u/Don_Andy

The system resets via Liquidation whenever experience batter production drops below a certain threshold. The exact reason for that is irrelevant. If Pwie would turn adult and then sit in a corner forever doing nothing then the system also wouldn't reset until something else requires it to.

Honestly, I don't really understand why Maurice just never targeted dante in those 3 months of clocking in but that's besides the point.

He did. Literally every time you did anything that would've messed with the loop. He just understandably didn't think you'd ever be able to actually beat him when he intervenes. That's basically like trying to delete a text file from your computer and having the text file instead say "no" and kick your ass. You'd probably be just as surprised.

He probably also wasn't aware until it was too late that Dante kept their memory between loops. That's presumably also why Blue Lady warned us about blabbing that to the sinners, because if he had noticed that before we were able to beat him he would presumably just literally have put Dante into a box and chucked it in a closet. As it was, he let the Sinners roam freely because they still participated in whatever process produces experience batter and since they were already struggling to meet quotas he was probably happy for anything that helped with production, no matter how they actually entered GMS.

That is literally what every single person, including Kromer, kept telling us on all three loops. None of the choices Dante made until actually defeating the Warden had any meaning whatsoever (with the exception of Pwie, who was themselves an unexpected anomaly) since they were choices that Maurice basically signed off on. And the moment they deviated from that, he personally intervened and rolled back the simulation.

IIRC, this is more of a coincidence that Carmen takes as confirmation for her own interpretation of the human soul taking the form of a tree. She is basically saying she must be onto something since N Corp independently arrived at a similar conclusion designing the Sisyphe system. This also indirectly implies that what Sisyphe is doing also has something to with the makeup of the human soul. If we stick with the idea of the human soul taking the shape of a tree you could say that Lobotomy Corp's purpose was to nourish the tree and let it thrive naturally like it would in a forest, while the purpose of Sisyphe was to cultivate the tree and harvest it's resources (in the form of experience batter) like it would in a plantation. Where Lobotomy Corp's purpose was to "fix" the soul in a way that Carmen considers necessary, Sisyphe "modifies" the soul to enable a maximum yield of experience batter, with little regard to how that might affect the "tree" in the long term.

What exactly makes you think that the personality of a sinner needs to at all match the ID they're getting?

Heck, even if that were an actual requirement, what better opportunity to break this convention than with Haute Couture identities who are versions of the sinners who have spent so much time in the GMS that they've all but forgotten who they used to be.

Pretty sure that's by design, too. Carmen hinted at something like that, the constant rise and fall of Wings is basically akin to the beating of actual wings as it "carries" the City towards a destination only the Head knows.

That's also why the events of Lobotomy Corp and Library of Ruina are such a big deal, because that's presumably one of the few, if not only times that a Wingbeat was not in service of the Head's design.

Though I got the impression that Herbert specifically couldn't give less of a fuck about T Corp and how well they're doing. He has his own agenda and T Corp in its current state is basically just the "bad ending" of his last attempt that he had already accepted but seeing the Time Ripper and Dante's ability to rewind the Sinners made him reconsider that whatever he was originally trying to do might still be on the table.

That depends entirely on whether you want to build a Bleed team or a Pwieclair/Rouge team.

Assuming that Pwieclair needs to be on a Bleed team is a bit of a fallacy stemming from the fact that that's just the best we got for him at the moment.

If you want a good Bleed team, KK Heathcliff and Ishmael are probably still better than Rouge Heathcliff and Ishmael. But if you want a good Pwieclair team then you'll want at least either Rouge Ishmael or Rouge Heathcliff on the team if only for their Crimson Cradle passive effect and once you've replaced one of the KK duo you might as well replace the other too.

Note the final line about the activation limit on his first passive there is definitely a limit on the counter to s3 And it’s not stated to be a per turn limit

To be fair, it doesn't activate a special version of S3 so I'm pretty sure this is just meant to be a "get one S3 for free" button you can press whenever he has Time to Listen active so you don't have to micro his kit as much and always save an S3 for the right turns (even more so since his S3 is also one of his only two ways to generate Ready to Narrate).

The activation limit is just to make sure you really do only get the one freebie for every Time to Listen "phase", regardless of how long it can actually last, but on paper you can throw out as many "natural" S3s as you manage to save up or happen to draw during the Time to Listen turns and those should be no more or less powerful than the freebie (other than running out of Preservation count eventually if you keep spamming it).

If you think this game is ripping off Fear and Hunger you have evidently not played either of these games.

They were moved over to work on Veulguard.

Yeah and surely that showed everyone that BioWare still had it. Can't fathom why they wouldn't just greenlight the next Mass Effect after that.

Nah, nah. It's always the publisher's fault. Either they meddle too much and are too hands-on, ruining the creative vision of these poor artists or they're too hands-off and don't give these creative bums the firm hand they need to actually deliver a product on time.

But the developer itself? Always blameless. If we would just let them work then the game industry would be a utopia. Uh, but don't let them work too much. Rein them in a bit. Not too much though.

Hey, what happened to the "they're just actors playing a role" bullshit theory? Maybe the Chaplain ID is a female sinner playing a male role!

No. They're not. The people from this mirror world become costumes when applied to our sinners because the technology can't actually deform sinners to the point it would need to to make them become distortions. Ishmael can't actually become L'Inamovible because Ishmael has legs. And eyes. And, well, just generally a humanoid body.

So rather than disfiguring Ishamel, the technology essentially turns the L'Inamovible Ishmael identity into "EGO gear" (not literally EGO gear, just using that as an example since "costume" is apparently too high concept) and slaps it on the Sinner Ishmael. Everything else still works exactly like all other IDs do. The Sinner vaguely, but not entirely, becomes the person from the mirror universe, just like Dante describes in their notes.

And that's also why instead of having her legs fuse into one long leg, Noir Ryoshu just gets a suit with mismatching legs.

What's described in Rouge Ishmael's passive is just using theatrical metaphors to justify how we can have identities with inhuman bodies. Or heck, maybe the body isn't even the issue and just the fact that the ID we're copying exists only in the Symbolic inside Sisyphe and can as such not just be copied over the way IDs from the "real world" can.

You dummies just took that literally and now everyone keeps parroting the bullshit that the IDs are all just "actors". The ID is not the actor. The Sinner is the actor. The ID is the costume.

Needleking Heathcliff likely looks just as fucked up as our universe's Needleking does.

"B-but then why do they not look like that in the uptie stories?" you might ask.

Because it's a bloody mirror, not a window. We see the IDs as reflections of the sinners. Always have.

Funny how no one had a single good word to say about BioWare in over two decades but now that they've been shuttered it's suddenly the end of the gaming industry.

Andromeda did serious damage to the franchise

I'd argue we did more damage than Andromeda itself did, because while it was undoubtedly the weakest Mass Effect it also was far from as terrible as everyone made it out to be.

I'm not saying we need to be good little boot lickers and accept whatever gruel is shoveled at us but the negative reaction at the game was (and evidently still is) so overblown that the franchise as a whole died there and then.

Heck, I'm surprised a new Mass Effect was ever on the table considering how very clear we made it after the reaction to both the original Mass Effect 3 ending and Mass Effect Andromeda that no matter what you do with the franchise, we won't like it.

I got you all beat on pettiness. Especially since mine is actually pettiness and not just realizing a couple hours in that I simply don't like a game. I bailed on OneShot because by pure coincidence I happend to buy and play the game on April 1st, where it is programmed to replace the protagonist's portrait in dialogue with a scribble instead of the normal ones.

I was already in a pretty bad mood at that point (for unrelated reasons) and that pushed me over the edge enough that I immediately refunded it and have so far refused to give it another chance. I guess it really did only get one shot.

If you wanna blame EA for anything, blame them for keeping Bioware alive for as long they did.

I know people are going to frame this like EA killed another beloved company but the only thing we can really blame EA here for is keeping Bioware alive for as long as they did.

You need to decouple our real world definition of "human" from the definition of "human" in the Project Moon games. And what that definition is exactly is literally one of the biggest ongoing mysteries of the game. I'm pretty sure that's what the New Nine are currently trying to find out. If they really are trying to create the "original human" then they probably assume that even what we would conventionally consider humans currently living in the City are not the original form of what is considered "human" in the Project Moon universe.

That's why the reaction of the Head is currently used as a benchmark for what might and might not be considered human in the City but even that measurement is flawed because we know fuck all about the Head and its motivations. We don't know if they make exceptions and we don't know if their detection of non-humans is foolproof.

All we really know for sure is that there are currently beings the Head would consider non-human in the City (which seems to include the blue fellas, Carmen and by extension presumably Ayin) but we don't know if they're successfully hiding from the Head or deliberately ignored/tolerated.

That movie is older than most redditors at this point.

But yeah, I getcha but the joke just wasn't very good to start with.

Also the absolute vast majority of indie devs are just knocking off existing games and have been since well before AI.

This is the funniest part of all this. Oh no, my Survivors clone. My cozy desktop idle game. My cozy farming life sim. My open world survival crafting game. My looping "find the anomaly" game. My backrooms game. Don't copy that. I copied it first and I had to actually put effort into copying it.

And all that aside, even before AI you couldn't just rely purely on Steam for discoverability. There is a fuckton of amazing and actually original indie games out there that nobody played. Heck, some games even get buried exactly because they're original instead of just copied slop. This looked like my kind of slop but it's actually something completely different? What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? This isn't cozy at all! Thumb down!

This isn't an issue of AI slop drowning out "real" games. This is an issue of AI slop drowning out handmade slop. Which doesn't mean handmade slop is a bad thing or you're not allowed to like that slop. You're just going to have to accept that slop is easier to make now and you soon won't be able to just get your handmade slop from the big supermarket chains anymore because they're gonna be stocking the shelves with the cheaper, mass-produced slop.

Because Walp is always happening soon and if they keep saying that next week is Walp then it will eventually be true.

I had my money on Chaplain Heathcliff.

Welp.

(Though neither is really ruled out entirely, it's not like Sinners only get one ID per season)

Though, it's not that he wanted the cocoon so much as the noise the cocoon makes. The little needle gremlins frequently warn you to be quiet and not make too much noise. I imagine it's just that at the point where we see GMS the Needle King is just so thoroughly distortion cooked already that he just jumps at anything loud down there. This Heathcliff one might just not be as far gone yet (but he's clearly getting there).

I mean, this is obviously nonsense anyway. This pearl-clutching train of thought has existed since long before LLMs were a thing and so called "indies" have always been afraid of someone stealing their "million dollar idea" before they have a chance to become the next Minecraft.

The other game that recently announced moving to a private playtest instead of a public demo was Drunken Goddess Reflux and look at either of these games. These are not even actually particularly original concepts to begin with. Drunken Goddess Reflux (or Pukey Goddess Shot Trick depending on who you ask) did not invent the concept of playing roulette against an NPC. And ReVamp sure as hell didn't invent the concept of base building and tower defense. Heck, they clearly ripped their entire aesthetic pretty much wholesale from Castlevania. Which is fine, I'm not saying these are not allowed to make new stuff based on old ideas but it kind of robs the claim "they're gonna steal our ideas!" of all credibility.

The actual quality of their games notwithstanding, these both are already copied ideas anyway. And If I really wanted to I wouldn't need a demo of either of their games to have an LLM copy them since there's already plenty of existing similar games I could use as reference.

What this ultimately boils down to is that some devs are just starting to sweat bullets because they've been spending years "stealing" someone else's idea only to find out close to the finish line that "stealing" someone else's idea now takes weeks at best.

And if "AI slop" was really as bad and obviously identifiable as everybody is claiming it is then they wouldn't have anything to worry about, would they?