Moneymunkie

Not only does this apply to trade lanes but with regards to where you could go via jump gates or with jump holes.

You could think of jump gates like a space highway, often placed at the edges of systems connected to the rest of the important spots (or at least the important/civilized/non-criminal locations) in a system with trade lanes. Want to go to another system? You used the jump gates to do so.

This works fine for a good majority of accessing the systems in the game, but once you start getting to the more undeveloped, frontier systems, your ability to travel is also affected, like if you had to drive down a rough, dirt road as opposed to a tarmac highway.

You may have to forgo the use of trade lanes entirely in some places that don't have them and some systems are not accessible via jump gates either, with you needing to find jump holes instead to reach them. In fact, to get some of the best ships in the game you'd have to access the Outcasts factions home planet which you can only do via said jump holes.

I thought it was really cool how they did that, was an effective little change in gameplay to show the development of a location and made exploring and going off the beaten track super rewarding!

Like a big ol' shit flavoured ouroboros.

Now that you mention it, I find adding RPG-like elements to a game can often take away from a game rather than enhance it.

Assassins Creed is a good example of this. In the older games you didn't have to worry about getting better loot and the like, so you didn't have to worry about if you had enough number power to assassinate someone. If you could successfully sneak up to them, you can do it.

You did get new tools and unlocked new abilities but these were handed out at set intervals which meant that missions could be more easily balanced and designed around what the player could actually do and thus meant you as a player could focus more on planning how to strike or doing some side activities to give you an advantage such as having an area of thugs now hang around in a spot who will go after guards that are chasing you.

Where the newer ones that have adopted more RPG staples, while they still can have their moments, feel more derivative and I find it harder to get into because my brain feels like its played this game already several times before.

And its all well and good having a massive world to explore but if you just fill it up with uninspired quest design and just a ton of filler content, is it really all that worth exploring it?

I just feel sometimes games try to do too much or try to check too many boxes, when it could really shine with a more focused and linear design instead. I get people want to get as much content as they want out of a game though, especially nowadays.

E-gun

Woah these look really nice! They feel like they "pop" better and more visually distinguish it being a beehaw community as well!

Mean there were times when I was logged out of Reddit and was trying looking up something on mobile and the constant badgering to install the app just had me tell it to flip off and I looked elsewhere instead. Lot of people tend to do things based on how convenient it is for them and if they go ahead with this, sure maybe some will download the app but a lot of other people will just get fed up and stop, particularly if they were using the browser version so they didn't have to deal with the app in the first place.

I'm not quite familiar with the Rio Grande river and what lives there but couldn't this cause a lot of issues for the wildlife in the river as well? Like if anything is migrating up and down it couldn't the barrier just block them from doing so?

A counter-point to this I would make is that the prescence of microtransactions can be a pretty hostile design choice with regards to folk who may be more vulnerable to it. Think people who have problems with impulse control, kids who don't know any better and buying a ton on their parents credit card or someone with a gambling addiction. One could argue that they could do certain things to mitigate the risks, like using parental controls for kids, to prevent them making purchases without their parents permission. But why should this be a thing they have to be dealing with in a game they've already paid $70 bucks for? It can be quite exclusionary if someone feels they can't trust themselves with not splurging too much and have to avoid these games like the plague, even if they would otherwise really appeal to them.

And it also feels like when people talk about the option of buying a cosmetic with real life money, that its a decision thats made in a sort of vacuum between the player purchasing the item and the game. But when you add a multiplayer game into the mix, you introduce a social pressure that can be quite a powerful motivator to pushing someone to make that purchase. An example off the top of my head would be with Fortnite, where theres been times when kids who have all the cool skins and emotes rag on those who are still playing with the default stuff you start out with, which could pressure people to make a purchase they otherwise wouldn't have.

Combine that with a lot of other little tricks that these storefronts use like making you only able to purchase in-game currency in a set number of quantities, that will more often leave you with a tiny bit left over to prod you to wanna purchase more so you don't waste the leftover currency. Or using "FOMO" with limited times to buy certain items and I'm just kinda left with microtransactions feeling pretty gross and manipulative to me.

Anyway me ranting on my soapbox over haha, but for a little extra food for thought on the topic, I'd highly recommend watching Folding Idea's video on the subject as it relates to Fortnite which has been pretty formative for me on the topic

Pull a little silly and just keep slighty moving the buoys further up the river every night and see how far they can get before someone notices

Good god I knew it wasn't going to go well but I didn't think they'd crash and burn it THIS bad.

The bar was on the floor and they still managed to somehow clip underneath it through the floor, end up in some backrooms-esque dimension only to trip on a banana peel and land face first in a pie.

Think its gotta be THAT moment towards the end of Disco Elysium (if you know, you know, I don't wanna spoil it for folk who haven't experienced it for themselves yet), it made me cry but it was a happy cry so I think it counts