I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.

I mean if you want to keep running bleed against a boss immune to bleed go ahead, but I’ll probably switch to an occult infusion.

I think guild wars 1 you didn’t just pop on any clothing you found. One of the NPCs was even like “you think you can just pick up a jacket after you set the poor bastard on fire and stab him, and it’ll fit nice and snug? No. It won’t. Bring me materials and I’ll make armor that fits you”

Then gw2 was like "fuck it people like when items with cool colors pop out of monsters "

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via “well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not”

Flawlessly clearing Genichiro in Sekiro was deeply satisfying. Parry parry parry, dodge, mikiri counter. Don’t think I got hit once.

If there’s going to be fantasies about murder, can his whole posse go out?

Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.

Last game I finished was Veilguard. Pretty close to EoY. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, and the difficulty falls off a cliff as a mage when you get life steal, but it wasn’t bad. The romance with Neve was entirely too… unromantic, and PG-13 though. Very disappointing. No intimacy.

Then I started CrossCode and it’s been good. Feels like a mix of old snes games (Zelda, lufia2) and MMO, without the annoying parts like other players. The puzzles also aren’t very hand holdy, which is nice. I feel like a lot of games are too aggressive with their “HEY IT LOOKS LIKE YOU CAN SLIDE THAT BRICK. HEY I BET FIRE MELTS ICE.”

I like that they did turn based but I didn’t actually like it that much. There are too many trash fights. I think one of the developers suggested a mod to cut HP so they go faster.

I also don’t really like the “one action per turn” model (as in DND) and kind of would have preferred action points (as in divinity).

But overall I’m a big fan of Deadfire, and I’m bummed they’re not making a third one.

I think the most fun I had was with chanter. Just hang out and summon dudes that wreck shit. Slap on the heaviest armor you want and just scream at people until they’re dead.

I remember realizing all the names are science terms and being like “oh that’s clever”

Kind of like it more than the usual “throw darts at a fantasy word board” that produces like Dark Age, Dragon Priest, Eternal Soul, etc

If we’re waving magic wands around, change the tax laws to limit how much you can inherit.

Changing the step up basis thing is actually pretty low hanging fruit.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp

https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes

Where would you lay the blame?

And how is that hypothetical response “intellectually dishonest”?

I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.

On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don’t think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.

I WANT SHORTER GAMES

Can I have my cake and eat it too? I want games with a short critical path, but satisfying ways to spend more time with it if it’s fun.

So like interesting NG+ stuff, boss rush modes, different builds, whatever.

They can be killed in their homes, too.

I don’t want to be a goat farmer but I do find people that work hard to make management richer are insufferable.

“”" A man is walking into the office when he sees his boss pull into the parking lot in a brand new sports car. “Wow! Nice car! How’d you afford that?” he says.

The boss smiles at him and says, “Listen. If you work hard, hit all your numbers this quarter, put in some overtime, then I can buy another one next quarter.” “”"

I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there’d probably be less Return to Office.

People are sometimes like “oh but violence is bad!” but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.

I’m an outlier in that I buy music on Bandcamp. Renting music feels like a bad deal to me, but for some people it might work out.

I think I repeat listen to albums a lot more than I repeat watch stuff.

Still, I’d consider a service that was like “pay $10 for this movie and it’s yours, drm free, forever”. A quick search shows WandaVision on DVD is like $50, and you’d have to like rip and self host yourself to stream it.

I think the subscription model is often user hostile, but it’s very lucrative

People just want all their shit in one place for a reasonable fee.

One problem with this is that monopolies are bad.

I’m not sure what the ideal solution is. It’s not “12 different services each charging $12/month” though.

I don’t think regular capitalism can really solve this.

The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like “{Coworker} says this test case is important”. Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could’ve gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.