What are you playing?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Martin's problem is necessarily the writing, but the massive assload of padding and general laziness. His magnum opus has about 5 times as many PoV characters as necessary (aka everything takes forever), and he just can't be arsed to actually finish the damn thing.
He's not the American Tolkien. He's the American Tite Kubo.

[Keith Chegwin]

I honestly think that it's not that he can't be arsed but rather that he's written himself into a corner. When he had an idea where the series was going with those first three books he was putting them out consistently every other year. After he killed everybody off he had no idea where to go from there and the release schedule reflects this. He's put out two books in eleven years and they were really meant to be one book. He only put out one book during the entire eight year run of the show

[Some Sick Fuck]

Martin is out of control. Unlike Tolkien, he doesn't have a clear idea about the overall story he tries to tell and the books show it. I haven't watched the show and I don't plan to, it looked like cheap rubbish to me and I think everybody heard about the disasterous last season full of shit.

Martin can write - the first few books are pretty good, but around the third one you will fully feel how much filler he's starting to put into them. I completely agree with Voice. And it just keeps going - I think he originally wanted to have trilogy, which raises so many questions about how did he end up with the current state, where it's not clear if he'll ever manage to even finish the series before he kicks the bucket.

He should've done what Tolkien did before - put the filler into the expanded universe or something and just focus on telling a story without bloating it with all sorts of shit. Writing an epic is truly an epic task for a mere mortal and I'm afraid Martin just drowned himself in his ambitions. I say the books are still worth reading, but they are flawed. And to be fair, many writers and storytellers fall into this trap of padding out the storyline significantly more than it needs (Berserk comes to mind, I like it, but half of that shit is padding - it keeps going for over 20 years or so and I'm surprised the guy behind it hasn't killed himself yet).

[Complicity]

They took a hardcore rpg classic and turned it into a shitty console hack 'n' slash starring a faggot who can't keep his gay mouth shut for more than 5 seconds.
I would rather play Elex 2 or Risen 4 than this shit.

[mad bum]

Kugel is going to be punching the air upon seeing that.

[rabidtictac]

It looks like a fucking Skyrim mod, right down to the npc telling you you're not allowed to do something.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I mean, Gothic is general has more or less always been a Kraut version of TES: Redguard. But the franchise has been pretty much shite since Gothic 3, so I'm not even getting my hopes up.

[Guest]

>guy in video
>I didn't see this coming
I did

PiranhaBytes got bought by THQ half a year ago and THQ itself belongs to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embracer_Group
https://embracer.com/

One thing they do is buy tons of dead IP's.

From an outsider perspective it makes no sense to remake Gothic 1. It almost seems completely irrational but that is exactly what is happening here. George Ritzer described irrationality as a natural outcome of overrationalized systems.

The older and more grown parts of the video game industry these days can be explained in terms of paradigm shifts (Thomas Kuhn) and McDonaldization (George Ritzer).

What people these days (falsely) call indie games is when people are in the paradigm of creation and money is a means to an end. Over a longer period of time the company can grow and a crisis happens where the paradigm shifts. Money now becomes the end in itself. For Blizzard the paradigm shift was around 2007 when they got bought by Activsion and for Nintendo it was around 2006 when they released the Wii.

SpoilerShow

Yeah and someone actually took the time to analyse this turd lol. I like his video about G3 as well.

SpoilerShow

[Kugelfisch]

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

It's a good game. Has it's flaws, but plays nicely most of the time - towards the last third, it felt a bit more repetitive and was losing some steam, but still, a good experience. I got it super cheap years ago, same with the sequel, which I should get into eventually.

I'm now playing Sadow of War. It's quite different. If you're coming fresh from Mordor you'll feel very underpowered, funnily enough. It takes a bit to quite get that you're not supposed to be a one man army anymore.
Speaking of taking a bit, you'll have to be a bit patient to get to the building an army part.

But once you do the best advice I can give you is to collect loads of intel, recruit any ork you can get and select the strongest as your bodyguard. Use the dude! You WILL need him!
Remember those very annoying orks that are immune to just about anything? Chances are one of those will grow a "liking" to you and become your vendetta, coming back again over and over again to hound your ass. Any bodyguard will already be a great help, dealing with the fucker while you're basically just dodging. A bodyguard that is resistant to his shit will be perfect.

Orks can also betray you. To avoid that you should keep them busy, try to not hit them in fights, not die too often, not be at too low of a level compared to them, go and assist during their own vendetta missions and so on.
Basically, if they grow bored or think they are just as strong as you they might get funny ideas. It's quite amusing, really.

But you really need to use those orks. You're not the "three hit combo and I can use a super two times" overpowered army slayer anymore in that game.

I'm not the biggest LOTR fan - actually I think the books are tedious and borderline unreadable garbage - but the setting is used very nicely here.

All right, pass the hooch to Spoony, you uncultured swine. That's a hot take if I've ever seen one. Maybe you just don't like fairy tales? I'm not some obsessed raging fanboy either (superfans of anything usually can't read to begin with), but I don't remember anybody who wasn't a Neanderthal ever talking shit about the way Tolkien was writing, if anything, he has been incredibly influential for a good reason. I still prefer Sapkowski, but I can't deny Tolkien was a master of his craft.

True, I'm not normally a fan of high fantasy. It's a very cheesy genre to me. I vastly prefer hard SciFi.
What Tolkien did right was create a fantastic world. What he did wrong was going on for fifteen pages about what any odd fucker is wearing, smoking, eating, drinking, looking at and like and what his niece's breakfast was like. Descriptions over descriptions over descriptions.
Maybe I'll give the books another try soon. But I dropped them because he would just go on and on and on about a campfire scene for well over twenty pages describing absolutely fucking everything in the most minute detail. I can't stand that shit.

[Some Sick Fuck]

I remember one guy in the first game coming back over and over, getting increasingly more pathetic with the amout of rags on his head - he even survived getting that head cut off, btw., good times

What you're describing sounds good - I don't mind taking my time with a game, quite the opposite. If anything, that just confirms to me what gaming journos were reeeing about, similar to AC:Odyssey. And I certainly do remember the immune bastards, even then, having my own chiefs that could just kill those immune guys, because the immunity apparently only applies to humans, helped a lot. I'm pretty sure the immune guys are never immune to everything, but sometimes that thing can be hard to get, like a Warg etc.

well over twenty pages describing absolutely fucking everything in the most minute detail. I can't stand that shit.

I don't remember it being that bad, but I like when writers are descriptive - not overly, if I felt like you did, that would put me off too, but for example, I really like Crichton, some would describe his books as dry, but that sort of sci-fi he wrote is perfect fit to me. I think Andromeda Strain is brilliant, for example, and on the other hand, that Terminal Man is shit.

There are many examples of writers being overly descriptive in classical literature, you know, that stuff they force you to read in school, and you will never care about those books on your own later in life, because they are mostly boring, or just don't seem appealing. I remember reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (arguably when I was teenager, so maybe nowdays I would see it differently) and I was bored out of my mind even though the book isn't even that long.