UltrViolet writes great posts but doesn’t have any comment section on his blog. Sometimes you just have to take that extra step.
I'm going to start a new feature in my blog, called "Dear @endgameviable". It will consist entirely of comments I want to leave on his blog, but can't.
— Tipa of the South Wind (@tipadaknife) October 7, 2021
Once upon a time, I used to do respond to other people’s posts on my blog, every day — almost every day. It was fun.
I started Greedfall a while back, but it didn’t click with me. It was “okay” but running back and forth to watch cut scenes is the main game activity. It wasn’t a good game for videos.
“Now What“
I’m actually surprised that a lot of New World players aren’t playing Greedfall. Granted, I haven’t played New World, but I did finish Greedfall, and got all the endings, and I really liked its take on the whole question of the ethics of colonization. I understand New World handles those same uncomfortable questions in a different way, with the natives welcoming the new explorers. Greedfall doesn’t go for the easy solution, here. I very much enjoyed the game. It reminded me of the good Dragon Age games.
With that kind of game, I could theoretically play it without recording it, but it just seems like a waste of time to play games now without leaving some kind of creative work or archival record behind to show for it. (And before you ask, blogging is too much work.)
Ibid
I feel the same way. I try to record most games I play, now, unless they are with other people, in which case I protect their privacy by not broadcasting it. I am slowly figuring out how to do Twitch. I tried a live stream on YouTube the other day, but I didn’t enjoy it much.
You should definitely try Valheim. I had a lot of fun playing with my static group. And some amount of fun playing solo, too 🙂
The Copied Factory, it turns out, is one of the easiest alliance raids I’ve seen in the game (admittedly I’m late to it, so everyone is now overleveled). Compared to The Labyrinth of the Ancients back in the day, it’s a breeze.
Shadowbringers 5.1
Sheesh. The Copied Factory left scars on me. Those first few days were rough, but I really wanted the outfit, so I ran it again and again. It did get easier over time. But when the second Nier: Automata raid went live — I quit the game. Even though I’ve come back to FFXIV, I still have never given it a shot. Same for the last Eden raid. I really do need to study up and do them.
The Labyrinth of the Ancients was fun.
Writing is hard, so UltrViolet implemented an entirely bespoke blogging system from scratch. Which is kinda awesome, actually. But I know exactly what he means — I never actually know what to write, I just figure I should write, and what comes is what comes, but I program computers during the day and I’ll be damned if I don’t love doing the same stuff when I get home. Weird.
It was UltrViolet’s struggles to get his blog running through Github and Markdown and scripts that scraped together his work and turned it into web pages that guilted me into finally making the old West Karana stuff available — first through a Python script that recreated the blog in Github, and then (with suggestions from Nimgimli to teach me how), actually combined the old blog with this one.
I’d have been content never to resurrect the old stuff. I’m kind of embarrassed about parts of it. But other parts, I enjoyed reliving.
Thanks for the free content, UltrViolet 🙂
If you’re serious about keeping this third-party comment section going, I’ll start reading Endgame Viable again. I haven’t looked at a single post there since the comment section disappeared. I point blank won’t read blogs that don’t allow comments because it raises my blood pressure to dangerous levels if I have something to say and can’t say it. I know UltrViolet said we could comment on Twitter but I don’t use Twitter so that doesn’t help. Also, that breaks the continuity for any future readers of the posts at the blog.
On the sensitive issue of how New World deals with the controversial setting and the issues of colonization and how the indigenous inhabitants feel about it… there are no indigenous inhabitants as far as I can tell. Indeed, a large part of the narrative revolves around trying to work out who they were and what happened to them.
There are plenty of earlier colonists. They’re the ones who welcome the wave of new arrivals that include the players. All of those people, although they got there a while back and built towns and so on, come from other nations just like the players – indeed the same nations in many cases, I think.
No-one seems to be saying much about any of this at the moment because all the attention has been on the queues, the mechanics and how successful the game is going to be but I’m finding the more I get into it, the more interesting the story is. Much of it is told in letters and journals, making the whole thing very fragmented and random, but that appeals to me. I can see a number of themes developing and finding out the truth of it all is one of my main motivations to keep playing at the moment.
I’d read a review that said that the native town NPCs were diverse and welcoming, assumed they were natives 🙂 I probably should play New World at some point, but I think I have missed the boat on that game now. Nothing I could write about it would be the least bit interesting, as so much has already been written.
You should definitely get on Twitter, though.
Well the “natives” are the NPCs, but they’re natives just in that they’ve been there a long time. They are not indigenous. There are no children on the island that I have seen, but since people tend to be immortal that is probably just as well.
For centuries, people washed ashore in ones or twos. But now, suddenly, tens of thousands of people are accidentally washing up from ten thousand separate shipwrecks.
A nautical disaster of epic proportions. The loss of a hundred thousand ships and their sailors should trigger a response from their home nations, you’d think…
And even though they have landed in heaven where they can live in peace forever, they use their good fortune to engage, Worm Ourobouros-like, in eternal war. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros)
They sanitized all association with colonization out of New World with industrial-strength bleach… I’m kind of amazed they didn’t change the name, too. It’s more like the television show Lost now.
I wanted to like Greedfall but the swoopy camera made me physically ill.
I tried to get into their previous game but couldn’t. I need to try it again.
Thanks for the comment. 🙂 Incidentally, I don’t mind people writing posts in response to my posts at all, I wish more people would do that… I actually think it’s better for the blogosphere in general because it spreads out the discussion more, instead of siloing it into private little community bubbles that not everyone sees. Anyway someday I’ll put some kind of comments back!