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Bruno Dias

@brunodias.bsky.social

4.4K followers 180 following 3.9K posts

Video game writer and and narrative designer. Personal blog: https://azhdarchid.com/ Fediverse profile: https://azhdarchid.online/@bruno Full bio: https://brunodias.dev/bio/ THESE POSTS ARE PROVIDED ‘AS-IS’ WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · Jun 9

📌 I'm a game designer and writer. Previous work includes:

- Skin Deep (Additional writing)
- Fallen London (Lead designer)
- Neo Cab (Narrative Design)
- Pathologic 2 (Localization writing)
- Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (Writing)

...as well as op-eds, criticism, and interactive fiction.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 6h

"I just think Taylor is the greatest living lyricist," said Tom, Swiftly

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 6h

god when the dow finally crashes someone is going to post "recession indicator: dow crashed" and they're going to get SO much engagement

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 7h

Peacemaker finale: eh. I don't really care for tv shows spending a lot of their final episode runtime setting up a subsequent season. this felt kind of unmoored and like a weird nonepilogue after the actual climax of the season

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 7h

picked up my second playthrough save of silksong and casually did trobbio 1 on first try so again the game is just not that hard folks

Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

like idk how the nobel committee even manages to meet. surely anyone remembering that Kissinger got one should make them go "oh" and turn around and go home to do something else with their time

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

they should just give the nobel peace prize to trump as the final in the long series of jokes that is the nobel peace prize

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

I know it's tedious to be like "and you're surprised???" but. like. what did you think the product was that you were buyhing

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

what did you think you were buying

The Verge @theverge.com · 15h

Amazon’s giant ads have ruined the Echo Show

Alexa, stop the ads.

www.theverge.com

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

Making something and putting it out in the world and feeling like nobody cares sucks, I know it sucks, but the threshold between "nobody cares" and "indie success story" is not going to be one journalist or one outlet or one influencer covering your game

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

I'm skeptical of how much streamers drive the market today, too. I think people latch on to the idea that if only you can get the right person to funnel attention to your game, it'll sell, that's not how that works.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

People imagine this world where Giant Bomb would cover your game and suddenly you sold a grillion copies, that was never the case.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

I'm going to be real with you at no point in my 10-year career in games were games journalists meaningfully capable of driving 'the market' to a large extent, not even for small indies

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

You can name lots of 'big' games with heavy narrative branching but those games have always been confined to specific genres, exceptions, or games that made some compromises to achieve that branching.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 10h

For that to be true, we'd expect to look backwards in time and see player agency over the plot be the norm in games before 2004 or so, and I just don't see it

Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 11h

I think choice is becoming a victim of technological advances and player expectations. If you choose whether Bob or Jim live in a SNES RPG, you’ve got a different set of pixels and text boxes. Now you‘ve got a new set of voice lines, Hollywood tier animations, etc.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 11h

Thinking about it, the original Deus Ex may be the king of choice in a game with a story, because your choices are significant, linked to gameplay and unforced. From the very start, for instance, whether you use or avoid lethal force against the “terrorists” determines something about you.

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Reposted by Bruno Dias

Gray Frights! @clickgate.bsky.social · 17h

Marazhai is an irredeemable monster who tortures people for his own enjoyment, but he also has a whip that makes him do big huge cums on command, so it’s impossible to say if he’s bad or not

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 16h

Are you ready to fight the plague, immediately fail, die?

Ice-Pick Lodge @icepicklodge.bsky.social · 17h

New demo arrives on October 13th.

How is the new demo different from “Quarantine”? In every way! The new demo is a slice from the beginning of the full game.

🕗 Starts Oct 13, 10:00 PDT

Read the full announcement below.

Last chance to add Quarantine before it’s gone!

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 17h

maybe making it legally required for the gamer chat app to have a full genital scan of every user to make sure they're not a child was less than optimal legislation

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

Like, this show is terrified of just being about two opposed but fundamentally evil forces colliding and the procedural of how that happens. It wants to humanize both characters but one is a mass murderer and the other is a jack bauer-esque fascist goon arguably worse than a mass murderer.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

People praised Lashana Lynch's performance in this but she's working with material that is *so* bad that I don't know what you can see in it. Eddie Redmayne fares better but just because he has more fun stuff to do!

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

This results in a lot of absolutely thudding material that grinds any sense of momentum to a complete halt. If any character in fiction doesn't need a wife, it's the jackal from day of the jackal. It feels like someone took screenwriting 101 advice terribly too seriously.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

But you can't revel in the stupidity of it all because the show's pacing is disastrous. This is taking a fundamentally procedural story – one of THE procedural stories – and it's padding it out to ten languid episodes of prestige tv by giving the two antagonist main characters turbulent home lives

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

You could teach a class on all of the writing problems with this show. Plot-wise, it's a muddled mess of ideas that don't make sense, poorly researched handwaving, and awful contrivance. It feels like the product of the two screenwriters from the mitchell & webb sketch.

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

how are there this many people who don't know what the deal is with waiting for godot

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

this show would be perfect if not for one teensy little issue which is that it's the worst written piece of television drama in the history of the medium

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.bsky.social · 1d

The Day of the Jackal tv show is unbelievably, catastrophically bad but I am now in too deep. I have to see how this shambles ends.

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