I think that’s the right approach. Once it starts getting old it won’t get better. That being said, the writing of the DLCs does not have the problem of the main story and are often pretty good. If getting access to all your character’s abilities wasn’t attached to playing the main story I would advise skipping the main game and only playing the DLCs.

I, like you, heard the story was bad but figured I could just focus on the gameplay and ignore the writing. Unfortunately, the reason the bad writing is so notorious is that the game is setup to jam it in your face consantly. It’s unrelenting.

Imagine playing a pretty decent game while a dead-eyed 50 year old comedian is making the worst jokes you’ve ever heard in your life while doing a very poor impression of gen-z internet slang they barely understand. The comedian thinks you the player are actually stupid so the jokes are as condescending as they are awful. Now imagine they won’t shut up. Every time you do anything in the game, you get a few minutes of these whacky jokes. Accepting a mission, every bullet of the mission, skits that you have to watch before progressing, etc. You have no choice but to engage with the lazy, insulting, horrendous writing that wears thin after minutes and goes on for the entire hours-long game.

There are mods that disable the endless chatter which I can’t recommend more highly. I made the misake of playing the game raw. The game is actually pretty fun, but the aggressive garbage of the writing is not something easily ignored.

Definitely. They could do something about this but they would make less profit.

This is, very unfortunately, what happens in every internet space which is targeted towards children and allows communication among users. It is by far the easiest way for anonymous predatory adults to make contact with typically unattended children. I would like at some point to see a child-oriented space on the internet have the highest priority of children’s safety at some point, but there hasn’t been one yet.

I think a lot of people are neglecting to think of Biden’s lifetime record in public office. The United States is the nation on Earth with the greatest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned and we have Biden’s 1994 crime bill in large part to thank for that. Unfortunately it wasn’t terribly shocking when he went on to be more supportive of the Palestinian genocide than any other president in US history other than Trump.

I wish. You’re giving right-wingers way too much credit. Most of those craven idiots do it for free for the opportunity to lose themselves in a gaggle of other morons. They are vulnerable in a way that is easy to exploit for people who know how to do it.

Keep pulling until you get hierarchy out.

From Wikipedia:

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

I’ve never understood why there is any confusion over the word “tankie.” It applies to the pro-cop left. If a leftist believes that it’s necessary for cops to beat minorities and dissidents into submission for their society to function, they’re tankies. If they approach leftism in a way that does not involve state violence against civilians to enforce those ideas, they’re not tankies. To me there isn’t a lot of gray area.