Eventually this became less of an issue and reviewers weren't as handcuffed to that scoring scheme but since they'd had made their readers associate a 7 with being a "dont buy this" score, they couldn't very easily go back to using the whole 5 point scale

It's a grandfathered-in dynamic from older times where if a review magazine rated a game from a major publishrr under a 7, the major publisher would just not send them future review copies. A new game could be absolutely terrible and 7 was the lowest it could score unless it was an indie.

He's been on this anti-bluesky rant for a bit.

bsky.app/profile/bloo...

Time for me to finally achieve the never-before-seen "punch a team off a cliff -> my supports buy me discord nitro" true combo

Oh boy now I can be the main tank and the discord kitten in the same party

All of Ferelden recognizes the Blight as an existential threat and that doesn't stop most of them from refusing to work with you or trying to kill you depending on your choices. It's a weak handwave; sounds good from a story-overview standpoint and is utterly flimsy in moment-to-moment plot beats

Ehhh like it's a thing that can happen but it's not something I've ever paid attention to and I've not had anyone leave the party outside of doing purely-evil/dickhead playthroughs or one later game event you can royally fuck up if you skipped a bunch of stuff to rush there

having been on both sides of the coin i reeeeally think FF14 had the right idea by making the raid size 8 ppl for anything difficult cause that's more like, manageably large ttrpg group than an organization that needs a sexual harassment policy

Those last parts are what killed it for me when I was trying to get into em. That cool idea of a huge world with tons of history and tons of stuff going on instantly evaporated when I realized none of what I was reading would mean anything in a year or two

DA -kinda- does this but you have to go to the extreme of "piss on sacred religious artifact" or "murder 100 children imprisoned against their will" for people to actually leave. You can do any number of less visceral but equally evil things all game and for the most part the party just grumbles

I've had the misfortune of being at conferences in the same hotels at the same times as heritage foundation conferences; there's very little they do professionally or skillfully

And a startling amount of the time the clipboard and vest are super optional if you know even the bare basics of their day-to-day.

And sidenote for some folks that it apparently need to hear it: Don't erp with strangers on the internet you don't know the age of, especially in a videogame that markets heavily to kids and teens