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Also bored at work, give me topics to ramble about
Awe
Sidequests
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I don't often mess much with them personally when I play games, since as established I am a very goal-oriented gamer so I usually have a laserlike focus on the main quest unless I force myself to branch out
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BUT
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sidequests are interesting because they're one of the biggest obvious sources of a phenomenon described by Yoko Taro as "emotional bugs" in game stories
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which is when a character as portrayed through story, and the same character as portrayed through gameplay, begin to desync from each other
Vehrec
things you like and dislike about Speedrunning
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as an example:
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The hero's love interest is afflicted with a terrible illness
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and the only way to save her life is to brave Mount Dungeon and find the antidote flower
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the player chooses this moment to stop and clear out his sidequest log a bit, maybe do some grinding
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four hours later he gets back to the main quest and stomps Mount Dungeon
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then when he returns to the city, the cutscene shows him as hurrying urgently to bring the antidote back
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but the gameplay experience has desynced from his emotional state, because the player had the freedom to not hurry and fuck around instead
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this is an inherent problem to games that have both characterization and player freedmo
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freedom*
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which is an interesting design thought
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Yoko Taro also posited from here that the typical shitty harem LN protag is actually the optimal hero for a high player-freedom video game
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because the character has no meaningful emotions and can't ever hook up with any of the girls who love him for unclear reasons, so he has no agency as a character
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meaning all the agency can be afforded to the player instead
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without desyncing from his portrayal as a character
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Vehrec
I love speedrunning as a spectator sport
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My favorite part is watching speedruns for the first time on a game I already know well
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so I learn just how little I actually knew about the game's mechanics
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and GDQ events, where half the fun is the running commentary where you learn how the speedrun works, and all the effort that went into it
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and the overall incredible positivity of most of the scene, so many of the great speedrunners are just great folks who encourage each other and newbie runners and it feels good
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I dislike that the golden age of TASbot is over
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for a couple years every TASblock was an incredible one-up of the previous one
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but then they had the year where the TASbot used in-game controls to hack Super Mario World into a Mario Maker clone controlled by the twitch chat
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and it's like
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they can't figure out how to one-up from there
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so it's just kind of been winding down ever since
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I mean you still get gimmicks like Burrito% but it's just not the same
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oops, Hot Pocket%