your posts are a good source material for learners
Haaaa I don't know if that's wise. I have a lot of bad habits and I've been inventing my own rules for a long time. Sometimes I think I enjoy coming up with different ways to say things a little too much.
Dude, I know. It's friggin weird! I've met a handful of people here who I would say are legitimately well-spoken and even-headed. And mainly I'm just talking about a neighbor I had who was from S. Africa. The actual people who are born here speak very simply, don't use much interesting language, and really just don't have a lot of reach in what they say. Always an obvious vocabulary difference. I find myself defining a lot of high-school words for people. There are still plenty of good, interesting people... no doubt. But compared to other places, I always wonder "Why is talking to you always like this?" Maybe I'm actually the weird one for even thinking that. People are different here.
I don't know why I'm not like them. We went to the same schools and go to the same places with the same people.
People like to tout our education system as being one of the best, but honestly, in 3 decades here, I've met very few people who communicate above a middle school level... some of the most intelligent people I've met aren't much better (and yet they can still be much smarter than I.) And then there's me, who learned too much for his own good and made going above the general lexicon too easy for himself. Weird mix, constantly. I don't blend in anywhere I happen to open my mouth. It's not like that in other places I've been, where the way people speak is often more natural to me. We also have a smaller population of non-locals from up north, who tend to actually understand me with more success. It's like anywhere else I go, I'm pretty much normal. Whereas when I'm talking to a fellow local, it kind of seems to baffle them at times. It's like the way I naturally speak is foreign to them. And then there are those who are trying to figure out if I'm some kind of genius, and appearing to wonder whether or not to trust me.
I get that most people keep it simpler for a variety of functional reasons, but that's not what I'm getting at. I don't speak in paragraphs
But we really don't speak the same English. In some places it can be VERY different from pretty much everyone else's English. It's not socioeconomic and I don't even mean it in a pretentious way. I'm not exactly better off, hah. I speak how I speak, just the same as them. I just can't explain why things are like that - I only know that it's enough to stand out to me and other people equally. People here aren't really crazier or dumber all around. They're still worth trusting and turning to for advice/info. Most just sorta come off as being a little out there, with isolated pockets of major wee-woo humanity. Some take to the slopes of the crater more than others. We're like urban hicks or something. Talking to people here is a trip, for sure. I've still picked some of it up. I slip in a little Florida-speak sometimes. Northerners say I sound very southern. Southerners say I sound like I'm from California, even though I was born here, surrounded by people who generally all speak the same. I can't win anywhere.
Metro Exodus is seriously taunting me now. It remembers when I was frustrated while it struggled with bugs and little design problems that would trip things up. I feel like it's gonna rear back and take things from me again.
I'm going through Novosibirsk - it's early in, so I've been prowling my way through with the crossbow to conserve stuff and preserve the condition of less reliable but more needed weapons. Super alert, on the jump every time. I never remember everything, but I catch it all when I focus. I had seen a couple of mole mutants hiding in ambush of on a tertiary path. They're not good hiders - they may pick decent spots and you really can't see them well, but they just gotta shuffle, grunt, and hyperventilate constantly, whether they're hiding or fighting. I shot one preemtively and dropped the other one right after. Bing-bang-boom.
But I guess somehow not triggering the ambush made the first one bug out, like the game didn't know he got activated. Because as I was looting stuff next to and out of sight of where he was hiding, I heard him growl and jump for a second. Turned around freaked out as fuck and then saw a friggen corpse flop over from a standing position. I DIDN'T KNOW THE CORPSES HAD FULL PHYSICS LIKE THAT. In a dark tunnel with the brightness turned way down and NV on, seeing that humanoid figure flop out, as though it was dropped by god, scared the bejeezus outta me! Imagine going through a level you've played several times and suddenly there's shit in it that not only wasn't there before, but isn't supposed to be in the game. It was like a Stephen King novel. Like, one day you go into your house and you could swear the walls have suddenly taken-on a completely different color, but for reasons that escape you, you can't remember what color it was supposed to be. Also, was the ornamentation on that lamp always spirals? I could swear it was ALWAYS leaves... didn't my mother compliment the leaves last Christmas? I thought I had decorations that matched that exact lamp... but I KNOW they had leaves.
It felt like that. Like when you have a dream of a place that you know you've been to a lot, and on one level it looks to you how it has always looked, but somehow you don't remember it looking like that. You know everything is different but you can't pin down a single difference. I have played through the level way too many times for crap like that.
But holy crap, that would be a cool concept to use intentionally in a game. Have it actually count your playthroughs and poke at the player's memory after they would usually be sure they knew how things are. On that 3rd or 4th playthrough, move stuff around a bit. Change the path subtly in more forgettable and insignificant portions. Put a couple a half-hour apart... and then make the next one 2-3 hours late. Just break the established laws of the game world in little, less distinguishing ways.
I mean, it brought a monster I killed back to life for a second to make a corpse fall over just as I turned to look. And for some reason the corpse took a real-ass fall. It was like puppet strings pulled it straight up and dropped it. You've gotta be kidding me with this game. It's more horrifying than I thought.
