Skua

Just be sure you give someone a heads up so that they can practice their archery enough to actually set you on fire

It’s great fun! So long as you’re on board with the experience it is trying to create, of course. FromSoft are good at what they do and don’t much care for whether or not what they do is everyone’s cup of tea

I’d love to try Bloodborne, because that gameplay combined with a bit of cosmic horror sounds amazing to me. I’ll have to either wait for a PC port or learn about emulation, though

The thing that stuck out to me more than I expected about it is how painterly it often feels. It’s exceptionally good at framing its environments in a spectacular or pleasing way even while the player has full control of the camera. I’m not usually one to worry about visuals too much, but this game’s environments really stuck out to me. And while it is very high-fidelity and nicely rendered, it’s less about the actual graphical performance than it is about the design of the environments

• Elden Ring. Only the base game, and this is my first run. I have been very thorough with it, though. I’m currently trying to beat Malenia, then it’s off to do the last boss

• Victoria 2. Weekly multiplayer session with a couple of friends. It’s 1915, and my people have just elected an anti-military party that is really hampering my efforts to swing a big imperialist stick around

• Lorn’s Lure. PS2 graphics, generous 3D platforming mechanics, and an impossibly vast and desolate megastructure to explore. Well I’m playing the demo of it, anyway. I am going to get the full version, it made a good impression.

I tried it out because I love the setting and we’ve obviously been somewhat starved for anything else Elder Scrolls, but I just couldn’t get into it. It felt like it never rewarded me for exploring like the main series does. There’s never something cool to find that’s just hidden out of the way.

I did also feel a bit miffed that the Northern Elsweyr story (the new one when I played, and the reason I wanted to play) was just the Skyrim civil war again, but without even the interesting idea of the rebel faction being nationalists against an empire. It was very little to do with anything about Elsweyr, and then dragons became the focal point again anyway

Obviously each to their own. I do see the appeal of it. It’s just not for me

The ceasefire is only between Israel and Lebanon. Rockets coming from Gaza will have been fired by Hamas or an allied group. There isn’t a ceasefire with them to violate.

I have loved the NSX in every sim I’ve driven it in. It has never been the car I’m fastest in, but it’s always the one I have the most fun in

I haven’t tried ACC, but I do have the original AC and a JGTC modpack in it

Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle.

OP here is also the author of the linked article, and OP has very specific positions about capitalised pronouns

Champ is the older spelling of chomp. They mean the same thing. At some point a shift in pronunciation occurred and spelling has reflected that, but the older version has been preserved in the phrase “champ at the bit”

One of the Paradox strategy games by a comfortable margin. It’ll be one of the Crusader Kings or Victoria games. I’ve got a weekly game night with a couple of friends that was originally just CK, but has for a while now been working extremely slowly through a megacampaign. You can take the end of Crusader Kings and make it into a mod for the start of Europa Universalis, then repeat the process into Victoria and then Hearts of Iron. You need to set some rules for yourselves, because an experienced player doesn’t need even a third of the CK timeline to demolish all AI threats, but the games are already good roleplaying fodder anyway so you can set rules that play into that. We’re currently about three quarters of the way through Victoria

Outside of those, Noita or Deep Rock Galactic. For a while, those plus a podcast were my go-to “zone out brain off” relaxation, so the hours racked up

His monarchy video is pretty poor. I didn’t downvote the link above, though. Just don’t hold much faith in the guy.

It was up until the Acts of Union 1707. Ireland got a similar treatment in 1800 (and then reduced to Northern Ireland later, of course)

Greece had some territorial changes while the map was being drawn

I feel like FromSoft’s games have a nice solution to this in that generally speaking, the world has basically already ended and you’re fighting through the wreckage to try to pick it up again. Not a viable option for every story, though, of course

I would quite like to see a game in which the events play out both without a completely fixed schedule and without being within the player’s control. If we take Skyrim as an example, since everyone already knows how that one works, imagine if:

• Civil war battles happen whether you are there or not. You get some notice about them or can maybe even ride in at the last moment to turn the tide, but they’re happening with or without you.
• Your sidequests to win over jarls and find powerful artifacts stack the odds in your chosen side’s favour. Intercepting the messenger on that one mission allows you to avert an otherwise guaranteed loss for your side.
• Alduin is also doing stuff on his own schedule. If you leave him unchecked, one of your allied jarls might have their army decimated trying to hold off a dragon attack without you.
• If you leave Alduin unchallenged long enough, jarls start defecting to the Dragon Cult and directing dragons with armies as backup towards your side, knowing that you are fighting for them and are the biggest threat on the board.
• Leaving your civil war side unsupported means that Balgruuf won’t agree to help trap Odahving. You then have to track down info about the portal to Sovngarde in an ancient scroll and take the long and arduous journey up the mountainside yourself on foot, leaving your civil war side without you for days on end

You’d need to make sure that the player has control over when these events start, but it already does gate dragons behind that first quest to defend Whiterun. You want to just mess about in caves for the first twenty hours, sure, go ahead.

Obviously Skyrim was never going to do this because it isn’t trying to be that kind of game. It wanted to be a do anything go anywhere power fantasy, and that’s fine. But I would like more games to do this sort of thing. I think some of Paradox’s strategy games actually do quite a good job of creating this feeling, but the gameplay is completely different (and it only works until you get good enough to just break the mechanics in half for most of them)

There was no title “king of England” or “queen of England” as of that date, in the same way that there is no king of Sheffield. There’s a king whose kingdom includes Sheffield, yes, but it’s not the kingdom of Sheffield

Fun fact, he was actually right in the original version — there hasn’t been a queen of England since 1707, when the kingdoms of England and Scotland were replaced with one kingdom of Great Britain

“The enemy has captured a command post”

For what it’s worth, the UK’s current PM is Keir Starmer. We had an election in the summer and fucking finally kicked out the last lot that had been, amongst their many other efforts to make everything worse, churning through leaders like 3rd century Rome. The new lot have their issues too and it is of course too early at the moment to see if they have actually restored some measure of stability, but there’s hope.

Personally I think that Asia is too big a category to be useful as it is and we should be drawing extra lines. Let the Himalayas, Urals, Altais, and Tian Shans count as continental borders too. Also the Sahara. All of those have been obstacles to human movement as much as oceans have

Funnily enough, it is not according to Russia. The definition of “continent” is almost completely arbritrary anyway, and exactly where you draw the line between Europe and Asia - or if you draw it at all - is probably the fuzziest bit of all. Russia and many other countries just consider Eurasia to be one continent

To be fair my limited experience with blacksmithing has given me the distinct impression that I would have magnificent arms if I did it regularly