Funnily enough Hollow Knight. I saw the release of the Grimm Troupe DLC on GOG and was interested by the art style. I thought, hey a metroidvania, it’s been a while since I played one and 15 €, that’s nothing. The rest was one of the best gaming experiences I ever had, precisely because I didn’t expect anything.

Ah thanks for the info on BAR! Nice to hear that they are working on a third faction.

Yeah, but while that second monitor map looks cool, I never managed to effectively use it. I was always too occupied with the main screen.

You can slow down (or enhance) the game speed of SC and/or simply pause in single player and give orders without worrying about reaction time. But I totally understand that it’s not for everybody!

Building times are long, yes. But in this game, more than in any other, it is important to support construction with additional workers. Everything that produces something, be it workers building something or a factory producing a unit or a missile silo creating a rocket can be supported by construction units. So while an experimental unit can have something like 120 minutes as building time, that is for one single unit. So you built that with 30 workers and then it’s only 4 minutes. Provided your economy can sustain the needed resources. But that is what the late game is about: building a strong enough economy so that you can output silly amounts of the big units.

The Aeon are the ones you mean. The “donut” is their experimental spaceship with a laser attack like Independence Day.

And it takes a bit getting used to the difference in economy to other strategy games, but I wouldn’t say it’s hella complicated. If you want to play at a casual level, you can do that against an easier AI. That’s how I play it and it’s still fun! =D

Please elaborate!

Is that an option to activate in communities which don’t care for long time archival of posts or is that thing instance-wide?

For sure I played it. I didn’t recommend the real classics till now, because I wanted to give less well known games a chance for attention. But maybe it’s time to talk about Thief and Deus Ex to get more people talking.

Same here, seems like nobody learned nothing from the odyssey.

Because some people are pretty involved in some communities and have people they care about in there. And would like to know if somebody they knew died or they themselves might want to announce it to them after they died. Not everything needs to revolve around you.

ICO and Shadow of the Colossus don’t have a lot of dialogue, but what they have is in a fantasy language with subtitles for you to understand

It was a different time. As you said, it is not a true statement in general, but I can understand where it comes from in the 2000s video game history.

Yes, that is definitely a gimmick that isn’t for everybody. I also played it by feels instead of carefully strategizing.

Oh hell yes. There is still a lot to improve, but we shouldn’t forget what has already been gained!

Passports for everyone are a relatively new invention, but passports as sign of being the emissary of somebody important are much older. Paiza is one such example in the Mongols empire. Wikipedia has examples reaching into antiquity.

500+ years ago there very much was border control, at least in certain parts of the world, because every regional lord wants to control what goes into his kingdom and what leaves. I can only speak for Europe, but probably every feudal lord over the world did the same. They levied taxes on merchants transporting goods through their kingdom. That happened on border checkpoints where the big merchant routes where passing through. This is how a lot of regions got rich: by being between a source and a big buyer region and taxing the shit out of merchants.

That’s why smuggling was so attractive. Go through the official road and pay 10% of your profits or pay this nice man with the donkey 5% and he leads you through the woods on a path the lord’s soldiers don’t patrol…

Secondly, in feudal Europe 500 years ago, peasants were still often the property of their lords, they weren’t allowed to leave the country. Another reason why border control existed. So no, most normal people could not just leave and travel to another kingdom.

Oh, that sounds very interesting. I have to look into it.

And honestly even more impressive. Because board games rarely had in my experience a great LN harmony, story/theme was mostly atmosphere in my experience. But I have to admit, I’m also not a hard core board gamer.

I only block communities for now. And my instance blocks a lot of … debate heavy instances.

Regarding blocking of individuals: feel free to do that, if it helps you having a better time, that is perfectly fine.

But I started tagging strange people if I think that something they said is not correct. Then later I randomly see them somewhere else behaving normally. So my current plan is tag them first to see if I find this one person repulsive again and if so then block them. This way it is less carpet bombing and I accept that everybody can have a bad day where they lash out.

The best explanation in Dark Souls for me is the hollowing: players who gave up and left, just their hollow husks staying around without anything filling them, so they are reduced to nothing more than zombies.

Which at the same time is a good metaphor for depression as well. Lot of people commented that “Don’t go hollow” kept them from falling further down the depression spiral.

As somebody with depression: it is dark, yes, but in a hopeful kind of way? That even at the bottom there is a light we create for is and others and we can always improve.

It definitely has dark moments, but the game doesn’t wallow in it. Instead it takes the approach of: this is you at your lowest, now build yourself up.

Ah yes, I definitely saw it then but didn’t internalise it.

And honestly, I’m mostly still stumped that the developers decided to make a certain dialogue at the end completely optional. That takes guts. And I’m so glad I got it. It cemented the game as my best emotional game ever. Right next to Outer Wilds.

Oh yes. Play the game! And if you have VR, there is a mod to play it in VR, do that!! That’s probably the only way most of us will ever experience floating in space.