Oh boy it's that time of the whenever where I remind myself that everything looks like a Minecraft mod when it's first added. Minecraft is such a large game that basically everything has been done already and any "new idea" that pops up has been at least considered at some point.
Everything they showed off today looks pretty neat, tbh. No complaints. It's also the most unanimously positive response to an update I've seen an a while, which is interesting. These events are normally an infinite argument generator, but everything I've seen has been minor. I do have some more thoughts to share, which I'll put under the cut.
I'll start off with the Vibrant Visuals official shader. It looks GREAT. Genuinely the best the game has ever looked IMO. I don't actually like Minecraft with shaders all that much. It's hard to describe, I guess they try too hard? Why is the grass always shiny? I eventually found one I liked called MakeUp and got it to look pretty good:
The clouds are from a mod called Better Clouds. I don't actually like the vanilla clouds, and honestly like shader clouds less, but I'm quite fond of these.
Let's compare to Vibrant Visuals:
Yeah, no surprise I like this. It's very simple and doesn't do much, but what it does do it does well. I, uh, still don't like the clouds. Too flat, too square. You can get the look without needing to make them massive slabs.
I'd like to touch on two more things about VV before moving on. First, the water:
This looks nice! Most shaders just try and make the water realistic more than anything, which fails to account for the fact that in Minecraft you can just. Have water somewhere. In a vertical column. Which is near impossible to see with any kind of realistic shader. You have to have the water texture visible on it or else you are just walking near a cliff and are suddenly drowning with no warning. The underwater effects are interesting, I'm curious to see how this affects the visibility of blocks or if it does at all.
I also want to look at the shadows:
Very neat effect with these, no comments. Would be curious if we can turn these off for sharp shadows or how they interact with higher-res resource packs. I also wonder if we'll get official custom shader support. Would be neat.
That's only half of the announcements, so it's ghast time!
this is my son Crump he has every disease
I like the dried ghast. He looks silly. It's kinda odd that it's an inventory block; i feel like a bucket would be appropriate. Like powdered snow.
Dunking a dried ghast in water does a thing:
Ghastlings, the next phase of the Ghast, are so cute. I have no words. Can't wait for people to build balloon stores with a bunch of these guys on leads.
If you give one snowballs, it will grow up into a happy ghast:
Content beast. Is friend. You just know that thing has more helium in it than brain cells.
I do wonder how we get more of them. Can we breed them? With what? Will it spawn a new dried ghast or a ghastling? I guess we'll find out.
I've seen a lot of people complain about the unusually high-res texture. At first I thought the normal ghast was like this as well, until I actually checked:
Yeah, the new one has a few more pixels than the existing one. At least 2-3x more pixels on edge. I think the artists were trying to make it more consistent with block textures, but ghasts are comically large compared to anything else in the game. For reference, I went and found the VanillaTweaks pixel consistent ghast that actually does achieve this:
This makes me uncomfortable whenever I look at it. Very strange looking.
(To clarify: I don't hate it, but I do prefer the normal one.)
Onto the star feature, you can make a harness for the happy ghast and ride it:
This is a great feature! Finally, air travel that doesn't require going to the end or silly redstone engineering. There's four seats, one on each side. Super useful for building as well since you can just stand on it midair:
Super handy for obvious reasons. Basically just survival accessible creative flight. I am going to stop posting images now.
I hope we can add storage for these somehow. Imagine using one as a sort of mobile supply depot for construction or for hauling stuff long distances. I think I would have added creative flight-style mechanics by making it a beacon option, but this works too. Definitely going to try and get one.
I also hope we get something like the old ExtraUtilities angel block or Quark cloud in a bottle that lets us place blocks midair. It's a convenience thing, but it would be a very good one to have.
I hope Mojang takes this as an opportunity to update/tweak some of the other mount options the game has. I could make this its own post tbh, but horses/donkeys/llamas are too hard to breed good versions of, horses need an option for saddlebags and I wish I could give them frost walker, there are no good pack animals despite llamas and camels both existing, I could go on. I would also like a mount summon option of some sort, maybe with a goat horn? Could be interesting.
Splatoon 3 came out shortly after I started my first year of college, and now after two years, it's coming to an end shortly after I start my third. We knew about this before the game even launched, but it still doesn't feel real.
When I played the World Premiere, I knew instantly that I had to get the game. My only Splatoon experience prior was playing 2's singleplayer campaigns and a little multiplayer at a friend's house and a single round of 1 at a different friend's house. Despite my relative lack of experience, I picked it up quickly and it was genuinely some of the most fun I had ever had.
Due to transportation related bottlenecks, I wasn't able to get the game until the day after launch, but once I got it I proceeded to play it every day afterwords for over a year. I kid you not, I didn't miss a single daily catalog bonus or salmon run superbonus for over a year until mid-November '23, and I seldom missed a daily Shel-drone reward (that thing in Alterna where you give it 999 power eggs and you get a thing the next day). The thing that killed this streak was buying Deep Rock Galactic on a whim and playing so much of it I missed a salmon run rotation. Probably for the best, honestly.
I don't think I realized how big of a part of my life the game was until now. The wi-fi at my college is kinda awful, so I did some research and bought a Ethernet adapter for my dock. 7 PM just kinda became Splatoon-o'clock since that's when the day rolls over during the summer here. If I didn't have time then, I would either stay up late or squeeze it in the next day.
I fully completed every catalog, several of which I had to grind about 30 levels for in the last week. I have accumulated nearly 700 hours in Splatoon 3 as of the time of writing, which isn't the absurdly high numbers typically associated with high playtime but it is far and away the highest of everything I play that keeps track. The only game I can think could be higher is Minecraft, which I have had for over a decade.
I hit every Splatfest, every Big Run, getting gold on a good chunk of the latter and winning exactly two of the former. (Team Frye FTW.) I've got somewhere past 200 snails saved up, since I never really use them ever.
(This is all on one console, for the record, which I got in late 2020 (IIRC) as a birthday gift for myself mainly to play BOTW again. This is also all on the Joy-cons that came with it; somehow remaining drift-free even after possibly a thousand hours of total use.)
The Grand Festival was the best send-off it could have possibly been. So much music, so much to see, some of the best Splatoon there has ever been. I took a ton of photos; I'll have to sort through them at some point. I also took photos of every splatfest in Inkopolis, my only regret there is that I didn't also take them in Splatsville.
o7 Splatoon 3. I don't know what changed, but I will never be the same as I was before.
current pet peeve: people (usually gaming youtube folks) using the term "dlc" (downloadable content) when they mean "update"
yes, updates are Content That Is Downloaded. updates, however, are a required part of the game. while in many cases, you are able to go back to a previous version that does not have that update content, the "main" version of the game is the most recent version with all of the updates.
dlc, on the other hand, is optional extra content, whether paid or free. it adds more stuff to the game but isn't required/part of the main experience. developers, players, and modders have to account for people who don't have certain dlc. it effectively creates two (or more) versions of the game to keep track of.
(for the record, this isn't a "dlc bad" post. i think if done properly dlcs can add a lot to an existing game. i just think it's important to recognize the difference. maybe this is why the term "add-on" exists lol)
do not have friends in fandom youll be fighting over the same man, neither of you will be able to take his ass in a fight, but i dont think thats the point right
