Almost everyone agreed that making the Psion a fullcaster made it a lot more boring than it should be, by playing almost exactly like any other fullcaster in the game. It’s a shame that they decided to stick with this decision.

I remember when people were so excited for the ABK acquisition. They really believed that MS was going to offer all the catalogue for cheap on their subscription service day one, and that Xbox would end up winning the console war.

a game with an Italian plumber stomping on turtles.

Perchance.

They’ll almost certainly sell these bonus levels as a DLC when they actually release. Don’t get caught up in FOMO.

The point I was trying to make is, that with their abysmal sales, maybe these units were produced before the tariffs went into effect, which means that they were not losing money on their sales, but increased the price anyway.

With how much and how fast Xbox sales have been dropping, are they even producing new units to sell? Or are they using tariffs as an excuse to raise the prices and make as much bank as possible with what little customers they have left?

Without going into much detail, I know of an indie studio where the game director wanted a lot of personal oversight on many things, music included. From giving other games’ tunes as a moodboard to take inspiration from for specific tracks, to minutiae like removing an instrument, swapping an instrument for another one, slowing or increasing the beat…

I don’t think it’s a matter of indie vs AAA studios as a lot of people here are making it out to be. It’s a matter of how big of a personality the game director is, and how much oversight they want over their game.

I very much doubt that when (if) the game releases, it will be worth the wait and live up to the hype.

I feel like everybody will answer “Silksong” for the foreseeable future lol

As for me, I’ve been in a mood for zombie games for the past few months. There are a LOT of them, but good ones? Not very much. I finished RE2make (which I kind of liked, with reserve) and RE3make (which I despised) at the start of the year, then moved to RE8, but I found it disappointingly boring, so I switched to Dying Light, which I’ve played for the past two months.

It’s technically a replay because I played it already a few years back, but I didn’t bother with the DLCs because I was kind of over with it by the end of the story, so I hope to 100% it this time. I really like it actually! I just find open world games exhausting in the long run as they drag on a bit too much.

You’re right! It also infringes on Nintendo’s exclusive patent to (a) show things on a screen, (b) move said things with a controller, and © display written text via alphanumeric strings.

What did your boss do to deserve this?

I mean, what specifically?

It’s a shame whales are all spending their time playing gacha games, they’d be phenomenal basket players.

3d tokens on a 2d map, but the DM can create 3d walls on the fly.

I found Tabula Sono to be the most immediate and easy to use. The tutorials for players and masters are well done, it runs on your browser with no installation needed, and it’s lightweight and easy to use. You can add maps and miniatures as needed, too, which is great for customisability.

Downside is that it’s literally only a digital table with maps and miniatures. You’ll have to write your features and roll your dice elsewhere.

My brother ran that one in Warhammer Roleplay. Although customized for our party, it was still heavily lifted from Rough Night at the Three Feathers. It’s a published adventure and it’s very well written, so I recommend giving it a read! I think he mixed it with Night of Blood and then added in his own ideas.

The thing to keep in mind is that, while the players are allowed (and encouraged!) to treat it as a mini sandbox, there is an underlying narrative flow as well, ie. things keep happening every now and then, even if the party isn’t involved. But if the players don’t want to involve themselves, it’s a good thing to make things happen to or near them.
Experienced players will probably have fun doing stuff and experimenting, while timid ones will require a bit more hand holding from the DM to make events happen around them.

The other user wrote a very good list of cliché plot hooks, so I’ll write a few that are a bit less cliché but still pretty straightforward.

DEFEND THE VILLAGE: very easy and straightforward quests for people new to the game and people who want to chill for a bit and slay a few goblins.

• For the past few weeks, cattle have been disappearing every night, and a small town has been looking for courageous adventurers to find the cause. The clues lead to a nearby abandoned castle where a tribe of hungry kobolds has been squatting for the past few months. The castle, however, is the old fortress of a fallen order of paladins full of traps that have been laying dormant for decades, and that the kobolds have managed to get back up and running.
• In the middle of a snowstorm, the party crashes into a village that’s recently been attacked by quite the ferocious pack of wolves. The local hunter went missing looking for their nest, and the locals whisper of a fairy tale about the “Winter witch”. The party searches for clues and either finds out that the wolves’ alpha is a shapeshifter druid who may or may not be the hunter who disappeared a few days earlier (and the winter witch was just a red herring), or that the wolves are being charmed by a real and newly reborn witch that wants the village destroyed because of what they did to her a few centuries earlier.

FOR QUEST AND GLORY: for more adventurous parties who look forward to sailing into the unknown.

• In the middle of the forest, the party finds a few corpses of bandits and a lone, wounded knight. With her last breath, the knight tells the party that a conspiracy against the king is about to unfold, the details of which are in a sealed letter she has in her pocket. She pleas them to carry on her mission, and dies. Unfortunately, more bandits are on their tracks and won’t stop at nothing to destroy the content of the parchment.
• A drunk sailor, the last living member of his crew, talks of a cursed treasure. He begs the party to embark on a journey towards the nearby atoll and return the cursed amulet to its rightful place. The rightful place turns out to be the ancient necropolis of a Yuan-ti tribe who went extinct a few millennia prior to the events of the campaign, whose ghosts may be around still, or maybe the curse was made up, and there is another crew member who has assassinated all of his former companions to take all the treasure for themselves.

SHENANIGANS AND BOOZE: for chaotic parties and experienced DMs who can manage improvising on the spot.

• A downpour forces the party to seek shelter in an old monastery in the middle of nowhere. Shenanigans ensue in the middle of the night, as other people have the same idea. A few examples: a rich girl and her escort travelling north who turns out to be a pair of lovers running away from her rich father; a cutthroat mercenary looking for the aforementioned noblewoman; a wounded woman who turns out to be the local Robin Hood; a merchant who has lost his entire shipment to a pack of wolves and has unknowingly contracted lycanthropy; the friendly priest of the monastery who is actually an evil cultist intending to sacrifice everyone to his pagan gods.
• The Gods have deemed the mortals unworthy, and have thus decided that punishment is due. From dusk 'till dawn, the demons will be allowed to roam the land, exercising their powers as they deem fit, and they are intent on making the most out of the allotted time. One of them may be a lone hunter looking to infiltrate the town and kill everyone, or it may be a demonic general laying siege to the city with an army of ungodly monstrosities. The evil team may have multiple objectives which the party need to protect, such as: the church, protecting the icon of the only god who has refused to agree with the apocalypse; a family with a pregnant woman, who will give birth at the end of the day and whose smell has the demons riled up; an old crone, whose pagan magic is protecting the village; a wounded demon huntress currently resting in the village, who a few decades prior repelled the same demon that’s now attacking the village; a former cultist who has repented and has been hiding in the village for the past few years, who the demons want to make an example of.

One-shots work well with pretty much any cliché storyline that the players can swiftly get the grasp of and jump into without too much time spent on exposition or build-up.

“There is [Evil character] doing [evil stuff] in [place], please go and defeat them.”

The evil character could be a tyrant overtaxing the population, a ghost tormenting a small rural town, a lich in the nearby dungeon doing shady stuff, a dragon who kidnapped a princess, etc… Pretty much anything that the players may have familiarity with and without arguing too much about the best course of action.

Depending on the premise, you could lead the players straight to the dungeon, or let them investigate a bit and come up with a plan to infiltrate the evil character’s lair. Whatever you choose, keep it short and easy to do: one-shots have very little time to dwell on specific details or plot beats, and if your players waste too much time on the planning/investigation phase, there won’t be time left to actually fight the bad guy.

Even if it’s a one-shot that won’t ever have a follow-up, including loot for the players to find is always an exciting addition. Players, like crows, love shiny thingies :)

Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.

Slip of the tongue. I likewise reject the idea of eastern writers being “usually” better at writing emotions and/or moral ambiguity, or doing it more frequently. There are countless good and bad stories on both sides.

I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.

Most of the examples I mentioned were mainstream movies and videogames that sold millions of tickets/copies. Or at least as much mainstream as Kamen Rider and Yakuza. There are tons of examples of well-written human drama.

I also fail to understand why action = video games. There are tons of successful games where action is not the main focus, or sometimes it’s not even present at all. I enjoyed the cozy vibes of Life is Strange, for example.

Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.

As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta.

Brushing off the first Rambo movie because of subpar sequels, and then using Dragonball (a series that had nowhere to go after Frieza and yet still gets milked with subpar sequels to this day) as a talking point is just nonsensical.

Mentioning Vegeta as a good example of moral ambiguity is hilarious because he is probably one of the worst written characters of all time, who single-handedly ruins the characterization of the entirety of the main cast.
The dude committed genocide or attempted one at least once per narrative arc and everybody was okay with spending their time with him for literally no reason. If I had two bullets and was standing in a room with Vegeta and Hitler, the safest option for Earth as a whole would be to shoot Vegeta twice. There is “respecting” another person, and there is “brushing off crimes against humanity because that character is cool”.

By the way, I don’t want to imply that eastern (Japanese? I don’t think you mentioned other media outside of Japan) writers are worse than western ones. I loved the first Yakuza game (the second one was very dumb and killed my interest in the series; maybe I’m missing out). Metal Gear Solid and Xenogears are, to this day, two of my favourite games ever. I went to the cinema twice in a row to watch Godzilla Minus One. I could also mention Oldboy for something outside of Japan, or Red Cliff, and those are both very much mainstream as well, and action too.

Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.

As opposed to eastern culture/media, where the average shonen protagonist will punch the villain enough to convince them to join the good team? Like, you are oversimplifying so much, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m also a bit confused by your point because you lament western characters only beating evil guys to a pulp, then contrast them to an eastern character doing the same.

If your point is that characters in western media don’t display emotions, there are tons of western movies that do exactly that. You won’t find them in generic action movies, but that’s true for pretty much any media around the globe, including eastern ones.

Rambo (the first one, the only good one) has Stallone crying his heart out at the end of the movie. Stand by me has the characters face their insecurities and inner demons throughout the entire movie. Lord of the Rings, Interstellar, Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Silence (western movie based on Japanese book, maybe this is cheating?). Automata’s entire point is to challenge toxic masculinity.

I could also mention animated films such as How to train your dragon, Tarzan, Puss in Boots Last Wish, Wall-E, Treasure Planet, Finding Nemo, Wild Robot or Emperor’s new Groove, which all have either human male individuals, or male-coded characters that happen to be animals/robots/aliens (IF your point was that male characters are often too macho and emotionless; if you were complaining about characters of any gender doing it, then the list expands).

If your point is that there’s no moral ambiguity in western media, half the above examples still stand. Rambo beat countless (evil) cops, but he’s not seen as a hero for doing so, and he’s a broken man by the end of the movie. Lord of the Rings is choke full of morally ambiguous or conflicted characters, although the most prominent and a fan favourite is Boromir of Gondor. Interstellar has the main character abandon his family to save humanity, and the movie doesn’t explicitly condemn nor praise him for his actions. Saving Private Ryan has the characters conflicted on what to do with a captured german soldier within enemy territory, and the consequences of their choice. There’s the entirety of the Goodfather series following an explicitly evil, but charismatic set of characters.

As for videogames, moral ambiguity was the entire point of TLOU2, although many people disliked that one for various reasons. Styx 1 (haven’t played the second one yet) has you play a character which does good for the wrong reasons, and bad for the good ones. Life is Strange 1 and 2 (haven’t played the rest of the series yet) has lots of morally ambiguous characters, often including the main cast. A Plague Tale, especially the second one, weights on how violence can ruin a person, even if they are forced to commit it for their loved ones.

I’m just mentioning titles off the top of my head, and I’m probably forgetting a lot which could further my point. Point is, I wholeheartedly refuse this idea of eastern media being the only ones capable of displaying emotions or moral ambiguity.

Schroedinger’s pants. He may be wearing them or not, depending on your interpretation.