The game itself is not spoiler-free! (load screen tips)
This is pretty much too late to do anything about for the majority of players, so it's intended as a rant and feedback to raise awareness. As amazing as the game is in many ways, there also have been various things that really piss(ed) me off. (And as a side topic, I recently realized I could install a mod that fixes glaring issues with shadows and objects popping in and out and moving all over the place (even on ultra settings and in an ugly rasterized fashion), surprisingly all without any noticeable impact on framerate!)
The issue I mainly want to talk about here is load screens though. That's another of those 'WTH!' things, where the storyboard sequences masked when the load process had completed and thus wasted time and probably were generally annoying after you've seen one several times. So to avoid having to hammer the space bar during every load, I installed yet another mod (Does it take modders to do all the intelligent stuff? I could rant about immersion breakers. too.) that deactivates the storyboard sequences. It's a bit of a loss of style to not have them at all, but overall less annoying.
But now this turned out to create another issue, specifically with the expansion content it seems. Because the regular load screens show various game tips and apparently those cannot be turned off. And those game tips are full of spoilers about interesting things you'll be able to do later in the game and the load screens pretty much spoil the surprise and tell you who and in what story context will provide you with what new means, i.e. some big spoilers.
Why the hell not keep those tips hidden until you have actually encountered that story content? Heck, at that point you probably don't even need those tips, since the game holds your hand to it anyway.
This kind of thoughtlessness annoys me in so many areas, and it seems common in game development, especially in bigger projects. There's a section on these forums for topics that might contain spoilers, but then the game itself spoils things. This is about on the same level as when TV networks show a summary of a show episode right before it airs, a trend that luckily has become rare, but these days transitioning into a summary of the next episode zero milliseconds after an episode ends is very common, so nothing has been learned, really. It's unhealthy.
Oh and Steam is no better. I post my screenshots on there and care to keep potential spoilers from viewers by spoiler-tagging the relevant ones, but for some inconceivable reason Valve decided to not cover the whole screenshot but leave areas at the top and bottom free, as if there's no way those segments of the screen can contain spoilers.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=452112076
This is pretty much too late to do anything about for the majority of players, so it's intended as a rant and feedback to raise awareness. As amazing as the game is in many ways, there also have been various things that really piss(ed) me off. (And as a side topic, I recently realized I could install a mod that fixes glaring issues with shadows and objects popping in and out and moving all over the place (even on ultra settings and in an ugly rasterized fashion), surprisingly all without any noticeable impact on framerate!)
The issue I mainly want to talk about here is load screens though. That's another of those 'WTH!' things, where the storyboard sequences masked when the load process had completed and thus wasted time and probably were generally annoying after you've seen one several times. So to avoid having to hammer the space bar during every load, I installed yet another mod (Does it take modders to do all the intelligent stuff? I could rant about immersion breakers. too.) that deactivates the storyboard sequences. It's a bit of a loss of style to not have them at all, but overall less annoying.
But now this turned out to create another issue, specifically with the expansion content it seems. Because the regular load screens show various game tips and apparently those cannot be turned off. And those game tips are full of spoilers about interesting things you'll be able to do later in the game and the load screens pretty much spoil the surprise and tell you who and in what story context will provide you with what new means, i.e. some big spoilers.
Why the hell not keep those tips hidden until you have actually encountered that story content? Heck, at that point you probably don't even need those tips, since the game holds your hand to it anyway.
This kind of thoughtlessness annoys me in so many areas, and it seems common in game development, especially in bigger projects. There's a section on these forums for topics that might contain spoilers, but then the game itself spoils things. This is about on the same level as when TV networks show a summary of a show episode right before it airs, a trend that luckily has become rare, but these days transitioning into a summary of the next episode zero milliseconds after an episode ends is very common, so nothing has been learned, really. It's unhealthy.
Oh and Steam is no better. I post my screenshots on there and care to keep potential spoilers from viewers by spoiler-tagging the relevant ones, but for some inconceivable reason Valve decided to not cover the whole screenshot but leave areas at the top and bottom free, as if there's no way those segments of the screen can contain spoilers.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=452112076
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