Soteriologian
10d ago
How is the story/characters? One of the most off-putting things about SMT5 is it didn't feel like it had any characters at all. I don't even mean they felt cliché: they felt inert, like mannequins. I'd happily take a stereotypical JRPG hero over the Nahobino/whatever-his-real-name-is any day.
Soteriologian
10d ago
How is Metaphor? I'm a Persona fan (3/4/5), but when I tried SMT5 I didn't like it at all. The battle system was mechanically better and had more depth, but everything else was worse. Much worse. In particular, the constant echo-y audio drove me mad. I stopped playing after the first chapter and haven't returned.
Soteriologian
10d ago
I haven't even updated yet and I still get the joy of Telegram adapting to the new Liquid Glass paradigm. It looks so bad.
Soteriologian
10d ago
As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough.
Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.
Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.
Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.
Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.
Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!
Soteriologian
12d ago
Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke, suggests that these sorts of group chats are actually really common among the right wingers he interacted with. In fact his response to this seems to indicate agreement this chat is tame compared to many conversations he has seen.
It is. In a darknet chat, I once saw someone say
Soteriologian
14d ago
I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. The author is a gifted wordcel: he has nothing worthwhile to say, but he is very good at saying it. It's just Reddit philosophy, dressed well.
Soteriologian
14d ago
In this context, choosing to join underground resistance group was choosing to die for the cause, soon and often in rather unpleasant way, and it was clear to everyone.
Why would it be clear to everyone? It's clearly false: the war ended within a year, with their team winning. In fact, this resistance leader himself survived the war.
I'm not saying there aren't people with a martyrdom fetish, but that's their problem, not an objective analysis of the situation or even a coherent strategy. In the words of one of the generals on the winning team: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
Soteriologian
19d ago
We use shock collars on the employees at all my firms. They’re there to do a job: they receive food and some coins as the carrot, but there has to be a stick, too. I don’t see why dogs should be any different.
Soteriologian
20d ago
I agree with much of this. My issue is that Elden Ring is saturated with mechanics that compound unnaturally well in favor of knowledgeable or skilled players and are either useless for casuals or actively counterproductive for them. Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?
If I were the designer, I'd just remove the penalties on these items. Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active. These changes make things easier for bad players, while not changing anything for skilled players (and if you want to rebalance the game around this by increasing boss HP, the net effect is the game is the same difficulty for casuals, while being harder for good players).
Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.
Soteriologian
22d ago
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.
It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.
Soteriologian
23d ago
Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!
And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.
The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.
Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.
There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.
For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.
Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.
Soteriologian
24d ago
Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!
The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.
Soteriologian
24d ago
Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.
Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I just use extra-strength Tylenol, since it's extra strong. Supplement with Brain Force and a good huff of a helium balloon.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I haven't tried patch 1.0 yet, but I did play back when the alpha was released.
From what I remember, it's not bad, but I much prefer the vibe of Hades 1. Hades 1 is just very strong thematically - at first you think your dad is kind of a bad guy, keeping you down, but as you fight your way to the surface for your first glimpse of paradise, it becomes apparent that the curse is much deeper than you know: it's in the blood. You were born condemned, to a Sisyphean quest to seek paradise but be denied access, and yet... through your failure, you make lots of friends, realize your troubles may not even be that bad compared to theirs, and well, I won't spoil the ending, but one can almost imagine Sisyphus content. It's a very deep game.
Hades 2 isn't bad, it just... it feels like Arcane season 2 compared to Arcane season 1. It would feel a lot better if its predecessor hadn't set the bar so high. And yes, as you mention, it does feel a bit woker.
Now, admittedly, I haven't played the new 1.0 patch for Hades 2 yet, so I may be missing key aspects of the story that pull things together in ways that make the game deeper. But from what I remember, Chronos sure felt like an actual bad guy, in a very cookie-cutter sense, and there didn't seem to be much thematic depth behind this, like the passage of time rendering the gods increasingly impotent or something (the main character is a witch, after all). It just felt quite shallow.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Yeah, it's not even a political radical thing. Nikki Haley does it, as does Josh Shapiro.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
That's not how this is going to play out.
At best, you're going to have the ICE data used by megacorps from Apple to Zillow to blacklist these people from ever being employed again; at worst, you're going to have Nuremburg trials for many of the more prominent ICE members (don't worry, they'll be super humane -- no deaths by hanging; that's crass and right-coded. Just prison and felony charges, to make sure you're maximally unemployable).
Soteriologian
1mo ago
The weirdest thing is the administration brought this on themselves. It's not like Epstein was a grassroots thing that they were forced to confront. It is specifically their making noise about it during the campaign that revived interest in the affair in the first place. Keep in mind Epstein died during Trump's first term, and yet somehow the fanfare then was minimal compared to what we see now. Why would they drum up attention about it, only to backpeddle? I mean, they did the same thing with auditing the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox. And annexing Canada. And Greenland.
Like what is sincere analysis of this stuff even supposed to look like? Because the most charitable interpretation I can give is "Ah, don't worry about it, they just say dumb shit for attention," which should already be a sharp indictment of officials entrusted with enacting national policy, and even that's not what I really believe.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Jordan Peterson is another example of steep decline in quality.
Even people who comment in writing have seen decline. For example, Scott himself. I don't mean to say he's bad now, or that his stepping back from the spotlight wasn't justified or even wise. But nonetheless, AstralCodexTen is no SlateStarCodex.
But further, I think there's a reason for the decline in good commentary: there is a deep crisis of faith in western institutions. I don't want to say "We all just need to clap our hands for Tinkerbell and believe!" because I believe this loss of faith is, at least to some extent, justified. Take the Epstein files. Half of Trump's cabinet made numerous public statements about releasing these files and clearing everything up for the public, only to backpeddle in the most pants-on-head, clown-world fashion once they came into office. And let me not mince words about what popular perception is about the Epstein affair: people believe this is Israel blackmailing US politicians, quite likely including Trump himself (who is almost daily seen with Epstein's next-door neighbor, Howard Lutnick).
And it's not just the Epstein files. Everything is suffering this same crisis of faith. Take the HHS with RFK Jr.. Or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Or even the Federal Reserve itself. Across all these institutions, we see accusations of at best policy motivated by partisan politics, if not outright criminal fraud.
Even areas that should be free of this sort of thing are not. For example, Larry Summers says inflation was crazy high in the early 2020s, we just changed the metric, while CATO says this is uninformed madness and you should definitely not pay attention to Larry Summers. Let me remind you, Summers is not a WoW streamer blabbering about a topic he knows nothing about; this is the former president of Harvard, with a PhD in economics, who has been a top-level advisor to multiple administrations on this very matter.
Finally, take the gorilla in the room: immigration. Third-world immigration is no longer perceived as a matter of "oh, there's some people who just wanted a better life, and some people think we should let more in, and some people think fewer." That's... soooo 2010s. No, today at best the contention is "you are importing people with the intent that they will influence elections by one day voting for you", and even that's the nice right-wing position; the bad-boy position is "there are people who are outright trying to replace the native demographics." These are no longer fringe positions confined to obscure image boards. This is now mainstream. And the tacit question making the air so thick one can scarcely inhale is: "and what is going to be done about it?"
So I ask you, how exactly is someone supposed to give measured, insightful commentary about this? Go ahead, read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. Sound like fitting commentary today, with Ukraine and Gaza all over your feed? Well, that's why we don't have commentary like that anymore.
Yeah, I watched the Haelian video when it came out (I used to watch him semi-frequently) and my immediate reaction was "someone is going to see this and say 'yeah right, watch this.'" I can't recall off the top of my head exactly what, but I do remember there was something about his probability analysis that made me think "This RNG isn't quite as improbable as he's making it sound."
Amusingly, Angel1C's 64 heat run was kinda confirmation of Haelian's analysis, in that the run went almost exactly as Haelian predicted it would need to. The bigger egg on Haelian's face should have been the second time 64 heat was done, which received much less fanfare and was done with a totally different build using the Rama bow.
Haelian is quite an accomplished runner himself. He's held many world records at various points, and iirc has the world first for doing a no-hit run in Hades.
EDIT: I think I remember -- it's the fact that you can get keys, which do indeed give you the ability to re-roll even on 64 heat. So that aspect of the dark mirror is, weirdly enough, not entirely turned off. You just start the run with 0 re-rolls.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I do enjoy attempting challenges myself, as well as watching them.
One other thing I like about challenge runs is that they often have some sort of amusing meaning internal to the game's universe. For example, when you beat Starcraft 2, in the final cinematic there's a line to the effect of "Just think on all the men we've lost", which, when you beat it without losing a unit, has the hilarious implied answer of "Actually, sir, it seems we didn't lose anybody." Similarly, Persona solo hero runs are basically beating a game about the power of friendship without the power of friendship -- great man theory confirmed. Challenge runs are often designed around some deference to the game's aesthetic, and even when they're not, e.g., hardcore, the difficulty at least lends more weight to the dialog. When the characters talk about how difficult getting to this point was, it actually feels true, rather than the "ya I barely paid attention to the mechanics and I just waltzed through" you get with a normal playthrough.
In contrast, speed runs often break the aesthetic of the game, rather than complement it. What does it mean in Elden Ring when you run off the edge of a cliff, heal yourself, and final boss whom you've never even seen just dies? That's just lame.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I found speedrunning entertaining initially, and still do to some extent, but in recent years my interest has shifted to a related but different category: challenge runs.
Challenge runs are fundamentally different than speed runs in that there is a bar to be cleared, and once the bar is cleared, that's it, the challenge is complete, and you can do something else. This stands in explicit contrast to speedrunning, where you can invest indefinite amounts of resources chasing the metric harder in ways that are often not compelling: e.g., repeated attempts to farm the best RNG.
My favorite challenge run category is hardcore, in the sense of permadeath. The first time I encountered it was in Diablo, but Diablo was specifically designed with "recovery" mechanics in mind that make it actually not that hardcore in practice (specifically, levels are quite easy to gain relative to quality loot, and the latter is not lost on death if you have it in your bank, so you can "bounce back" after a death very quickly). Hardcore is actually a lot more fun in games that weren't specifically designed for it, the most popular being Classic WoW. But the neat thing about the challenge is it's applicable to almost any game, because in nearly every game ever made, simply beating the game is, in some sense, a string of segments which together constitute a no-death run, so hardcore is just "can you just do it right the first time?"
The reason I find hardcore so much more interesting than speed runs or even other challenge run categories is that it emphasizes a completely different skill set: most challenges incentivize a high-risk high-reward just-try-again-if-you-got-it-wrong playstyle, and hardcore is the exact opposite. In many games, it's almost a test of character more than a test of skill. For example, in Classic WoW, you can basically beat the challenge with minimal effort by just making a rule that you'll only kill single mobs a couple levels lower than you. Yet despite this very simple path to victory, I think only around 1/1000 players actually complete the challenge. It's extremely difficult to exercise the level of self-control required. One quick anecdote: a player was talking in zone chat about being super tempted to do some high-risk quest for this juicy 14-slot bag or something, and I was like "But you realize you're not actually getting 14 loot slots, right? You presumably already have what, a 10 or 12 slot bag in your worst bag slot? So you're taking this risk for 2 slots. The question isn't whether the risk is worth 14 slots; it's whether it's worth 2 slots." And he replied something to the effect of "wow, when you put it that way, this is not at all worth it, thx". It's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're taking worthwhile risk when you are not!
Anyway, enough of hardcore. Challenge runs generalize well beyond this. Other popular challenge restrictions that apply to most games include things like "no items." But they can be anything. For example, one run I did last year that I found quite fun was doing Final Fantasy XII with gambits-only (defined as starting once you get past the tutorial and gain access to gambits, obviously), i.e., once you're in battle, just put the controller down and watch. It actually wasn't as hard as I expected, but it was quite enjoyable and felt totally different than playing the game normally. And it doesn't feel like watching a movie at all. More like watching a children's play when you're the director, and you sit there helplessly hoping they won't mess it up and make a fool of themselves and you.
For Elden Ring or other Souls games, popular challenges are beating the game at level 1 and doing bosses without getting hit. For Pokemon, Nuzlocke is by far the most popular challenge category. For popular RTS games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, you can beat the campaigns without losing a single unit on the highest difficulty (GiantGrantGames has some popular videos showcasing this), which I suppose is kind of like hardcore but feels a bit different.
In conclusion, I find challenge runs much more entertaining than speed runs. They rarely entail abusing glitches in the game engine, they aren't usually plagued by uninteresting incentives like RNG farming or decaying into some flavor of "who can play DDR the most precisely"? They have a wide range of difficulties to choose from, some being very easy, e.g., no items in Pokemon or Persona, up to nigh-impossible, e.g., beating Hades on 64 heat. And most importantly: there is a point at which you can say you are done.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I think you're correct. The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.
That said, I think it's going to get worse. Commenters here have previously speculated that the administration's attempts to crash the economy (in real terms, not in asset prices' terms) while simultaneously pushing through an enormous spending bill targeted at procuring large numbers of disaffected young men is preparation for war in some capacity. Whether with China, Iran, or "Internal Enemies", who knows.
But even among the right-wing thought leaders, this has been viewed with extreme suspicion: Musk has openly condemned it multiple times, Fuentes... well, his interpretation is obvious. And the administration has no competing narrative at all. There really isn't a single thought leader on Team Trump. Kirk was arguably the closest thing to it, and even he was feisty enough that large numbers of conspiracy theorists seem to think he was assassinated by the administration (or those behind it) for failing to toe the line properly on important matters. I do not believe this is the case, as I've previously elaborated, but this is nonetheless a narrative that even on-site was immediately perceived as worth amplifying: notice George Zinn, an old Jew, promptly rising up and claiming he was the shooter. An obvious lie, yet not one lacking in narrative meaning or intent. Netanyahu simultaneously releasing a statement with Trump confirming Kirk's death is similarly coy chicanery, like a rooster crowing to claim credit for the rising sun.
I don't pretend to know how all this will play out, but I can at least claim this with confidence: resentment and spite are not the ingredients of a winning movement, and I perceive these in abundant supply.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I’m an interlocutor
I noticed that after my comment, yes. My apologies.
Also moneyed interest thinks Harvard is impressive. You seem to crave that?
Not really. I’m pretty dismissive of American universities in general. You have people like Peter Navarro or Eric Weinstein getting doctorates from Harvard. Not only do I think these people aren’t particular bright, I think they’re downright fraudulent.
In contrast, take someone like Grant of 3B1B. I’m sure he has credentials of some sort, but I don’t know or care what they are. I consider him very high human capital because of the quality of his work.
Finally, Kirk built something at scale whereas Fuentes has not.
With big money behind you, everything is at scale. You can take almost anyone and make them a celebrity by throwing enough money at them.
Fuentes has centralized power actively opposing him, booting him off every major platform, and yet he still thrives.
I’m sorry but I don’t know what sort of epistemic model you come from where a plant given water and fertiliser in a climate-conditioned greenhouse is somehow more impressive to you than one tossed into the desert that manages to take root and grow anyway.
Thanks! Sounds worth a shot, will pick it up sometime.
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