UBON'S PROFILE

I was actually counting down to the point at which someone would start throwing out slurs, and then defend that as a 'difference of opinion'.

some opinions are awful. some opinions are flat-out worse than other opinions, be it because they're poorly-informed, or irrelevant, or just violently hateful. criticizing these shitty opinions isn't censorship, and it isn't ~being afraid of other people's viewpoints~ either. assholes always fall back on this whole 'um sweatie pie you should treat all opinions equally :-) i came into this thread to shout and piss and you need to treat me as nicely as everyone else :-)' thing -- it's gotten old years and years ago.

in general, Sooz, I agree with you about the audience thing; while I feel like a lot of people who feel threatened by discussions of or by marginalized people in gaming choose to believe the hyperbole because it's easier, the terminology is often kind of steep... and for people who haven't been exposed to the ideas much either way, it can help to put things a bit more softly. I don't think I agree with you that someone who's basically only posted to shout at feminists over the past year has any kind of earnest rationale of his own, but that's mostly an academic point anyway.

author=slash
For what it's worth, when you start throwing around crap like "SJW" (and to a lesser extent, "gamers") as if it's a nasty insult,

I get that I should probably be nicer to gamers, but these aren't, like, equivalent. 'gamers' are a noted subculture that, while growing more diverse with time, still largely displays a tendency for blind consumerism and a resistance to change, and 'gamer culture' is absolutely a thing that bears examination and sometimes criticism. 'SJWs' are an imaginary group that antiprogressives invented to pretend that shouting at vulnerable people is okay because they're all part of some secret underground cabal trying to erase men's dicks or something. driving fake but comfortable equivalencies really doesn't do this topic any favours, you know?

you're not the only person to be a little offput how often I talk about 'gamers' or 'nerds in sweeping tones, and I've reined that in a good bit to talk about things in more specific terms, but often it's still the best way to call something what it is. hell, there are countless people (myself included!) who refuse to consider themselves 'gamers' because the group has produced these connotations over years of terrible behaviour.

tl;dr: saying 'gamers are weird about women and often like to ask for free things on phony intellectual platforms' is honestly just a thing that's true. 'SJWs want to destroy straight white men and their ~right to have sex~', meanwhile, is a tougher thing to prove!

(that's actually something a prominent curmudgeon said! I'm amazed.)

I'm not super fond of it, honestly? Dragon Quest III is still kind of my go-to RPG for unwinding with something simple and repetitive, but the more recent titles seem to have just about the same amount of inbuilt grinding, which... isn't really what I go for with recently-made RPGs! trying to localize the pun-heavy dialogue often comes off awkward to me, as well -- I don't know if they seem any more natural in the original script, but having every enemy or town name be some strained joke or rhyme wears on me a bit, you know?

that said? III is still super nice. I like it a lot.

the story has, at least, improved since 2.0, both in terms of what's happening and in keeping things moving without a long dinner-cooking tangent. the presentation of Azys Lla is also my favourite thing right now -- I've taken to hanging out there when there's nothing to do, just because the music and the wrongness of the landscape are so nice.

I'd say that for me, at least, the 'selling point' of the game is in the quality of the dungeons and bosses. the set pieces are all interesting even in straightforward dungeons, and the bosses are all very exciting. without spoiling too much, the final boss of Heavensward's main story quest has you fighting and dodging through a particularly long, particularly famous summoning sequence in its entirety -- and if you survive, the boss is so spent that it can only stagger around swinging blindly as you whittle off the last of its HP. very well done.

author=Feldschlacht IV
Team Fortress 2 was (and is) incredibly popular, cost money to buy, and then went F2P. It still generates income via the ability to buy item crates and cosmetics and I'm pretty sure it makes even more money than it ever has ever before at any point.

note that I said F2P wasn't the obly successful model, not that F2P was itself somehow inferior (though in FF14's case the steady flow of development capital really shows, I think.)

author=LouisCyphre
I'm open for some Final Fashion XIV any day of the week. Too bad no one plays on my server.

I'm over on Cactuar, personally! some cool people there. name's Ghil'ra Mauuk, in case anyone else is there.

I really like the term 'name-brand rpg' because it begs the question of what bulk-brand or no-name rpgs are like