Pinned
[she got me losing all my cool]
"Kill yourself" is basic. "I hope your fandom gets a new installment that is objectively a great work but also tonally dissonant from the previous ones in a way that generates a huge newbie boom of people uninterested and hostile towards the history of the franchise" is smart. It's possible. It's terrifying. It's happening right now.
Rain world downpour. I will get violent about this.
i also tagged downpour on that post lol as much as i love it i really do !!! i also want to rip my hair out sometimes
The only moment in downpour that i give a single shit about is during the saint character story if you are going in blind and try to take the chimney canopy route to 5p, only for the bridge to just be *gone*. Fully gone. No music, no rubble, the superstructure entrance simply is not there. That's the singular moment in downpour that i can confidently say is good. All the dlc did was find every question that was the focal point of pages and pages of theorizing and open-ended analysis about the different themes those theories could be trying to convey to the player (people were curious about what void worms are, but only because it is important to figuring out what they represent) and the motherfuckers rolled up and added a bunch of new information that just meant we had to scrap hours of theories that pointed to themes about hopeful existentialism. They had a story with all the philosophical weight of something as coveted as "the stranger" by Albert Camus and they fucking trashed it so they could tell a story about a mother who was so angry her pups got eaten (circle of life, sorry it happened) that she was blessed with superpowers by the amazing tech wizards to smite the un-evolved savages for not being refined enough to understand the bond of family.
Absolutely fucking ass DLC in every way, and just to add insult to injury, the devs delayed the release of the DLC by 3 years to make the stupid fucking horny slug cat dating game meme mode. Fuck the entire dev team, nobody has ever lost the plot as hard as those morons.
It is seriously difficult to properly convey the artistic perfection of the monk, survivor, and hunter campaigns, the void sea art direction, the environmental storytelling, the ability for the game to hold back. That's something i think people need to remember, part of what made rain world so alluring was being at the bottom of the food chain, and being treated like it; not just by the creature ai and supercomputers, but by the world itself.
When you get to LTTM, which, for a first time player, is a long and arduous journey that in any other game would merit some sort of reward, rain world just says "okay, you understand? Now go other way. More journey."
The entire first time interaction with LTTM is one of the moments where the game flexes its ability to show, not tell, and you can tell a lot about a player based on their actions when they first reach LTTM: every big moment in the game is a test of the ancients 5 main karmic weights or whatever, and LTTM is a test of gluttony. LTTM is surrounded by 5 neurons. On a basic level, these are food. On a gameplay level, eating just one gives you a slight glow which is INCREDIBLY HELPFUL for your journey through shaded citadel shortly after. But on a story level? The five neurons are all this creature has left. When you pick one up, it BEGS you to put it down. The yellow messenger flashes messages telling you not to eat the neurons. And this is what makes the first survivor run so perfect: any other game would give you a reward. This one didn't. Do you believe yourself to be so important, that you would TAKE a reward? Are you so full of gluttony that you would steal what you haven't earned? I did. And i still regret it.
Nothing in the entire downpour DLC comes close to this moment. Nothing. And thats just LTTM, the vanilla game also came with such notable experiences as:
- The Echoes
- 5 pebbles
- literally every single area in the game since each one is its own masterpiece of game design and environmental storytelling
- the most authentic and natural ecosystem and creature AI of all time, that is still gamified enough to be enjoyable to interact with
- everything related to the ending
Downpour? Downpour gave us:
- a bunch of fucking reskins and like 3 unique creatures that are all just forgettable gimmicks
- the red lizard but unbalanced to the point of genuine absurdity
- 5 dogshit campaigns
- a few areas that are all really annoying to traverse
- lore drops that were better left unknown (complete butchering of their original principles of "show dont tell")
- 5 OC's that are fun in fanon but when made canon were fucking unbearable
Horrible horrible DLC. i hope someone makes a mod that removes all of the DLC areas so i never accidentally have the urge to go through one again.
I think one of the most heinous parts of the DLC was revealing the names of a bunch of different supercomputers as well as describing, in detail, their interactions with each other and the lead-up to 5P's sabotage of LTTM. None of that information was interesting or necessary, it did not expand on the already established story in any meaningful way, nothing that was added in the dlc was in any way close to as impactful or important as the already established lore between 5p and LTTM, so why even add it? Slop DLC.
"The Ride" is song that plays when you're being dragged by the void worm, it's just muted by the track "gold swim", so it's been isolated by playing the inverse of gold swim over the track which combines the two of them.
this one song was so well designed, so emotionally captivating, so able to capture the feeling of being a creature that has just, for the first time, comprehended the sheer scale of what is happening just below the surface of the world. This song is the embodiment of what it must feel like to realize an eldritch truth, and it plays while you're being dragged into the infinite sea of fluid that can truly obliterate a soul, permanently removing it from the infinite cycle of life, death, and rebirth. in the original game files, this track is LOUD, but it's just barely able to peak out from behind the smothering droning of "gold swim", creating a feeling of being smothered by an incomprehensible knowledge that you're just barely beginning to understand.
Nothing in the entire DLC is even 1/10th as important as this soundtrack that most players barely even reach, and the remaining players don't even hear because it gets so smothered by gold swim. Even in the last moments of the game they were committed to hiding the full truth from you. The DLC is worth NOTHING compared to a soundtrack that isn't even on the official OST list, they had to datamine this out and isolate it. NOTHING.
