Any hopes for the next Fire Emblem for switch?

If it follows the format of Awakening and Fates as is generally assumed, I’d hope for the following:

– a setting other than Archanea or one directly tied to Archanea, either somewhere completely new or (possibly even better) one with ties to another setting that fills in some of the blanks that all FE settings have. I wouldn’t be opposed to another go at Fates’s world….

– either no breeding at all or breeding that actually ties into the plot. I’d prefer the former.

– more same-sex pairing options or at the very least substantive subtext, including for characters other than the Avatar.

– On that note, it’s not that I want another Avatar so much as I think they’re probably inevitable outside of remakes at this point. I imagine that at some point self-insert protagonists will get annoying to write around, but so long as they’re popular an interesting Avatar (like…um…drawing a blank here) is about the best we’ll be able to hope for.

– I’d like to see them continue on without weapon durability, though I think Fates’s weapon triangle needs another pass. It was very strange to have tomes alongside physical weapons, even if bows and daggers did pretty well.

– Light magic and, for the love of Crystal Dragon Jesus, pseudo-Catholic classes. Echoes did great in this regard, but that was a remake of a game with a highly visible quasi-Marian devotional religion already.

– not the vampire idea, because Nohr has enough leftovers from that concept for it to feel redundant – and because as a member of a (quasi-)aristocratic European culture frequently sensationalized as vampires and miscellaneous undead I’d be contractually obligated to complain about it.

– something like the Turnwheel would be nice, but I’d just as readily take FE10’s generous iteration of battle saves.

– Radiant Dawn (and Gaiden I think? Echoes didn’t keep this feature) are the only games so far to force at least one stat point increase on a level up. Why is this not a series standard?

Of course it’d be even better for FE16 to go off in its own direction, and that would match up with how often the series changes up its general look and feel, but that might be a long shot.

A guy who makes Role-playing games has criticised a map of New Orleans for being “unrealistic” and it’s gone viral

There are already lots of people having a laugh over this…interesting dissection of the New Orleans metropolitan area from someone who’s clearly never been here and knows nothing of the city or the history of its expansion. Worldbuilding enthusiasts can however take three lessons from this cartographical exposé:

1) There are logical reasons behind every one of the incongruities pointed out in the article, most of them related to the difficulty the city had in expanding outward over land in the mid-20th century since the entire region is so thoroughly waterlogged. Except the vast and intricately-mapped swamps outside the city – that’s just a feature of the terrain.

2) Names given to geographical features do not necessarily have to match up with their strict scientific descriptions. Lake Borgne is very obviously not a lake, but neither is Lake Pontchartrain which is really an unusually large and shallow brackish estuary. Both were named in the 18th century, and when contrasted against the Mississippi River and the abundant bayous and marshlands of southern Louisiana they do resemble lakes.

3) Scale is everything. The maps criticized in the article identify features of the entire metropolitan area. New Orleans proper, a.k.a. everything you think of when you think of this city if you’ve never been here, is all contained within this considerably more zoomed-in map:

(Also note that almost all of the area south of the river (which is called the Westbank, and yes this makes sense) is not included in New Orleans itself.)

The Vieux Carré is that rectangular block between streets just north of the “e” in “Orleans,” for reference. This is the Crescent City – note the shape of the river here – and everything else is just outlying settlements ranging from an approximation of standard American suburbia built over plantation land to remote fishing villages along key waterways to land that isn’t actually settled and almost certainly never will be because it’s uninhabitable marshland that’s also vanishing into the Gulf of Mexico at a disturbing pace.

So yes, builders of RPG worlds, don’t hesitate to be as outlandish as possible when designing the layouts of your settings, because there’s surely somewhere in the real world that will have you beat.

A guy who makes Role-playing games has criticised a map of New Orleans for being “unrealistic” and it’s gone viral