I appreciate some Camina in both forms tbh. If I’m being honest, I think I kind of like the Drummer from the series more.
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Yeah me too. Much bigger (and different) role, kind of a conglomeration of a few different characters in the books. She ended up owning every scene she was in in the series.
Tried No Man’s Sky for the first time today and it seems way better than I remembered it being reviewed at release. Seems cool!
Then I looked and that was nine years and 31 expansions ago 
So yeah, they’ve been busy on it.
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I disagree that any one is more “effective or compelling”, and I’m borderline on “emotive.” I’d say interactive media is more personal. But they’re effective at different things.
Looking at ‘The Expanse’ as a good example that’s been presented in multiple mediums.
The books are the most effective at conveying ideas and philosophy. You get to see inside characters’ heads and understand why they do the things they do. It conveys the central thesis of the story that true progress is a slow and messy process that comes from people who disagree pushing and pulling against each other. That good leadership is filled with uncertainty over whether you are doing the right thing or not. That unilateral decision making by people with the conviction that “I know best!” is seductively appealing, and ultimately atrocious. Other media don’t convey this as well.
The TV show does the best job of creating an emotional connection to the characters in the story. To see how each of the characters react to the events and having empathy for (or disgust with) them. Where the books do the best job of dissecting why Marco Inaros is a horrible leader, the show does the best job of showing you why people follow him. It is the most effective at helping you recognize what a charismatic narcissist looks and behaves like.
Games are the best at putting YOU into the narrative and making you feel and consider yourself. They’re about YOUR experience. They are best at making you really consider how YOU would react when placed into these situations.
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any EU world of warcraft gamers in the house?
I wish I could be a new player in NMS as it stands now. I played it from launch despite its flaws. They’ve really worked hard on it and it is a great game now, but I’m just burnt out on it sadly
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Interestingly, Ty Franck, who collaborated with Daniel Abraham to write The Expanse novels (under the pseudonym James S A Corey), first conceived of the story as a multiplayer online video game or table top game. Daniel Abraham suggested they write a series of novels instead. And then they were involved in developing the TV series.
As others have said, different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and allow the creator to focus on and explore different elements of the story. That doesn’t make one better than another just different. (On the other hand, a person can strongly prefer one medium over another: “it’s my favorite” is not the same as “it’s objectively the best.” 
)
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I think you are anchoring on specific examples here instead of what I actually said. What I said was that games provide potential for more effective storytelling media than cinema or print. I don’t think that any art media a priori has more or less value than another; that’s nonsense IMO.
Look at it this way. Games are a superset of printed media and cinema. A game with only cutscenes is functionally equivalent to cinema; even with bigger budgets these days. A game with only text is really just a book (or more likely, a novella). In terms of potential, games entirely encompass these other media, and provide for additional immersion and interaction on top of them.
Again, I think we’re discussing slightly different things - I am saying games are arguably the most important new media for storytelling because of the additional potential they provide above and beyond static media consumption. You’re using a specific example here that had varied execution quality across all three fronts.
Yep. And it would make an outstanding MMO 
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It’s really good for a chill exploration/gathering game! I’m impressed.
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Yes, same! Playing the expeditions is a bit like starting fresh, but yeah. They have put so much good free content into the game to bring it up well past the original expectations. It’s quite impressive.
I just finished the The Cursed expedition in like two days. It was a bit of an annoying one, with a tedious mechanic.
Been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 a lot, it’s good stuff. Closest comparison I can think of is it’s Skyrim but set in an landscape somewhat similar to Witcher 3, and there are no fantasy elements. There’s quite a lot of immersive sim stuff going on. I spent the first few hours being told constantly that my character smelled terrible. Best moment was trying to sneak up behind a bandit to ambush him. I got about 10 feet away and he suddenly said “what’s that awful smell?” and turned round to see me.
Also playing a lot of Street Fighter 6. I bought a leverless controller and have spent a couple of months slowly learning to use it after having spent years playing on a pad or stick. I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t have to think about it any more which has been incredibly rewarding. Making a slow but steady push towards diamond rank with my E. Honda.
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Only 6 more sleeps until Monster Hunter Wilds
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I am also very excited for this!
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What’s your weapon of choice? I’ve gone lance and hunting horn (because as a Scot, how can I pass up the opportunity to wield a set of bagpipes on a stick as a weapon?) in the past, but I’m thinking of switching lance for gunlance in Wilds. It looks ridiculously fun.
I’ve only seriously played great sword before. I’m considering sword and shield or hunting horn for wilds. I tried lance a few weeks ago in wilds and I could see the appeal but it didn’t really mesh with me. Maybe I should try gunlance, big explosions fun.
I’m playing on PC and I’m also a little nervous they’re going to ship it with drm that tanks performance. The benchmark ran well and performance has supposedly slightly been improved since the benchmark build so fingers crossed.
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Yeah I’m on PS5 and the two betas were pretty rough performance-wise, but the final build seems to be much improved so I’m hoping for the best.
I need to give greatsword a proper try, I’ve never made a proper effort to learn it. The lance in the beta was missing a ton of improvements from the final build and didn’t feel great, might be worth giving it another look at release and see if it clicks then. It’s not the flashiest weapon but I love how you can go toe to toe with a monster, tank anything it throws at you and then poke them right in the face afterwards.
Never thought i would do this but I might dip in to Classic WoW. Anyone here have a server pref? I hear NA/Whitemane is good.
Playing Ghost of Tsushima again - or Sushi Ghost as my daughter calls it! A massively great game and I upgraded to the PS5 version.
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I need to revisit that before Ghost of Yotei (wonder what your daughter will call that one 
) comes out, I never did finish the DLC.
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Man Blizzard are weird.
So Retail WoW is kind of a mess because there’s just so much stuff in it after 20 years. There’s various systems in place to deal with this but it’s imperfect, and similar to Destiny 2, there is no current way for new players to have a coherent leveling experience with the original (and still fantastic!) content.
So in 2019 they introduced WoW Classic, which was the original game (with none of the subsequent changes, good or bad) since before the first expansion. At the time I did not see the appeal but now I do.
Due to player demand they started adding expansions to it over time. It’s now up to the third expansion, which basically (and intentionally) broke the entire world in a cataclysmic event (hence the name, WoW Cataclysm).
This is kind of a problem, because now it starts to suffer from all the old content issues of retail; Cata was the turning point from the old world to the new one in Retail. On the plus side there’s lots of quality of life changes, but the downside is the old version of the world is, once again, simply gone.
A lot of people were unhappy with this, so parallel to Classic Cata they rebooted Classic “Era” servers, basically a fresh version of Classic.
Eventually those got mature and filled with max level players with little fresh to do, so they made new “Season” servers with wacky rules.
And now for 20th Anniversary they have, in parallel, rebooted Classic again, with fresh servers and a plan to add only the first one or two expansions (so far).
So now WoW’s player base is split across several different parallel worlds - Retail, Classic Era, Classic Seasonal, Classic Cataclysm, and Classic 20th, all very different games. And very confusing to new players.
Just… weird.
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