*gets my arm bitten off by a wolverine in the canadian wilderness and this billboard instantly teleports to my location, silently mocking me as i bleed to death*
makin their way downtown, walkin fast, spell slots blast , thezonecast doot d-doot doot
it’s finally done y’all - the boys are complete and I am at peace. walk on you beautiful horny boys
“I will admit one bit of trickery I did was, because we had a limited number of voice lines, we started doing things like making some of the main characters mute. So they’d only do like, hand gestures and symbols and non-spoken text. We were only able to get away with that for so long.” - Chris Avellone, src
damn bethesda really did all they could to fuck over obsidian on new vegas
and it didn’t even work considering none of these characters fuckin suck nearly as much as anyone in fo4
Bethesda probably thinks that 10000 lines for everything is enough for an rpg they make which would explain a hell of a lot
like how the fucking butler robot is programmed with more swear words as names for your protagonist than some npcs have lines
Obsidian was handed this restriction, on top of the existing restrictions of the engine, and made them work.
ED-E communicates more through beeping than pretty much any so-called ‘character’ in FO3. His lovability was still so strong that the final confrontation of the final DLC of the whole game hinges on ED-E and his wellbeing.
The Think Tank had to have whole conversations with you while you ‘faced’ a single character and 5 talked, and one of them can only make static noises - a damaged ‘voice module’. He participates in conversations nonetheless, and Obsidian chose to make this an opportunity for skill checks, meaning if you develop your character in a certain way you are able to understand him and you get more options in dialogue.
Christine is mute for the majority of Dead Money and talks to you through narrated hand gestures. The reason for her muteness - forced vocal surgery - is the DLC’s major plot point, and the trauma over this informs much of her character, PLUS her interactions are engaging and immersive in a pure ‘show don’t tell’ kind of way. You have to read the description, imagine a person making those gestures, and ask yourself what they want to communicate. It gets you to think, empathise, and consider what type of reaction the character you’re playing will have. Doing this through a narrated dialogue box hits it home in an old-school RPG way that trying to watch a clunky animation communicate the same never would.
Christine was so powerful as a character that fans still, to this day, discuss their disappointment over her not being reunited with your other companion who she loved and was forced away from. (Which was for technical reasons rather than narrative ones)
This is why it’s so meaningless for companies to proclaim their game contains over 50 million lines of dialogue - quantity quite simply does not matter. Fallout 4 had actors perform record amounts of dialogue and yet it managed to say comparitively little
and about half of it was “my dead wife”. Obsidian were for some reason given a hard limit on recorded lines and they didn’t slim down their cast to allow for a load of padding. They turned to other means of communication, while still portraying personality and charm and made every single line count.
my computer is black and blue…. not black and red….. it’s a Fake Gamers
This black and red shit has to stop. The true gamer colors have been and always will be black and green. Black representing the exile and pain a gamer goes through, and green representing the mountain dew all true gamers pump directly into their bloodstream.
the red represents mountain dew code red, you fool
The blue represents mountain dew voltage, you are all true gamers
im valid???
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.
