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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Both games do environmental storytelling, but with vastly different goals.

    Obsidian approach is very constantly supporting a consistent tone and overarching setting. It is more desolate and feels more desolate because that’s what a lot of these in-between little areas are supposed to be. But the details in each area that are there so tell a story about what the area is like and how it function, they give a history to what you are seeing but it often isn’t over the top and full of little cute mini-stories you can follow. It isn’t bad storytelling, it’s telling a story you’re not into.

    The Bethesda approach is often much more varied. Each settlement or location can have all these environmental stories, often will little miniature running plots. The variety extends to tone, and type of story. This does come at the expense of some coherence if you step back and start putting a critical eye to everything as a whole.

    They are trying to give players different experiences. FNV a player can travel through a bleak desert, maybe only with hostile encounters as the Jungle Jangle radio plays until they finally hit a settlement and it feels like an actual refuge from the sun and rad scorpions to the player. The desolation builds that. Fallout 3 and especially 4 don’t want the player getting bored, so there is something interesting and different every ten feet to check out.

    I suppose it says a lot about me that my Fallout 4 modlist turns the world into an extremely dangerous, ghoul filled place with dark nights, and rad storms. All of which makes travel on the overworld terrifying, and settlements feel extra secure in contrast.










  • I almost entirely posted on smaller niche communities and didn’t really pay attention to bigger ones. It was mostly relaxed. I remember once going onto r/entertainment and making a mild criticism of a show. I returned to find my comment like -70 and with essay length replies explaining how my opinion and lack of enjoyment were “objectively” wrong (Reddit comments did seem to love declaring certain opinions as objective). It was wild.



  • Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.


  • Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.




  • On was on this helicopter infil-extract mission (walking multiple km in and out for fun) and got back to base, and was immediately put on the gunturret of a convoy that was going to an outpost. I was oh by the way informed I going to spend the next few weeks (read: months) there so it was a frantic packing job before hopping in the turret. I think I was up in the ballpark of two solid days,[and in thinking about it] a hair over going into a day 3. I ended up throwing up from energy drink overdose.

    [Edit: in retrospect perhaps not an amazing amount of time, as I’m sure plenty of gaming sessions have gone long- but it did feel the longest. Certainly the most sustained exertion and concentration without sleep.]