SonicBoyster

I'm here because I was disappointed in the Quicklook and would recommend anybody looking for opinions on the game seek out additional sources of coverage.

The way this game handles the actual RPG 'mechanics' (Skill points and dialog trees specifically) is something I haven't really seen before, and it makes the game worth picking up later on sale even if you don't think you're into 'reading' your way through a thirty+ hour game. If you *are* intending the play the game, and you aren't sure what kind of character you want to make, I'd highly recommend creating a custom characters with two of your 'attributes' (Intellect, Psyche, etc) at '4' and two of your attributes at '2.' The extremes can be fun if you have a specific character concept in mind but you'll get the most 'interaction' with your skills if you have a large number of them slightly above average.

I thought the game was great, and that some misunderstandings about the game combined with a brutish character build tainted the Quicklook. Make a dude you wanna role play!

More life is strange, yo. It'll take them a couple of months to go through the whole thing if the community wants them to keep going (if they keep exploring at the same rate, which they should) but, as has been mentioned, the game does get progressively more interesting.

Fantastic work.

The internet is doing what the internet does by overreacting and sliding down slippery slopes all over the place. I'm going to quote a guy from the first page of these comments because he seems to be the kind of person filling up all of the threads on reddit.

The idea that mods are a 'corporate money sink' runs counter to the very next sentence, which is attempting to argue that people who create mods "shouldn't" do something but should instead do something else. He says it's about the corporations, but acknowledges that it's the choice of the mod maker, and then says mod makers' freedoms should be restricted such that they should be (from the sound of it, anyway) required to request donations instead of charging fees. Afterwards he explains off the top of his head that 'good' mods would make money through those donation requests (apparently not through paid workshop though?) and then explains that Steam has become 'worse' without explaining what worse means because Steam has been adding features. In a later paragraph he changes subjects entirely and mentions how modders don't make enough money from the workshop.

This is every argument on the internet about this stuff right now. The whole monetization system is completely optional, but because people need something to rant about on the internet, and because people would bend over backwards to point the finger at a corporation instead of the people enlisting the services of said corporation, we end up with totally ramble-y nonsense about how the world is falling apart without any evidence to support it.

It's optional. Vote with your wallet. Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. We can all calm down now.

When Hearthstone was new it had a few coin flip cards, and they all felt like garbage, but they had a risk-reward factor that made putting them in the deck a strategic decision. Mad bomber might hit your own guys or might not hit anybody, Tinker would randomly polymorph an enemy and sometimes backfired (which was still too strong and they nerfed it), Ragnaros hit randomly, so it was only viable as a desperation move or on a favorable 50/50 shot at sealing a game away. This just isn't the case anymore.

Look at piloted shredder. It's just a broken card. At worst it's a 4/3 that makes a 1/1 and that at least costs your opponent an attack or some mana, but it has something like an 8 to 10% chance every time it dies to create a minion that probably breaks the entire board. Doomsayer? Thanatos? Millhouse? Succubus? Stealthed Assassin? Even something like a loot horder or shielded minibot, or a nat pagel, can randomly give someone card advantage or tempo and board presence that they didn't account for and did nothing to earn. And you often see 2 of these in the same game. If both players are using them, which is pretty often, you're seeing 3 or 4. The chances of just one of them breaking the game aren't all that low anymore, and that's just the one card. That doesn't account for something like a Blastmage or an MCT or Ragnaros or bomb lobber just happening to hit the right thing to flip the table. It doesn't account for something like unstable portal or sneeds or the 6/4 shredder randomly creating something that is wildly overpowered. It doesn't account for Dr. Boom's bombs randomly doing 3-4 damage to a minion and breaking the entire board for 7 mana. All of these things are unlikely but you're seeing multiple dice rolls every game which means you're going to see them, and when you do see them, you're either going to be having fun because you're playing mario party, or you're going to feel like you've completely wasted the last 10-15 minutes trying to play a competitive game.

It's not fun for me anymore. There's no risk-reward anymore, it's just occasionally-super-rewarding now, and even when I'm on the receiving end of it I just feel dirty, because it wasn't the deck I made or the way I played that won me the game. This, combined with the unfortunate reality that about 30-40% of the people actually trying to win points on the ladders are spamming Mech Mage and Face Hunter, which only have counters that are absolutely horrible against everything else, makes this game feel completely unrewarding to me, and I'm just bummed out as hell by the whole thing. I've got more than 2000 wins logged on my account, somewhere relatively close to that many losses I'm sure, and I've just seen so much evidence over the few weeks that luck has been winning or losing me at least half of my games that I'm just not into it anymore. Topdecking the thing you need to win feels kind of crappy, but winning via random magical luck embedded in cards you were going to play anyway, with far less risk than reward, is just a bummer.

The site will be lessened by your loss. Good luck man. I'll follow your work wherever you end up.

Jade Empire was great until you reached the Good or Bad ending. I have a bias against games that aggressively trivialize my journey up to the end of the game with hand waving, and it was tremendously disappointing for my relatively neutral character to get stuffed into one of only two boxes.

Origins is longer, larger, with some actual grey situations that inspire contemplation and the occasionally difficult decision. It also has a lengthy ending that documents what happens to the world and your companions. It's just... more, of everything, and better at most of what it tries to do.

The real scary thing here is that it's so hard to actually locate the people doing this stuff (with regards to the doxxing and whatnot). There are only a handful of people who are actually doing real damage and sending real threats, and tracking those people down requires federal authorities to reroute resources and manpower into something they might not even consider worth investing their efforts into. Somebody sending out death or rape threats and posting personal information publicly should be at more risk than they actually are right now, and the few people that are doing it can just kind of keep on doing it until they get bored of it. We can talk about battling back against the fear-mongering as a 'community' or whatever, but at the end of the day, a 'cultural atmosphere' of general positivity still wont stop a handful of crazies from doing way more harm than the rest of us can do good.

The DLC felt completely unnecessary. It didn't add anything to the story, it didn't develop Elizabeth, and it didn't give me more of Columbia. I got to play a less capable version of Booker that was losing her mind and constantly rambling nonsense at herself over a radio. I got to sit through a Saw-like torture sequence that served no purpose beyond being one of the most gratuitous plot devices I've experienced in a video game. I was forced through one of the silliest retcons of a character I've seen since George Lucas telling everybody Guido shot first. I got a game ending that let me experience a woman getting beaten to death with a wrench so that the first Bioshock could be just a little more convoluted than it already was. Staple onto all of that how we've already established via the original Bioshock Infinite ending that this is only one possible timeline of an infinite number of dimensions and the "progression" of Elizabeth's character into a powerless tool becomes all the more meaningless.

We already had our fanservice DLC for rapture, why couldn't we got one for Columbia? Saddens me we'll never get to see that piece of content.

@joshwent: There's also the train of thought that the people we disagree with most are the ones we should be paying the most attention to, lest we become trapped in our own most personal and compartmentalized world-views. Attacking them with loaded language is the way we place them on a pedestal and glamorize them through controversy.