Immunity

The Adventure Zone is really good as people have mentioned. If you're interested in some similar stuff in video form, I'd recommend watching Critical Role. It's a bunch of voice actors playing D&D and it's the best D&D thing that I've watched. It works well as audio only, but the video adds a lot.

Man, the more I play, the more I am absolutely perplexed by how bad some of the decisions they made are. I'm really surprised that with all of Blizzards experience from SC2, Heathstone, and HOTS that they couldn't put together a competitive mode that wasn't rife with bullshit. On the plus side, people tend to play a bit more seriously in competitive, that's not to say that they don't make really bad decisions, but they try a bit harder and play to the objective more often which is good.

Just placed in 55 (top 21%, not bad I guess) and from what I've heard I can expect that to drop down quite a bit over the next several games since loses reduce your rating far more than wins increase it. That seems dumb considering it's a team based game, but I'm not a game designer.

I started watching ration reviews as my latest youtube hole to fall down and this guy's reviews were usually the ones I watched. He's quite good at them, but I thought the exact same thing that you did.

It's alright so far. The thing I hate most about it is the same thing I hated about CS GO's competitive mode stuff. The matches are a best of 5, which take way too fucking long. Overwatch is great because the matches are quick and you can leave in between rounds if your team is just god awful. Having to sit through 3 rounds of getting absolutely stomped is not fun at all. That's not the norm, but it makes me want to avoid competitive in favor of quick match just to avoid that scenario.

Quick match lets me avoid the bad matches pretty easily by letting me get the hell out of there if I want at the end of any round. I know that a BO5 is a better test of one team's skill over the other, but it just feels completely at odds with the fast matches of quick match which is one of the things I love about Overwatch. So I dunno, that aspect of it ruins it for me a bit. If it was a BO3 I'd be a lot happier, but I doubt that's going to happen since it's a competitive mode and people into that kind of thing have a boner for matches that take for-fucking-ever.

Also, the sudden death mechanic is terrible, but they've said they're going to fix it next season. There are a few things about this mode that seem kind of bad, but it's only the first season so it's reasonable to assume that they will come up with a better system for the later seasons.

I'm working on starting a novel myself. I'm in that, I have an idea but I've spent some time fucking around and not actually writing it phase. Hopefully I can find the focus to actually start on it today.

It's interesting that you took the self-pub route. I don't think I'd go that route myself. I understand wanting to keep your independence, but having an agent and an editor that can help you hone your story seems incredibly valuable to me. At the end of the day it's still your story and you get to decide what to do with it, but I would find that kind of active feedback incredibly helpful I think. This is all conjecture of course, I have no actual first-hand experience with it. Traditional publishing would take much longer to actually get something published when compared to self-publishing, but what you gain out of the whole process seems like something I'd benefit from. For example, I would be really bad at marketing, having someone else do the bulk of that for me sounds great.

Anyways, thanks for the story and inspiration, duder. Best of luck with the second book.

@flashflood_29: I'd say that's probably not what most people expect, but I have no data to back that up. I'm just assuming most people don't watch extreme sports expecting someone to die. Fuck up and wipe out, but walk away in the end, yeah sure. It's like F1 or Nascar, people want to see a crash, but not see someone carried out on a stretcher afterward.

Tonally it just came out of nowhere, since we've never seen a sports game try to depict death so brutally and also casually shrug it off. Like I said originally, it's fine and I don't expect them to change it. If that's what they're going for that's cool. It just took me, and apparently others, by surprise and I think that's why. If they're trying to make a fun mountain sports game for the whole family, then they've gone too far in that spot. If they're targeting a more mature audience, then maybe it works, but it's still likely to turn some people off.

The first death felt really brutal. The guy yelling "Nooooo!" just before he slammed into a mountain, breaking every bone in his body was unexpected.

It's about context. I don't think they need to tone down the violence, it's just incredibly unexpected given the context. Yes these are dangerous sports, but these sports are traditionally handled in more of a video game-y sort of way. The wipeouts are either way over the top or barely handled at all to the point that it doesn't stand out.

There were straight-up, bloodcurdling screams that you could see a real person making in their final seconds before a sudden death rather than a dumb video game character going ragdoll and flailing around with goofy physics. That's kind of weird for these kinds of games. We just haven't seen it in a sports game before and I think that's why it stands out. We expect violence in a Call of Duty. We expect blood, shooting, and screaming. In fact that's part of the draw. We don't expect that in a sports game so it stood out as kind of odd.

When that hang glider landed after the race he probably should have started fucking weeping openly since he just watched what was probably one of his best friends die horribly. Instead he was just like, alright cool got that shit done. It was just weird.

I don't have much to add to this other than to mirror what others have mentioned by saying 5 - 10 years is an INCREDIBLY generous estimate. We are nowhere near ready for automation on that kind of scale. Sure little prototypes with unrealistically controlled environments and scenarios, but rolling out enough automated machinery to eliminate the need for an entire section of the workforce will take a hell of a lot longer than 10 years.

I agree with Vinny when he says this is the best time to be playing video games. The amount of variety is incredible right now. We've got games of all different genres and experimentation is happening all over the place.

We're seeing games being made now that would never have had a chance in the past. Life is Strange is a story about the friendship between two teenage girls. Yes there's time travel stuff in there, but it's about friendship at its core. That game would be unthinkable 10 years ago. Meanwhile, we've still got games like DOOM coming out that are all about literally ripping and tearing enemies apart in glorious, gory fashion.

Yes, AAA developers could lay off the sequels and give new IPs a shot, I'll agree with you there. But that would also take some massive re-structuring on their part. Teams would have to become much smaller and a lot leaner if they don't want to risk huge lay-offs if their gamble on a new IP doesn't pay off.

This year especially has been an amazing year for games so far and it looks to be even better if games like Deus Ex and Civ 6 deliver a quality experience. If you're not excited for any of the games coming out that's fine, but that sounds like a personal problem rather than a problem with the video game industry.

There are a lot of fantastic games out there and more coming out every month, if you can't find something that interests you then either you're not looking hard enough or you may just need to take a break from video games and do something else for a while. Maybe you'll come back ready to play some damn good games. They'll be there waiting for you.

E3 isn't very exciting this year in general because there's not a ton of new stuff. With Nintendo saying they're not talking about NX at E3 that pretty much deflated most of my interest. But a weak E3 says more about E3 than it does about video games.

I'd like to see it be full of open world dungeons. What I mean by that is rather than zoning into a dungeon or whatever, it's about exploring an open air dungeon. Maybe some old ruins where you have to move between buildings to get the various items, solve puzzles, and fight stuff. Instead of multiple levels that you traverse between, they're sprawled out over a larger outside area, with some indoor/underground stuff mixed in.

That's the only thing I can think of to make it interesting. I can't imagine a huge open world that's just a giant monster field with big dark doorways that indicate loading screens for the dungeons being too fun. We're kind of nearing open world over saturation at this point. And I definitely don't want to go around talking to people and getting quests Witcher 3 style. It works for Witcher 3, but it's not what people come to Zelda for.