Month: November 2015

I’m SO conflicted about Star Wars Battlefront

Posted on by Nimgimli

Star Wars Battlefront launches tomorrow. I haven’t pre-ordered it yet, but I’ve come close a few times. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do.

You see in the beta, and during EA Access’s “Early Access” period that started late last week, I’ve found the Walker Assault and Supremacy modes to be really fun, but the rest of the game feels like throw-away content. And I like the meta aspects of SW:Battlefront. Here, at last, is a competitive multiplayer game for the rest of us. The e-jocks hate it because anyone can jump in and have fun. The blasters have no recoil and long ranges which I’m told (by commenters on various posts, so it must be true) makes Battlefront a “no skill” game. To which I say “Good, you e-jocks take your attitudes and go back to COD or where ever is in vogue among your kind.” I almost feel a responsibility to pick the game up just to support this decision.

The modes I love most really capture the feel of Star Wars well, too. I frequently find myself just kind of taking it all in. The first time a Tie-Fighter comes screaming out of the sky, clips an obstacle and spins out of control before crashing in a fiery explosion right in front of your face…well if that doesn’t evoke some kind of a smile you’re just no Star Wars fan.

There’s no voice chat in Battlefront which is another reason the e-jocks hate it, and another reason I love it. I can jump into a game and play and not have to listen to crappy music or racial slurs, or be told how much I suck. I can just have fun and do that thing I do where in my imagination the folks I’m playing with are decent people rather than the awful, awful individuals I usually meet in MP games. (And of course if you WANT to chat with your friends you can just start a Party out of game and chat that way.) With 20 people per team (again, in the 2 modes I like) it’s easy to blend in and just be OK and not wind up at the bottom of the charts and feel like you’re dragging your team down. Usually the people on the bottom just spawned into the game shortly before it ended, anyway. You can pretend to be one of those guys! In any case, the point, for me, is not to win (though I do try). It’s to spend a few minutes experiencing a Star Wars battle from the inside.

But it IS generally “a few minutes.” It’s not a game I find myself playing for hours at a time. I jump in, do a few matches, get my fix and move on to something else. Is that worth $60?

If this was a single player experience it’d be an easy choice: Wait for a sale or something. But if I’m going to play I kind of want to play it while the servers are nice and full and games spawn quickly. Plus with new Star Wars movie out next month, there’s the whole Star Wars fever aspect.

But the other big downside is the crazy-expensive season pass. The base game is $60, the season pass is $50. I wouldn’t care about this except for the fact that Season Pass holders get access to new content 2 weeks ahead of everyone else. That means if you don’t have the season pass and opt to buy DLC, you’re going to be experiencing it for the first time playing against people who’ve spent 2 weeks mastering the nuances of the maps. Since this really ISN’T an e-jock kind of game, that might not be as big of a problem as it sounds. but in general I don’t like how hard they’re trying to motivate us to spend $50 on a season pass of mostly unknown content.

Of course if I just opt to buy the initial game and say no to all DLC, that doesn’t impact me at all.

So pros, cons, confusion. It’d also be easier if I hadn’t purchased so many great games lately. I’m still pretty heavily invested in Fallout 4. If Battlefront had launched last summer I would’ve been all over it. I could wait, but again I kind of want the full server experience (and to not be the one level 1 guy playing with a bunch of level 50 characters).

Maybe I should flip a coin…

What was but now is not. (Fallout 4 random events)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I had an odd thing happen in Fallout 4 and wondered if anyone else has seen this kind of thing. This post will contain minor spoilers for random (I think!?) events.

So I was headed out past Tenpines Bluff for the first time, traveling pretty much directly east. I came to a small cliff and at the bottom was a derailed train. Climbed down and met a woman selling a Brahmin. Bought it and asked her to deliver it to one of my settlements. Started checking out the train and got jumped by some ghouls. My dog and I took care of them in short order. While looting the bodies I heard voices.

I followed them to a small shack and inside were two men, one threatening the other with a gun. Both were named Art and both looked alike. It was the classic sci-fi conundrum of which man was the real dude, and which was the carbon copy. I tried to use my powers of persuasion to de-escalate the situation but failed. (Had I known I was going to have to be persuasive I would’ve slipped into my sequin dress and replaced my welder’s goggles with sexy sunglasses!) In the end I was pretty much forced to attack one of them, which I did. He put up quite a fight but I won. The other Art thanked me and started wandering off but then curiosity got the better of me (me, in this case, referring to the player, not the character) and I attacked the 2nd Art too, already planning to reload my last save game but just curious if I’d be able to tell which was the “real” Art by the corpses. My plan went awry when he killed me, though.

So I loaded the save game I had from Tenpines Bluff and headed in the same direction. Found the same woman selling the same cow and I bought it again. Started searching the train but did NOT get jumped by ghouls this time. Then I noticed Art wandering down the tracks away from the train. I chased after him and tried to talk to him but he said “I just want to be left alone.” and kept going. I went back to the shack where I’d seen the two Arts arguing in my other game and found a corpse…of Art. And a synth core. So I guess this time the real Art took care of the Synth without any help from me (even though I believe I got to the scene a little faster thanks to no ghouls).

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m kind of excited about the possibility that the game world kind of chugs along without you, and so depending on when or where you are, or maybe depending on a random number generated when you start or load a game, you’re going to experience difference events in different play-throughs, or the same events in different ways, or… something.

I mean the reality is it’ll be a miracle if I actually finish Fallout 4, but still it’s nice to think that if I do finish it and love it so much I want to play through it a second time, some of my experiences will be different.

Darkness on the edge of town (when the town is post-apocalyptic Boston)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Lookin good, General!
If one is to be a general,
one must look the part
Like many other folks, I’ve been playing Fallout 4 this week. By now you’re probably sick to death of blog posts about it. Never let it be said that I shy away from annoying people, so here’s another.

I want to talk about nights in Fallout 4. I’m still early in the game. Level 4 or 5. (I didn’t play Wednesday night so I’m behind everyone.) At my level damn near everything is a danger. There’s an alpha wild mongrel out there that has killed me 3 times already (pro tip: you need to save your game…it’s been so long since I played a game that I needed to save in that I keep forgetting!)

Last night I was working on an early quest, traveling back and forth cross-country. By day the land seems dead aside from the odd killer bug or wild dog or pack of mole rats. But while I was in a building, night fell. Now I had to hike back to Sanctuary in the dark.

I have to say, Bethesda NAILED the night time. It’s not realistically dark, which would be no fun at all. But it’s dark enough that you’ll, for example. see a tree stump in the distance and for a second think it’s a raider. In real-life terms it’s like late dusk, that time when shadows play tricks on your eyes. (In my typically disorganized fashion, I neglected to capture any nighttime screenshots, sorry!)

But even better than the darkness are the lights. If you get up to a high spot during the night and look out over the wilderness you’ll see lots of lights. What are they? I find myself really torn between curiosity and fear. Of course in many cases curiosity won out. Some of the lights are abandoned camp fires (though I’ve been jumped while pawing through these sites looking for valuables when the owner returned from wherever NPCs go), some are camps of raiders. Some are camps of friendlies. And some are just glowing fungus.

I find it really eerie traveling by night in Fallout 4, which seems to be how it should feel.

Of course you can use an “exploit” if you don’t like that feeling. Tapping your VATS button gives you the equivalent of night vision since it’ll highlight any potential targets nearby. I try to resist the urge to use it, but at the same time I’m glad its there for when it’s getting late (in real life) and I just want to finish a quest before bed.

So far I’m really enjoying Fallout 4, which is a nice surprise because I never got very far in Fallout 3, which felt kind of tedious to me. So far Fallout 4 feels a lot more streamlined when it comes to stuff like searching for loot, inventory management and conversations.

Now I just need to find my dog. We were headed for home last night when we stumbled into a camp of raiders. I never even saw them until they started shooting. I had to run, finding enough cover to take a shot every now and then. I killed three or four of them but I was nearly finished myself. I found good cover and ate some food which made me feel better. I started back towards the raiders when a mole rat jumped me, and it wasn’t alone. There were three or four of those ugly creatures and by the time I killed them, I was so turned around I wasn’t sure where the raider camp was. And then I noticed my dog was missing.

I stumbled around in the dark, hoping to find the dog, or the raider camp, or even one of the corpses, but found nothing. Eventually I headed back to Sanctuary, sad and alone. Tomorrow I’ll go searching for my dog. Maybe he returned to the Red Rocket gas station where I first found him.

A different kind of stress

Posted on by Nimgimli

As of today it’s been one week since I stopped writing for ITworld (last Tuesday in a marathon writing session I banged out 3 posts and scheduled them for the remainder of the week). This change has had quite an impact on me. I’ve caught myself laughing more, being silly more and just, in general, feeling less tense.

Except when I’m not. Basically I’ve traded time-pressure stress for financial stress. I’m not sure how it’s going to feel once that extra check stops coming in so I’ve been fretting about that. But the difference between time stress and money stress (for me at least) is that time stress is constant. I often spent most of my day stressing about what I’d write about next. There was always a new deadline coming. Even when I took time off from the day job, I had the blog to worry about.

Financial stress is actually more intense (because it’s nice to have a home to live in, for example) but I seem able to ‘put it away.’ There’s not much I can do minute-to-minute about money, but I could, in theory, always be writing or researching a blog post. I used to check my RSS reader at least 6-8 times every day in order to keep up, for example.

The end result, so far, is a happier, more relaxed me. I find myself doing the WEIRDEST things. Last night after dinner I sat and read the newspaper. And I mean an actual, made-of-ground-up-wood newspaper. We subscribed to the Sunday paper mostly for the coupons (see above re: financial stress) but I’m finding myself leafing through it and reading about stuff I’d never otherwise read.

In terms of gaming I’m enjoying time-gobbling activities like going for fast lap records in Drive Club. The blogging me never had the patience to drive lap after lap trying to shave a second off my time because it felt like I was wasting precious time. If a game activity didn’t offer constant in-your-face stimulus I would bail on it as too time-consuming. But now I have free time to do things. I no longer have to decide what one thing I’ll do in an evening, there’s time to do several things.

Overall it’s a pretty good feeling, and worth having to cut some corners financially in order to maintain it. As long as we’re safe and warm and can pay stuff like medical bills and buy new shoes every so often, I think I’ll stick to this one job idea. I kind of dig it.

The problems with Steam Machines that Gabe Newell doesn’t talk about

Posted on by Nimgimli

Did you folks read Develop’s interview with Gabe Newell, talking about Steam Machines?

One quote:

�At console price points, we�re going to have machines like Alienware�s, which are faster than today�s consoles,� said Newell. �So the same price point as today, except you get better performance and you�re connected to everything you like about the PC and the internet.�

I’ll take at face value his assertion that the AlienWare Steam Machine is faster than the Xbox One and PS4 (would love to hear opinions on that) but Newell is playing fast and loose with “console price points.” The Alienware starts at $450. The Xbox One and PS4 both start at $350. If my math is correct, that means that Alienware is about 29% more expensive than the consoles. My wallet, at least, says that’s not the same price point.

Of course there’s a lot more to costs here. Maybe you already have a big library of Steam Games, or you’re rubbing your hands greedily thinking of the Steam Holiday Sale. Truth is over the course of a few years a Steam Machine + software will probably end up being cheaper than a console + games (this depends on a lot of personal variables, and how patient you are about waiting for sales).

Newell goes on to talk about “knock(ing) down the barriers that keep PC gaming out of the living room” which is something I heartily approve of. The relatively low cost of Steam Machines should help with that, and the Steam Controller is supposed to help, too. More and more PC games also support traditional gamepads.

But there are still problems. Many Steam games have user interfaces intended to be used from 2 feet away, and trying to use them at typical TV-to-viewer distances (say 8-10′) is tough. If Steam Machines catch on we can hope more developers keep couch-gaming in mind and offer UI options that work from a distance, but we’re not there yet. I think it would help if Steam added some kind of “couch friendly” indicator to its game pages. You know, in the section where it indicates controller support and whether the game has Steam Achievements.

The other big limitation to Steam Machines is Steam. These are Steam Machines, not PC gaming machines. Sure we all love Steam but you’re not going to play World of Warcraft or League of Legends on a Steam Machine since (as far as I can tell anyway, correct me if I’m wrong) those games don’t run on SteamOS or Steam. And it goes without saying you’re not going to play Halo 5 or Destiny on a Steam Machine.

If you’re a PC gamer who just wants to be able to go play some of your game collection on the sofa, a Steam Machine might be a fine solution, but I don’t see Valve convincing many console gamers to exchanging their PS4s or XBox Ones for Steam Machines. The ecosystem just isn’t there yet, in my opinion.

Disclosure: I don’t have a Steam Machine. I went for the bastardized route of the Steam Link and Steam Controller, so I’m streaming games from my PC to the Steam Link. Streaming, I have to admit, injects yet another set of issues into the process. On the other hand going this route means I can (in theory) play games on Steam that only run on Windows, not SteamOS. In practice whenever I try to use the Steam Link, after spending 20-30 minutes of fiddling with Steam Controller settings and trying to find a UI I can see, I just shut everything down and fire up a no-hassle console.

Scientist vs Lawyer: How I’m going to try to be a better blogger

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple weeks ago I was watching Star Talk (Neil deGrasse Tyson’s show). His guest that night was Bill Clinton. One of the interesting points made (and forgive me, I don’t recall exactly who said what) is that we need more scientists in government, and fewer lawyers. (Lawyer is the most common pre-politics job in congress, apparently.)

The reasoning was that scientists based their views on evidence. They look at the evidence and then form a statement based on it. Lawyers, on the other hand, are trained to work backwards from a goal (e.g. this person is innocent/guilty) and present supporting evidence to bolster their goal and weaken opposing views. Evidence that doesn’t support their goal doesn’t get presented. Yes, this is a huge oversimplification and I don’t want to get into politics here, but it lodged in my brain.

Too often (when blogging) I act like a lawyer rather than a scientist. In other words (purely hypothetical example) I’ll think to myself “I should write a blog post about how the PS4 is a better media streamer than the Xbox One.” When I come up with the idea, I’m assuming it’s true. Then I start gathering data to support my assertion. If I find data that doesn’t support it, it’s really tempting to just kind of push that data aside.

A more scientist-y way to approach a blog post is to ask myself a question: “Which is the better media streamer, the PS4 or the Xbox One?” Then I’d go gather as much data as possible, determine the answer to the best of my abilities, and then write the post, possible changing the question to the answer at that point: “Here’s why the Xbox One is the better media streamer.”

I’m inherently stubborn so once I decide something is true it’s really hard for me to change my mind. That was touched on in the Star Talk episode too. Too often our society views changing our mind as a sign of weakness. (Remember they were talking about politicians.) If a politician says they’re pro-{insert any policy} and then new evidence is presented that causes the politician to change their mind and become anti-{insert that same policy here} then too often the politician is seen as weak, wishy-washy, or not fully committed. In science though (according to the folks on Star Talk!) being willing to change your opinion based on new evidence is seen as a positive thing.

Moving forward I’m going to try to embrace my inner scientist more. To start the posting process by asking a question and then letting the facts answer that question; to base my views on the evidence and data I have available; and finally to be willing to change my opinion based on new/changing evidence.

As a corollary, another thing I need to work on is saying “Thanks” when someone corrects me. Too often when I state something that is incorrect and someone corrects me, my first impulse is to dig for data or a way to spin things so I can still appear to be right. That’s my ego at work. The wiser course of action is 1) confirm that the correction itself is accurate and assuming it is 2) thank the person for making me a tiny bit smarter that day.

Reinvigorating the pursuit of mythical fire-lizard critters

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hey if you’re reading this, I want to thank you for being one of the 3 people…. oh wait, that one is a bot. OK I want to thank you for being one of the 2 people to still have Dragonchasers in your RSS feed.

For the past five and a half years (give or take) I’ve been writing a blog at ITworld called The TechnoFile. It’s been an amazing opportunity, but over time Dragonchasers really suffered because of it. For a few years I managed to keep both going, but eventually I started to run out of steam and got to the point where I just didn’t have it in me to write for this blog after finishing my work for that one. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know!

Anyway, this Friday my last post for The TechnoFile will run. Suddenly I’ll have a lot more time in the evenings (that was a side job…I do have a 9-5 full time gig as well) and I’ve been thinking maybe I should try to revive Dragonchasers.

I’m not 100% sure there’s still an audience for gaming-blogs being written by some schmo with no insider info; I kind of feel like social media may have replaced personal blogs. But what the hell, it’s worth a try. I do have a huge list of marketing and PR contacts at this point, though I’m not sure how long they’ll be interested in engaging with me as a solo act. I guess we’ll see.

Even without support, I can go back to rambling about the games I play and whatever else moves me. It’ll be nice to be able to write about anything I like rather than sticking to the (admittedly rather broad) ‘beat’ that I was assigned to at ITworld.

Anyway again, thanks for sticking around. Once posts start rolling out I might ask a favor; I might need some help getting word out and maybe boosting my audience to 4, or even 5 (!) people.