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Let's play a... game?
April 25th 2008, 02:36 CEST by bishop After spending several months not giving a damn, I finally got around to purchasing the orange box and I am now getting into playing Team Fortress 2 on a regular basis. This feels like a game that most of us have, and could probably get into organizing game nights around. So why not? Gabe's already going through the initial steps on server setup! Maybe it's a horrible idea doomed to failure (this topic sure seems like that!) but when was the last time all of us got together to play something? Enemy Territory? Bombing Run? And just think, there are no pants for me to steal! I've never made a topic before. I have no idea what I am doing. |
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Topic: Let's play a... game?
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Thanks TreeFrog. |
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Bob- I'll take one if you have one. |
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K, I sent it. Steam says the invite went to your cox address. "That's not to say that games shouldn't have stories, I just think the story should be the player's story, and find more ways to celebrate and promote that, rather than the game designer's story that you're imposing upon them." - Will Wright
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Thanks, Bob. |
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Manifold: Time was not very good. Rambled on a bit, covered a bunch of topics in various interesting ways, and then it ended. "Blizzard could easily appease the color-hostile fans by adding a graphics option that reduces chroma by 90% and brightness by 50%. And maybe changes all spoken text to goth poetry."
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Reading a Baxter novel is akin to self-flagellation. Moat.
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I enjoyed his book that was a sorta sequel to the Time Machine, but the rest, not so much. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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TreeFrog (#1656): Reading a Baxter novel is akin to self-flagellation. So... it's good, clean fun then? |
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Strange. I think I've read most of Stephen Baxter's novels and I'd say while none of them were "great", I enjoyed all of them. Perhaps I just have shitty taste. |
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Baxter is an old school style hard sci-fi writer. Take a BIG SCIENCE concept, explore it with a mediocre plot, make sure the concepts being examined are more interesting than any of the characters, and wind up with a flat, ambiguous ending. "Bioshock, sadly, is no Painkiller." - BobJustBob
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(Which is to say I like his books, but I know going into them they'll just be scaffolds for examining the core BIG SCIENCE idea) "Bioshock, sadly, is no Painkiller." - BobJustBob
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Speaking of sci-fi, I've read two recently by Joe Haldeman: 1. The Forever War (1975) 2. The Accidental Time Machine (2007) Both awesome. The Forever War had space marines in it g-man, you'd love it. The Forever War is crammed with commentary about war that would have been obviously relevant at the time and was eerily still pertinent. It was also pretty timeless, none of the tech described seemed outdated. Classic. The Accidental Time Machine was a light hearted adventure story I guess. Strange but fun. |
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#1657 by LPMiller I enjoyed his book that was a sorta sequel to the Time Machine, but the rest, not so much. Yeah that one was actually fun. "Blizzard could easily appease the color-hostile fans by adding a graphics option that reduces chroma by 90% and brightness by 50%. And maybe changes all spoken text to goth poetry."
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Joe haldeman is one of my favorite authors. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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Hey Owen, your package arrived yesterday. Thanks a lot, I owe you one! "Bioshock, sadly, is no Painkiller." - BobJustBob
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#1664 by LPMiller Joe haldeman is one of my favorite authors. I'll have to pick up some more. Got any recommendations? I've got these three already: The Forever War Camouflage The Accidental Time Machine |
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#1665 by Hugin Hey Owen, your package arrived yesterday. Thanks a lot, I owe you one! Glad to hear that Hugin. I hope it's useful. I ended up buying a copy from a B&M store here and it was actually quite helpful, ended up highlighting the fact that my TV was clipping off 3% of the picture in 1080p over HDMI. One firmware update later and I now have 1:1 pixel mapping in 1080p. |
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The Forever War is great. Game Developers: Don't forget the zombie monkeys.
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How timely, The Forever War is possibly a future Ridley Scott movie. I look forward to hearing about how much worse it will be compared to the book. |
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yeah, the Worlds trilogy. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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So, Fallout. Thanks to help from some crappers I finally got started with it, the first three times I ended up quitting in disgust as I was drowning in choices I couldn't grasp the meaning of. I also had some help from a coworker that guided me through the early Megaton interactions, guiding me to Moira and her Wasteland Survival Guide. That was a really important part, it's basically like a tutorial that slowly explains shit to you but I hadn't gotten it by myself because I'm such an RPG noob. Maybe they'll learn for their next game. Anyway, so I finally had a successful play that didn't end in sheer frustration. I played for twelve more hours total so I obviously found something to enjoy. But that's about as far as my enjoyment has taken me, the lure of their supposed open world no longer appeals, and if I were to play it again it'd just be to complete the main quest and everyone says that part of the game is rather pointless. So might as well stop, right? The way I see it there are three core problems that drag it down, preventing enjoyment, but I'll just go with my primary concern with this post. My biggest problem looking back is how drenched the game is with unknowable consequences. Right from the start you’re asked to choose between stats I didn't actually know the importance of, and the results was often negative. So I would level up, distribute my points, only to come across a door or a terminal moments later that required slightly higher skills than what I had chosen! One extremely frustrating time I was literally just around the corner of a terminal that required two more goddamn points in Science. Had I known I would’ve chosen to spent those points no problem. Fuck you for putting me in that position you stupid cunting game! NPCs suffer from the same problem. You can say something to a guy that has a permanent, detrimental, effect on your progress, and there’s nothing you can do to foresee it. But, some argue, it’s exciting and just like real life! If you take away consequences the game becomes meaningless! And indeed they’re right, consequences are good, I’m not complaining about consequences in principle. My problem is the specific way Fallout does it, when you can’t know how someone might react. Maybe that guy gets angry if you don’t have 100 bottlecaps for him now, so next time you talk he asks for 300. Maybe that girl won’t talk to you again if you say something rude the first time you converse. There are many more examples but I won’t bore you with them, suffice to say there are instances where you just can’t know beforehand. The result is that anyone you meet becomes this unsettling potential bomb of potentialities you might accidentally set off before you even know it. You might want to save before approaching a new NPC just in case they suddenly start shooting at you (I mean c’mon, seriously, I couldn’t even talk my way out of their aggressiveness!) Ironically, and tragically, all these random consequences have the opposite and catastrophic result of rendering the choices irrelevant. If you can’t know what happens next what difference does one choice make over another? If you help a guy will that accomplish anything or just make someone else angry? If you shoot him instead will anyone even notice? Sometimes everyone gets mad over a murder, other times they don’t even notice. Choices can be exciting in real life because of the relentless consistency of life, but Fallout is just a game. A game with gaping holes of inconsistencies at that. <EARLY-STORY SPOILAR!> I certainly couldn’t save my father, though I shot every threat quickly and efficiently. If he had just opened that goddamn glass door I could’ve taken out the people threatening him in a single VATS encounter, argh, why didn’t he just open it? Why couldn’t I break the glass? What could I have done to make the outcome different? Why do I have to accept that as an immutable facet of the story but still be expected to care what happens if I’m rude to some barkeep? </SPOILER> It destroys my immersion in the world since it destroys why I should care about the world and its supposed consequences. I don't buy it with all the inconsistencies, and soon all I see are the underlying triggers and thresholds. My own father referred to me as his son fer Christs sake, how can I be interested in what he has to say to me when he can't even get my gender right? Since I've long ago fully internalized the 'crap tradition of harshness and polarized opinions I might come off sounding like I think the game supersucks, but that's not really the whole story even if I do think the negatives outweigh the positives. Everyone else have already written about all the positive things though so I'm only focusing on the negatives here. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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Your wrongness is...sublime, gaggle. Just so sublime. "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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Right from the start you’re asked to choose between stats I didn't actually know the importance of, and the results was often negative. So I would level up, distribute my points, only to come across a door or a terminal moments later that required slightly higher skills than what I had chosen! This has more to do with the simi-linear open world game then "unknowable consequences". You simply aren't gonig to be able to open every lock and hack every terminal as soon as you find them, remember I told you to keep notes on places you might want to return too because of that. Also if your just a few points away you should have found/recived a lab coat fairly early that'll boost science there are also usualy some mentats hidden near most terminals that'll get you around a 5 point boost (look inside the open top wood crates Bethesda world designers really took to hideing stuff in there). My problem is the specific way Fallout does it, when you can’t know how someone might react. Maybe that guy gets angry if you don’t have 100 bottlecaps for him now, so next time you talk he asks for 300. Maybe that girl won’t talk to you again if you say something rude the first time you converse. NPCs react in a believable manor, insulting them gets them riled up as does an unbelievable lie. The only time they have an unforseen reaction is to speach challanges, which will always give you a % chance of sucess listed next to the option. For the most part they've avoided haveing a falure or pissing someone off lock you out of something completely. Usualy you'll just have to pay more, forfit part of a reward, or take a little longer path to get where you where going with that NPC. The few times you do get competely locked out there will be an alternative solution or quest line for it. <spoilers>There are a group of gouls living in the tunnels near tenpenny tower that are trying to get into the place. You can insault him the leader by acting like a bigot untill they attack you (he gives ample warning) locking you out of sideing with the gouls or finding a peaceful solution forceing you to side with the residents and report the gouls dead.</spoilers> If you shoot him instead will anyone even notice? Sometimes everyone gets mad over a murder, other times they don’t even notice. There are rules that govern such things. When ever you kill a nonhostile every person that liked them gets mad at you for it, so nobody gives a shit if you kill burke in megaton but will if you mess with say Gob. Don't forget garnishes such as: Fish shaped solid waste.
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Cheers for the response. I was already wearing the +5 Science item at that specific time when I was missing the two points, but to your credit I did forget about the menstats. Drats. I'm not complaining about the 100-skill-required doors in Megaton as such, I understand that some rewards are best saved for later. But when I come across terminals and locks deep underground in a place I'll only visit once, and they seem totally appropriate for my skilllevel too (because my natural progression has drifted me very close to having enough points to try them) I get frustrated when I come up juuuust shy of the requirement. I think that's a reasonable thing to be frustrated by.. Of course I understand why it happens since that's the kind of freeform RPG it is, so maybe I'm essentially complaining about an inherent trait of its genre. That's okay by me though, I just react to what I'm playing. #1673 by None-1a There are rules that govern such things. When ever you kill a nonhostile every person that liked them gets mad at you for it I think that sounds good on paper, but I killed the leader of Tenpenny tower that everyone seemed to love and there were no consequences whatsoever. Even dumped his body over the tower. That was confusing to me, even if there's an intricate system behind it to explain why that's so. And I'm pretty sure I've talked to NPCs that I could be snippy with without consequences, but others would become angry if I gave them a bit of lip. So do I load after pissing off Gob because he's all sensitive, or do I sweettalk everyone I meet because I'm now afraid any one of them could be the sensitive type? I really don't think it's consistent or clear in any way, but if you enjoy their system then I guess that goes a long way to explain your like of the game. I don't want to be right here or whatever, I don't mean to start an argument. I'm just posting my experience and enjoy its reflection in other's experience. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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It's the oblivion system of sometimes shit you do has consequences and sometimes it doesn't and stop caring about it. |
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I think there is a fundamental disconnect between what you want from fallout 3, and what it's willing to give you. A lot of those issues are on the level of "I would like RTS games, if the combat wasn't real time." It's not that you're wrong specifically, it's just that when it comes to major design decisions, you and the game aren't seeing eye to eye. First, you have to let go the of the impulse that you're going to experience the whole game in one play through. Fallout 3 is designed so that you are not going to be able to 100% it in one session. You just can't. You might not be able to 60% it. Yes, some choices are better then others and you don't know how things will turn out, but just as much as wandering the map, finding out choices and how they affect characters and the world are part of the exploration process. It's something to embrace, not be scared of. You seem to want something much more deterministic, where you can plan ahead and hit everything you want to hit, like a tour book, where the game wants to let you out on the streets and let the fates take you where they may. You play the game, see what you see, then the next time you can do it differently if you choose. This "unsettling potential bomb of potentialities" is what makes it interesting, instead of pushing a button to get a piece of cheese as a reward, which is the usual videogamey way to do it. If you really, really want the cheese I'm sure there are FAQs being written as I type that will let you grab everything you want. Otherwise, just do what you can, and do the rest next time. It's not perfect of course, like the spoiler you mentioned is an instance of bad scripting, and a place I think they strayed from their design goals. The main plot is restrictively linear, and feels out of place oddly enough. This one is actually much more guided then the previous fallout games. Here they at least tell you to go to Megaton right away and give you signs pointing the way. I never felt as lost as I did in the previous games. gaggle (#1671): Choices can be exciting in real life because of the relentless consistency of life I don't get it, what does that mean? What relentless consistency? |
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He's right about the lockpicking and hacking though, those are garbage. This is why you don't do minigames for shit like that. Not only because FUCK YOU AND DIE MINIGAMES GTFO but also because the game has to treat them completely differently. Everything else in the game has a percentage chance of success based on the character's skill. Instead the game says OH YOUR SKILL IS 49 SO SORRY COME BACK NEXT LEVEL LOSER even though every lock is picked in exactly the same way and every terminal is hacked in exactly the same way. If you can do one you can do them all. fuck America
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gaggle, i think you only play games so you can over analyze them to death. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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I meant that my actual father never gets confused about my gender :) For whatever reason the game's inconsistencies really bugged me, I think because it actually got me caring a lot to begin with so it was extra frustrating to have that slowly slipping away. You're right that me and the game don't see eye to eye, which is also why I don't think the game is omglol-sucks or the likes. The problem has more to do with me than it, basically, I guess I want something other than what the classic RPG genre offers. Your explanation makes plenty of sense though, I can get a feel for what you get out of the game and it's clearly enjoyable. I won't play it any more but I'm satisfied with the twelve hours I managed to put in. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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Lp, how else to learn about oneself? Can't just watch the telly all day long. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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You could...I don't know...go outside? Meet women? Go to museums? Ride a bike? Eat at a nice restaurant? "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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He can do all that in WoW, can't he? "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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The fuck, museums?, I'd make an age joke if it weren't you saying that. And if I wanted to meet women I'd play WoW, pff (I'm starting WoW up again tomorrow..). But I don't have to cover it up in jokes, I really do find games fascinating and I do like talking about them. Talking about games (and other forms of entertainment too) is just about the most interesting subject I can think of. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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that.....is really kinda sad. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" - "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
"LP, your big balls are a religion." - Jibble |
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Museums are the best. I try to go to one in every city that I visit. My favorite is the Air and Space Museum at Balboa Park, San Diego. I've been there at least 3 times in the past 12 years. 52 Weeks and Something's On Movie Blog
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Nope. That's a classic simple response, grats on that. I don't know if there's anything much more core human than the games we play and the stories we tell. It's all communication and psychogy in the end. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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I was at an art gallery showing M.C. Escher recently, I liked surprisingly many of his drawings. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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I can probably spell psycology correctly if given enough time, sigh. In my defense I'm posting all this from the iPhone, have mercy. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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I was at an art gallery showing M.C. Escher recently, I liked surprisingly many of his drawings. I love the one with the ants. "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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#1683 by gaggle The fuck, museums?, I'd make an age joke if it weren't you saying that. Museums are fucking awesome gaggle. You may be dead inside. |
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Yeah, that was my reaction as well. I've loved museums since I was old enough to walk. Art, history, science; I like them all. "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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I've seen enough shit that I have to make the comment that it depends on the museum in question. But sure, some are good. And yes I really am. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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You'd like my city. It's a Baroque city with a lot of museums and things to see. It's been named as one of Germany's ten most beautiful cities, and rightfully so, I say. "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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Also, gaggle, how far from Kiel, Germany, do you live? "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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#1692 by gaggle And yes I really am. A navel-gazing dork? Yeah, we already knew that. "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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Looks like a pretty neat city, FoRmaT. Damn you Euros with your long histories! "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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And, if you want to see a really cool museum; U-995 is awesome. "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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Thanks, Ergo! It's a joy for the eye to walk around here. Everything is really beautiful. If I eventually do find a nice job here (unemployment is at about 6%, but much of that low figure is consequence of the aforementioned 400€-jobs, which *suck*), I might very well stay here. I just love the parks, lakes, old churches... "Action stars of two decades ago shot .44 bullets out of their cocks. Honestly, if me and Charles Bronson were in the same room I'd kill myself just to make sure he didn't hurt me."
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I was last in Europe in 1995, and visited Holland, southern Germany, Czech Republic and Austria. The architecture is spectacular. I was particularly impressed by Prague and Vienna. Also, the amazing difference in the accents of the German and Austrian dialects made it sound like two separate languages. "Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr. Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." --Kenneth
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#1695 by Ergo A navel-gazing dork? Yeah, we already knew that. Now you're just being mean. "Common sense; it is so rare, it is a god damn superpower."
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