BOYCOTT MICROSOFT GAMES (incl. games by blizzard, bethesda, mojang, and obsidian)
lok ming 樂明, 25, it/its, tme. aka @eastgaysian. this is my gamer's den for primarily dragon age and rogue trader, which is to say i post all kinds of bullshit and never maintag anything
doodle tag + 'polished' art + writing. i think lyrium causes impotence and thedosian women are subject to the andraste-witch dichotomy.
don't make me tap the sign (read the wretched of middle earth by charles w. mills)
carrd oc directory here (eternal wip); tag links below ⬇️
Hi random question but I really like your crpg posts and its made me interested in playing some myself. do you happen to have any suggestions for good, like, entry level crpgs? im interested in rogue trader based on ur awesome remoboth posts but i dont know how beginner friendly rt is LOL
so my honest answer is that crpgs as a whole tend to look intimidating on the first approach, and every time i've recommended one to someone without experience in the genre i end up dumping a lot of information and caveats on them 😭 but i'm delighted that you're interested so here's a bunch of paragraphs.
general advice: save often! become best friends with the quicksave button and hit it after doing anything. don't be afraid to look up a walkthrough, bc ime especially with owlcat sometimes there is just some real mechanical bullshit going on (and sometimes you might unknowingly set yourself up to get fucked over way further down a questline). you're always going to want one person in your party who specializes in the Unlocking Things And Disarming Traps skill. and it is always ok to cheat your way past a mechanic that is interfering with your ability to have fun
if you're already interested from my posts, rogue trader isn't the worst choice to start with, imo - owlcat has definitely made big mechanical improvements between each of their games, so rt benefits from their experience on km and wotr. the tutorializing is much better than the pf games. the cargo system streamlines inventory management, the system is not as sprawling as their pathfinder adaptations, and the game is entirely designed for turn-based so combat is overall, imo, more thoughtfully designed and plainly less difficult than km or wotr. and all the dlcs are actually worthwhile.
my biggest caveat is that rt's solution to the 'early game is a slog because being under level 5 sucks ass' problem is that you level up frequently, which can easily get overwhelming. there is no built-in auto level up feature, but there is an auto level up mod using community-provided builds, if you're willing to figure out a little setup to save yourself the hassle later.
pillars of eternity is another one that gets described as a good introduction to modern crpgs, which i'm also a big enjoyer of. it was initially designed for rtwp but received a turn-based patch recently, so you can try out both modes to see what you prefer.
biggest caveat here is that obsidian is under microsoft, which is a boycott target, so i'd recommend pirating it if you want to play. if you need advice for that i can also offer that off anon lol. secondary caveat is that i've seen a lot of people bounce off the initial lore dump of an intro. if it's too much to process, it is okay to let some of it just wash over you and let your quest log fill you in on the important bits.
and my final recommendation is that everyone ever should play disco elysium. which maybe isn't necessarily the best introduction to the genre as a whole because it's very unique. but it's a good game that is, i think, easy to get into as long as you're down to read a lot. you don't have to worry about combat in it. and disco-likes are kind of an emerging subgenre of crpgs now lol.
(if your computer can run it stably, bg3 is arguably the most 'approachable' and certainly the most popular modern crpg, so it's easy to find a lot of guides and information on, but that first point is a big if. the mechanics that i think are genuinely well-designed are counterbalanced by my seething hatred for swen vincke and larian's shitty racist writing. so i can't Recommend it.)
was great-uncle havard trevelyan actually a self-hating egg the whole time? former bioware writer who prefers to remain anonymous states 'i don't know who that is,' 'how did you get into my house'
If anything, those orange fragments of something incomprehensible in the upper corner where Yrliet is looking should be her collapsing craftworlds. I can't this.
I hate the design of Eldar things, especially Eldar craftworlds. Their structures look like randomly broken pieces of plastic, their ships look like a pile of rotting fish scraps covered in insect eggs.
The plot was planned to be poster-style, but Yrliet wants to be chibi. I don't know why.
thaismene romance: I don't know if this one is possible. she is 100% too scared to openly reject the rt but does know how to provide them with one million propriety hoops to jump through to keep them at a distance. i'm not sure she'd be willing to get so personally involved with someone who has that much power over her no matter how nicies they may seem. maybe even especially if they seem nicies. might actually actively try to talk kibellah into killing her at some point if she likes you too much
remoboth romance: he is always going to be amoral at best. his ending options are dogmatic, heretical, and hopelessly self-destructive. he will refuse to take you seriously if you tell him you're in love with him. if you don't validate his religious delusions he's just going to be more insistent about them. he's a yandere
ok wait. first of all obsessed with everyones ocs. second of all May I Add... can u all tell me about the saw traps you guys are designing as romance routes for your ocs. the madness people have to accept and play through to romance them. the aspect of this romance that u think makes fans fully justified in sending death threats
caden trevelyan romanceable companion controversy because after a certain point you can only continue the romance by effectively ordering him as inquisitor/religiously manipulating him as the herald of andraste
Unfuckable. or actually true version that nobody would ever allow to get put into a video game is you can only get a fade-to-black if you pull the same coercive implications move. and then he's fully clothed while the inquisitor isn't and dialogue immediately establishes that he wouldn't allow any attempts to touch him. if you try to force the issue he freaks out and leaves, and it's kind of a breakup-fakeout where if you apologize he's like I think it's best if our relationship returns to how it was before, but if you keep pushing you finally get the trans reveal. and then can uncomfortable power dynamics with coercive implications fuck him if you want, which is fine and ethical because he likes it. and everybody would fight about all of this forever.
the point where you have to order him to accept your advances comes way earlier if you're trying to flirt with him as a man. nobody can agree on whether this is homophobic and playing into predatory gay stereotyping or a thought-provoking depiction of his internalized homophobia
the silver dragon xelliren was telling me adventurers keep succumbing to madness instead of conquering the tenebrous depths and defeating the spawn of rovagug so i asked how many adventurers he has and he said he just goes out and finds a new adventurer to give his quest afterwards so i said it sounds like he's just feeding adventurers to the madness of the dungeons and then the dude who sells stuff he loots off of the adventurer's corpses started calling himself the really especially most honest guy
caden trevelyan romanceable companion controversy because after a certain point you can only continue the romance by effectively ordering him as inquisitor/religiously manipulating him as the herald of andraste
Unfuckable. or actually true version that nobody would ever allow to get put into a video game is you can only get a fade-to-black if you pull the same coercive implications move. and then he's fully clothed while the inquisitor isn't and dialogue immediately establishes that he wouldn't allow any attempts to touch him. if you try to force the issue he freaks out and leaves, and it's kind of a breakup-fakeout where if you apologize he's like I think it's best if our relationship returns to how it was before, but if you keep pushing you finally get the trans reveal. and then can uncomfortable power dynamics with coercive implications fuck him if you want, which is fine and ethical because he likes it. and everybody would fight about all of this forever.
the point where you have to order him to accept your advances comes way earlier if you're trying to flirt with him as a man. nobody can agree on whether this is homophobic and playing into predatory gay stereotyping or a thought-provoking depiction of his internalized homophobia
i think people are starting to confuse class analysis with bioessentialism. like... no not all men do this, but Men as a constructed social class do do this. that's still okay to say. that is regular material analysis of the world around us.
this is true, but it is not bioessentialist. both cis & trans men WILL see a mouse & eat it. this is because it is in their best interest to eat mice. they benefit from eating mice. this is essential to their class position, not their biological makeup.
my vision is that she'd actively hit on the inquisitor immediately after establishing that she's married to sebastian. the whole time her dynamic with varric is Weirdly Romantic in a way that makes everyone around them uncomfortable and if you try to ask either of them about it they have no idea what you're talking about. she brings wine to your room (uninvited) and drinks it all herself while telling idealized stories about her adventures as the champion and tenure as viscount and gets really condescending about knowing the pressures of power and responsibility. if you try to criticize her she throws wine in your face and leaves. if you try to engage in any physical intimacy she laughs at you and is like noooo don't get offended i'm just drunk (barely able to talk while giggling) and then events proceed per the tweet
emmrich: sorry it took us so long to save you from REGRET PRISON, rook. so what did you do in REGRET PRISON
dak-wai: well, after having to come to terms with my guilt over bellara being taken by elgar'nan i started to feel like i was losing my sanity so i started to break my fingers and i would just break my fingers and set them again. i started breaking my bones. i broke every bone in my hands. i broke my arms, separately, and then i started to break my own ribs. i broke my femurs, it took a while. and then i healed and broke them again. by the time i realized varric was actually dead the whole time my bones were all scar tissue. they had all grown so solidly back together that i was unable to move. after spite possessed me i had enough power to spontaneously break every bone in my body, and then i could move again. as an abomination i could heal almost instantly. that is all i do now. every time i move my body, my bones shatter and heal back into my next shape. if i take a single step every bone in my legs splinters and then reforms. i don't know what pain is because my body no longer truly belongs to me
taash: ok but it looks like you're just walking normal
