LizardKingDk

@TerminalDread @HMBohemond That might have helped. But I also just think GW trying to make the magical super soldiers the poster boy for their fantasy franchise was misguided to begin with. That stuff works for 40K, but fantasy players I think lean far more towards regular human warriors.

@HMBohemond @LizardKingDK Astartes have a diversity in culture & Aesthetic that feels natural. No matter what colour a Stormcast paints their armour they all feel the same. Immortal lighting dudes. Maybe coulda been fixed if their were Stormcast empowered by different winds, not just Azyr?

I'll break down the full history: WHFB = Warhammer Fantasy Battles, the original Warhammer fantasy tabletop game. Currently represented via the Total War: Warhammer game series. AOS = Age of Sigmar, the current "main" fantasy game that replaced WHFB. It's a weird sequel via total universe collapse/reconstruction. TOW - The Old World, the current OG WHFB tabletop game, a kind of prequel to the general events of WHFB. Warhammer Fantasy Battles was doing poorly due to rules bloat, army size bloat, and poor model/rules support. Rather than fix the game, Games Workshop completely retconned the ending of a player driven campaign called Storm of Chaos and created the End Times. This ended in Chaos destroying the world and Sigmar (mankind's God) rebuilding it. The Age of Sigmar setting was born. Age of Sigmar had no lore. That was the intended design. No lore, no story, nothing. It was designed to be "cool fantasy models" with nothing but the most basic story treatment to justify it. Also they killed Slaanesh off screen. It flopped horribly. WHFB fans hated it because their game died needlessly to prop it up with GW boasting about AOS sales vs WHFB sales. Which was based on the fact WHFB was discontinued. So if course AOS would sell better that year than a game that didn't exist anymore. New players never showed up because it was lame. Turns out you need a setting and lore to actually justify why all your models are fighting. Also the rules were absolutely juvenile. There was a rule for one character that said the player with the biggest beard auto-wins. I'm not kidding. AOS was sent back to the drawing board and it's 2nd edition came with an actual setting and lore. A lame setting and lore that feels like a dark and edgy Korean mobile MMO with similar model designs, but lore none the less. Also Slaanesh is no longer dead, just in cosmic horny jail and slowly breaking free. AOS is not a good game. Not even close. The lore is bad but the game is worse. It's limped along for four editions now. It's looking like their 5th edition will be another big setting reboot in a desperate bid to save it. Total War: Warhammer came out not long after AOS first released. Just one year later. It's made more money than AOS did and is unironically made the Warhammer Fantasy Battles setting more well known. GW kind of shit their pants because they realized how bad they fucked up nuking WHFB for AOS. So they rereleased it, old minis and all, in 2024 as Warhammer: The Old World. A prequel to the original WHFB. The Old World is objectively the better, more popular game. There's huge animosity between the three. WHFB players resent AOS for being an unwanted, cash grab replacement for their game which GW never really put any effort into. AOS fans are bitter because AOS never caught on like 40k, perpetually in last place even compared to specialist games, and hate that WHFB is once again getting more love via TOW. TOW players are mostly WHFB oldheads and new players coming from Total War who don't give a fuck about AOS. This leads to AOS players being bitter, spiteful, and jealous of 40k and WHFB/TOW. They try to force what 40k and WHFB/TOW have built organically in terms of player appreciation.

@HMBohemond Third edition Stormcast looked decent, specifically the infantry that had spears/shields and redesigned armor. Before that, SC felt like the biggest "designed by committee" faction ever. The big hammers and old armor designed felt like a bastardised hybrid of Warcraft and WH.

Aesthetically they never made Stormcast work. There's a 'realness' to Space Marines in their nature as transhuman mortals that is missing from Stormcast as they're purely divine in nature. Stormcast lack that, and as a result lack that aura of physical power and sense of war torn grit.

First Draft. Have just bound the manuscript of my forthcoming book ‘The Madness of Cars’

People will hate on him for this, but Peter Hitchens is right. You can’t complain about the atomisation of society while also stanning cars.

Even this is a stupid false equivalence. Everyone knows, and knew at the time, that the Hercules and Xena TV series were "a bit of a lark". The ridiculousness was part of their appeal. The same absolutely cannot be said for Nolan's film, which is supposed to be "serious".

genuinely tired of people online pretending Kingdom of Heaven was “a good movie”

ポケットモンスター　ハプスブルク/ブルボン

Traitor Sister of Battle & Iron Maiden of the IVth Legion by @hou_jae04

The origins of an elf necromancer.

Chris Nolan is a complicated man. He bowed to a dying agenda. He chose to worship it and show disrespect toward the Greeks. He could have created a masterpiece. Instead, he chose to go woke and destroy his career. Woke Hollywood is dead, and Nolan will be remembered as a weak man

@AcademicAgent_X I don't think that's a controversial take? RTS as a genre peaked in the late 90s / early 00s and never came close to match it again. Feels like RPGs have fared better in that regard.

I have no problem saying that the RPG is simply a more important genre than the RTS

@The_TrueSons @ManletThorin But why bother making a new species if you are literally just going to have them be humans? At that point it would have made more sense to have Visar just be a blind human and that her home planet had a large community of others like her. That's what makes the whole thing silly.

@LizardKingDK @ManletThorin I mean KOTOR came out when EU was pushing force Sensitive Species to a High degree thanks in part to Heir to the Empires popularity with Ysalamiri, and Vornskyrs. They were making a lot of Humanoids and Animals have special Racial Force powers in the 90s-2000s era

No amount of bene gesserit boner manipulation could inspire the degree of diamond dingaling I get from Visas seductively telling me to lob hand grenades into a crowded cantina

Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award …

@SandyofCthulhu Gabe Newell is proof of the Great Man theory. He is single handedly holding up PC gaming right now.

Gabe Newell owns the majority share in Steam. Now, I know Newell somewhat. We've met. We've talked. He's not a close friend by any means. But it is by his will and genius that Steam is the way it is - a triumph of good guy capitalism. A great site for finding games, with cheap prices, frequent sales. Well ... I don't need to praise it here. You guys all know about it. When Newell passes away, it's unclear what will happen with Steam. Doubtless his shares will go to his family. Will they continue his vision? Or will they sell out to one of the many circling sharks who have been trying to buy it for years? What will happen if the sharks DO get their teeth into Steam? I believe that in that case Steam will go to hell in a handbasket. Owned by men in suits who don't give a sh*t about quality or the consumer. Probably it will become a subscription service or worse. If it gets sold to a horror show like Electronic Arts or Disney it'll be a nightmare. The only mitigating feature is that a different service might arise, but it will need to fight the rotting lumbering corpse of Steam to establish itself. I am content that since I am several years older than Gabe, it is plausible that I won't live to see this terrible day. But you might. Gabe Newell, to me, is literally barring the gates to Hell for us all.

That's transposing the entire thing, not keeping it ostensibly in Ancient Greece while blackifying some of the characters, thus destroying immersion.

@escapefrommelos You should compare them to the first edition Liberators, not the newer ones.

how did nolan manage to shoehorn the godawful age of sigmar minis into the odyssey…?

Looking back, millennials grew up during a genuine golden age of AAA innovation, and somehow, we responded to it with some of the most dogshit criticism imaginable. A lot of the industry's current problems are the direct result of studios trying to "fix" complaints that never actually mattered in the first place. Look back at some of the most common complaints from our time, and you'll see for yourself "The campaign is too short. It’s only 8 hours!" So now every game is padded with endless busywork, crafting systems, collectible spam, and pacing-destroying filler designed to artificially inflate playtime. We traded tight, replayable campaigns with memorable set pieces for 60-hour slogs that most people never even finish. "It has a tacked-on multiplayer mode!" A huge number of beloved multiplayer experiences started as “tacked-on modes.” Developers used to experiment because they could. A lot of those modes existed because parts of the team had downtime while waiting on other departments, so they built weird ideas for fun. That kind of experimentation is how entire genres are born. Thanks to this criticism, we barely get interesting side modes anymore. Singleplayer games stopped experimenting with multiplayer, and multiplayer games stopped shipping with campaigns. "The game is too linear and on rails!" Uhh, yeah? Sometimes that’s the point. Linear games allow developers to control pacing, tension, balance, atmosphere, and spectacle with precision. Not every experience benefits from being an open-world sandbox. Now everything has to be “go anywhere, do anything,” which usually just means bloated maps full of repetitive content where players accidentally skip important moments or experience the story in the worst possible order. "There’s nothing to do after you beat the game!" This helped create the live-service mentality where games are expected to become permanent hobbies instead of complete experiences. Seasonal progression, daily challenges, battle passes, rotating shops, login rewards. Games used to end, and now they’re designed to be work. "The cutscenes take control away from the player!" So now stories are delivered through endless walking sections where characters slowly talk at you while you hold forward. Ironically, this often feels less interactive than a well-directed cutscene because you’re not really playing, you’re just pretending to. "The game is too repetitive, you just do the same thing over and over!" This criticism pushed studios toward constant novelty at the expense of mechanical depth. Older games would give you a solid core mechanic and let you master it over time. Modern AAA games are terrified you’ll get bored, so they throw gimmick after gimmick at you instead of refining the fundamentals. "It’s just another brown military shooter!" This criticism was understandable at the time, but it led to every game becoming terrified of sincerity. Everything had to become quirk chungus, self-aware, colorful, ironic, self referential, and stuffed with marvel-style dialogue. A lot of AAA writing lost the ability to be earnest because studios became scared of being called generic. I could go on and on, but you get the point. A lot of people (rightfully) blame sarkeesian for the current state of the industry, but we really dont blame yahtzee enough, seeing as he got everything he asked for, but not what he wanted.