#like story stuff and housing and the implementation of new game mechanics basically

[princess-of-the-corner]

FNaF AU Inspired Pizzeria Simulator

Okay so, now that I’m at my computer, I can share that idea:

So basically, the opening cutscene would be a lot like the opening cutscene of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator, but it’s narrated by Charlie as she recaps her character arc up to this point, up to and including the fact that she killed William Afton TWICE.

But now she’s inherited the IP, the ruins of the original location, and the original animatronics.

Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza carries a bit too much baggage in Hurricane, Utah to run it there, and so Charlie heads out of town to try and reclaim her legacy.

At the end of the cutscene, the tutorial begins, with Charlie purchasing a vacant building to turn into the new and OSHA compliant Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. In the set-up phase, Charlie can make changes to the Pizzeria, purchase items from the catalog, restock food and merchandise, hire and/or fire staff, playtest games, stuff like that. (Note: Catalogue Animatronics cannot Free Roam.)

After you click the “Open for Business” button, you then play as Charlie in her office as she has to deal with problems as they arrive (equipment malfunctioning, accidents need to be cleaned, etc.) and try to resolve problems as they arrive. Golden Freddy followed Charlie from Utah, and will use his ghostly powers to break things and try to drive Charlie out of business, serving as the primary antagonist of the campaign. Additionally, Charlie will periodically have to change the settings on the “Global Music Box” to keep the patrons from getting irritated by the same songs playing all the time. Charlie can also run Showtime to make the Animatronics perform. From Day 2 til the end of the story, Charlie can also use her computer to research each of the MCI victims, to try and figure out how to lay their souls to rest.

It is impossible to die here, but the Pizzeria may close early if someone is injured during business hours.

When closing time rolls around, everyone cleans up shop and heads home, where Charlie either Settles or Disputes any lawsuits the Pizzeria might have acquired, and if she’s done enough research, she can choose to salvage one of the haunted animatronics she inherited.

Charlie can choose to salvage any Animatronic as long as she’s done enough research regarding the child haunting it, and this is where the horror elements come in. In a combination of the Salvage Sequences from Pizzeria Simulator and the Parts & Service Minigames from Help Wanted, Charlie has to try and appease the ghost haunting the animatronic so she can free their soul and dismantle the animatronic for parts. These serve as the boss battles.

Failing a salvage results in Charlie getting jumpscared and injured, necessitating that the player pay a hospital bill. Success, however, results in a cutscene where the murdered child provides some closure to the story arc presented by Charlie’s research, giving us an idea of what they were like in life, and providing some context regarding Golden Freddy. After they depart, Charlie unlocks the corresponding Toy Animatronic.

These animatronics can be customized to a greater extant than the catalogue animatronics, complete with having unlockable alternate suits AND potential free roaming. However, all behavioral upgrades must be tested and debugged BEFORE they can be implemented during Business Hours. Charlie can be Jumpscared while Debugging, necessitating a trip to the hospital and leaving the Business Hours to be handled by an NPC.

The more popular the pizzeria gets, the more aggressive Golden Freddy becomes during business hours, causing more workplace incidents.

After Charlie has salvaged all four animatronics and met some other requisite (5-star Pizzeria?), her house is visited by none other than Fredbear, the source of the Golden Freddy apparition.

Fredbear serves as a bit of a boss rush at first, forcing Charlie to repeat some of the mechanics from the Salvage Sequences, before Charlie is able to escape him and hide in her panic room, where she must keep herself safe from 12AM-6AM, all the while Fredbear is giving her a “Reason You Suck” Speech for reopening Freddy’s and trying to revive the brand, and also astral projects Golden Freddy to have him act like one of the Phantom Animatronics from FNaF3. If Fredbear catches you at any point, hospital bill. After 6AM rolls around, Charlie is actually able to speak with Fredbear and, the other spirits vouch for her. With that, the final spirit is laid to rest, and Golden Freddy will no longer sabotage your pizzeria.

Sandbox Mode is unlocked, as is the option to replay any of the Salvage Segments you wish.

If Charlie’s funds dip into the negative (be it from Lawsuits or Hospital Bills), she’ll go Bankrupt, resulting in a Game Over. If the Hazard Level goes too high, the Pizzeria will be closed due to OSHA violations, and Charlie will be arrested for Criminal Negligence, resulting in a Game Over.

In the closing cutscene viewed when wrapping up the story, however, Charlie narrates how far she’s come, and even notes that, if William Afton does come back, she’ll be ready for him.

What do you think?

-

I love this so much actually. It’s a greaat rundown of what I wanted to happen between games!

#submission #fnaf au #tw fnaf

[horrorvalegame]

December 2022 Progress Report - Sparkling Vampires

...

......

...

It speaks for itself, doesn't it?

It took months of effort, but Acts 1, 2, 3, AND 4 have all been polished.

From tiny little description changes to entirely new sections added or changed, all four acts are now in a state of "basically being release ready!" so to speak.

Of course, there's still a lot of work ahead of us, but this was an important milestone to reach.

Up until now, myself and my team of Testers have only been able to play the game "in chunks" because certain parts were incomplete or under construction. But now, with the exception of the final boss and ending, we can play HorrorVale from the moment Alice walks out of her room to beating the Act 4 Boss.

Hitting this was a great place to send off 2022, and a great place to START 2023 fresh.

One of the major hurdles jumped over to get to here is the completion of a brand new Dungeon in Act 1.

Savvy HorrorVale fans will remember the Forgotten Mansion, that really gray old house from Act 1 with the funny Pink Guy.

Well, in order to improve pacing, it's since been moved to Act 2, and in it's place a brand new dungeon has appeared.

The HorrorVale Police Department

Did you ever wonder where all those Frankenling police officers actually work?

Well, they work here!

In the midst of all this Creepy Chaos, the HVPD have managed to lure one of the scamps into a cell in their station. Unfortunately for them, it immediately broke out and caused havoc in the station, cutting the power and trapping several Officers inside.

In order to get access to one of the Generators required to get to the Mayor's Lab, Alice will have to brave the Station and come face to face with one of the nastiest Creepies out there.

Most players exploring the town for the first time will encounter this place before encountering any of the other Generators, and the great thing about this new dungeon is that it not only acts as a better addition to the overall story of Act 1 (Frankenlings and the Mayor's influence), but it also provides an actual proper introduction into what Creepies actually ARE.

Do you remember playing Act 1 and hearing people talking about Creepies but... Never really understanding WHAT they were talking about?

You guessed that maybe that weird guy that took your dog must be one but... How many people also knew that Mark the Murderer was a Creepy?

Through this new dungeon, you'll not only meet an incredibly fearsome Creepy first hand, but the characters will give you a bit more insight into what Alice is actually dealing with.

To fans of Resident Evil, they'll probably feel right at home at this place.

And while we're on the topic of Act 1, a few other changes were made as well. For instance that one Generator by the Abandoned Shack actually has a proper "Puzzle" behind it now, even though it's more like an introduction to a mechanic you'll use later.

Another puzzle that was replaced was in the Mayor's Lab, where that kind of really lazy chest memory puzzle has been replaced with something a bit more interesting.

To anyone who's already played through Act 1 with the Demo, all these changes should help with ensuring it still feels fresh for you when you play the Full Game.

So what's next?

Next on the list is Sidequests and Second Quests.

There's a whopping total of 60 Sidequests in the game, and although all the Party Member recruitment quests are complete, there's a handful of non-PM quests we want to implement as well as the Second Quests/Ultimates Moves. This is the next big hurdle and one we'll be running straight toward in January.

The largest challenge here being the Second Quests and Ultimate Moves. Ultimate Moves are essentially extremely powerful moves all Party Members have that can only be used once per battle and are generally pretty costly. They're your big reward for doing that particular character's Second Quests.

So, that essentially means... 31 Animations to coincide with them, all surely much more impactful than any of their regular moves. Fun stuff!

(Early Ultimate Move Activation concept art)

In the previous Progress Report, we mentioned that we'd talk more about our 2023 Plans in THIS Progress Report. Well... Not yet.

We have something in store that's not quite ready yet, and when THAT happens, then we'll be more willing to openly talk about our plans for 2023.

Just stay tuned!

#horrorvale #progress report #hv #horror vale

[kjclfaller]

Cough cough cough cough leaks spoil hype send post

#whether or not eula or yanfei get released in 1.5 im not going to be pulling for them #im not upset that the characters were leaked but because their leak was also paired with the leaking of major updates #like story stuff and housing and the implementation of new game mechanics basically #it puts a sour taste in my mouth to see yall disrespect game devs like this #say as much as you want about how it doesn't matter since mihoyo is a huge company #it's someone's work that's still in production so to see them spoiled without permission so readily #really confirms that yall dont care about artists/creators/the game design and dev team and its SO so annoying #leaking on the pretense that it doesnt matter bc the company is huge is actually so stupid #bc in the end they're still gonna create and plan things for you?? and you're still gonna play the game and support them?? #you're a consumer and to disrespect creators like this is just horrible #i dont even care if the big people at mihoyo feel hurt about this #all i care about is the dev and design team because we dont know what goes on behind the scenes anyway #they could already be disrespected by the big guys in the shadows and the leaks will just add to it #also yall saying its okay to leak bc mihoyo didn't implement proper security in genshin impact #i hope yall know the dev team and security team and qa team are usually different people so to lump them all in like that is shit #sorry im still really pressed bc im just thinking about the dev and design team being so proud of their work only to get leaked like this #its been a hot minute so im quite late to the party but wow yall are bad #me not pulling for eula or yanfei isn't a statement btw - in fact it would be better if i did as a way to support the people who made them #i just don't want to pull because of personal preference and i associate them too much with the leaks which i hate #long story short stop leaking pls think of the artists #smh artists will never have their work be respected #rant #kjcl talking #genshin impact

[fandom-scatteredthoughtsonpaper]

Dark Obey Me AU Outline, Breakdown, Game Mechanic + Specifics, + Some Other Stuff

{Previous post}

Kickoff and Quick Summarization:

Leviathan won a new preliminary horror game with VR aspects from a contest to test the game out before its actual release and invited Mammon and Yuki (MC) to play. This experimental immersion becomes too realistic when Yuki's latent powers takes the experience of the game to new levels when the entire House of Lamentation is sucked into the virtualization. Yuki, now alone and confused to the rules of this blended world of reality and simulation, has to venture through the house and recover the brothers from the game's influence. The game seems a little rigged the more Yuki advanced, so is someone actually pulling strings off screen or is paranoia seeping in?

Type of AU:

Mirror Universe, Interactive AU (you can help build up the world of this event)

Potential tags:

Horror, Psychological, Bloody, Dark, Angsty, Possible Sexual Assault, Death Is Allowed, Bodily Harm

Brief (and Liable to Change) Explanation of How the Game Will Work:

-After the House of Lamentation is shifted and adapted into the game's world, the seven demon brothers are also adapted to the elements of the psychological horror genre and placed as progressively harder bosses that MC has to get through to advance the game and undo the effects of what happened.

-The brothers that MC has converted back to normal will stay on their side and aid them in rescuing the other mentally manipulated boys, some even serving as necessary requirements to further progress. They can roam around the house and their rooms can serve as a temporary safety spots, but MC has to be with them to ward off the game's influence from trying to appeal to their cardinal desires based on their sin they govern and controlling them again.

-MC can try to appeal to any brother at any time, but if they don't meet requirements the struggle will be a lot harder and the emotional toll will be more effective on the chosen brother. If MC fails to convert the brother, not only does the next attempt become tougher, but MC takes damage deemed appropriate by the game based on the sin of the brother.

-The only exception to this rule is Mammon. Mammon is basically the tutorial. He's a mandatory scripted event to teach MC how the gameplay will be, and how they'll make it further in the game.

-Each brother is equivalent as a boss. The only way to progress to the next milestone is to release the grip the game has on the brothers' minds, but it's not as simple as breaking a curse like MC can canonically do with their powers. MC has to make a connection to the altered version of the demons, and to reach that connection they have to tackle each brother's insecurities and issues. Not like resolve them entirely with a heartfelt speech, and voila, they're okay again, but really reach into their hearts and remind them that they're not what the game has turned them into, that they're more than their sins and valued individually by MC.

-Thus having the proper brother on MC's side makes that connection a lot easier when it comes to certain brothers. Once that connection has been made and the game has less control, then MC can use the pact they made in the real world as the final move to disconnect the hold the game has in the virtual world.

-Again, however, it's not as simple as a few deeply passionate words and the veils are lifted from the brothers' eyes. Certain items can be found in each bedroom that helps strengthen the pact to mean something aside from a vow between a human and a demon. Requirements are necessary for progress.

-The pacts MC has with the brothers is a key relevancy to progressing the game. Without trying to appeal positively to their insecurities/fears the game has a strong hold on their minds and the use of their pacts aren't as effective

Rundown of What I Mean:

Mammon is the first demon MC bonded with and that applies itself strongly to their connection and relationship, especially in this event. I might be biased here, and not to mention I'm trial and erroring the story with my MC, Yuki, but I believe Mammon has the strongest connection with MC because of how he feels for them, how empathetic he is, and how emotionally aware he can be.

Mammon governs greed and already easily succumbs to his wants in the real world, but as of now in the canon story, he's grown a bit away from his sin, because of his relationship with MC, like most of the boys have. He can put MC above his own desires, and that influence deals a lot with how MC saves him after he attacks them in their room.

Mammon wants to sell MC's body, bit by bit, blood, teeth, hair, organs, nails, etc., as a means to pull in some serious money in the black market. Greed completely takes over Mammon, and he has very little regard for MC's life. When MC tries to use their pact's powers on Mammon the first time not much is really done, because the connection wasn't made. However, being the tutorial, Mammon becomes less influenced quicker than the rest of his brothers. MC has to remind him he's not a total scumbag that loves only money while Mammon is choking them out. So time is of the essence, because MC is physically harmed in this reality and can die as well.

I'll have a rough draft of this scene up later to better explain the process.

So Basically:

MC has to find items or something meaningful to assist them in helping the brothers become aware while under the game's manipulation, and then making a connection to their actual selves that helps absolve the mind control before using the pacts MC has made to finalize the severance, although it's not totally gone.

How I Plan to Progress the Event (Susceptible to Change) and Suggestions That Have Been Implemented by Other People So Far:

-MC starts the event off at the Lord Demon's castle with Diavolo and Barbatos before returning to the HoL to play with Levi. Before MC leaves Barbatos gives them two coins and a cautionary warning [credit to @jinxed-rose ]

-The unstable powers of MC conflicts with the game and locks the HoL and its residents inside the virtual reality.

-The game treats the brothers as bosses and turns their worst qualities up to 11. The small glimpses of how we saw the brothers in the beginning of the game before warming up to the MC is how they're portrayed in the game. They're meaner, deadlier, and heavily warpped from their original selves.

-MC can physically be hurt and/or killed, so the more of the brothers they can rescue the easier the game will be to traverse.

-The brothers are ranked by the order of when they got a pact with MC. So the optional progression between the brothers would be Mammon, Levi, Beel, Asmo, Satan, Lucifer, and Belphie. The longer MC has been in a pact with the boys the easier it is to sway them out of their brainwashing, but it doesn't have to be in this order [credit to @felix-the-lemon-king ]

-Another option of progress with the brothers can be psychological fortitude. What I mean by that is the boys' durability to withstand breaking down from their insecurities being provoked. So Mammon's biggest fear is MC getting hurt so he's automatically the first boss and Lucifer would be among the last to confront because he's mentally strongest and that's where the issues would lie. [credit to 13ineedpills13 on AO3]

-Levi is an optional boss that can be done early or late in the game, it doesn't really matter. If MC goes for Levi first, he'll be relatively easy to return to normal, but if MC doesn't get to him until later then he'll be a lot harder to help. If MC attempts to rescue the others before Levi and succeeds the game will make him aware of this. Levi will get more and more enveloped by envy and jealousy and his insecurities will worsen, making it harder to appeal to him. [credit to @sunshine-apprentice ]

-The reason Levi is an optional boss to go after at any time is because he has a mystery that reveals itself later as the event starts ramping up and big reveal towards the end. It's not really a secret if you read the notes on prior posts, but shhh. [credit to @felix-the-lemon-king ]

-Lucifer is the assumed main person to look out for, because he is the elder, head of the house, and most powerful and sadistic. He watches from the shadows and sets up elaborate snares and ambushes to sike out and slowly breakdown MC. Beel is more frequent around Lucifer's bedroom.

Somewhat Established "Rules" of the Game:

-Each encounter with the brothers during the actual moments of fighting and struggling will be violent and dangerous. Injuries will be painful and won't magically heal after the fight is done. [credit to syvintri on AO3]

-Death is very much possible, but it's tough for the brothers to die. It's not that hard for MC though. So, perma-death is plausible, but it's evened out with the two coins MC gets from Barbatos.

-The end goal is in Levi's bedroom, but it won't be accessible until after the brothers have all been released from the grip of the video game.

-MC's room is the only actual safe room in the house, so it's basically the headquarters

-Beel is the guard that routinely patrols the hallways, but he can be lured away with food from an area for a bit of time

-Each brother's room has a way to help figure out how to un-brainwash the boys, but they are dangerous to go into

-Overcoming the boys' insecurities and sins are a key relevance in progressing the game

-Line up of the boys in order as bosses (potentially): Mammon, Asmodeus, Belphie, Beelzbub, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan

Concerns and Questions:

There's still a lot of gaps and unfilled holes that I'm not entirely sure how to connect properly. Trying to figure out how to write the encounters between the brothers that are being manipulated and MC/the brothers rescued is going to be tricky. Making sure the boys' characterizations stay close to how they would be will be a challenge.

So my questions for you will help me figure out what people would like to see and also help me connect dots in the story and plot.

A matter to discuss, for instance, is what a comment said on AO3:

"I think them interacting in a proper manner storywise when they are brainwashed is impossible, and such a drag to read. They should only interact during battles, and after battles, as they go on and save the others."

How should I go about writing the progress of the story?

Should I write it like an actual fanfiction, all detailed and specific and going at a constant pace, or should I skip moments instead of writing every scene that could occur to stay fresh and steady-paced, or should I try to base the chapters like actual event lessons in-game where stuff happens briefly and isn't very long?

Or another comment:

"So maybe this is just me, but I think it'd actually be more horrifying if the 'game' wasn't perma-death. Especially if everyone remembered despite any sort of revives or resets and with in-game injuries actually being painful. There's a high potential for angst is all I'm saying. But I guess that lends itself better for a normal fic rather than a choose your own adventure thing"

How should I write the "fight" scenes?

Should they be brief yet detailed or meaty with the conflict as MC tries to resolve the situation before anyone gets too hurt oor would this be good moments for turmoil between the brothers to arise and brawls break out ooor... I don't know what else.

How would the angst and heavy trauma best be applied according to y'all?

What kind of angst would each brother go through as MC tries to rescue them?

Some other questions:

Is the line up of the brothers as bosses okay, or should they be reconfigured to make more sense? Should it be linked how psychologically weak to strong they are or how their sins correspond to the next?

What would they be like at their absolute worst? How far do you think they could dive into their sins if they didn't have morals?

How dangerous would the brothers be?

How would the game use each character's insecurities and fears as their driving point?

How would you like to see brothers interact with MC during the confrontation? Or with each other before/during/after?

If MC were to die what would be the best way to take them out that would really fuck up the boys and devastate the psyche? Any brother is liable to maim or hurt the MC, but which one(s) could actually kill them? Or if a brother took a hit meant for MC, who would be more inclined to step into the line of fire?

These aren't all the questions that I have knocking around in my head and stumping me, but they're the biggest ones. I would like to hear inputs from others, BUT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't feel inclined to answer everything that I've listed. Those are just questions that I thought of and put on this post as examples of what I'm trying to figure out.

Finishing Off:

So yeah. That's the progress I've made so far, both on my own and from suggestions and opinions from other people.

I'd love to hear what y'all have in mind or would like to suggest or a take on a matter for any scenes, interactions, or whatever. Even if it's ideas of your own that relate to something that hasn't been brought up or mentioned, feel free to comment it or send me an ask.

Something this extensive will require a lot of thought and work to be done right, so that's why I had the notion of making this an interactive AU

So, if you're interested or wanna talk about the concept, hit me up! I'm dying just to ramble about potential stuff or read viewpoints about the brothers that you want to see happen or stances for whatever.

#obey me #obey me au #obey me dark au #obey me mammon #obey me satan #obey me levi #obey me beel #obey me lucifer #obey me leviathan #obey me asmo #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me belphie #jess writes

[llazyneiph]

                                     SIMDROIDS MODPACK

It’s finally here! My first mod for TS4!! I’ve poured about 70+ hours worth of blood, sweat, and tears into this bad boy over the past month and it’s fiiiinally done.  This is a mod that I plan to continue to update with new content in the future, mostly in regards to the gameplay aspect of the mod itself.

                                                WHAT IS IT?

Simdroids

 is a traits based mod that gives you something a little different to play with, with the options of creating Simdroids to live amongst your sims. 

The mod consists of one trait, the

T-4L0S

 trait (under lifestyle) that is the basic model of every Simdroid. Once in game, you Simdroid can be programmed to one of 4 different modes; Perfect Partner, Celebdroid, Homemaker, and Manual Laborer.

Basic Model

- The basic T-4L0S model is an all-rounder designed to make your Sims lives easier. They will not experience need decay and will learn all skills at an accelerated rate.

Perfect Partner

- This mode will give your Simdroid whims and interactions that will help them to become a perfect match for your Sim. They will be able to learn skills such as charisma much faster. Due to the social nature of this setting, Perfect Partner Simdroids will experience social need decay. 

Celebdroid

- These Droids make perfect celebrities, as they learn all musical and theatrical skills much faster. Their whims will be related to all things creative! They also experience social decay!

Homemaker

- When programmed to Homemaker, Simdroids will become a perfect live-in Nanny! They will take care of children and cook meals for the family, great for when the parents are working late. Their whims will relate to children and taking care of the home. Homemaker Droids do not experience need decay. 

Manual Laborer Droid

- These droids will take care of all handy issues around the house and excel at growing a garden. They will learn all handy and gardening related skills at an accelerated rate. Manual Laborer Droids do not experience need decay.

Childroid

- Due to overwhelming response, I implemented a separate trait for toddlers, children and teens, called ‘Perfect Child’. They learn at an accelerated rate and will get whims related to completing homework and learning skills. Childroids will experience energy decay.

They have an option in their social interactions to turn both their hunger and temperature sensitivity on/off.

**Due to technically being a machine, Simdroids do not age. (You can cheat age them up though)

Every programmable option comes with custom moodlets and interactions!

Simdroids will always have a +10 fine moodlet, to keep them at a consistent ‘emotionless’ state. 

                                                DEVIANCY

Sometimes your Simdroids will see or interact with something that will trigger an error in their coding, an ‘emotion’!

If you decide it is time for your Simdroid to deviate, and become a fully emotional being, then take your Simdroid to any lot with my custom ‘Simdroid Safe Haven’ lot buff. 

Any Simdroid on the lot will get a buff that unlocks a social interaction to begin the first stages of their deviancy. Follow the buffs from there to complete the mini-quest!

If you get stuck or decide you prefer going about a faster route,

read this 

for a step-by-step guide on how to deviate!

Deviancy is supposed to be played slowly, to replicate more of a roleplay experience, so just be warned that if you complete all the stages quickly, the buffs will all stack on each other!

After deviating, all Deviants can trigger the first stage of Deviancy in other Simdroids, just with an interaction!

INCLUDED:

- Basic Simdroid trait, with all programmable traits. - Childroid Trait - New Career (Simdroid Mechanic) with two branches (Mechanical Mogul and Blackmarket Bio-Magnate) - Deviation - Many new interactions (not just for Simdroids) - New holiday tradition (Appreciate Simdroids) - New lot buff (Simdroid Safe haven) - 2 frankenmeshed objects (Simdroid mechanic cabinet and basket o’componants) - 1 new female hair, MM swatches, with glowing cable accessories under hats and different bandana swatches under necklaces. - 3 new female outfits - 3 new male outfits (Almost all outfits have emission maps, so parts of the textures glow and flash!

***Need to knows***

- Needs WILL go down if engaging in an interaction that puts a need decay multiplier on the sim. For example, working out will lower hygiene. I hope to change this in an update. - Childroids cannot currently deviate, if people want this, I will put this in an update!

- After all is said and done, this is my first mod, there are probably going to be a few rough edges but I’ve tried to get everything in tip top shape. Please let me know if you experience a game breaking bug or smthn

okay i need to go to bed before i literally die, but thank you sm to all my testers, you guys did an awesome job and i’m forever grateful. I’d tag u all if I wasn’t so tired. Also thanks to like plumbella and sims supply bc i watched all Jesses’ sarah story and all of James’ vampires playthru whilst makin this and it kept me relatively sane lmao

                                                   CLICK HERE

**PLEASE PLACE SIMDROID MOD.PACKAGE AND SIMDROID MOD.TS4SCRIPT IN YOUR MODS FOLDER, NOT IN A FOLDER WITHIN YOUR MODS FOLDER, OR IT WILL BREAK SOME OF THE MOD!

pls @ me or tag me if u post gameplay of this mod! i’d love to see pics and stuff! i follow the llazyneiph tag!

#ts4 #sims 4 #the sims 4 #ts4cc #sims4cc #sims 4 mod #ts4 mod #dbh #detroit become human #simblr #sims 4 custom content #ts4 custom content #the sims #sims #simdroids #mod #custom content #sims custom content #sims cc

[weirdponytail]

How modern is everything in MIC? Like what technology do they have? Plus, what does dragon armor look like in this universe, I’m really curious, lol?

Haha, once again that’s a sort of difficult question that needs to be answered!! Buckle in, folks. Sorry the post got so damn long!

Modern Inheritance Cycle is a bit of a misnomer, really. Technology varies pretty widely, so I can’t point to a chunk of our history and say ‘iz like that!’ for MIC. I’ll do my best to give a general overview.

Big things are that fossil fuel engines do not exist. Planes, automobiles, etc, do not and will not exist in MIC. Horses and walking are still the main travel methods. Both swords and guns are used. In the Broddring Empire, the most technologically advanced computers are those box computers from the late 90s early 2000s. Somehow, MP3 players exist, but not the sleek ones we know now (Eragon has one that he keeps on his person at all times). There is some difference between the level of computer tech humans have when looking at the Empire and Surda. Elves and dwarves have their own levels of tech that are more advanced. Radios are a thing, but for communication and entertainment/news, and again differ somewhat between races. 

Also, big note that my friend Cor brought to my attention: My dumbass completely forgot about the Urgals and figuring out their levels of tech. It’s low, mostly due to combat focused and rather secluded (iirc) lifestyles. 

Alright, let’s get down to specifics.

Handheld Weapons: While guns are a thing (modern, right here, right now guns), they haven’t taken over swords and other bladed weapons completely. Heck, swords are still a major part of the series! Close combat is done with swords, while guns are usually pistols, rifles, etc, used mid to long range. Things like AKs and very large magazine automatics aren’t very common, but burst fire and semi auto are okay. Examples: Arya and Brom both carry pistols and occasionally a long gun or combat rifle of some sort, while Murtagh has a specialized rifle he uses. Fäolin was a trained sniper. It’s sort of up in the air really. I add them when I feel like it. 

Large Weapons: As mentioned in my MIC Dwarves post (LINKED), dwarves developed some artillery type weapons and small tanks (WW2 levels at the highest), run on magic energy. This energy is usually stored in mid to low quality minerals and crystals and can be replenished either via putting your life energy into it, or (and this is something new, I’m not sure if it’s going to stay or not) channeling the resulting energy release from basic exothermic chemical reactions into the crystals, though this is only a thing that dwarves know how to do and they are NOT sharing that information.

Armor: Oddly enough, Kevlar isn’t really prevalent. There’s still enough of a focus on hand to hand sword fighting that there’s mixes of other materials that could deflect sword blows with materials that can dissipate the impact of projectiles. Dwarves are the best to look to for their lightweight metal alloys for this purpose, and Saphira’s armor is the pinnacle of that technological achievement. I’m rusty (HA!) on my metallurgy and aramid fiber applications info, so you’ve sparked my urge to do some research. I’ve not figured out a good dragon armor design yet, but when I do I’ll definitely draw some up!

Oh, more armor! Elves have perfected spidersilk armor, and when properly mixed with metals or aramid weaves it creates fantastically resistant cloth and plating. Arya’s jacket, mentioned plenty of times in MIC stories, is made of this spidersilk cloth mixture. It’s stopped bullets before, and is pretty resistant to cutting from nearly everything but a Rider’s sword or other crazy rule breaking/bending magic. Arya’s armor in my original ‘The Soldier’ drawing is also spidersilk, though it’s more spidersilk alloy plate. If you see anything that’s a mottled texture, mottled blue or blue grey in my MIC art, that’s had spidersilk added to it. Elvish armor (and even some weapons) relies on it heavily. 

Elves tend to have the ‘highest’ level of tech, but it’s mostly due to an abundance of magic, time, and knowledge in other fields that lead to strange new inventions. They don’t develop it often, as it’s mostly a fleeting hobby, but when they do implement it with their magic it can be pretty dang cool. Glenwing studied, among his mental health and medical training, electrical engineering type things and thus knows how to rewire both nerves and devices. Rhunön is quite adept at working magic into her forging, as well as mechanical and electrical (sort of) work. When Glen loses his arm in the ambush, Rhunön is the one that makes a prosthetic for him that sort of ends up being like Fullmetal Alchemist Automail, but without the painful surgical requirements. It requires only the same amount of energy that movement and actions with muscle and tissue would require with his real arm, so it is linked to his own energy. Arya, meanwhile, picks up a lot of mechanical engineering from bothering Rhunön as a kid and gets even more experience with it via dwarvish tech, weapons sabotage, and ‘use everything till it falls apart’ forced rationing with the Varden, leading to a combination of her and Glen’s skills to create their squad’s special radios that are mentioned in a few of the MIC stories.

Dwarves are the most mechanically inclined and, again, use energy storing crystals very frequently in their creations. I think it’s mentioned in my dwarf post that many many households have items and tools that house these crystals. I go more in depth with the post I mentioned so that’s probably where you’ll get the most info.

Humans are kinda stuck. Galbatorix tends to draw from things reported on/seen while fighting against other forces and has his people develop from those. Military weapons have been the main focus, so there’s not much in the way of computers or that kind of stuff. Those old box computers are usually only used in businesses that can afford them for finances and the like. As for artillery, the Broddring Empire has developed ‘cannonbombs,’ artillery shells that are clusterbombs inside an outer shell that can be on a timed fuse for detonation before impact or explode on impact and releases several more explosives (If you want a better explanation, check out MIRV grenades from from the Borderlands games). They’re the bane of trench fighters.

Meanwhile, in Surda, computers are a little smaller! Due to the hot climate, Surdans learned to make more efficient cooling systems and were able to make them smaller and more compact, leading to an explosion of research into making the rest of the equipment smaller as well. They’ve moved on to tower+flat monitor type computers. Surda is more interested in chemical engineering and tech towards the center of the kingdom, while defensive tech and development takes precedence along the border for obvious reasons. 

Even though humans seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, I always want to mention that in MIC, humans are the most ingenious, able to use, reuse and repurpose due to their ‘limitations’ when side by side with other races. They think outside and all over the box, occasionally cutting the material of the box to see if they can make something out of that. It’s something that most dwarves and elves just don’t understand, and thus often overlook or underestimate. 

That’s...all I’ve got at the moment. I hope that helped a bit! Please, if you have any more questions, ask! :D I love world building!!

#modern inheritance #modern inheritance cycle #eragon #inheritance cycle #The Inheritance Cycle #modern inheritance lore #mic lore #mi lore #enjoy the exposition #technology in mic

[guerilla935]

My Favorite Games That Made Me Care About How I Looked

I’m very self conscious about the way I look in video games. Not only is it normally very easy to change an outfit or get a haircut in a video game it also says something about how I’d like to be perceived, especially in an online game. There are a lot of games that allow their players to express themselves in a lot of really fun and unique ways and I think that it’s really special when you get to celebrate a style that you would never get to portray in real life. These games that I am about to talk about are all games where I was able to look at my character and feel some ounce of pride at something that I had created. Some full disclosure for these images, I pulled them from official gaming outlets and developer blogs but none of these that you are seeing are my original characters. If anyone would like to request to see any of my characters from these games (or any other games!) I would be happy to go and grab screenshots of those characters.

Grand Theft Auto Online

This is a pretty easy choice for most people. I chose specifically GTA Online over any GTA game or Red Dead game because I think the really special part about this is its setting. Your image is not only your character and your outfit in GTA Online but also your car, your house, and your business. There are a lot of different places to choose to call home and there are a lot of things to get “invested” into. For example, my good friend mojo5 runs a night club and wears suits and spends a lot of time gambling at the casino. That’s a character that would be different than mine who dresses and acts like a street racer. It gives your character a kind of personality and back story that is hard to achieve in other games. I have always kind of considered Grand Theft Auto Online to be a modern MMO of sorts, a playground. And as much as it is a huge lobby where you wait to start activities, it is also a sprawling city-space where you can essential live, make money, create this fun fictional life for yourself. And as far as fashion goes, the outfits, the cars, and the real estate help you shape that fantasy. Basically, I can tell you that I spent way more time customizing my character than I spent in actual activities in Grand Theft Auto Online.

Saint’s Row Series

I love Saint’s Row. It is very similar to the last entry in this article but has this unique and goofy style that makes a lot of things okay that I would never do to my GTA character. In Saint’s Row I can have a neon blue Mohawk wielding a 10 foot melee weapon that is designed to look like something extremely unmentionable while driving a night rider space car that is also a tank and it’s totally fine because in the next cut scene you are about to fight Roddy Piper in Keith Davids nightmares. The games are incredibly wild and I love how I can let loose with a lot of different styles, and in the same way that I feel like I am creating my gritty street racer in GTA, I can make my goofy crime lord super hero secret agent in Saint’s Row. I think specifically in Saint’s Row 2 I took it a little more seriously because the tone of the game is a little more serious than the other entries however I have a specially place in my heart for how wacky each game allows me to be.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

You knew we couldn’t just not talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With the current situation, the Animal Crossing community is insanely huge. I cannot avoid the heap of Animal Crossing videos and screenshots all over social media. On my island of Sandover Village, I am patiently awaiting the Able Sisters to set up shop so that I am able to put in codes from everyone else’s custom designs that I’m seeing on twitter. That is because I have on my phone a stockpile of sweatshirts, sweaters, robes, and hats that I am actually really excited to show off in game. I tried to create some of my own but I am not one of the gifted seamstress’s that there seems to exist on the internet. I am not very far into Animal Crossing but by looking at other peoples games I know that I have only scratched the surface of my options in the game. I have to commend Nintendo on the amount of individualization that the design pro feature gives to its players. I have never seen a game give players the option to design their own clothing and it makes the social experience of the game feel so fresh.

Dark Souls III

One of the most badass games that I have ever played as far as character design is concerned is Dark Souls III. When I put on a new set of armor I sit in awe of how it looks because I can see each tiny tear in the cape, every dent in the helmet, and the wear and weight of the armor. I was dragged through this game by some friends (because I could never in a thousand years have the patience to beat it by myself) and I followed them to every cursed swamp and death crypt because I wanted to see every weapon and every armor set. You look absolutely ghoulish in every armor set and I love it to death. This game allows so much in the way of customization and I think it helps that almost every gear set is good enough to get you through the entire game and that allows you to play with a lot of different looks and game play styles. This game is tough, really really tough, but you look really good even when you die.

Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 is a really special online shooter. I think in the month that I played this game religiously the thing that kept me playing was coming back to the stores to see what kind of clothes were in stock and what kind of items I could steal off the players in the lobby. I think that the developers of Splatoon 2 knew that the players were in it for the threads because every reward for playing the game was most likely a piece of clothing. The clothing options kind of vary from academy prep to Patagonia camp wear to skater outfits. And it comes together in this very hipster overall aesthetic that blends really naturally. The game features a mechanic that I really like wear you can walk up to anyone in the online lobby and look at what their wearing and order it. By the time I logged on the next day I had (a noticeably weaker version of) the exact same item but it really makes you feel like anything you see, you have access too which is really cool. And the ordering of the items kept me coming back to play every day.

Final Fantasy XIV Online

I’ve heard it said many times that the real end game content of Final Fantasy XIV Online was the glamor and housing systems, and for most people they aren’t wrong. I will never stop being surprised at the outfits that players can put together in this game. I have seen millions of players in my 750 hours in Eorzea and I have not seen two characters look the same. The customization options are really limitless and I truly believe that. I played a healer mage and in my time at max level I had outfits that made me look like a cowboy, a thief, a fox spirit, a grim reaper, and even one that made me appear like a real healer mage. The clothing options throw a Final Fantasy twist on every kind of style that they set to replicate. So even though all the outfits can be wacky they never feel out of place in the world. If you want a game that you can make almost 50% just about customizing your character and taking it out to the town to show it off or in big raids to flaunt your style then this might be your game.

Pokemon Sword And Shield

Pokemon is still trying to get it right but Sword and Shield is Game Freaks best attempt at trainer customization. The clothing options in the game are very European, well, they have always been that way but they are ESPECIALLY European in this one. Probably the greatest customization offered is the hair which in the world of anime characters is the most important one. I loved designing my character in this game but it was just so brief because shopping in this game is so boring as most clothes in the actual stores are very samey which makes the act of shopping pretty boring most of the time. I would roll up to a new town really excited to see what kind of stuff they had in the shop but it was just new colors for the same weird duffel bag that your character had already. Note that the game is mostly about the Pokemon so they really didn’t have to put any trainer customization in the game to make it a good game but they did a half decent job putting this much customization in the game and I feel like it’s going to keep getting steadily better the more times they implement this feature into their games. Big plus, you can design your trading card in the game and it is the most adorable thing and feels like a huge payoff to have a cool card if you’ve put a lot of effort into your trainer.

Soul Calibur VI

So I haven’t actually played Soul Calibur VI, I bought the game and went immediately into character creation and started making my own roster of fighters that I ended up using maybe once or twice and moving on from. The character creator in this fighting game is really special. So the idea is that you choose a character that already exists and you keep their move set and fighting style but change how they look and immediately the things that came out of the community were hilarious. Some are kind of terrifying but they come shockingly close to being somewhat recognizable. For me it almost comes down to that being someone who is unfamiliar with the cast of Soul Calibur VI I cannot tell the difference between actual characters from the game and characters frakensteined together in the character creator. As on of the most fun character creators I’ve ever used I think it’s at least worth googling what other people have created.

God of War (2018)

The newest God of War introduced something that we never got in the older games and that was the ability to change out what Kratos was wearing. While it was important in the game to maximize his stats, it also made you look cooler and cooler as the game went on. I wouldn’t say that you have a lot of options of things to wear in this game but I always felt bummed when I picked up something with relatively low stats that looked amazing. Later on the armor sets become more like trophies for completing hard tasks. The design of each piece of armor is really intricate and amazing to look at and while you can’t just pick whatever you want, I really wish that you could.

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

In the Reaper of Souls expansion pack a new vendor was added to Diablo III that changed the way that I looted in the game. The vendor was called the mystic and she would make a piece of gear look like any other piece of gear of the same type. This meant that I could look amazing all the time without sacrificing strength. The way that the database of appearances you could pick from expands over time gave so many options that I couldn’t decide at some points. The coolest armor in the game was now accessible at any time. And the armor in Diablo III looks tight, sometimes I would argue that unless you pick some unique stuff it doesn’t make that big of a difference because of the isometric point of view in the game but it is really fun to have an added layer of customization in Diablo.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

So this is actually a section dedicated to Nexus Mod Manager because Skyrim in itself doesn’t actually have a whole lot of variations in the ways you can dress. But with the powers of modding you can now do absolutely anything and there are a whole group of 3D modelers out there getting you immersive and lore friendly items that make you look a whole lot cooler. The wonderful world of modding can turn kind of creepy very fast, a lot of very suggestive mods are out there and a lot of very inappropriate things so you know, a fair warning. It’s incredible when you can make it work and keep it from getting to the level of ultimate Skyrim. You can change and add clothes and weapons, add hair styles, and even add entire races into the game. Sometimes though I really believe that I like browsing mods a lot more than I like actually playing with them but I found that it is really satisfying to download a mod like Immersive Armors and see just how much it changes how diverse the selection of armors that not only you but everyone in the game now wears can be.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

So I believe that some other previous Zelda titles had the ability to change Links outfit but never to this extent. What I think is the coolest part about the clothing system in this game is that you wear certain clothes to survive certain climates but you can also forget all that and make a yummy meal instead that lets you be warm wearing the desert clothes in the snow. The amount of armors that you can amass in this game starts off kind of underwhelming but becomes really fun and interesting and serves all sorts of fun fan service for fans of the series. This game doesn’t have the versatility and variety of some of the other games in the series but any game that lets you cross dress to sneak into a city of warrior women is credited for its costume design in my book.

League of Legends

I have spent a shameful amount of money on skins. I hate League of Legends and I hate most of the business practices of Riot Games but their skins just look good. I can appreciate when someone I don’t like makes something good and they consistently pump out awesome looking skins that are frankly worth the money if you play the game regularly. Back when I played this game daily I put up way too much money, even I think about 18$ just on a skin that changed colors when you typed a specific command. Anyways that’s really all I have, there aren’t a lot of games where I like the skins, especially the fact that they are mostly behind pay walls but League gets a pass I suppose.

Destiny Series

I used to be really into playing a specific game mode in Destiny named Iron Banner. I played a lot of it in Destiny and a good portion of them in Destiny 2. When you played enough Iron Banner in a year you were able to collect an armor set to commemorate the achievement. Almost all the cool armor in Destiny has purpose to it. Not only do you get to decide how you look but it also is you showing off the fact that you completed a raid, were really good at sparrow racing, or kicked major ass in the crucible. Each armor was recognizable and everyone knew what it meant. I think that is what makes the customization in Destiny so rewarding, its that it is in itself an actual reward for completing hard tasks that not everyone will be able to complete.

Code Vein

Out of all the anime games I’ve played I think what stands out to me the most is that their character creators have all been really bad. This is where Code Vein really shined. Code Vein has this dystopian vampire aesthetic that is really unique and allows for a lot of ways to make cool characters that fit into the look of the game. I don’t think that what they’ve done here is completely new but they have this style that is exciting to play with. Making a revenant is fun and builds this anticipation for the rest of the game. I also respect the games decision to allow you to make modifications to your character after the game has started which is not something that most games would allow. Code Vein has these cape’s that you can wear to gain abilities and those are cool to add onto your outfit but I don’t think that it outshines what the character creator has done here. It’s a niche thing I guess but if you have always wanted to make your own anime vampire then this is it.

A Persona

I really like making characters for a reason. I think a lot of the escapism of video games hinges on me placing myself into the character on the screen. That’s why I love what you can do in games like Animal Crossing that is all about creating exactly what you want and Final Fantasy XIV Online where you get to exist and share in a world as a persona of sorts. Being able to customize a character in a video game does not make that game good or bad, but I think that when you are given the option the developer is given an opportunity to make it a very special experience and allow you to be unique within a community of people online. And the internet has made that sharing of characters really special, allowing everyone to see how unique of an experience you can have with a game by beating it with “your character”.

Special Shout Outs For Stylish Games And Characters

SSX series being dripping in 90s style

Also NBA Street Vol. 2 for the same reason

Persona 5 for being the most stylish game ever

Halo because space marines rock extra style points

Katana Zero for being badass and 80s neon will always be in style

Specifically Graffiti Mario in Super Mario Sunshine he had flair

Samurai Legend Musashi for having a stylish game case but being a horrible game

Devil May Cry just for existing

#video games #long post #fashion #code vein #destiny #destiny 2 #league of legends #the legend of zelda #breath of the wild #the legend of zelda breath of the wild #skyrim #the elder scrolls v #the elder scrolls v: skyrim #nexus mod manager #diablo 3 #diablo 3 reaper of souls #god of war #kratos #soul calibur vi #pokemon sword and shield #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #ffxivonline #splatoon 2 #dark souls 3 #animal crossing #ACNH #animal crossing new horizons #saint's row #saints row 2

[vgperson]

What Did I Translate in 2018?

#vgperson

[myfriendpokey]

clearance sale

clearing out some of my backlog of opinions before the new year so i can start anew. in this post I have accumulated some writing scraps on the only three topics: 1. finance 2. mystery 3. location

FINANCE

i enjoyed these recent-ish posts against the idea of indie sustainability, although as someone who already works a day job i always feel a bit ambivalent about the advice to just work a day job to pay for this stuff - - like yes, absolutely, do it, BUT sell your shit too in the knowledge that the type of precarity we associate w/ creative work is already in the process of being implemented everywhere else as well (or has already been - zero hour contracts, sub-living wages etc). like i am fortunate to still have a day job which pays a living wage and leaves me time to work on my own things on the side - but this feels like an anachronism rather than an inevitability right now.. maybe my unsustainable games will help keep me afloat when my job gets automated and i have to go work in an amazon warehouse, unsustainable games for an unsustainable job, ha ha ha. video games are an exploitative bubble but so is the rest of "the market".

it is true that this is a political problem rather than one in the narrow remit of things that can be fixed with the right 10-point sales plan- -  nevertheless i think the issue of trying to make even small money off these things will remain kind of pressing as, in turn, regular employment comes more and more to resemble irregularly compensated hobbyist labour.

anyway one point i found really interesting, which i think all the above posts kind of grapple with - - the idea that it's not necessarily more "realistic" to aim at selling 1000 copies rather than 100,000. i think while we make fun of the aspiring millionaires a lot of people have just been banking on the idea of a fertile middle ground between the two extremes of tiny and ludicrous amounts of sales, between boom and bust. i'm sure there are still people working in that space but it seems like it's shrinking.

one question brendan keogh asks in his piece is "why should game makers be any different  [from the norm of artists, musicians etc not really making any money]?" i think this can actually be answered a little - because hobbyist game development sort of exploded in tandem with the internet itself becoming more naturalized within everyday life, because the economic basis for indie games was always centered around the internet, which means people working in indie games were always in the vicinity of the massive, startling movements of capital that the internet rendered more visible and immediate. no more were the weird vicissitudes of the market hidden behind closed doors, in boardrooms or stock quotations - now you could log onto any site and see just bewildering amounts of money suddenly funnel into the pockets of this or that individual in real time, frequently to their own surprise as well. and i think this connected to something more general - a sort of ambient awareness of financialization, the way "the financial sector" cannibalized things like industry, the greater visibility of capital not as something embedded in some specific product or set of individual practices but as a kind of weird free-floating aura arbitrarily descending or departing. enormous reservesof "general" wealth became more visible just as the benefits and stability of waged employment became yet more desolate and i think you need to see the draw of one in part as a consequence of the other. 

gacha-capitalism, permanent artificial scarcity coupled with the vague, insistent prospect of fantastic gains, as long as you keep playing. which is a rhythm already enshrined in many areas of working life - broke college students and unpaid graduates hustling for eventual employment, waged workers grinding through until  retirement. but it's one the enhanced immediacy and swiftness of capital on the internet intensified and extended. fabulous payouts can strike anyone at any time, in exchange for slowly bleeding out the prospect of any other kind of livelihood. much like the austerity following the financial crash which levelled so many basic social services for no particular purpose other than the hope that doing so for long enough would please the gods of prosperity to start tossing money around again. all dues, no pay.

i do think it's worth being cynical about the efforts to domesticate this process, building a fair and sustainable biome within capitalism, by using the tools of that same capitalism etc.  but if the format can't be seperated from the wider world then that's something which swings both ways. for me the most interesting critical work around vgames right now is in the effort to move outside of the constant, numbing boom-and-bust cycles of capital, the idiot repetition of exhilaration and depression and exhilaration and it'll all be okay as long as we can hold out one more cycle, particularly when that's a rhythm which has been central to the development of the format from the beginning. i think anyone involved with developing videogames has probably seen multiple generations of cool shit emerge, get abruptly killed off and written out of history in accordance with market diktats, and then replaced with a new wave of cool shit whenever the investors shift gears into "expansion" mode again. a mode of thinking about and preserving what people do that stands in opposition to this is something i can easily imagine being more generally useful in the culture, as ever more areas of life and culture start becoming subject to the same questions.

MYSTERY

there's a mystery in depth and a mystery in shallowness. with depth the habitual glance of recognition goes out and falls through - you can place roughly where something is in relation to the world, but not what it's doing, not where it goes. as a presence it seems to require a new mode of attention to be recognized, which i guess is why it sometimes makes me uneasy - that challenge, the way that challenge can be moralized. are you a bad enough dude to engage with art?? if there are 100 black obelisks in a field which one do you decide to look at? and will it really turn out to be deep, or just dense?

videogames can feel like depth-worship, like the embodiment of an essentially cthonic system of values. how deep did you go and what did you see there? did  you find the gold bars in pac-man? (www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.cgi?action=url&type=info&page=pmgoldbar.info.txt) did you see the secret ending? how far did you get into the game mechanics, into the lore? this marks the top 10 deepest players on this game. surpass  them... if you dare. an ethos of diligent attention, hierarchial levels of  understanding and initiate-dom, a sub-culture. and at best a maguslike  dedication to altered states of consciousness that i can respect, an interest in shifting through mangled pieces of debris in search of secret mysteries. at worst the authority cults and tests of true belonging that spring up around those mysteries, whose value is in being hidden and whose guarantee is in the strenuous effort with which they must be located. paranoia about true spiritual meanings being plundered by opportunistic interlopers. stay out. get good.

the videogame has the basic opacity of the computer system and the act of engaging with this curious abyss is allegorized into dungeons, castles, mazes. trapdoors and secret corridors. one pleasure in looking up older games for me is in seeing them recognize and learn how to thematize this basic sense of mystery. in bubble bobble the obscure scoring mechanics and secret endings are cheekily perverse, arcade challenge by another means - another system to game. in king's quest there's something like a crossfertilization between the strange causal voids of the fairy tale and the adventure game: "Exit the gingerbread house and go east and east. There is a large walnut tree here. Take walnut and then open walnut to discover a gold nut. Head east and take bowl . Look bowl  to see the words “fill” at the bottom. Fill and the bowl will fill up with a delicious stew." the wizardry games took the connection between mysterious game systems and occult knowledge much further - the "true" ending of wizardry iv means finding a secret chamber and answering a series of riddles based on your knowledge of the kaballah (or at least, kaballah-derived tarot interpretations).

it's easy to moralize depth - lotus eaters, magic islands. you wander through a strange land and then return to find it's 5 hours later and you forgot to eat. there's something creepy to me about depth on an industrial scale, about building huge tunnels with massive teams on forced overtime, and then a team of professional tunnel reviewers cautiously start descending on ropes and come back every so often and say, well, 20 hours in and it all looks ok, and meanwhile everybody else is jumping en masse. maybe that's more of an issue with consumer culture in general. but sometimes it feels like a way to avoid dealing with certain inherent limitations of that culture, or even limitations of art in general, by projecting those limits out to the end of ever-deeper tunnels that fewer and fewer people will ever see, the rest of them straggling back, exhausted, getting jobs. well, i can't tell you if red dead 2 is good or not. i only got 60 hours in, and i never even found all the falcons.

if the mystery of depth is having too much space for speculation to operate coherently within, the mystery of shallowness is having not enough space for speculation to operate at all: something is too manifestly there, limited, closed-off, it's hard to push it away to get some metaphorical breathing room. 

i feel this way sometimes reading writers like tove jansson, flannery o'connor - SOMETHING happened, the stories are short and clear and describe some definite event without too much uncertainty, they even have "broader themes" raised - but somehow the themes feel embarrassingly outsize for the stories, and the stories remain too clearly defined to sink back into the murk of a generalized moral or experience. they feel like moral stories when you can't work out what the moral might be.

robbe-grillet on raymond roussel: "Now these chains of elucidations,  extraordinarily precise, ingenious, and farfetched, appear so derisory, so disappointing, that it is as if the mystery remained intact. But it  is henceforth a mystery that has been washed, emptied out, that has become  unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. One has the impression of  having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty."

there's a famous shallowness to videogames as well that's most often caught by people outside the culture - when you see the fake videogames in a comicbook, or on tv, and they're named something like "washing machine simulator 3000" or "municipal tax assailants". and part of this also stems from the computer, the history of the computer as it insinuated its way into everyday life, as a mysteriously elaborate and convoluted way of doing just impossibly banal things, like balancing chequebooks or printing text. the stubborn thingliness of not-quite-functional machines, the way the thingliness glosses and corrodes their own internal fantasies, mirrors of the basic weirdness that is human consciousness as a material fact within the world. 

with my friend i used to joke  about "e3" just being the dumpster behind an abandoned gamestop - all those needy longform experiences frozen into evocative trinkets. find a nonfunctional disk copy of mario odyssey and it gives you all the same delight as playing mario odyssey, only without having to. i think there's something beautiful about that flatness, that directionless object-hostility, the rejection of the grandoise hero's journey fantasies that it implies – as well as something baleful, a rejection of consciousess in general, the idea that it could take you anywhere not inside your own head.

LOCATION

why are there so many videogames about going outside? every time i've played a videogame it's been inside a room, usually a dark one, mostly while still wearing my pajamas. for me it is an internal activity. but not only do all these games take place in fields and plains, they always talk about the wonders of going on a voyage, the beauty of the great outdoors, the superiority of the wandering main characters to the slugs and layabouts who sit at home all day.... it's weird to me, i demand we move past these cloying pseudo-critiques. raymond williams once pointed out that the first pastoral was written from the perspective of a rentier daydreaming of cashing out and moving to a country home. i demand more games with the courage of their implict convictions and that if they require you to sit motionless indoors  for hours they should explicitly establish and argue for a value system in which this is the best possible thing that you can do. imagine if movies were all set in dark chambers full of people sitting down - i think i can say they would be much less insipid as an artform. "all of man's problems stem from an inability to stay in his room".

(images: Gakken No O Benkyou Soft Kazu Suuji, Legend of Legaia, a Chinese bootleg cart, and ...Iru!)

#gamechat #room

[unmeiokaemasu]

anyway while I try to forget the trash fire currently raging in heroes, I started the Blazing Blade a couple days ago! :D

and I’ve been having an absolute blast. I watched a let’s play of it before so I already knew a lot about it, but I think that probably helped me enjoy it more - I’m still not very good at these dang strategy games, so having a notion of what’s coming next I feel is mitigating some frustration.

but also...I’m kind of enjoying that it’s just moving from one map to the next? like I like the characters in this a lot, that’s why I wanted to play this one, and the goofy story isn’t bothering me...in fact I’m enjoying that as well, but...hm. Awakening had the very start of other activities outside of battles, Fates had the My Castle which...yikes. Thinking about it now I think enjoyed it quite a bit but right now the thought of returning to it is exhausting. Echoes finally debuted 3D movement, and then 3H was basically split into 2 separate gameplay modes. ...I haven’t played the Tellius games so I don’t know what kind of extra stuff they might’ve had; my impression is not much since they were such epic stories and had just made the jump to new consoles and 3D. My impression of Shadow Dragon and New Mystery is that they intentionally didn’t have any newer systems.

Typing all that out I can see why some people felt Awakening was taking the series away from its roots. There’s a lot of fun to be had in just reading the story setup and then just playing. buuuuut I’m not saying I’d take back anything Three Houses added. Even on my 20th or w/e playthrough, I still have some fun running around the monastery and doing all the chores. ...it’s funny thinking about how quaint this version of a 3D hub world will probably seem if the series decides to keep implementing it in the future, but I think it’s a good start. obvs liked the super robust support system and all the writing and voice acting that went into that. The teaching mechanic was also cool, getting to give extra non-fighting attention to your favored units. I guess one thing I’m learning is that I didn’t like all of the optional battles; now that I’m thinking about it I spent a long time grinding in those (because I’m not very good so I needed all the power I could get), and that was really the most tedious part to me. But it’s not like grinding hasn’t been in some previous games.

Anyway I think it’d be cool to see the old games remade in 3H or new style, but it might be equally cool to see 3H stripped completely back to 2d, no animated cutscenes, the monastery is now just a menu...that could be fun.

oh yeah well anyway FE7...I was genuinely terrified going in because, once again, I’m really bad at these games, and even though I have fun I’m a little disappointed I still struggle as much as I do. I don’t think this one was renowned as particularly difficult, but still. ...buuuut even after starting on the story proper, I did pretty well! In fact sometimes I made some striking blunders, but recovering from them was super exhilarating. (My favorite was when I misjudged Guy’s movement when he was still an enemy, and he and Marcus nearly killed each other. Matthew was also badly hurt, so it was extra funny when he and Guy had the recruitment conversation with like 2 hit points each) (No wait I forget even better was when I was trying to recruit Erk, and I just couldn’t get Serra over to him and I was sure he was about to be murdered, but then I realized Lowen could pick him up and ferry him over to her. I’ve had a lot of fun with the rescue mechanic.)

#catfishchat #fe talk

[willwritesablog]

Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition: Impressions, Criticisms and Review

Published by Obsidian Entertainment. Original release date: March 26th, 2015. Definitive Edition release date: November 15th, 2015.

Price: $29.99 MSRP. Current Steam Sale: $7.49. Current Epic Games Sale: $9.99 (with coupon.)

This article has also been published on Blogger.com (Mirror Link)

12/23/20

Over the past week or so, as a part of the Epic Games Free Game of the Week promotion, I’ve picked up Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition for free and have been playing it on its Normal difficulty almost nonstop ever since. This being the second video game by Obsidian I have played (the first one being Outer Worlds--releasing four years after Pillars had its original release), I felt it appropriate to share some of my thoughts over the quality and experience of this game, comparisons I have made, and some other miscellaneous observations. It’s worth prefacing this with that I have not fully completed a run through this game and haven’t actually completed the game’s second act as of yet (more on this later)--however, I’ve put close to 70 hours into this, and while others have spent thousands of hours on this video game I feel I can write on this with some authority.

Starting with its strengths, Pillars of Eternity is engaging. There is a lot of content to delve into. Much of its characterization is convincing, and the voice acting that it does have is well-performed. Another YouTube channel that I watch, “Should You Play It,” estimated in their review that “25%-30% of the game is voiced,” which seems like an accurate assessment to me. Regarding its story writing, its overall plot and characters themselves are very reminiscent of a decent or good Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Some tropes can be expected, but overall the plot runs smoothly enough, and the characters themselves are generally rather fun to interact with, even in cases where they're not very original.

The game does suffer from a variety of flaws, many of which aren’t immediately apparent to the player and that bear mentioning. The talent pool that Obsidian recruited to do their voices is incredibly small. Half of my party, as it turns out, was voiced by Matthew Mercer--possibly the most distinguished voice actor of the bunch--with my main character (using the “sinister” voice effects), the story character Aloth, and the story character Eder all being voiced by him. Kana, a character that comes later on, is voiced by Patrick Seitz (famous for many different television, video game and anime roles) and also does a character at the beginning of the game (Sparfel), the voice for the commander of the Crucible Knights, and multiple other additional voices. To my own ears, Richard Epcar had to be the most frequently-appearing voice actor in the game, voicing the Caravan Master at the beginning, Raedric’s voice, the spirit of Od Nua (whom I haven’t encountered yet) and the forge master Dunstan in Defiance Bay, along with other additional voices.

Sadly, Pillars of Eternity’s Credits page as well as the Full Cast and Crew IMDB Page only provide incomplete insight on who voiced which character within this game, and while some message boards exist on the subject I’ve not found a comprehensive resource over this topic (maybe I’ll attempt a full list for myself later on.) It’s a massive rabbit hole to go down nonetheless. The Outer Worlds handles this limitation as well, although that game’s execution of this I’d be inclined to say was a little more successful. Only 1% of Outer Worlds's entire production team were actually voice actors, which strikes me as interesting; the NoClip documentary series discusses details about this as well as how the writers had to plan questlines ahead of time to prevent characters with the same voice actor from interacting with each other, when possible. No definable moments of this happening in Outer Worlds come to mind off memory, although there were a couple of occurrences in Pillars (e.g. Kana and the Crucible Knight commander) where it wasn't avoided.

One of Pillars of Eternity’s major problems is interestingly a feature of its design--its Kickstarter rewards implementation. When you visit the first town, you are effectively bombarded with a number of uniquely-named NPC’s--and when you approach them, you get the opportunity to “look into their soul” or walk away. As a new player I was pretty befuddled by this, thinking that these were details I needed to memorize for some upcoming puzzle, when in actuality it wasn’t anything more than crowdsourced product-placement. 

Some games can pull this off with success--LISA The Painful, for example, had a majority of its character names sponsored and selected by Kickstarter backers. As an RPG, this worked; you had a name on-screen detailing who it was that you were going to attack (on a black border above your characters), you kill them, and you move on. Other donor rewards involved creating a party member or a boss battle character, but these were done cautiously, and at least in my own experience, they didn’t hinder the game enough for me to discover that these were Kickstarter-donor characters on my own.

It’s the opposite case for Pillars. In many cases it’s special snowflake-ish. You’ll enter a bar and encounter 5 people named “commoner” and Archduke Franz “Quickfeet” Elfenhein, with a two-paragraph set of memories that mean frick-all to the actual experience. If you read all of these, you *might* encounter one or two funny ones, but what’s the point? You can expect that these were written before a finished product was released. It’s a dilapidated experience. Later in the game you’ll visit a house, with one of these pointless O.C.s effectively “standing guard” for no other purpose than to nick you town reputation points for trying to steal something.

Outer Worlds includes a stealing mechanic as well but it was implemented more fairly. Your character didn’t have to dump a bunch of points into a nearly-useless Stealth skill--instead, it was dictated by NPC line-of-sight. Stealing in Outer Worlds, for the most part, is actually *fun*, in Pillars, it was worth me avoiding entirely.

This may as well serve as a segway into the leveling system--on which I don’t have much to say about it, other than (maybe not relative to other ISO-RPGs, or in comparison to, say, Dungeon and Dragons) that it’s a headache. The story characters that the game gives you access to all have unoptimized and relatively-mediocre starting-stats, so to use all of them (exclusively, without hiring an unvoiced “mercenary” NPC) some creative planning is needed. You’ll also effectively want to min-max your own character’s build to help compensate for inevitable party weaknesses--the game (similar to Outer Worlds) offers a releveling system should you level up the wrong stats, but anything set at character creation is basically unchangeable--which is when the greatest number of character traits needs to be decided. Wizards are good, a priest or two is required (otherwise your party is without a healer), Chanters are bad--but you wouldn’t know this unless you looked it up ahead of time, or unless you’ve played the game before.

And this description leads me to my strongest point--Pillars of Eternity has a habit of setting up unclear rules, punishing players for breaking them, and calling that “replayability.” To be clear, if these “unclear rules” were drawn across moral lines then it wouldn’t be an issue. Fallout: New Vegas has a few main factions that the player could side with and give control of the main world to; all but maybe one of these choices could be argued as potentially being the “best outcome.” Pillars of Eternity (and Outer Worlds to a similar extent) is lacking in a lot of this--*and* game mechanic-wise, the game punishes you for doing normal, explorative stuff and so often sets up inconceivably unwinnable scenarios where you have to be so deliberate about your actions and game mechanic options to actually achieve a (clear-cut) best outcome. Outer Worlds is better with this.

A small example; in the beginning of Pillars, your character encounters some rioting townspeople accosting the owner of a grain mill. If you go inside, the mill owner notes that he is fair in his dealings, although he prioritizes the best of his grain stores to townspeople who need it the most (like pregnant women)--this quest being strikingly similar to one in Outer Worlds’s beginning. If you pass a resolve check of 14, the mill owner will allow for his grain stores to be seized by the rioters. Only if you pass a intelligence check of 12 does he actually lower the prices--and you can postpone solving this quest for an absurd amount of time, waiting until you have the right items and buffs to pass that speech check.

Another example; when exploring the docks at Defiance Bay, your character can notice a shining purple light. If he/she interacts with the light, your character will encounter the memories of a dead child. Should you trigger this innocuous interaction, you will have locked yourself out of being able to talk with townspeople on the disappearance of this boy, which includes the boy’s father, who has since become an alcoholic at the local bar. If you had spoken with the mother first, and then him, and passed a speech check, the man would go back home--otherwise, he’s stuck at the bar forever.

The worst example, *by far* of unfair, “gotcha!” game mechanics has to come from the quests within the game’s DLCs, The White March 1 and 2. Moderate spoilers ahead (warning to anyone concerned with those): you either have to outlaw the study of animancy, make certain dialog choices that lead to a companion becoming an evil crime boss, or lose out on a speech check at the end of DLC 2 when trying to teach mercy and compassion to a “god,” instead getting railroaded into one of two lesser outcomes, *OR* deliberately not finish the game’s second act, do all of the DLC stuff, and then come back if you want all three good endings.

Surely, however, it’s for “replayability.”

It’s punishing in the stupidest ways. Outer Worlds had a few negatives similar to this; you have two major factions that you can ally with, one being cartoonishly evil, and one quest exists where if you neglect to open up some unsuspecting dialog on a computer terminal (and instead delete it straight away) you permanently lock yourself out of a speech check and are then forced to genocide one (or both) of the other factions (or ignore it and get an even worse outcome.) Outer Worlds is metagameable in the sense that you can discover which decisions affect the ending slides ahead of time, and it encourages you to take advantage of its game mechanics a couple of times (particularly with how you can cheese an ending for a certain quest and with how you can cheese stealing a certain poster on Monarch that, by all accounts, an NPC should see you stealing) but certainly nothing to Pillars of Eternity’s scale--and it isn’t as demanding on the player’s time investment, either.

Another criticism--the amount of text present in both games fringes on ridiculous. To quote Philip J. Reed’s review on The Outer Worlds, “ Obsidian’s [writing] tends to be long, meandering, and packed with characters who will never use six words where a twelve-page monologue would suffice.” Pillars of Eternity is no exception to this claim; your character will frequently encounter lore books that most players will pick up and forget where they received them from (their placement usually being an inconvenience to immersion) and I as a player quickly had to learn to tune some things out--especially considering that I was already “metagaming”/looking up other quest analyses beforehand and had more-direct information about the characters on-hand.

A quirk in the dialog that’s consistent in both games is its style of integrating companions into your interactions; both games follow a formula of having an NPC talk to your character, followed up by a companion making some side remark that is hardly ever acknowledged by the NPC--as if your companion is whispering it to you (although the voice acting negates this), or as if it’s a theatrical aside, the companion characters doing a fourth-wall break to react to the events with you--and only you.

One aspect that Pillars of Eternity is stronger than Outer Worlds in, I would say, is in its combat scenarios. Early on in Pillars, the player is encouraged to storm a local leader (Lord Raedric)’s fort. The player has three options on doing this; climb up the side of the tower (using the grapling hook and some small skill checks) and fight through a small number of guards, go in through the main gates and fight most of the guards head-on, or sneak in through the sewer grates and fight monsters after using a strength check. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, as this is early on enough that the loot you would acquire from fighting actually matters and each route can be fun in its own right. 

Compare this with The Outer Worlds, where you have a similar fortress assault involving a sewer, a temporary disguise, or direct assault option, where the sewer entrance leads you straight to your objective, the combatants are innocent, non-soldier people (or robots), the disguise you would have falls off after every ten steps you take, and it’s late-game enough that attacking enemies won’t give you any worthwhile loot. Or compare it to the quest “The City and the Stars,” in which you can either stealth through a whole building, or kill the building’s guards and lose town reputation points... or pass a simple skill check where your character can acquire a permanent disguise and not set off any of the enemies whatsoever, allowing you free travel to loot and make it to your objective. Or again, compare it with the quest “Passage to Anywhere” where you as a player are either tricked into spending all of your money on opening up a shortcut, fighting and beating two overpowered enemies (which I did), or blitzing through an alternative route, outrunning all of the enemy characters and potentially bypassing a third of the game in the process (the easiest, by far, to do.)

Maybe these deficiencies are easier to see in hindsight, after a finished product exists, but these are negative aspects of game design.

The combat mechanics themselves are pretty fun. Sometimes the pathfinding glitches out (or A.I. will inhibit your characters from automatically attacking a new enemy), and the lack of a single button to change your entire party’s weapons is a small inconvenience, but for the most part it works well. The design choice of having this be a game where you repeatedly “pause” the game to issue new combat instructions (rather than feature a turn-based system) can be fatiguing over long play sessions, and Pillars being that style of game might be a dealbreaker to some players, but I generally enjoyed that feature.

A final point on the writing--Obsidian is a little “woke.” There’s really no getting around this one. I’d like to revisit the idea of certain (reasonable) dialog choices not being included in Obsidian’s games, either out of laziness (e.g., in Pillars of Eternity, my character, a priest of Berath, encountered a small chapel to Berath... and all of the dialog choices amounted to “Who is Berath,” “I’ve never heard that title of Berath’s be used before,” even though other dialog checks take your background into account) or from lack of playtesting and feedback (e.g. in Outer Worlds, not having the option to transport a certain character to a different planet on this early quest’s third outcome) but certain decisions and design choices by the studio don’t have that excuse.

In Pillars, for example, the only way to get a good outcome on one quest and thus significantly raise your reputation in the town, is to lower the price of black market birth control. No moral qualms are raised and no ways for your character to roleplay against this are made available. Prostitutes also exist in Pillars of Eternity (although that feature remains partially broken), and the only way to get a (stackable, temporary) +2 enhancement on your resolve is for your player to solicit a male prostitute in the game. Outer Worlds also features a major quest, where you’re expected to assist one of your companions in getting into a lesbian relationship; again, no way to repel or address any disagreements or differences through your player character’s roleplaying are present. The mentality is like the equivalent of the show Arthur’s episode on gay marriage; “if we don’t address or allow representation for our opposition, it doesn’t exist.” It’s ironically closed-minded and annoying when the game that frames the weight of your moral decisions is so detectably and consistently biased.

Minor spoiler alert, but both games also feature a priest support-character that (at some point in the game) hates their god, and the character leading the not-evil main faction in Outer Worlds was directly inspired by Rick from Rick & Morty--if that speaks anything as to the mentality of this studio. Other choices, such as (in Pillars) winning reputation points by buying and freeing slaves as opposed to killing the slaver and freeing slaves, and winning reputation points for forgiving someone of manslaughter and allowing the person to keep his secret, also speak a little on Obsidian’s morality and inhibit player freedom in additional annoying ways.

ALL that complaining aside... there is a lot to enjoy. It’s a big world to tap into, and it does have a sequel where you can import data from this game into that and have some of your major decisions be reflected in that game as well. It also features a stronghold (a Kickstarter stretch goal) that the player can manage--some meta knowledge of the game’s upcoming events and mechanics helps a lot in this, but it’s certainly a unique addition to this type of RPG and is genuinely a fun thing to work with. The combat mechanics are fun, although in many situations, it felt far easier to cheese the opponents’ pathing A.I. by luring a single enemy away, murdering him, and saving the game (note: both Pillars and Outer Worlds will likely leave you with a mess of save files after one playthrough), rinsing and repeating, and it would have been a welcomed feature had there been a button to change all party members’ weapons at once (which is helpful in that strategy, where you shoot a character, run away, and then beat on him/her/it as a group with swords) but the combat was still overall fun (albeit perhaps tiring and a monotonous after long hours of play.) The player economy is relatively punishing, with found items typically holding around an eighth of their sale value when you resell them, but this too is manageable (especially if you exploit a money glitch like the one from the first town.)

Obsidian can make a good game. It’s just disheartening to see that many of its flaws are systematic.

Ratings: 

Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition: 7/10

The Outer Worlds: 8/10

Follow twitter.com/will_salsman for more content!

[retspecgame]

Retropective: Monster Hunter

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Or in heat. May the Lord have mercy upon thy soul

So, you played all those newfangled Souls games but you crave for something a bit more... different? You’ll probably feel confident enough to take on this odd yet incredibly popular Japanese game which sadly, suffered the same fate in terms of how well-known it is in the West. It has all the bells and whistles that makes the combat just as nuanced and perplexed as a Souls game would. But then, when you just try to get that woolly mammoth thing’s delicious meat and all to barbaque on a spit you brought along in a snowy place, you’ll suddenly get greeted by a huge dragon-like creature that would crawl really quick right to you after dropping straight down. A roar that could send an avalanche rolling down, snapping its jaws, sharp teeth and all. You’re just armed with a toothpick. And wear paper for armor. It’s 5 feet right in front of you. 

Welcome to Monster Hunter.

The recent developments of the game, having an open beta of Monster Hunter: World this week (which unfortunately, only PS4, PS+ users are allowed to take part in) for a stress-test of their servers, had me hyped since the game was first unveiled in E3 this year. It is a fantastic, long-awaited take for the game itself. Finally there are changes that makes sense in the game that long-time players would be more relieved than be disgusted by, honestly. At least in my opinion. But I do find it a bit awkward that these kinds of changes that I would had fantasized of when I was just a new player back in ‘08. It’s uncanny!

Monster Hunter is a game that first came out in 2003 when Capcom was not crap trying to make full use of the PS2′s internet connectivity option for online multiplayer. So they came out with 3 games: a racing game, a Resident Evil/Biohazard: Outbreak and... this. Of the lot, Monster Hunter actually managed to came out top, even against friggin’ RE which is not exactly a bad game though with somewhat questionable implementation. The thing is, the team that wanted to make this game put a lot of effort into it. It wasn’t generic or half-assed like the other two, it actually had a more unique gameplay mechanic in comparison. The music produced for the game is gorgeous, the worldbuilding around the game surprisingly meaty even if most of it isn’t really fleshed out in-game, they have adorable cat-men made, and basically the whole pull for the game is that you constantly beat the hell out of the dragons and dinos you find and wear their skin as hats. Awesome. The game later managed to be honored with a remixed version endorsed by Capcom that added the G-rank, more monsters in the roster, more weapons, more maps, some new improvements, just about everything! And you get to pay for it full price after buying the first game. Typical Capcom business as usual.

But the series never truly shined until it comes to the handhelds. Sure, it had a console release soon after with Dos but the real reason why this game is developed because the game emphasizes multiplayer a lot more than you think, having the Gathering Hall readily available for online play. Unfortunately, consoles don’t really solve the age-old problem of Japanese salarymen lacking time and money to own and play consoles at home, their very target audience. So, let’s say getting the game to run on the PSP is not only technically impressive, but it does make a hell lot of sense. You could go for a quick curbstomp with some random strangers or friends travelling along the train ride to and fro, the rush hour is always a frantic but sometimes frustratingly dull daily routine. Or, get to your friends’ house to play MonHun together instead of theirs to play. Either way, a 4-man hunting party taking down a fiery dragon is always a magical experience, not quite like how you’d have seen before outside of a drab MMO. Strategy and skill (and a big stick) is what you need to kill a monster but teamwork makes the job all the more enriching than taking one down alone. Even the later Portable versions of the game pretty much made the game mandatory for multiplayer, even in singleplayer with the introduction of Felyne Comrades (later known as Palicos), adorable little cat-men decoys/light support hunters that you have them tag along in hunts. 

You just can’t say no when it says it wants to go with you!

Of course, all the big fancy fights and nice weapons and armours you’d get along progressing the game later would ultimately boils down to slow, hard, meticulous, gratuitously grindy work. A very Japanese thing sometimes. Besides, you’re not a Monster Hunter just because you happen to have a chest full of weapons and armour that popped out of nowhere right? You have to understand firstly that your character here took this as a career. Your character definitely signed up for this. Most of the time, your character will start off as the village Exterminator- I mean, Monster Hunter, where he/she accepts quests from the local village chief to do jobs and bounties posted by just about anybody in the game. A newlywed? Chef? A friggin’ Princess? The Chief? Yes, anybody! Sometimes you don’t even need to go through the details why, just take it for that sweet, sweet zenny reward. And maybe you’d be able to make that hat you always wanted along the way. Or if you’re down with the fluffy bits of the game, you could get to know who your clients are with the descriptions detailing the job you’ll be taking. Some desperate for reprisals, some makes sense, some petty, some irresponsible, some are dubious. Some even came from kids who just wanted you to gather some plants in the woods. Yes, you don’t always get to kill monsters in this game, filling out that hunter-gatherer criteria of your job. 

In that matter, gathering (and eventually hoarding) stuff in the game would be your bread and butter in the experience. To get plants and mushrooms totally for medical stuff is one of the earliest thing you have to do in the game. Preparations before taking on the big ones are key to surviving your fight, just as crafting, farming and cooking would. In this early phase of the game, the really slow burn, grindy part of the game would center around you familiarizing with the game before eventually getting to finish the main story in the game in less than 10 hours in-game when you come back a veteran. Hoarding enough of your stuff in the wild would eventually lead to you actually make cool stuff with it too! Mainly the fancy hats.

Capcom might have called this a hack-n’-slash but you never get to play this like you did with Dante in Devil May Cry (another Capcom release). When in that game, you’d be more aggressive and pulling your attacks, lightning-fast and never get tired from it, Monster Hunter is much less so about that. Even the fastest weapon you can play in the game stresses in a way that you must position yourself in a good spot before pulling off some fancy moves. Wrestling with how the game’s control scheme shits on the more simplistic, button-mashing style of gameplay in most hack-n’-slash games could be half the pleasure, especially if you happen to master them as well. But the game still relies on you methodically placing your attacks, learning attack patterns of your enemies, knowing when to run, set up traps, manage stamina and health, noticing telltale signs of it about to pull off moves or ready for capture. All the while not knowing when you’ll know when the monster would drop with the lack of a health bar. It does sound complicated on paper but in practice, well, even less so. All those things would happen in the heat of the moment and it’s up to you to manage them. No amount of preparation could save you of you can’t utilize them properly here. The weapon animations are, however, mostly uncancellable and sometimes you got to drop the hammer in the right place in the right time if you want to do some serious damage. That includes finding openings for the monsters and targeting their soft, squishy parts for that extra DAMAGE. The game would really punish you for doing haphazard attacks but sometimes it’s not really your fault as much as the game itself.

What do I do to deserve your hitboxes?

It may sound like a feeble excuse of not being good at the game fighting it but there is a reason why the Plesioth, the big fish monster thingy, is universally reviled as a monster to fight. Simply because hipchecks are incrdibly annoying when mixed with the large hitbox sizes in the earlier iterations. Capcom managed to fix this AND not having it back in later games, thankfully. So all is well.

Outside of combat, you’ll notice how explorable the maps can be when you step foot in the hunting grounds. Most of the time, they felt like natural locations, sometimes asymmetrical but never quite felt like it intended to direct the players to a certain location like some level designs would. More like, how much you could explore the whole place to sate your ever-growing curiousity. Hiddn paths, shortcuts and potentially exploitable  spaces you’d find along the way while looking for your prey. It’s also the little things about the whole environment that you’d notice. It’s incredibly diverse, never feeling samey or generic as most fantasy-themed game would when involving dinos and dragons to kill. Sometimes you’d enjoy the little details surrounding the map, like a giant shell of an elder dragon on top of a mountain or  how nature had reclaimed an age-old ruin in the middle of a jungle, large swathes of desert sands or lava that actually behaved differently depending on the time you are in there, day or night. Or simply something more aesthetically pleasing like a mountain you see right in front of the first area of the map or islands with waterfalls come crashing down from a height as far as the eyes can see. Those maybe just blocky polygons and textures at the time but they never fail to capture my sense of wonder and the fact it reminds me that I couldn’t explore at those parts of the game. If you want to know how immersive the game world can be, look no further.

Perhaps this is what their newest game wants to convey to us. The maps of the previous games are beautiful but barely interactable. You could only hop onto ledges, swim and gather at select sites at that point. But nothing further from that. The new game, Monster Hunter: World would explore more on this, allowing players to actually do something cool about it. Breakable obstacles, environmental destruction for opening new paths or traps, places you could actually hide in, animals you can find there to travel to new areas or inflict status effects, the amount of the detail they put in this is crazy, limited only to your imagination. All in one, massively seamless map. One might fear these could lead to a wasted effort since sometimes it’s not a big focus during fights, especially when you’re timed during your job to take down one big monster before it’s up. The emphasis on exploration could potentially be ignored in the favour of a more direct action-oriented play. Players more accustomed to focusing their efforts onto fighting monsters for more than 4 games may not even try something new for that but it remains to be seen. What appears to be a novelty may evolve into something bigger when you have all the time you need to explore on the map, opening up more possibilities to what you can do in the game-world later in the full-game.

#monster hunter #retrospective #gaming

[rhythmantics]

a collection of doodles; stuff for a 3rd Orre game idea I bounce around sometimes and a couple of OCs

the dream is to one day make a fangame for the orre series

tbh with the way pokemon currently is i don’t trust them at all to handle orre

xd was already Lighter and Softer than colo, and i can only shudder to imagine how much lighter they’ll crank that dial. we might even see shit like...routes...and wild pokemon on them...like??

the orre games had this wonderful moral ambiguity and urban decay that i don’t think pokemon is capable of catering to right now, since they’re trying so hard to have this image these days of this sprawling, kid-focused series. and yeah, s/m’s story got dark and shit, but the game wasn’t marketed that way, and it’s more of a juicy tidbit than the core of the experience.

If a third orre game isn’t unnecessarily gritty and edgy then, like, what’s even the point lol

So i do have rpg maker xp and I do have pokemon essentials and i think i’ve more or less worked out the mechanics i need to have implemented, but i dont think i ahve the time to spare to actually finish it in any capacity because the amount of new assets i’d have to create - tiles, character models, etc - is so massive it would realistically take me several, several months even if i was doing it as a full-time job

so in any case here are some ideas to titillate your interest:

GAMEPLAY:

level scaling across the entire game, across every trainer (possible to turn off for a more traditional pokemon experience). Regular trainers would be set ~3 levels below your team, “strong” trainers (ie cail, rider willie) would be set at your team, and bosses would always be a few levels above. The only place this wouldn’t apply would be Mount Battle, which is, after all, a side challenge. This mechanic would pretty much do away with the need for level grinding except to balance out team levels. reasoning: the orre games are known for their higher difficulty curve, and this plays off it. Double battles also make for very interesting avenues of strategy exploration; with bosses always a little tougher than you are the hope is you might wipe out a couple times before figuring out a winning strategy.

Lucky egg given early but no exp. share.

higher catch rate on shadow pokemon - since the game would start you out at lvl 25 and honestly this is just an anti-frustration feature

Again, level scaling can be turned off for a more traditional experience, but the idea would be that the levels would get pretty high pretty fast, and by midgame you’d be going up against lvl 55s and stuff (just enough to start encountering some salamences and flygons), hopefully ending the game in the 80′s.

Pokedex -> strategy memo, and seen = obtained. Strategy memo actually contains opinions from the player character rather than just standard “animal facts” type stuff.

No routes! Just cities! Pokespots still in effect to limit the player’s pool of usable pokemon.

Missed pokemon integrated with pokespots or maybe made un-faintable so you have to catch them because i’m really not that good at programming guys

SETTINGS:

Orre is a cold desert. I know technically it’s based on the Arizona desert, and I’ve been there, but friggin look at the fashion, these people would all get heatstrokes in a matter of seconds.

So to that end, my orre is actually based on the Atacama Desert, whose topography not only resembles Orre’s (volcanic mountains on one side, ocean on the other), but is a cold desert (with daytime temperatures peaking around 60 degrees F) and is considered the driest desert in the world, with some places having not seen rain in centuries, having been compared to Mars in regards to how uninhabitable it is.

you know, like how apparently wild pokemon can’t survive in orre except at the pokespots.

also the orre colosseum looks just like the atacama hand and i dont think that’s a coincidence

canyons, oases, underground rivers and deep underground cave systems, forests to the northeast and a coast that’s actually somewhat habitable via fog collection

THE UNDER IS BACK

gateon renamed Io Port (the japanese name) to go with the gem/mineral naming scheme of the rest of the game. Plaque added outside lighthouse reading “Io Lighthouse” (GEDDIT)

cipher key lair being torn down by reformed eldes, working with lovrina and gorigan, in order to create an amusement park, hopefully to be an international tourist attraction of the more innocent variety than realgam

Areas given a name. Desert is orre desert, northwest forest is Tempor Forest, mountain range is Kabla Mountains, keeping in line with Eclo Canyon

A new town named Appoak, one of those aforementioned fog-collection coastal villages, which has the distinct honor of being the place you buy your wildflower seeds, which are often scattered in the desert as funerary rites because it’s kind of hard to build a grave out there and this is a tradition that natives of orre held long before the settlers/miners came in and which has overtaken the settlers/miners’ traditions, especially during and after the starvation riots that happened after the majority of the mines ran dry and the companies stopped sending their support to the workers that were now effectively stranded in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Dead were littered on the streets, no one had the ability to bury them all, and so the tradition of scattering flower seeds instead of erecting graves that would simply be wiped out in the next sandstorm (and have you ever tried to dig a hole in dry sand) became popular since it felt like more closure

Anyways Appoak cultivates desert flowers year-round and sells the seeds and performs funerary rites, as a result it’s considered something of a sacred locale in that no one wants to mess with it because you have no idea who you might be pissing off whose loved one was buried with Appoak rites

CHARACTERS:

Michael, 5 years later, now 18 (in xd he’s called an “unknown teen” by ONBS and honestly he’s so short that i’d feel bad if he was older than 13 at the time of the game) is your player character! Trainer class Lab Kid, with a cool hover-scooter, who is now officially a staff member at the Lab HQ as a result of reaching adulthood (though he’s been helping out with field research long before that.)

Your starter is a sylveon, level 25, because this Michael is not a blank-slate character, and sylveon is both in character and doesn’t conflict with any choice of eeveelution from the first game. In fact, this michael made it through the entirety of the first game without evolving his Eevee, like an absolute madman.

Lily and Jovi start the game off overseas giving lectures on shadowfication and purification, mostly so that i don’t have to create their sprites. But also because them leaving is an excuse for them to take all your pokemon from the first game with them, for “demonstration purposes,” leaving you with just your eeveelution and maybe some second pokemon-i-don’t-know-what-yet-probably-your-choice-of-any-starter so you can hurry up and get to the double battles without sacrificing an ability to make a choice on your starter.

Wes is in the game and he is an asshole and you will love him

Cail actually serves a plot purpose

Cameos from all your favorite admins and named characters from Colo/XD, most of which remain unfought until either late or post-game (because the focus is on the new story, you know?)

Miror B and flunkies at Io Port, the proud owners of a popular and, more importantly, lucrative new ludicolo dance act.

Eldes, trying to make up for his past, sponsoring an amusement park being worked on by Lovrina and her brother, with Gorigan overseeing the construction. Snattle offhandedly mentioned as having been elected governer by default (no one else was running) and helping with greenlighting these projects since he and eldes are, apparently, sand-golf buddies and eldes has been twisting his ear for the greater good

also eldes wears a dress shirt with hawaiian print on it

Dakim lives on mt battle now

not as, like, part of the mt battle challenge. he just . sorta. lives there.

Venus is now the onbs weather girl and onbs can’t decide whether they like her or hate her

the jail squad: greevil, nascour, and evice. They’re poker buddies. orre jail for the rich is basically a retirement home because orre is ridiculously corrupt.

ardos? ein? well...

PLOT

So, your field assignment is to collect samples of M18 - also known in Almia by the name of “Dark Crystal” and sometimes colloquially referred to as “shadow crystal” in Orre - for research.

As you probably already assumed, this stuff works as a catalyst for shadowfication and Orre happens to be supernaturally abundant, though it having been strip-mined out by cipher during the last two cipher events has made it much rarer (and it’s theorized by NPCs that the return of wild pokemon may have something to do with the lessened M18 presence).

touching it initiates a small flashback cutscene, as it’s apparently transformed from normal quartz into M18 by the abundance of negative feelings somehow (again, you’re collecting it for study) so that’s how we get some nice backstory about michael’s dead dad (who isn’t eldes, sorry guys, he’s a guy named Prof. Taiga because - haha - Taiga Lily) and other characters

Somehow this investigation leads you to the first rumblings of a resurgence of cipher, who is also collecting M18, though for much more nefarious purposes

So, anyways, in XD, when you beat ardos in the orre colosseum, he sent you a creepy-ass email declaring that he’s basically gonna stalk you forever and kill you during cipher’s - what, third? - third coming, which he’s totally gonna do. Sequel hook! which comes true! because HELLO, your opponent is Ardos, who’s been working in secret this whole time, plotting your demise.

Also ein is there, which is important because...

QUICK HEADCANON BREAK

In colosseum, Cipher specifically targets Celebi because they know celebi’s power is directly tied with undoing shadowfication. (Material in-game suggests that celebi has been responsible for purification for generations of rui’s family, which means cipher didn’t INVENT shadowfication, but they did create a method for doing it ARTIFICIALLY)

However, in XD, cipher doesn’t target agate at ALL. they never even step foot in it. In fact, they’re so woefully underinformed about purification that they feel the need to kidnap Prof. Krane over it.

How does that happen?

Well, we know cipher in game 2 is the main branch, and cipher in game 1 is actually just an orre side branch. Whose only real plan with shadow pokemon was just to rig up really exciting and morally inexcusable colosseum matches for rich people to bet on. No world domination in game one!

So my theory is this: Cipher orre branch created shadowfication basically on a whim and tried to make money off it, which you stopped. When you stopping it attracted attention, cipher main branch had to take notice, and realized that, hey - fucking shadow pokemon ,fuckin world domination, right??? so they promptly took over all of cipher orre branch’s operations and replaced the old personnel with new ones from main branch, while forcing them to hand over their research.

Ein did not take being fired well.

In fact, he took it so poorly that he made sure to destroy all his information on purification before handing over his research.

Cipher in game 2 has no idea the connection between Celebi and purification.

BACK TO THE PLOT

Because Ein has been re-hired by Cipher, he brought with him his knowledge of purification.

They know about celebi.

Also wes is there? He plays a major role, mostly after it’s revealed he’s actually a cipher admin.

...His eevee and espeon are missing.

time travel shenanigans idk

it rains at the climax for the first time in 10 years!

this is a wip

if this is interesting to you guys lmk! im always open to talking about it more in-depth or hearing ideas. hahah...

#pokemon xd #pokemon colosseum #prowler i think is the name for that trainer class #stalker or tracker maybe

[felidae-charr]

Why GW2 Just Can’t Keep Me

A mechanics post - holy cow, we haven’t done one of these in a while!

I haven’t fallen out of love with Guild Wars 2, but once again I find myself in a pit of complete disinterest with the game. Ironic considering that there’s an expansion coming out and there’s all this jazz with the Living World stuff, right? And yet here I am, logging into Final Fantasy XIV every single day, being far more excited about Stormblood than I am about the prospective GW2 expansion.

Why is it that GW2 just isn’t able to ever keep my interest? What does this game do that makes me look at it, and say “Eh. Whatever.” and leaves me playing it like a tide - coming and going and never able to just stay playing it? And I know I’m not the only one that has this problem, too. 

Today, we’ll be looking at the endgame content of GW2 and why it, for me personally at least, dramatically fails to actually make me care to keep playing.

MMORPGs, in general, follow a very similar formula for their end-game. They all tend to apply a very standard “content drip” that is designed to keep loyal veteran players logging in, while also potentially capturing new players all at once. Many also make use of the infamous Gear Treadmill™ - easily one of the most controversial aspects to MMO games in general that employ the use of them.

Guild Wars 2 follows a similar set up, and yet for some reason of every game I’ve ever played, it is the least capable at holding my genuine interest. Why is this? Why is a game I love so much just so bad at keeping me playing? When I have 58 characters, when I’ve invested so much time and so much money, why then do I still reach these points where I just don’t care?

Well, part of that is because Guild Wars 2 might have a similar set up in the form of a content drip, ArenaNet have never been consistent until very recently (if we’re honest.) Veteran players will remember that, at one point, the game was suffering from a massive content drought with practically no real updates at all aside from the usual gem store nonsense. And if I’m being honest, I still think Guild Wars 2 suffers from content drought really badly, even after every update. Because, if we’re honest... they just don’t add a lot of content in the first place.

The ultimate reality of Guild Wars 2 is that their content drip, though now semi-regular and designed to consistently update the story of their game, still isn’t enough to prevent players from winding up starved of things to do. Dungeon rewards have been gutted to the point of them not worth the time to run any more, and ArenaNet have failed almost majestically at fixing the core problems as to why nobody ran the likes of Arah often or why Twilight Arbor’s Aetherpath went so criminally under-run. They have always been trash at making their dungeons - which are fundamentally fun and well crafted - worth running. And that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? The Western gaming culture, and especially in MMORPGs, likes to be efficient.

They like to DPS as fast as possible to skip mechanics just because they can and because it makes it go faster. In the same way, we also like to know that if we’re going to spend half an hour in a dungeon, it’s going to be worth our time. If we could spend that half an hour doing something else and making double or triple the reward (with potentially less effort, too) then we would never run the dungeon. It’s a waste. And thusly, the GW2 dungeon team was scrapped, and we haven’t seen a real dungeon in actual, literal years. Content updates don’t give us new ways to play with other players in party-specific dungeon content.

Of course we have the infamous raids, but to be honest, I don’t like the raids in this game. I find that the classes and builds I enjoy playing don’t fit into the raids, which are slowly but surely trying to shoehorn the Holy Trinity of classes back into a game that’s original design was built around scrapping the Holy Trinity completely. I also find that while raids can be fun with friends, raids in GW2 can also bring out the literal worst in players - with people being kicked for not putting up enough numbers on the parser or being kicked because their class just isn’t optimal. Raids, for me, are not endgame content because frankly I don’t care for them. 

The new story sections that our content drip in the form of Living World gives us are completed in, at most, four hours. And that’s if you’re playing kind of slowly and exploring. If you’re burning through the story alone, you’re often done in two hours or less. These solo instances are often fun to run once or twice, too, but they quickly become not-worth-running or outright boring because there’s never any change to them and it isn’t like a dungeon where you’re running with new people every time. Eventually these little story pieces just sort of sit there and the only time you play through them again is if you happen to be, I don’t know, farming experience points for masteries on a level 80 character.

And the new maps that we’ve been getting, while also fun for the first few hours, can just as quickly become boring content. The latest map released, Draconis Mons, I actually hated on pretty much every conceivable level. There was too much going on in that map, the mini-map was atrocious and I couldn’t make my way around it without getting lost somewhere, there was so much bloom and bright burning fire and particle effects that my eyes got about as sick shit of the map as my brain did, and none of the events were actually engaging. Kill this, kill that, oh a group event to kill something else. I out and out thought Draconis Mons was the biggest flop of a map ArenaNet have ever released, and I still do.

So what is there for me to actually do? The reality is: nothing.

The content drip that ArenaNet offers is simply not enough, because the reality is that it doesn’t give us anything new that keeps us playing. Raiders will continue to raid, certainly, but I find raiding to have been implemented very oddly and in a direction that seems to be very opposite from the core of the game itself. Similarly, World versus World is still criminally ignored by most of ArenaNet and I haven’t had fun in that basic zergfest for a long time, and PvP is just as neglected to the point that those funny little “tournaments” ArenaNet tried to hold when they wanted to break into the e-sports scene have been cancelled and most of the veteran PvPers basically abandoned the game to find pastures new, with developers that actually cared.

I could log in to do my dailies, but why would I? Dailies do nothing but give me gold, which I in turn don’t spend on anything, because there is nothing I want or need to spend it on. Most of the achievements are either easy to get or a boring grind and there’s rarely a nice middle. Aside from the couple of new ones in the last few Living Story updates, I’ve done every fun jumping puzzle. I have 20 characters at level 80 and I’ve done the Personal Story too many times to be willing to count.

Guild Wars 2 just doesn’t cater to me. And that’s fine, it is under no obligation to - but it also means that I am constantly going through phases where literally any other game is more fun than GW2 is. Final Fantasy XIV Online, for example, has taken me by absolute storm once again. The expansion looks promising, and while there are often several months between content being released in that game’s content drip, they always come with new dungeons, new boss fights, new story elaboration and quests. I still have plenty of side quests to do if I want to, other classes to level, I’m eagerly awaiting the next set of joking silly Hildibrand quests, I get new little emotes to play with, new furniture for housing, and so on and so on. FFXIV also does a fantastic job - in my eyes at least - at making the gear treadmill fairly fun. I always know the minimum rewards I’m going to get from doing all of my dungeon runs in a day, I can plan what to buy when to buy it, I never feel like the game pressures me into needing that gear as soon as possible, and I always have the option to do raids to see if I can get lucky and have gear drop for me instead. Honestly, while I initially fell in love with GW2 because of it’s no-gear-treadmill policy and the abandonment of the Holy Trinity that had always bothered me as a lover of DPS classes, I’m ironically finding that FFXIV is just flat out a better crafted MMORPG that takes a lot more care and puts a lot more effort into making sure end game players don’t just sit around waiting for poor excuses for content. 

And that’s why I’m sitting here, staring at the GW2 icon on my desktop relabelled “Fashion Wars” trying to find the will to even log into the game at all for the sake of something silly like screenshots. Which I can also do better in FFXIV, for the record.

I love Guild Wars 2. I love Guild Wars 2 very, very much and it has an extremely special place in my heart, and it will always be one of my favourite games. But once again I’m stuck in that rut where I love the game, but the game really doesn’t love me that much, and I can’t find a reason to log in to even do something as simple as stare at my own characters. 

#long post #Felidae rambles #GW2 #Guild Wars 2 #mechanics post #why is the endgame in GW2 so bad #especially the lack of dungeons #i'm really starting to feel that lack of fun party content #world events don't cut it anet

[rpgmgames]

January's Featured Game: Wishbone

DEVELOPER(S): Skitty, Kwillow, Ellie, Natasha ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace   GENRE: Western, Drama, Farming Simulation WARNINGS:  N/A SUMMARY: Wishbone is a character drama-slash-farming sim game that takes place in a wild west-inspired setting. The player takes the role of a farmer, fresh off the wagon in a new town and tasked with building a successful ranch. Wishbone might seem sleepy and mundane at first, but there’s trouble brewing on the horizon: a fierce, prolonged standoff between the lawmen and the outlaws that will decide the fate of the town itself.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself!  *Skitty: Hello! I'm Skitty, a scruffy weirdo whose hobbies include drawing, programming, and cooking. I also happen to be the coder, project manager, and one of the main artists. In 2014, I released my first game, Theo's Big Adventure, but actually haven't really been involved in the community... I'm a bit of a hermit.

*Katie: Hi! I’m Wishbone’s portrait artist, and I also do some other less easily categorizable stuff, like writing, spriting, concept work and research! This is the first game I’ve ever been a part of the team on, if you don’t count an unfinished choose-your-own-adventure game I made in Flash when I was 13.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Skitty: It's kind of a funny story. Several years ago, I used to be part of the Fallout: New Vegas roleplay community on tumblr. Just for fun, a few of my friends and I came up with an alternate universe where instead of living in the post-apocalyptic desert, all the characters lived in the wild west instead. We ended up having a lot of fun with the idea! My friend, Ellie (who is also working on this project as a writer), suggested the idea of an Animal Crossing-esque game based on that setting... and I, having coding knowledge and having made a game before, volunteered to make it. The struggle between the four central characters remains the same as the initial concept, but the project and the people of the town have evolved a lot since then.

How long have you been working on your project? *Skitty: I started it around April 2015, so it's a few months short of two years old. Progress has been slow because I'm also juggling a job and other obligations, but even during busy times, I typically manage to work on Wishbone every week. Every couple weeks, new features get done and updates are posted to the dev blog.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Skitty: The three biggest ones are Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Red Dead Redemption. From Animal Crossing, we have have befriending townspeople and decorating your house. From Harvest Moon, we have the farming mechanics and romance. From Red Dead Redemption, we have hunting, foraging, and outlaw bounties. And I suppose Fallout: New Vegas deserves a shoutout for kicking the whole project off, albeit indirectly.

*Katie: I’ve liked Wild West settings for a while, but this project has made me go big on trying to absorb as much information from both the actual time period and from media as I can. Lately I’ve been trying to cram as many old Westerns into my eyeballs as I can so I get a good picture of the (romanticized) aesthetic and shorthands that have been used for this genre in the past.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?   *Skitty: Honestly, we’ve been fighting against RPG Maker’s limitations since the beginning, since the game we’re making is quite unlike a top-down RPG.

I would say that the biggest difficulty so far has been the patch of code that manages animals aging, getting sick, eating, giving birth, etc when the day rolls over. Originally, each animal event had an autorun page that would process that information when the player entered the barn map, but that would get very messy if the player didn’t enter that map all day. It got even messier if the player sent the animals in the barn out to pasture! To solve this, I first had to learn the order in which autorun events are evaluated (tip: it’s determined by the event ID number!). But that wasn’t enough… as more features were implemented, it became obvious that that approach just didn’t work. There were too many conflicts, and every time I’d fix something, I’d have to go through 20+ animal events, each with 40 pages, and change something over, and over and over… it was incredibly inefficient, typo-prone, and hard on the wrist.

Eventually, I got sick of it and recoded the whole animal system to use “generic” Common Events for interaction (basically I copy the animal’s specific stat variables to “generic” variables used by the function, then call it), with the aging/giving birth/eating/etc handled by a single event that was called once when the player slept. In hindsight, it seems so obvious… but my previous project didn’t use Common Events at all, so the first year of Wishbone’s development was largely dedicated to learning how to use them effectively.

*Katie: My biggest obstacle has been myself. I’m both a procrastinator and a perfectionist, which is just a horrible combo for ever getting anything done. Thankfully Skitty keeps me as on task as she can, but I still get mired in fixing-loops, and you would not believe the amount of times I’ve sent her revised images just because I moved a nostril two pixels to the left because it had been bothering me so badly.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Skitty: It actually hasn’t changed a whole lot. In the beginning, we had this core concept, basically just Animal Crossing plus Harvest Moon. But even back then we knew we wanted a big plot and minigames and sidequests and stuff… it was just a matter of figuring out if those were feasible to program.

I’d say it actually has more features now than it did in the original concept, too. I think in the beginning we had maybe five minigames, now it’s more like 8-10ish (depending on what you consider a minigame).

*Katie: It’s far larger than we had intended, that’s for sure! The art style has also shifted quite a bit, from the switch to wholly original graphics from borrowed sprites to subtle alterations in the sprite and portrait style. I think the biggest, most significant change, aside from making all-new sprites, is the inclusion of the sky in most of the game’s maps.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? *Skitty: It’s pretty much the same as it always was–me as the programmer/project manager/spriter, Katie as the portrait artist and other spriter, Ellie, Dax, Jester, and Reuben as character/plot contributors. Oh! I guess the big difference now is that we are in the process of hiring a composer?

What was the best part of developing the game? *Skitty: Seeing it all come together into something finished and cool. Sometimes I like to just lovingly look at the maps and videos and such I’m proudest of and think “wow, I did that! And it turned out almost exactly how I’d imagined!”

*Katie: Agreed! The little bits and pieces don’t seem like much, but when they’re part of a whole it’s like they’re completely transformed. I’m also happy to be working in a group - it makes me so proud to be part of this effort!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Skitty: Man, I’d definitely be craftier about how I handled the code for the animals. I didn’t know a lot about scripting at first, MONTHS worth of headache could have been avoided if I’d known how to use script calls.

*Katie: I don’t want to say ‘I wish I could change everything!’ because that’s not true, but it’s hard to keep myself from feeling I can always improve the parts I’ve contributed to the game. I’m doing a lot of learning on the job, and when I look back on things I’ve done before - even just a couple of portraits or sprites ago - it feels like I need to do everything over and make it better!

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game's universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Skitty: We definitely have plans to use the characters again, but when they’re revisited, it’s going to be in different contexts. You won’t see the desert of Wishbone again, but the characters will absolutely be popping up in future projects.

*Katie: Yeah, these characters are sort of like… actors, in a way. Type-cast actors. We like to put them in different scenarios and see how they adapt.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Skitty: Gosh, it would be amazing if people liked the game enough to call themselves a fan! I’m definitely looking forward to people’s reactions to discovering plot twists and easter eggs and such. I hope people like the characters, too.

*Katie: Having something like this done would feel amazing. I’ve never been part of something this big before, and it’s a lot to be proud of. After that - if even a handful of people like the game, I’d be elated!

Is there something you're afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game?  *Skitty: I hope there aren’t too many bugs in it when I release it! I mean, I’m testing it as I go, but it’s a really big and complex game… there are going to be things I don’t catch. I’d be really disappointed if I released it with a glitch that broke people’s save files.

Also, I really do hope people actually like the characters… I’d be sad if they didn’t.

*Katie: I hope the art does justice to the game… I’d hate for it to be distracting or off, it’s something I worry about frequently. And boy I hope the story and characters come off okay!

Question from last month's featured dev: What's the biggest turn off you can get on an RPG maker game? *Skitty: Hmm… honestly, using the default sprites tends to be a pretty big turnoff. As an artist, it is very important to me that the game have an “aesthetic”, a sense of atmosphere, that the characters feel like individuals… that’s what really catches my eye and makes me want to learn more. I know not everybody is an artist, but like, a simple 8-bit sort of style, or even a “shitpunk” style like Space Funeral is more eye-catching than the default tiles.

Also, I find games made with the default tiles tend to be very easy to get lost in due to the generic nature of said tiles… if you gotta use those, at least make sure your maps are tightly-built and easy to navigate. I’ve played several RPG Maker games where the player spent a lot of time in huge, empty green fields with little or no landmarks. Add some stuff to make the area memorable… players will thank you for it!

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Skitty: Try to set realistic goals for your first (or second, or third…) project. It’s so tempting to want to tell your magnum opus immediately, but that’s usually a recipe for ending up frustrated, disappointed, and quitting. My first project, Theo’s Big Adventure, was fairly short, used mostly ripped sprites from Mother 3 and ripped music from other video games, and still took a year and three months to complete.

Also, try to make working on your project a habit. I find that the hardest part is often just getting started… but once I get in the zone, I can work for hours. Set goals for yourself (whether it’s as big as “I’ll finish Chapter 5 by April” or as small as “I’m going to work on my project for at least 30 minutes today”) and reward yourself if you complete them. If you don’t complete them, don’t beat yourself up… just set the goal again (adjusting it to be more reasonable if needed) and give it another shot.

Oh, and one more thing… it’s alright for something to not be perfect. One of the biggest killers of a long-term project (aside from overambition and having it not be a habit) is perfectionism. Don’t get caught up in the cycle of continually revamping the same pieces over and over again–just let it be imperfect and move on. Nobody’s first project is perfect, but future-you needs the experience and confidence you’ll gain from finishing it to pull off the project of your dreams in a few years.

*Katie: All of the above, but from someone who’s less disciplined, to people who perhaps have similar issues: get somebody who’ll keep your nose to the grindstone and get you working and finishing things when all you want to do is either chase butterflies or toggle an eyeball back and forth to make it “perfect”. You would not believe how much it helps.

We mods would like to thank Skitty and Katie for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved! 

Remember to check out Wishbone if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum 

#rpgmaker #rpg maker #rpg maker games #rpgm #games #game of the month #gotm #pixel art #pixel games #wishbone #interview

[terryblount]

Control Review

What is Control? What makes Control different from other Remedy games? What does it mean to control? Is controlling enjoyable or just another meaningless task. Would you dare to control? Do you like power over others? Do you believe in destiny? Would you attempt to kill yourself for answers or power? Well… Remedy did and they’ve done it gloriously. So did I and so will you. It’s the only way through.

You are a worm though time. The thunder song distorts you. Happiness comes. White pearls, but yellow and red in the eye. Through a mirror, inverted is made right. Leave your insides by the door. Push the fingers through the surface into the wet. You’ve always been the new you. You want this to be true. We stand around while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget. This happens more and more now. You gave us the permission in your regulations. We wait in the stains. The word that describes this is redacted. Repeat the word. The name of the sound. It resonates in your house. After the song, time for applause. We build you till nothing remains. The egg cracks and the truth will emerge out of you. You are home. You remind us of home. You’ve taken your boss with your boss with you. All hair must be eaten. Under the conceptual reality behind this reality you must want these waves to drag you away. After the song, time for applause. This cliché is death out of time, breaking the first the second the third the fourth wall, fifth wall, floor; no floor: you fall! How do you say “insane”? Hurts to be happy. An ear worm is a tune you can’t stop humming in a dream: “baby baby baby yeah”. Just plastic. So, safe and nothing to worry about. Ha ha, funny. The last egg breaks now. The hole in your room is a hole in you. You came and we let you in through the hole in you. You have always been here, the only child. A copy of a copy of a copy. Orange peel. The picture is you holding the picture. When you hear this you will know you’re in new you. You want to listen. You want to dream. You want to smile. You want to hurt. You don’t want to be.

Welcome to the Federal Bureau of Control, hold on to your hats, this ride is gonna be nuts!

Story-telling for the Mentally Insane

Before I explain what the hell is going on with the psycho bumble above, let me throw some story over you. You play as Jesse Faden, who visits a building – named “The Oldest House” – of the Federal Bureau of Control (F.B.C.). Soon after your arrival, you find the Bureau director dead with the murder weapon right beside him. Instead of running out of the room in panic, Jesse picks the “service weapon” and attempts to blow her brains out. Instead of the weapon killing her, however, she becomes the director. Just like that Jesse Faden is the newly appointed director of the F.B.C. and all the hanging portraits of the director are swapped with her face.

“They call me the director, but that’s not me.”

Jess after everyone accepts her naturally as the new director.

If you guys played any of Remedy’s games before, you should know how it tends to create complex stories. This time, the story of its latest game even more complicated. Actually… it’s bat shit crazy. My favorite game is probably Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and, in my opinion, the Max Payne games changed the third-person shooter landscape. Alan Wake was also pretty damn good; I loved its combat mechanics and its story was engaging. As for Quantum Break, there is only one thing to say… “mediocre” (insert Immortal Joe’s voice from Mad Max).

Only in this building an astray can be deadlier than a cigarette. Unless of course Riddick holds that astray.

The SCP Foundation

None of these stories can even scratch the story and lore of Control, which are balls to the wall insane. Control’s story is heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation (Secure, Contain, Protect). If you got some time to spend you should read some of their stuff as they are quite good. Basically “The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name”. The amount of stories is crazy and many of these little stories are exceptionally good.

When you are lost in the darkness, look for the light. It will guide you back, probably.

Jesse Faden the New Director of the Nuthouse

Jesse Faden is the only playable character, unfortunately, and let me tell you she is not that interesting. The voice actress is perfectly fine but her performance did not convince me, at all. Jesse has a very basic backstory and nothing in that story is convincing enough to make me believe how cool she is, especially when faced with the unknown scary and insane world she is in. In my opinion, she should be losing her mind from the second she arrived at the Bureau.

“A carousel horse, why kids stuff always so creepy?”

Jess trying to make sense of what the hell she’s actually seeing.

As I said, everything in “The Oldest House” is completely bonkers and Jesse’s behavior seems completely out of place. No sane person would react so logically in a situation like this. Do you remember Alan Wake? That guy was losing his marbles, as he should, in an incident which – compared to Control – feels like a walk in the park. Still, there were some rare and specific occasions when Jesse expressed her feelings by simply saying a “what the fuck”. Unfortunately, these parts are late in the game and also completely optional, so my point still stands.

What?!

Visuals & Controls

In case you don’t already know, I care very little about a game’s visuals. Thankfully John has already posted his performance analysis so I don’t really have to go into more technical details. I’ll just say that the game performs great on my system and that it looks pretty. I do not own an RTX card so I cannot comment on the ray tracing effects. But anyway, I had stable 60fps with everything on high and a couple of options like reflections on medium. I lowered those settings only because the visual difference did not justify the performance hit. Many players have reported several issues with the game, however it appears that I was lucky. The only issues I encountered was a teleport (which is not an obtainable skill) bug and an infinite loading screen, and both of them occurred only once.

Thankfully, the game’s controls were great. Imagine if a game called Control controlled badly. With a bit of remapping it plays wonderfully but why on God’s green earth there is no key for walking? Why oh why Remedy? An area movement restriction in specific locations, where you can bypass it with the sprint key, would be enough. Lastly, it’s unbelievable that there are no settings for motion blur and depth of field. Seriously now?

Hello Kevin! Ha ha ha! Seriously the lighting is amazing.

Audio, Music & Facial Animation

The audio in Control is superb on every level, and all sound effects have been masterfully implemented. Hell, I did not even get the usual audio glitches which I usually get from games by using earphones. The in-game music is minimal as you can only listen to music through radios or in a very specific room. There is only one scripted sequence with music and all the rest is ambient sounds with some very basic music tracks during fights. The voice acting is pretty good; not great, but good enough. Most of the voice actors are pretty convincing with some exceptions. One of these exception is Jesse; I really don’t like Jesse as I explained before. I like the facial animations overall but there were some dialogues, especially at the beginning, that didn’t impress me. On the other hand, Remedy emphasized Jesse’s lip movement to stand out, which looked really nice.

The Heart of the Game

The gameplay in Control is so – god – damn – good. Seriously, these kind of games are very rare these days. The only ones that come to my mind are Second Sight and, of course, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Those games did psychic powers justice but they got nothing on Control. Control is all about the gameplay, as all games should.

Is that an 8inch floppy disk? God damn I’m old. In case you didn’t know all videos in game are live-action. That’s how you utilize live-action footage. Do you hear me Quantum Break?

Mental Abilities & Destruction

You start with some basic abilities and along the way you get more and more (obviously by completing missions). There are several psychic abilities and some of them have secondary functions. The game features five such abilities; telekinesis, mind control, barrier (shield), melee (force push) and levitation. For example you can unlock an ability that lets you control two minds at the same time or move larger object like forklifts. You can literally grab and throw almost everything you see in the environment and even if there is nothing around you can still rip a concrete junk from the environment and throw it to someone’s face. It is so much fun. Now if I had to choose one power, that would be levitation. I loved levitating above the battlefield and raining destruction upon my enemies; it felt so satisfying. There is also a dash/evade ability (no roll thank god) but, sadly, it is not upgradable.

“Quack if you understand my words.”

Random Bureau agent contacting an interview with a subject.

Now regarding destruction… holy crap, it’s phenomenal. These might be the best destruction mechanics I have ever seen in a single player game. You can literally destroy almost everything and most destroyed objects stay there until you leave the area (something you rarely see in other games). Unfortunately, the bodies do disappear, however they disappear in a cool way. They do not vanish in a lame way as in other games, like Mass Effect: Andromeda for example. The bodies, kind of, evaporate and there is a believable reason behind that phenomenon. To be honest, I’d prefer if they stayed because without them you lose the feeling of success. At least the destroyed environments are still there to remind you what just happened.

Almost everything you break, stays broken. Even when you rip pieces from the floor.

Something I really loved in Control was dashing and watching everything around Jess getting pushed or destroyed by the “movement force“. When you hold an object with telekinesis you can see little pieces of the environment getting pulled in by the telekinesis force, which is super cool. Same goes for when levitating close to objects or structures.

The “Service Weapon”

Regarding the game’s arsenal, there is only one weapon and it is kinda of overkill since Jesse is already a weapon of annihilation. The “Service Weapon”, as it is called, is an Item of Power. These Items can only be used by specific individuals, like the director of the Bureau. Any other person who attempts to interact with such an item will most probably seize to exist in an instant. In the beginning, the weapon acts as a revolver. As you progress, though, you can give it other weapon forms with different characteristics.

“Yes yes, easy peasy!”

Ahti the janitor before sending Jess to lift the lock-down.

Just like the upgradable powers, the Service Weapon has five different forms; revolver, shotgun, machine gun, rifle and grenade launcher. While I tried all of them, I eventually settled on the machine gun and shotgun. Like I said, all of these are upgradable through weapon modifications and by crafting better versions of them. As such, the grenade launcher – for example – can be modified to have larger blast radius for instance. All mods have rarity levels and can be found in the game world. You can also craft mods but they are very expensive in rare resources and the same resources are used for upgrading the weapons.

Shooting Mechanics, Movement & Cover

If there is shooting involved, I always prefer playing in FPP (first person perspective). I am not a great fan of third person shooters, unless of course they are actually good. Thankfully, Control excels on this area, especially when there is no cover and the game pushes you to move around. All guns feel great and unique in terms of handling. If there was something I did not like, it was the shoulder swap; it’s different than what other games do and, unfortunately, it’s not that good. Still, and since this is not a slow paced shooter, I rarely used. And while there isn’t any cover system, you can still take cover and crouch behind things (you cannot “hug” a wall like Gears of War though).

I’ll give this guy the silver medal for his death expression, the gold was given to the guy with the busted radio in Resident Evil 2 Remake.

Standing still is not advisable, something that is also hinted during the loading screen tips. Enemies will rush you and they will use explosives in order to make you leg it. Of course you can play the game as you please. Personally, I used every tool in my disposal and tried to mix different powers which sometimes left me astound. The flow of the combat is amazing as you can shoot an enemy, dash and melee him, levitate and power slam to another, throw a forklift to someone else and use the shield to get some distance while you regain energy. All of these feel natural and blend in amazingly. Hats off to the people responsible for this combat system.

Perfect Balance with No Restrictions

Control does not have any ammunition for your weapon. Instead, every type of weapon has a fixed number of shots. The weapon recharges while not in use and if you use all shots there a slight time penalty (reloading). Same goes for your powers; there is only an energy gauge and nothing more. Just like the weapons, the energy bar replenishes while not using them and there is also a time penalty for using all your energy. The game is forcing you (in a good way) to use both your powers and weapons, without making it impossible to do as you please.

This is how the area map looks like. It can be confusing at the beginning, but you can open it while on the move.

Location (s), Exploration & Collectibles

There is only one location, “The Oldest House”. From start to finish you will be confined in that building. Of course this building is gigantic and you will venture into many different areas, where in many of them the rules of physics make no sense whatsoever. This might make the game a bit monotonous for some people but I did not mind that at all.

“I never liked flamingos, too..pink.”

Jess before facing the..latest pink epidemic

Exploring the federal building is fun and rewarding, even if the game never forces you to do so. There are tons of stuff to find and many of these are cleverly hidden away. There are even hidden places filled with easter eggs. You can find many collectibles that will give you a better insight into the game’s lore and you should probably read these if you want to understand what is going on. After all, the story is not straight forward and can be very complicated at times. Quite frankly these might be some of the most interesting collectibles I have ever read. I usually don’t like reading stuff when playing a game as I prefer something like audio logs. However, all it takes in Control is to read a couple of the documents; after that you will probably be hooked.

Side Missions, Enemies & A.I.

There are three types of side missions: missions given by specific characters, missions found by picking collectibles and ­time based missions with a random objective. None of these missions are mandatory; most of these missions are pretty basic, however, they give you the chance to obtain valuable resources. I did them all just because I couldn’t get enough of the combat. Now if you don’t fancy that, you can simply rush forward and only do the main missions. If you choose not to complete some of the side missions you might lose some important stuff. Some of these missions even hide a boss battle and believe me you will want to meet these “bosses”.

This is probably the creepiest thing I ever seen in a video game lately. Seriously it gave me goosebumps again while I was typing this. By the way this video was meant for children.

Speaking of bosses there are not many; if I remember correctly you only face one true boss in the main story but I do not want to give more details as we’ll be entering a “spoilers” area. The regular enemy (HISS) variation is not bad, but it could definitely be better. There is even one enemy who I did not manage to destroy no matter how hard I tried.

“Do you feel it? Something is coming.”

Jess getting the “feeling” while she walk into a dark corridor.

Remember that paranoid second paragraph of the review? Well, there are people floating all over the place, chanting that incantation all the frigging time. And I loved it. If you shoot they will stop for a second. If you shoot them, they will disappear but they will eventually re-appear. Whoever thought of that has my respect, because it changes the perspective and feeling of each room.

It think I run into Criss Angel’s family.

Unfortunately, the A.I. is nothing special. You can lure enemies in a corridor or you can bait them through corners. The A.I. is designed to challenge you when you are on the move. When things work as intended, the combat feels great. Still, the A. I. could be way more advanced than what we got.

Control

I will be honest; I adored this game even though it is not perfect. Jesse is totally unlikeable… at least until the very end. The voice acting is not always great and the facial animations of Jesse lack emotion, especially you compare them to Emily’s (except the first time you meet her; she is a bit creepy and not the good kind of creepy).

This is Emily and we really like her. We wish we could play her instead of Jesse.

The map is very Metroidvania and may not be very accessible to people that are not familiar with these type of games. There is also backtracking and I know that some of you hate that. Still, the good news here is that there is a fast travel mechanic. Moreover, you cannot manually save as the game saves automatically and every time you die you have to start over from the last checkpoint, which might be troublesome for some players. Lastly there is no difficulty levels and the game can be a bit hard at some points, especially if you haven’t upgraded your powers and weapons. On a side note, I would really love if they added a new game+ mode with increased difficulty in a future patch.

“Finally! No more quacking.”

Jess after she’s done with..it.

There are several things I did not fully explain or even mentioned in this review in order to avoid spoilers. There are many parts of the game that will probably surprise you or even leave you speechless, so I don’t want to take that away from you.

I also don’t know if you guys watched the promotional videos of the game but most gameplay videos did not represent the actual quality of the final game. My initial thought before playing the game was “god damn it this is gonna suck”. However, I am glad I was wrong because Control might be the best Remedy game to date.

Awesome weapon designs

Hundreds of collectables

Fitting music and sounds

Memorable boss battles

Superb psychic powers

Fluent combat system

Destruction & physics

Hours of exploration

Great performance

Compelling story

Interesting lore

Level design

Unlikable Protagonist

No difficulty setting

Some backtracking

No manual save

Map design

Exclusivity

                Computer Specs: CPU: i5 4440, GPU: Palit 1660Ti OC 6GB, RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws X 16GB HDD: Crucial 275GB MX300, OS: Win7, 1080p

Playtime: 20+ hours total. That’s a guess by the way, since Epic’s launcher has no timer.

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