skulblaka

I hate that I love that story, but HPMOR is actually genuinely really good.

The belters make a pretty solid example of what it sounds like OP is looking for. The entire setting doesn't match to a T but there's enough interaction with inhospitable environments to be worth looking into, I think.

Precisely

Edit: I have discovered that I can annoy my girlfriend by saying kombucha in the same intonation as Ryu says hadouken and it is very excellent

The DLC's aren't going to fix the problems with that game. But in true Bethesda fashion, mods might.

I'm sorry to say you definitely did but it wasn't through any real fault of your own. We got real bamboozled by Overwatch, it was incredibly disappointing.

Fromsoft generally teaches you things by killing you with it. That's a style decision that I personally enjoy (usually....) but it's not for everyone. Then once you master the thing, they hit you with another new thing and kill you with it, so on and so forth until the end of the game.

Doom (and don't take this as a complaint, I loved the game), is a game that wants you to beat it. It gives you tools and information up front and generally speaking, presents you a path of least resistance that you can take for optimal slaying. The Doomslayer isn't intended to die, he is an engine of destruction. Elden Ring and by extension earlier Souls games, don't do that. Those games want you to die and learn from it. The Tarnished, the Chosen Undead, all of them, canonically in lore die over and over and over in pursuit of their goals, and you as the player are expected to act that out. It's a fundamentally different approach to gameplay style and intent. Elden Ring provides you the tools to succeed, but they aren't laid out in front of you. You'll have to explore and experiment and die a few times to understand what you're working with.

Sekiro in particular was a little bit of a departure from this with its popup explanations for tutorials, and that was taken into Elden Ring to get even as much explanation as we got in that game. It's still cryptic, more so than Sekiro I think, but cryptic is Fromsoft's style, for better or worse, and this is the refinement of that.

I do, genuinely, recommend the game. It takes some getting used to and has a learning curve, but if you understand the language the game is speaking to you it becomes a little less frustrating. I've learned to love that language from as far back as Dark Souls 1, but if you learn to love Elden Ring first it will translate well backward in time if you'd like to try the earlier games.

Personally, I've never been polled. Not once. And neither has anyone else I've ever met in my life. I'm not saying they're made up wholesale, because frankly, I have no idea. But I am saying that, at the very least, they're not likely to be an accurate representation of the American citizenry as a whole. If nothing else, the percentage of "undecided" voters raises some eyebrows for me for the reasons I just stated. If you've lived in America the last 8-16 years and are somehow still a fence sitter, you've managed to ignore a veritable deluge of information being sprayed directly into your eyeballs with all the delicacy and care of a fire hose.

I understand the average person is probably pretty dumb, but I have faith in humanity that a significant percentage of us aren't that dumb. Being on the bell curve means you're plenty intelligent enough to understand whether you want to vote for red or for blue and for what reasons. I refuse to believe that there are people in America legitimately weighing if they would rather vote for protected freedoms for American citizens or vote for banning books that speak about protected freedoms for American citizens. The two choices are so wildly opposed to each other in structure and in intent that there isn't a choice to be made, all people will land on one side or the other of this argument and there is no center ground to waffle around.

Twenty years ago, I understood undecided voters, because there still remained some small amount of nuance in the way American politics were carried out. We have now lost that. Our political landscape is now Blue Team vs Anti-Blue Team and the fence that the undecided voters were previously sitting on is now uninhabitable rubble, because there is now no component of our government that can come to a sensible cross-aisle decision. The independent, moderate voter is now a relic of the past in our supercharged, hyper-partisan pre-civil-war violence mockery of a civilized government.

If Trump is any indication, no politician will ever need to be 'competent and coherent' ever again, constituents would vote in a literal corpse if it had a sign propped on it saying "gays bad"

It is impossible to escape political propaganda in modern America. It's on your internet, it's on your radio, it's on your cable TV, it's on your streaming TV, it's on your super bowl ads, it's on your gas station pumps, it's on your news sources, it's on your social media. "Oh I don't pay attention to politics" is no longer a reasonable excuse because that is impossible, it's shoved down the throat of every citizen nonstop from every angle. The two candidates, in this case Trump and Biden, are such polar opposites of each other in every single possible regard that the only way someone can be undecided between the two is if their multiple personalities are arguing over it.

It would be far less damaging to international relations, that's for fucking sure.

Your local businesses have more voting power than you do, by a long shot.