"a vast industrial machine that exists to produce nothing"

"Your death will move something, even if all it moves is the stock price of a publicly traded corp half a lightyear away"

Also hit level 25 tonight (at last!) and got the Cryo Archive cutscene. Violent little things. This game continued to wow.

Loaded into Perimeter with two friends and free kits, wiped a squad with purple gear off spawn. Next round, took our new purple gear back into Perimeter, and immediately got wiped by a squad with free kits. Marathon is incredible.

I am so impressed with the @marathonteam.bungie.net's attentativeness to feedback, nuanced solutions for hard design problems, and general willingness to experiment with the playspace they've created. Really exemplary stuff!

The Realis actual play on the FatT patreon has been incredible listening. The way this game thinks about character and story is so invigorating and inspiring. Feels both fresh and deeply informed by a legacy of other great storytelling games. Go back this!

"Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war."

Horrifying: "Individual targets move across the columns from left to right as they progress through each stage, a format borrowed from Kanban, a 'lean manufacturing' workflow system developed at Toyota, and now widely used in software development"

"A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal"

"Players don't read text." This is not literally true in all cases, but it IS a factual statement in many contexts.

An interesting question is "Why?"

The same player who reads a text-heavy game like Disco Elysium may not read text popping up in a UI during the action or during a tutorial.

Is that knife in your hand for me? YouTube video by Austin Walker

A little encounter on Tau Ceti IV.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqNv...

jessica defino talks about how contemporary beauty culture is skewed towards the algorithmic gaze and rejection of "human" qualities: it's poreless, filtered, digitally and surgically altered, faces made uncanny through use of botox and filler. this kind of tech mirrors that rejection of humanness

even from a pure technical perspective, it's clearly throwing out a bunch of the actual lighting information in the scene to replace it with essentially a pre-baked yassified valley face. it's the Samsung moon thing but for video game characters' faces

Coming soon: Seven-Part Pact A fantastical, ornate TTRPG from Jay Dragon about the might and folly of powerful wizards bound by a venerable Pact.

Seven-Part Pact, my fantastical and ornate TTRPG about the seven most powerful wizards in a fantasy world, is coming this summer to kickstarter!!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/sjg...

I Cannot Stop Thinking About Marathon It has the juice.

MARATHON MARATHON MARATHON MARATHON MARATHON aftermath.site/marathon-bun...

For folks curious, a chunk of my concepting was for Field Maintenance in Dire Marsh and designing the big harvester vehicles. What @ninehydras.dev and the world art/palette team did is so so rad

Coming soon: Ruin: An Anthology of One Shot Incursions for Trophy A collection of 14 new incursions for Trophy Gold and Trophy Dark.

From the publisher that brings you Sprigs & Kindling (that's me!), in collaboration with @jesseross.com and @pemetawe.bsky.social comes a new anthology of one shot incursions for Trophy! Sign up to be notified of launch 😄 www.kickstarter.com/projects/fir...

All in, it's a really confident work of design. Some rough edges and tuning to work on for sure, but it's shaping up to be quite a polished experience at launch. I'm excited to dig in to the full game.

Combat is fast, tense, and punchy. Everything sounds and feels really good. The core gameplay loop is tight, not overly complex, and rewarding with both useful items and story beats or lore in exchange for completing contracts. We were about 50/50 on successful exfils, which seemed fair overall.

We had some really interesting emergent encounters with multiple other squads and AI enemies. Flow through the big POIs is fluid for all involved (human and AI), which creates some fun confusion and chaos. There's lots of opportunities for surprise moving between different levels and buildings.

Played more of the Marathon Server Slam tonight, but this time with two friends, and I'm sold. Solo is extremely punishing, but the game really isn't balanced for solo (at least right now). As a squad, though, the game shines.

So I reserve my final judgment for now. Really strong first impression, but a subpar solo gameplay experience. Need to play with friends before I see where I ultimately land on it.

But the metaprogression... Trying to complete a simple contract solo, tried it four times and was taken out by invisible campers each time, because I needed to clear a bug nest to do so and gave myself away. Not good! I worry that the stuff I'm here for is going to be trapped behind the bad...

Factions, unlocks, all the metaprogression: it tickles my brain. Really like the integration of story bits, worldbuilding, character, etc. All works together really nicely. I even like the UI, if a little busy and hard to parse. Just so slick, completes the game, all of it of a piece design-wise.

Solo runs are not good. Will have to try with my Hunt Showdown group. Have a lot of hours in Hunt, so the format isn't entirely foreign, but wanting to learn the ropes and just play by myself was... not the best. Major balance issues to work out if solo is going to be a viable mode.

Played on PS5 and PC. Gunplay feels better on controller, classic Bungie, but everything else is worse. Using gamepad rather than keyboard and mouse feels impossible, an unnecessary added challenge.

Marathon is so stylish. Aesthetics are really working for me. Environments, lighting, sound... SOUND. Oh man. Just want to listen to this game, wander around and poke at things. Story surprisingly interesting, too. Vibes off the charts.

Wow. I have no idea if it will retain a playerbase, but Marathon is one of the most exciting visual and storytelling statements of intent I've ever played.

I'm considering buying an extraction shooter for the narrative; the actions of a madman

composite satellite image of Antarctica, the snow & ice appearing as different shades of blue and beige, the sea is black. following three images are variations of this theme.

GUYS have you seen this. antarctica on google maps. go look at it. this is tech struggling to process the Sublime

3 When you search a dead man's room before the police arrive, roll +instinct. On a 7-9, ask 1. On a 10+, ask 3. Take +1 forward when you act on what you fin...

I've started a blog writing PbTA moves for games that don't exist. Here's today's entry.

https://onamiss.bearblog.dev/3/