Ermz

Is Where Winds Meet not allowed as part of the comparison? Because to me, it's by far the best game of the 3. The depth of the combat is obscene. If you don't like the story, you can literally wander off for 300 hours and just explore. Like damn.

'No punishment for experimenting'. That might actually be a first for a soulslike. The genre has HORRIBLE resource economy for upgrading weapons, where you get railroaded into something that may not even scale well into the endgame. Keen for Lords of the Fallen 2.

Alex brings some of my favourite daily reality checks.

Helldivers 2 is one of the tragedies of modern gaming. I thought it would be my 'forever' game. I built an entire YouTube channel around it - millions of views - the works. Bailed after they started pulling their balancing BS and it became insufferable. Entirely self-inflicted

Joseph is the only one of Arnold's offspring that genuinely seems proud of that fact. Imagine being gifted those genetics and not putting them to work.

Stop saying 'yes' to slop hard mode. If the developer didn't bother to create different move sets, you're not obligated to waste your life on bullet sponges.

Part of the problem is that I went from Where Winds Meet to Phantom Blade Zero. It was sort of like going from DCS to Ace Combat. The less I used my brain in PBZ, and the more I spammed, the better the encounters went. It's like permanent Eddy in Tekken.

This is why Elden Ring is still the GOAT.

They don't want Cavill in the role specifically because he'd be too good of a 'classic' Bond. They want to undermine the character, like they have every masculine property over the last 10 years. The movie will be a humiliation ritual. They know Henry won't take it.

People in the west are so normalized to obese turds they forgot what women actually used to look like. If you travel abroad, you quickly learn the only 'unrealistic' models are the abominations western developers have been churning out.

I'm going to explain how to grow a long-form YouTube channel for everyone. I've done it 3 times from scratch, in unrelated niches. My channels cumulatively ended up with many dozens of millions of views between them. Here goes: The approach is always the same. Create the channel via an established, trusted Google account with lots of history. Ensure the email you use has existed for a long time too. The algorithm's first goal is to safeguard the platform from scammers, and a distant second is to serve impressions and help grow your channel. You need to signal authenticity first, quality second. Identify your niche, its glass ceiling, and make sure you're okay operating within its bounds. If you dream of 100M views per video, you're not going to start a channel about glassblowing. Pick a trending topic with asymmetric supply to demand in your niche. Brainstorm ideas and approaches to covering this topic that other creators aren't already doing. The demand-side interest will create an algorithmic wave you can ride to artificially boost your early content. Become INCREDIBLY good at pitching your video. Study everything you can about effective thumbnail and title packaging. This is your lifeline before your channel establishes natural audience credibility, and nobody has any reason to click on your video over established creators. I would advise leaning heavily on curiosity gap and audience-focused pitches. 'The One Thing Nobody Told You About Life'. 'They Never Believed He Could Do This.' 'This One Moment Ruined His Entire Life.' Hyperbolic. Vague. Establish a premise where they have to click to see the payoff, then build the entire video structure around the payoff. The thumbnail should supply additional context. Do NOT reveal the payoff in the thumbnail. Fit the content to the viewer. If you're covering gaming, as the quoted creator is, understand the demographic and its general capacity. Gaming audiences are generally unaccomplished adults and/or children. Their virtual accolades are stand-ins for the things they never achieved in the real world, or serve an escapist function from lives they prefer to disengage with. Ergo, they are very easily emotionally disregulated. Your entire video should be that regulation mechanism, because they clicked it to hear their own opinions and feelings come out of your mouth. They want to hear another person say things they already believe in a slightly novel way. Understand their average capacity and comprehension levels. Don't babble off a post-graduate level thesis to people whose comprehension sits at 5th grade level. Get a feel for your audience's general attention span based on your early AVD figures. Start inserting hooks and circuit breakers when they naturally zone out. Once a particular motif breaks out, identify EXACTLY what made it successful, then SATURATE your channel like mad with that same motif. This is the algorithm offering you a hyper-growth phase. If you play its game, it will reward you. Did you find that you standing in front of a white board in a bikini while pointing at text that's *just' too small to make out suddenly doubled your CTR? Do that for every future video with a small twist. That's now your visual brand. At this point you need to begin considering the implications of audience capture. But that's a topic for another time, as this post has already become outrageously large. This serves as a solid primer to get you up and running in almost any niche. Remember, your job is not to create content you love. It's to help serve YouTube's advertisers face time with your audience. The longer you keep them on the platform, the more ads they see - whether on your channel or elsewhere. Once you understand that this is how the algorithm views your role as a creator, everything else will fall into place. Good luck.

The comments are honestly worth reading just for how people responded to #3.

This brought the Crimson Desert haters out of the woodwork. A single player MMO that gets reviewed as an action game. You can be a kung fu master, fly a dragon, raise animals, run businesses, dispatch workers, go seafaring SECONDS apart. Its lack of identity IS its identity.

Incredibly well said. Bethesda have been a zombie company for over 20 years. They release vanilla sandboxes for modders to fix and turn into fully fledged games. They are the literal definition of developer slop.

As someone who barely escaped that shit alive, I can assure you: We didn't need the 'Western powers' to dismantle Yugoslavia. We did it perfectly well ourselves.

If Path of Exile 2 wasn't free to play (ie. you pay $80 and get access to everything) it would be the greatest aRPG ever, hands down. But watching level 5s walking around like glowing demigods because microtransactions butchers the aesthetic progression entirely.

I wonder why Salon went bankrupt.

I remember how excited we were about the future when we were kids. I thought we would have flying cars by 2026. Meanwhile, in actual 2026, the government of the most powerful nation on Earth has to state their official position is something learned in 3rd grade biology.

Hard to believe most people never even try a martial artist build in #CrimsonDesert. You can literally JUGGLE bosses!

Fallout 2. Still the greatest game of all time.