our thumbs and wait till they release Elder Scrolls 6, receive more awful reviews and outrage, and then get gobbled up entirely by Microsoft.

This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.

So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.

And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.

Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.

Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.

Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.

Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.

What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.

There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe

I don’t think most cheats are just for the fun of the game. Most cheats get developed to sell to the huge Asian markets of cheaters. It’s fairly normalized in China and somewhat Japan to cheat in games. And then they get sold to everyone else as well.

Then after the cheats are sold, TF2 and CS2 become vulnerable to bots and idling. Many of the drops you get in those games can be sold, often for a very low price but multiplied by a thousand, it’s worth it for cheaters. And valve doesn’t much care so long as their game reviews are positive because it inflates the player counts of the games and also they can ban the accounts, take away items, and then the cheaters will spend more to get them back on a new account.

Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.

The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.

Oh yeah strictly speaking if you follow the scientific method you are doing “science” however what the twitter thread is getting at and what I’m getting at is that science without the scientific process isn’t the same thing. Typically in a professional setting we just call that research.

The scientific process contains the scientific methods but there is an aspect of connection to the scientific community. I’d argue that if you’re using a company to build and develop a working base of knowledge through the scientific method, you’re failing at the building and organizing knowledge part of that science definition by not sharing what you know.