I mention the comparisons to other media because that media did it well and Flux didn't. You see the flux a handful of times but in the end it's just something happening on the background whilst these immensely unoriginal and boring supervillains wander around being similarly uninteresting. Even on a more basic level, it's yet another antagonist destroying the entire universe. Doctor gets between universes again, just gets jerked around constantly and only ever reacting to things because even she doesn't know what is happening. And people get teleported around constantly, often as the means it escape from danger which is unspeakably cheap, a man who has barely seen a lightbulb steps inside the TARDIS and is only mildly surprised by how completely impossible everything he's seeing is. Episode ending cliffhangers not resolved but subverted within a minute of the beginning of the next episode.
In what world is it too early to "jump" to immortal god, considering that's basically what they said in the show? Thousands of lives, she doesn't die she regenerates indefinitely forever. She IS immortal and that's the power of a god. Previously there have been references to the doctor appearing godlike due to the basically magic-seeming TARDIS, her tech, being benevolent, helping out everywhere and then disappearing. Well now it's not a naive, yet charming notion from a lifeform that's not advanced enough to understand. She IS one. She is no longer the roguish timelord objector going on adventures, which is the dynamic I liked.
Future huge story reveals will be about her past, and it'll just be unknowable, impossible to empathise with things like "oh it turns out I'm an ancient god" or "it turns out I'm the last of a different and even more powerful race now" which I think would actually be worse, imagine wading through all this shite just for it to basically be the same as before.
I like the traveller encountering problems and fixing them setup, I don't really like the "person showing up to a random problem happens to be the most important person that's related to that problem and also in the universe" really, especially when she's a god. You say you won't mind unless the doctor gets superpowers, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar turned up. I bet there's a thing the doctor will have to do because they're a powerful ancient race, the only that race could withstand it.
On the other hand I didn't hate the Christmas special, so we will see. At least the butcher that wrote the flux is gone.
See it didn't feel briskly paced to me, it felt pretty slow because I never knew what was happening up until the end of the episode, then it'd go into high gear for five minutes to setup a cliffhanger, often doing so in a cheap way as well. And what was happening wasn't really interesting. It's a cloud destroying the universe, it's the Nothing from Neverending Story, meh. And the villains seemed like they were taken out of Destiny, yet more noble-ish scifi superbeings.
Maybe it if it was well written I'd like it more, but it's poor and the way characters act is absurd even for Doctor Who. I mean, Yas can just walk onto an alien ship - one she's never seen before - and knows how to use its systems. Nobody reacts to things they should find unbelievable to the point of freaking out beyond a sentence saying "what was that?" These issues pop up in the preceding few seasons, but Flux is just poorly written throughout, so maybe that's why such a massive change is such an issue.
Maybe it's because what was once a rogue timelord skipping about time and space and doing good, having adventures, and saving people is actually another superbeing that is the means through which the timelords were created, an immortal being of incredible power. It just changes the context, well-meaning roguish timelord versus immortal god.
There are brighter spots. I actually liked the dog alien guy, I thought that was going to be bad when it revealed what was going on but I turned out to quite like him. Of course he was paired with John Bishop who I just don't think could pull off the role, which is a shame as I like John Bishop.
It's a pretty significant drop in quality, I was enjoying myself until I got to Flux, even though there was a clear drop it the quality of the writing before it. It spends so much time trying to build a mystery but doesn't give enough information to really make it intriguing for me, then it just solves whatever that was over the course of a few minutes and skips over to another.
Flux is poorly written throughout and it destroys everything we know about the doctor. Previously the doctor was basically a rogue escapee of a morally ambiguous and very powerful alien race, but now is instead the entire reason for that race's existence. Powerful, immortal, and with a past we now know practically nothing about...it completely changed the dynamic of the show and retconned the doctor's entire backstory just for a cheap surprise that goes completely against everything we knew, and they didn't even manage to deliver it well. May as well make the doctor "the chosen one."
Whittaker's really good, she carried her run until the Flux, which I watched for the first time last week. It was shit, even she couldn't save it. It was so bad that the Tennant episodes that follow it are better in comparison, despite them being pretty poor and repeating themes from RTD's run, like he didn't have any new ideas. A mysterious monster from the void of space that steals your voice and turns into you? That's Midnight.
Listen if you want to piss away money on transient shit you are welcome to go and do it, but the person missing the nuances here is you. The industry moving towards these models is negatively affecting gaming as a whole and it'll only get worse, even if you're too blinded by tacky skins to notice the reason why.
Imagine how much staff works for Hasbro or Tencent, because that's the league we are playing in here - after a quick Google, Hasbro has 6480, Tencent has 108,436. Larian is a dust mite to Tencent and DND has been around for half a century, had a film based on it recently, just had a game of the year based on it and a two decade old dnd IP. DND made $100-150 million in 2022.
So you're saying that if Microsoft hadn't hoovered up another company due to being creatively bankrupt, almost two thousand people would still have a job?
Basically all games have review embargoes. If you're lucky it's before release and you get the code even earlier, but there's almost always a date you can't publish before.
The issue you're looking for is not sending code out before release so that there are no reviews at launch, so they get more people buying it blind instead of consulting a bunch of negative reviews and deciding not to.
Yeah I messed with this before and everything you say is true, plus enjoy hitting the headset with your glass or whatever every time you want a drink, can't really eat anything either. The only option is to sit still and watch, very disappointing.
Oh yeah, you've got to go full chaotic evil for the lich. I revived Staunton Vane (it's been a while now, that's the dwarf with the tragic backstory who works for evil woman whose name I've forgotten I believe) as an undead, I had a few lich only companions who were undead (they don't talk much though, most of them whine about being controlled if I remember right), my city was dark and almost desolate, filled almost entirely with undead subjects. My councillors, the ones still alive, were a bit terrified and hopeless. By the end my Lich was so good at supporting the undead characters that I started to just go with a full undead party. Poor enemies must've been terrified.
It was incredibly macabre and grim, of course, but it was so damn cool.
I think it's simpler character creation-wise because DND has gotten simpler in the same area, definitely seems much less complex than before.
Wrath is going to be my favourite for a very long time I suspect because of the Lich thing. I've always wanted that since playing DND games as a kid and it's the only game that allowed it. Then it went above and beyond, I could reanimate almost anything, it was great.
You clearly don't have even a single idea what's going on here.