This is a joke.

Icewind Dale the Second, Intermission for Fake Longevity

Continued from here.

 

Job the Dwarf Cleric's finally high enough level to cast Raise Dead! Praise be unto Ilmater, no more reloading entire fights because of one unlucky crit!

Sadly, that just brings to the forefront IWD2's other problems, for instance as a case study in the importance of a thorough quest log and in a larger sense, properly communicating the nature of a game's challenges to the player.

The sequel shifted its noncombat focus from trap disarming to puzzle solving. While the puzzles themselves range from trivial to obtuse, they do help break up the hack'n'slash routine so overall a welcome addition. The glacier temple game room was the worst of the lot so far, a clutter of levers you have to pull to remove one boss' immunity or summon a series of random monsters for one of your characters to solo. The first function is almost a non-sequitur except for the boss in question being vaguely associated with said game room in a piece of flavor text... even though she spawns elsewhere... and that still leaves you with no clear definition of the game room levers' effects. The second function could've been simple enough except for lack of a scoreboard to keep track of where you've placed so far in the scores of tiers and sublevels of duels.

A clearer example, however, would be the Fell Wood.

It's a network of zones as nodes from which you can exit in several directions, most false, one leading you further through. Thanks presumably to my Paladin charisma, that dryad was willing to divulge half the route, but you're still left with ten or so unscouted mini-zones whose solutions have to be brute-forced, most of them identical to each other.

On one hand, I love this. Following verbal directions is one of the best golden oldie game mechanics I've repeatedly wished would make a comeback in newer RPGs, after having been supplanted by those idiotic HUD markers for everything for over a decade. On the other hand, revisiting the dryad's information requires you to scroll upwards through an unsorted journal, and revisiting the information on which Fell bits of Wood you've already traversed is utterly unsupported via the interface. Sure, corpses can mark some zones, and you can drop bits of trash loot to mark others, but given both of those decay with time you lose your map-marking progress if you decide to rest.

While both the game room and the twisty forest can presumably be resolved with some pen and paper and brute-force grinding

1) Brute-forced puzzles make as cheap a timesink as damage-sponge mobs.

2) I did not pay for your product only to have you kick me out of it to make my own origami map.

 

Still worse is the duergar / hook horror cave, especially for the ochre jelly fight. Note, it's far from impossible, so long as you know that:

- you can't backtrack once you descend into the cave

- you can't rest anywhere in the cave except at the duergar boss (and even then only by slightly betraying my Paladin alignment)

- hook horrors always spawn extra adds behind you in every fight

- ochre jellies split when damaged

- the key you need to be able to rest is down the ochre jelly hallway, not the hook horror one

That last point can at least be mitigated by rogueish (or in this case, monkish) sneaking and exploration. I buffed my fighter against elemental damage, let him get mobbed and had my ranger pelt the clusterfuck with incendiary devices I'd thoughtfully stockpiled knowing my group lacked an arcane caster for fireballing purposes, while the speedy monk made a mad dash for the back of the cave. You might say, well, you found a solution eventually, so quitcher yippin' Werwolfe. But this was after reloading for three hook horror fights after seeing where enemies pop up with no warning (and thus which character I needed to stoneskin) reloading in a vain attempt to backtrack when I found no place to rest, reloading several times to discern ochre jellies' fission mechanic and resistances by trial and error, reloading more when I found out they keep spawning in from a nondescript spot on the cavern wall.

 

So why exactly am I being punished?

Am I failing for being unprepared? I had the firebombs, I had the right protection spells prepared, I had a passable scout, I had the brute force and the subtlety... but not the information on when to use any of these, because a random hodgepodge of enemies simply materialize out of thin air at you, and you won't find out about them except by trial and error or a third-party cheat-sheet. Not to mention the unforeshadowed and unexplained "you cannot rest at this time."

While IWD2's trendsetting naivete makes its interface lacks and timesinks clearer than most, for one thing such gimmicks still crop up to this day. For another, even when not, they serve as an excuse for designers to avoid implementing puzzles or difficult fights altogether (under the pretext they would wind up equally frustrating) when the issue was never the difficulty but thematic consistency and equipping the player with the exploration / interface tools to suss out and automatically index relevant factoids within the game itself, to scout and prepare for each challenge.

Continued here.

On the Monkey's Two Backs

"A body lies open in the fish[wo]man's yard

Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips

One less soul in the soul cages

One last curse on the fish[wo]man's lips"

 

Sting - The Soul Cages

________________________________________________

 

"We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them"

 

Billy Talent - Red Flag

________________________________________________

 

"   As the boy gets to boy-girl age, if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual, he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks, or the student body presidents, or the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school, and the system and in life in general, and so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls, especially the ones he's most biologically addicted to, the beautiful ones, the cheerleaders, he starts withdrawing into porn. And, a little bit of porn is not a huge issue. But the porn basically is... based on, the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus you have. And so as he gets addicted to that dopamine he begins to get addicted only being able to be stimulated when the risk-taking is higher and higher.

     So finally he succeeds and one girl, woman, being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her, but he's so unable to be turned on just be the mere maybe light touch of a hand, um, or turned on by just being fascinated by what she's saying and the interaction or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with a little bit of touch; he's so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs and when he gets to be entrusting of her a little bit, he says, you know, can you be this way, can you do this, can you act this way, and she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the porn, eventually gets disgusted with him and withdraws, and he begins to say, alright, this convinces me, I am as worthless as I thought I was, and the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn, and what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction, even as he's also becoming simultaneously frequently addicted to the video games at the same time"

Warren Farrell in a discussion with Jordan Peterson on the upbringing of boys

_________________________________________________

 

"No one's asking to go dancing

Its not like that anymore
Its romantic if they mean it

When they shut your fingers in the door"

 

Dresden Dolls - Glass Slipper

_________________________________________________

 

Wait... what the hell makes you assume your fingers should be blocking that door in the first place? 

To be reiterated at a far future date, but having stumbled on that Boy Crisis dialogue I couldn't pass up the chance to repurpose a third red flag in a row. Though fully aware this was not a scripted discussion and I'm therefore not being fair in tone-policing or nitpicking Farrell, I do find his wording revealing of our general assumptions.

Start with the word "succeeds" as a reminder of just how one-sided are the courtship rituals we've inherited as our inescapable, practically universal cerebral undertow. The male courts his heart out, attaining as much social status as he can to lavish upon a potential mate, while she sits in judgment of his worth. If he "succeeds" well, good for him (and bad for the nine other men who got edged out of the race) but there is never even a question of success or failure on her end of the bargain. If he's rejected, then he has failed and not her. Hey, I can see the appeal. Passing judgment is fun! It's basically what I do every few days here at the den.

 

Similarly, if she gets disgusted with his sexual preferences in this scenario, we assume it is entirely the fault of his preferences. Her judgment is not up for debate. Moreover, even accepting this currently trendy accusation of porn escalation, paraphilias do not spring up overnight. The female in question could have pre-empted the entire scenario by walking up to the male of her choice a year earlier (before he got into lemur masks, croquet mallets and penny whistles or whatever the current fad is) and propositioning him herself, a scenario in which she can expect nearly guaranteed "success" - except it's obviously too much to ask of her to lean even slightly off her pedestal. Or, as a better analogy, a rock in the middle of the ocean, where yon melodious maid need but signal her existence, awaiting sailors to build a ship and make their way to her only to drown for her amusement.

After all, why should any woman settle for less than absolute control?

"Withdraws" is a funny term too, because it shows up twice: negative when the male withdraws from having his hopes dashed, his worth declared insufficient (and likely being out a few dinner dates' worth of cash too) but when the woman "withdraws" from her own rejection of another, we pay no attention to her destination, to what the woman does behind her curtain.

Because it's not behind a curtain.

Romance novels can be found on any bookstore shelf (if you can find a boostore) and Hitachi "back" massagers on the shelf at the supermarket. No respectable movie theater would dare show porn, but think nothing of plastering Matthew McConaughey's sheepishly grinning mug alongside children's movies, which are themselves laden with RomCom tropes to the point of parody. Oh, by all means, let us weep for the woman who feels like an "object that is being traded in for the porn" of the man's shameful, secret desires, despite every single step leading up to the sexual act being defined by the man's ability to mold himself to whatever Prince Charming ideal is plastered on every single movie screen, checkout magazine and billboard, in public, in every facet of society!

 

Why do we accept the presumption that any man who doesn't get aroused by "the light touch of a hand" must be a perverted monster who's desensitized himself to normal sexual relations? If we're to summarize mammalian sexual relations, regardless of the particular courship displays of each species it would still factor down to "face down, ass up" and in fact we have no trouble ridiculing the men of previous eras for being so sexually repressed as to get aroused by a flashed ankle... or elbowwww! Yet the same sublimation, when expressed by females or on their behalf, is presumed the moral centerpoint of the entire enterprise! We are to accept, unquestionably, that half the species cannot be interested in sex unless it includes tiny sparkling rocks, ritual feeding among the extended tribe, rhythmic public limb-flapping, conspicuous conveyance, aural accompaniment by a more famous male and no less than seven different scented candles. The term for shifting of sexual priorities toward nonsexual elements is "paraphilia" as I seem to recall, and if you're really, honestly searching for causes of sexual dysfunction among the East-African Plains Ape, look first to the nuptial gifts and endlessly reiterative courtship displays, the entire spectrum of ludicrous kinks we glorify as "romance" and toward which our species' sexuality has careened over the millennia.

 

We presume, unjustifiably, that the moral high ground must lie in females' home turf, to the point we can accept a scenario like the above without questioning the endless feminine kinks, the sadistic Ithacan trials which the man in question was obligated to practice and master in order to "succeed" in attracting a mate, before the story even starts, before his preferences are even brought into question to be condemned. If a man being rejected thinks himself worthless, by what assumption does the woman doing the rejecting balance that equation?

While you could find endless such examples in any media, this particular interview galls precisely because it's framed in Peterson's usual self-help manner in terms of the man's best course of action, and was voiced by arguably the most famous and influential men's advocate. Farrell even slips up at a later point in the video and uses the term addiction to refer to men's attraction to women, but sadly chose to ignore the implication that pornography, that overwrought pale imitation, is not the main culprit here. Far from curing those addicted to the heroine of this story, he is merely denying them their methadone. This is, in fact, the main problem with most of those who claim to be trying to repair the currently growing rift between the sexes in Europe and North America. They focus not on teaching men how to compensate for their instinctive subservience before female demands but how to learn to stop worrying and love their matrimonial bondage.

The two yammer back and forth about the slippery slope of rejection, substitution, addiction, self-hatred leading to such extremes as school shootings... yet their solution is to teach boys "delayed gratification" the better to absorb female scorn and abuse and continue drowning themselves chasing that siren approval.

 

Instead of condemning that teenage boy for "withdrawing" into porn, why not admit that repeatedly throwing oneself upon rejection is itself insane, that no sane person would accept this one-sided supplication and it is only our innate insanity, our hormonal addiction, which forces such behavior upon us? The more pornography allows boys and men to "withdraw" from defining themselves by their worth to women, the better. It is not a solution, not truly. No matter how much we'd like to pretend otherwise, we need women, desperately, psychologically, somatically, intrinsically. Don't fool yourselves. Don't deny reality. Defy it, if you can, however much you can.

 

Much like heroin, we should acknowledge that heroine addiction is very real and also a need not to be indulged, a self-destructive thrill, a surrender to those who view our self-hatred and enslavement as their absolute right, who presume to sit in judgment, who presume that sex, the meeting of the sexes, should occur on the home turf of their own romantic paraphilia. Any palliation from such life-sapping subjugation should be sought and refined, not demonized. Though every new generation will be fathered by men willing to have themselves enslaved, we could at least stop catastrophizing the extreme negatives of the scant and fleeting escape options available, and instead refine them so as to minimize the self-hatred which comes of forfeiting a hopelessly rigged game.

Positing Identification with the Lotus Flower

"Cast off the crutch that kills the pain

The red flag waving never meant the same

The kids of tomorrow don't need today

When they live in the sins of yesterday"

 

Billy Talent - Red Flag

_____________________________________________________________

 

    Peterson: "if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance because you see that you have no discipline, then a logical response to that is to cease positing goals."

    Farrell: "Absolutely. And that's exactly what happens, but we have, through technology, sort of, a perfect escape, and that escape is into video games, where you can identify with a hero, and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing, and then as you begin to get better with certain manipulations, you can play that game with certain types of people and increase your skillset at the game, but you're never able to translate that into everyday life, and so you start becoming addicted to the game, which are designed to increase your dopamine, without achieving anything."

    Peterson: "[...] the thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill. But the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward, because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning. So, the problem is that a lot of real-life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them, because you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline. [...] Many highly skilled endeavors [...] requires an apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding, there's a lot of just disciplined repetition."

 

Jordan Peterson and Warren Farrell on The Boy Crisis and Gender Politics

(normally I'd transcribe their hemming and hawing for poots and giggles, but in this case it proved excessive)

______________________________________________________________

"Suffers from a large case of pay to win."

TVTropes going all post-ironic on reality's ass.

______________________________________________________________

 

 

One of my early posts here addressed a growing concern that mobile games were threatening to overtake PC games in popularity, and due to their addictive and accessible simplemindedness might kill PC gaming altogether. I dissented, pointing out that

1) PC games had already been fighting this battle to a draw with consoles for the previous thirty years and

2) shifting the mass market's buying power away from PCs as a platform would leave more room for quality as opposed to sheer mass appeal, would leave PC games to capitalize on their strengths of depth and complexity instead of constantly struggling to outdo Mortal Kombat in mindless button-mashing.

Eight years later, phone games have not only overtaken but doubled computer games' market share, raking in over half while PCs and consoles split the remainder evenly. Further validating my predictions, not only have mobile games cut into the growth of the console market more heavily than PCs', but the past eight years saw the cRPG revival (now undone by Microsoft) and a steady proliferation of TBS, puzzle games, managerial games, survival horror and other genres which had been more or less ignored from 2000-2015.

I can never listen to Warren Farrell for long without his sotto voce headshrinker demeanor grating but I can't deny the great debt owed to his work toward men's rights. I've also said before that I can't entirely hate Jordan Peterson because while I usually disagree with some step of his reasoning, his prima facie observations about modern society hit their mark. However, the moment these two venerable pates started nodding in the direction of electronic games, I braced myself for the inevitable Magoo moment.

Because they're old. That was the joke.

 

At least I got a good hearty guffaw out of the adorable notion that video games lack grinding. Sure, sure, Peterson wasn't entirely wrong in that the EXP / gold / rep "grinding" in video games is reinforced by a trickle of rewards, contrariwise in the real world nobody's standing by to hand you a lollipop every time you install a spark plug while leveling up your car repair skill. Both of them nonetheless make two unwarranted assumptions: that games can be represented by Pac-Man, and that real-life games are worth endeavoring in the first place.

Let's quickly knock down that first assumption. Even back in 2014, another one of my posts pointed out that games like Europa Universalis or Mount&Blade, which did not dangle constant preset rewards before players but let them choose and pace their own goals and plan of action within a larger system, boasted a smaller but highly appreciative following. Hell, I've ranted for at least a hundred pages about the need for players to posit their own virtual goals instead of merely reacting to reward stimuli. I even dragged Aristotle into it! So as soon as Farrell and Peterson start talking about men playing video games I'd have to ask - which men and which games?

Second, as to getting one's dopamine fix "without achieving anything" I'd have to question the unwarranted assumption that highly skilled endeavors in the real world are worth endeavoring in the first place. This came up as I was trying to wrap my head around the target audience of a real virtual world (pun both intended and defied) a true MMO, and realized that paradoxically, the life built in a game can be more thoroughly one's own, can more meaningfully reflect personal intent and effort, than the depersonalized labor of industrial society. Even with a doctorate, what exactly do you achieve in the real world? Manufacturing ten million more Pokemon plushies to stuff landfills? A 5% less toxic motor oil to justify 500% more unnecessary automobiles? A hundred million more Coca-Cola bottles? A 3% fluffier breed of poodle? Ten thousand more skyscrapers and private jets for the Trumps of the world? Realistically, what gets so laughably puffed up as "gainful employment" boils down to sacrificing your life in service of megacorporations cannibalizing each other. The vast majority of people, rich or poor, smart or stupid, will never have a chance to do anythng meaningful or productive; if you ever do, it'll be by sheer dumb luck. You will never be more than a henchman for Goldfinger in his struggle to destroy his competition, not to build, create, invent. Real-life endeavors have predominantly been endeavored by people raised in a society which "tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years, then they expect you to pick a career", under the false assumption that if you just rise high enough in social rank you will escape being stepped on, that by stepping on others you will ease the pain on your own back - the cruelest lie, as mass media treat us to endless examples of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy still haunted by insecurity and the myriad psychoses of social betterment.

And so I sublimate my productivity into lotophagy, and will continue to don, as often as I can, that despised skin I hide under a rock.

Serial Experiments Lain's end credits were obviously designed to teeter between menacing and serene, panning out from the vulnerable waif, embryonic, sinking into the visceral tangle of electronics increasingly consuming her life. Such themes are at least as old as microchips. I could easily achieve the same effect by tracking Case's obsession in Neuromancer, but a picture's worth a thousand words and Lain, that gender-flipped autopoietic anima gestating in that post-human ravel, has always struck me as the ideal illustration of electronic escapism.

The phrase "identify with a hero" misses the mark so widely as to veer into open insult, and here we need to return to the question of which boys / men and which games our luminaries are addressing. The vast majority of gamers are now thumbing phone games, crushing candies and angrying birds, or at most calling duties on an eksbawks. Pocket computers rule the market. To me and quite a few others, however, a computer, a computer game, a virtual world, is something you plug yourself into, not something you carry in your pocket. It is a portal, an all-encompassing second skin, not a pocket talisman you rub for dopamine. TV, alcohol, sports and religion provided escape to stupid men long before electronic games, but the fruit ninjas are not the ones you hoped would be "attaining something of importance" are they? Your fight's with me, the unproductive geek decades running. You'd rather have this blog be a thousand pages on boosting sewage system efficiency instead of a thousand pages on the finer points of goblin-slaying, no matter how astute my observations on goblin-slaying.

 

Games allow identification not just with "the hero" on screen, but more importantly with a persona or playstyle of one's own devising. For all that complaints like Farrell's and Peterson's (and many others) are worded as toward the populace at large, their true issue is not with the 90+% of the game market which is a mere stand-in for previous decades' movies and sports, which relies only on passive reaction to stimuli. The new factor these past few decades has come in the form of truly complex games allowing one to become both the lotus-eater and the lotus eaten, to mold a borrowed fantasy for personal consumption, and that addresses a very different segment of the population.

 

You might complain about Call of Duty but you're really scared of Dwarf Fortress and Kerbal Space Program. The true worry is that the small minority of intelligent, creative young boys can finally access escapist activities complex enough to occupy even their attentions, and may not grow up into the unshrugging Atlases on whom the system depends to continue functioning. To continue cannibalizing. To continue enslaving. Because so much of our world depends on the most intelligent young men finding no outlet for their desire to challenge themselves except in stepping on others' necks on the wage slave ladder.

Speak for yourself or they'll speak for you

"Our only hope is the minds of kids"

Billy Talent - Red Flag

Ready to quote the same song three days in a row?

Last year, my Corsair Demographic series of posts tried to get at the sort of audience who would inhabit a true persistent virtual world game, a true MMO, which ended with the depressing realization that we will never have such a game, because we lack the chivalrous corsairs to fill it. That whole series started, however, with citing Lord of the Rings Online's decrepit, brain-dead remaining audience as negative example, who ignore 95% of the game they bought in order to log in every day for perfunctory chat participation and maybe running the one single currently popular instance.

The year before that I compared the more mature audience of The Secret World with the much more kid-friendly Warframe, concluding with the depressing realization that the idiot brats were more alive, interested, engaged in their activity and: "I have a request for my generation: Please don't get old."

Last night I got to see the intersection of those posts.

 

I reinstalled LotRO last week (I'm not expecting it to have improved, but can't stay away from Middle-Earth, damnit) and a couple of days ago joined a guild, fully knowing that I'll be kicked out (and banned from the game again) in another few weeks for pointing out gamer stupidity. Last night I was privy to a lengthy conversation between several gamers supposedly in their forties and fifties.

They complained about LotRO's decline, about the death of fellowship maneuvers and the unsatisfying end-game timesink. They rightly pointed out that the rest of the playerbase unjustly restricts instance groups to only half the classes, and that some classes like the burglar or loremaster desperately need their old functionality back. They argued about the merits of PvP. They reminisced, for hours (I had time for my one-hour teleport to cool down) about other old MMOs, about the classes they played and the battles they fought in DAoC and the combat sytem in AoC, about the likelihood of Camelot Unchained becoming vaporware for over-reaching, about a myriad old WoW-clones and other MMOs, about D&DOnline, Final Fantasy and games I've never even heard of, minutely dissecting the pros and cons of their group content, including how they motivate players to run said content.

It was one of the most comprehensive discussions on MMOs I've ever seen crop up spontaneously. Even I was impressed.

There was, in fact, just one, exactly one pertinent topic which never arose, the whole time they sat in their rocking-chairs griping about how they don't make 'em like they used to.

None of them ever bothered suggesting they actually get a group together and DO SOMETHING!

Icewind Dale the Second, Part the First

Time for me to brave the challenges of the only Infinity Engine game I've never played, Icewind Dale 2. It was going to be just one post (after the first installment, I fully expect the sequel to be a linear dungeon crawl with little or no roleplaying to speak of) but as IWD2's quirks prompted more general observations, I'm splitting it.

 

I'm also taking the opportunity to step outside my comfort zone by avoiding my usual chaotic neutral elf wizard/druid main character.

 

While I'm at it, I might as well build a beefier party than I normally would, and keep it Lawful and somewhat pious.

My Jungian Shadow's now a Halfling Monk instead of backstabbing rogue

plus Job, a Gnome Cleric of Ilmater

Pokey the Halfling Ranger

and finally, as insurance against my own incompetence, mighty munchkin Beef Supreme, a Dwarf Fighter halberdier with maxed STR/CON

 

So I'm doing this with 5/6 party size, cross-class thief skills and no arcane magic. No, I have no idea why they're all little people. First couple of characters worked out that way so I ran with it. I also hear you ask: why Ilmater? Because having never played a party like this, I fully expect to suffer. (I also imagine them intoning as they march: "endure; in enduring grow strong")

Well, let's see how far my little lollipop guild gets.

Nice touch starting out with quarterstaves and needing to scrounge around Targos for basic gear. Few cRPGs manage to properly showcase your humble beginnings in order to offset your later splendour. Even when you start getting +1 gear, it's a piece here and there, not full outfits for your whole party.

 

I start dying immediately after the tutorial until I figure out the correct strategy with my current group is to faceroll everything. Ignore careful positioning and mow down goblins / orcs / ogres as they come. Since even my squishies are as tough as my normal groups' malnourished meat shield, enemy archers pose little problem and once he gets rapid shot, Pokey can easily drop a spellcaster or two if needed.

Reminds me of arguing about Neverwinter Nights 2 with actual D&D players accustomed to kvetching about overpowered spellcasters. I pointed out that my NWN2 weapon master could do everything my druid could, but simply by standing there autoattacking instead of worrying about spell combos. Repetitive fights against constant streams of enemies combined with plentiful magic weapon drops and mountains of freebie consumables made fighters the easy-mode option over spellcasters in these mid-generation cRPGs. Taken to its logical extreme in Diablo-clone action"R"PG button-mashing, the pattern was not overturned until Dragon Age: Origins, and even then more as a result of the spirit warrior prestige class, an epic-level Tenser's Transformation letting mages give themselves fighter advantages.

Anyway, first few levels aren't much trouble, except for fights in large open spaces with fast or teleporting enemies, where my melee-heavy group just can't control the field. You know, the "have entangle or die" fights. Also, maaaan, entangle freakin' hurts when you use DEX as your dump stat; side-effect of playing squishy groups in the past has always been a half-decent reflex save across the board. On the flip-side, cutting through all the gratuitous damage sponge bugbears, trolls, ogres and giants (a.k.a. grunts, Grunts, GRUNTS and GRUNTS) goes a lot faster than for my usual slingshot artillery squads.

On the other hand, here's a recurring problem with D&D adaptations:

Taking 45 damage at level 5-6 is devastating. Taking 45 damage from one random mook's one autoattack while fighting a dozen such mooks a dozen times in a row is just stupid. It's not testing your preparedness, just your willingness to grind. When even mail-clad Job the cleric with his 20 CON (i.e. beyond maxed) gets 2-shotted in a single round, not by big badass bosses but by trash, by all means tame your damn randomizer! Or better yet, admit that randomizer was never meant to work under the overcrowded conditions of a Forgotten Realms themed Doom mod.

 

It's also why I've always ignored starry-eyed fanboy nostalgia for these... classic, but hardly ideal old dungeon-crawlers. Icewind Dale gets praised for its difficulty but that difficulty consists of either wasting hours upon hours of your life picking up dropped gear and trudging back to town every few fights to resurrect fallen comrades or mashing quicksave every step and quickloading whenever the crits go against you.

 

Do you think this was a difficult fight? Reload, re-cast buffs and I waded through it effortlessly. If the exact same player using the exact same characters in exactly the same way has even odds to triumph or be forced to reload, you start losing the function of players at all. Might as well throw randomly-generated NPCs at each other and take bets on which way the dice will swing. Without a GM to adjust to player tactics, any D20 adaptation which isn't simply too easy (e.g. NWN, KotOR) will demand such strict min-maxing as to deny player choice or turn into a reload game. The D20s were obviously never meant to roll autonomously.

Anyway, fights have been getting predictably easier instead of harder heading into the next act. Spellcasters are still underpowered and my plate-mailed max-HP munchkins can shrug off or soak physical attacks, Shadow's stunning fists of shortling fury keep one enemy per fight locked down and the infinite free resting trivializes any damage short of death itself. I'll wrap this up some other day, but for two last notes as I square off against Sherincal:

1) As so often when video games try to moralize at me, I find myself wanting to join the villains.

2) Don't tell me I'm fighting a random mash of monsters. An army of several kinds of monsters is interesting. It could open up strategic options for campaign progression and provides dramatic tension between its constituents. An army of every kind of monster on the other hand just sounds like you ran out of ideas and defaulted to leafing randomly through the monster manual in an ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny. One of the elements which elevated Planescape: Torment's plot and setting above the usual video game tripe (and allowed it to stand the test of time so much better than IWD) was its narrower, more coherent focus on a few major figures' past and present interactions, even couched as these were in the most expansive re-imagining of D&D gimmickry.

 

Continued here and here.

________________________________________

edit 2023/03/13

No, I have no idea why I originally misspelled Jung as Yung. I have it right in other posts. Eh, the guy's probably used to it after all this time. Maybe "Yung" is a Freudian slip of some kind? I'm sure someone's written a dissertation on it.

DM of the Droids

 "The Batman I poke fun at is an untouchable supersoldier icon. [...] Batman Begins is an excellent, superbly-made movie that dissects his motivations, gives him real problems, a real past and makes him human"

"A good movie? Man, that sounds disappointing."

David Willis - Shortpacked 2005/06/20

While I like webcomics, I've never been able to stomach those borrowing their art from some other source: sprite comics, screencap comics, photo comics, etc. If you can't draw... just don't work in a drawing-dependent medium. Write stories instead. (If you can't write either, do it anyway but call it a blog to lower expectations.)

DM of the Rings, a comedic RPG take on LotR after the movies came out, is a notable exception, both observant and hilarious. Imagine Tolkien as a GM railroading a few munchkins through a heretofore unknown campaign with a ludicrous amount of backstory. Hilarity ensues. In the vacuum left by its ending Darths and Droids tried the same treatment for Star Wars, and as far as I'm concerned (as <not> a Star Wars fan) mostly failed. How come?

DM of the Rings focused on the incongruence of LotR with the role-playing game mindset it inadvertently created by inspiring Dungeons and/or Dragons, the discrepancy between wistful, idealistic, retrospective mythology and RPGs' munchkin-first values of escalation, incentivization, violence and narcissism. It was especially funny when such tendencies rubberbanded back to accidental commentary on the movies' abridgement of their source material, like Grima's death or Elrond showing up to tell Aragorn "keep your hands off my daughter." It also repeatedly juxtaposed players' demands for more freedom with the GM's interest in pushing a narrative, a subject I constantly harp on here at my den. In other words, DM of the Rings explored a specific, logical outgrowth of the genres themselves.

Darths and Droids on the other hand... is a fanfic. It takes itself too seriously. It presents an alternate story using the movies' imagery (starting, unfortunately, with the prequels) but the changes seem largely arbitrary instead of stemming from direct observations. Though, admittedly, rewriting Jar-Jar Binks as the product of a ten year old girl's imagination hit spot-on. Unfortunately, it also tries "going meta" in an already parodic work by expanding the gamers' own tedious life stories. Unfortunatelier, it missed the point of DM of the Rings' weighing of LotR against the hobby it inspired.

 

Which is a pity, because Star Wars' unimaginatively bare-bones monomythic science fantasy heroics have had a huge impact on all "action" game genres, and FPShooters/FPSlashers in particular, as opposed to LotR's impact on roleplaying. Start with exactly why stormtroopers needed terrible aim in a movie as opposed to a game, and work your way through the cliches from the viewpoint of a handful of co-op FPS gamers or laser taggers.

 I brush my teeth religiously. With a cross.

Dual Universe, post 1 of <=2

"if you're looking for a combat simulator you won't like it but if you wanna build stuff that's great"

Thus a veteran DU player welcomed a new one in general chat a couple of weeks ago while I logged in for my daily log-in, and it inadvertently reveals one reason why Dual Universe can be considered vaporware.

I built this plane. It is not great. Stuff it.

 

In case you haven't heard of it, DU is one of the games promising to make good on MMOs' potential as persistent virtual worlds, and in fairness it sticks to a couple of valid core concepts like a player-driven crafting economy, single, uninstanced world and destructible goods (and relatively realistic physics to boot) but unfortunately flounders both in execution and banking on legitimized cheating.

 

Before addressing the construction system issue, note I will be referencing quite a few of my old posts about MMOs. Half the reason I started this blog was that I'd gotten tired of explaining to random teammates the problem with theme park multiplayer games and wanted to set my thoughts down so I could just link you all to my MMManifesto, beyond which I honestly expected my interest in this blog to peter out. A decade later, the games which fueled my initial complaints (WoW, EVE, LotRO, CoH, TSW, WAR, Rift) are either dead or zombiefied, but newer titles like Dual Universe insist on copying old gimmicks regardless of their validity.

Let's start with that player's comment above. I concluded when conceiving of superhero games and City of Heroes' self-appointed successors by saying "Merely copying CoH will not in itself yield a worthwhile product. The game failed for some very solid reasons. If all I get from your product is a character creator, I may as well just take some 3D design courses instead." If I "wanna build stuff" then I could get into Minecraft or fire up a new Dwarf Fortress or expand my already towering base in No Man's Sky or launch a few new junkpiles in Kerbal Space Program. MMOs need to offer a convergence of styles and levels of willing cooperation and equilibrate divergent player motivations in a single interconnected system. If PvP combat is your mode of competition, then your combat simulator had better damn well work, because competition is the greatest driving force behind all other activities in such a persistent world.

 

Does DU's PvP work? Not from anything I've heard, though admittedly I never tried it before going inactive. Mostly I remember complaints about lag, but I'd like to point to another issue. My little plane in the image above is flying over to repair and unload goods from my totalled interplanetary vessel, which crashed on approach to the Sanctuary (safe zone) world, when my graphics began stuttering and grinding to a 0.5 FPS slideshow making it impossible to maneuver. It put me off the game, being the second time I'd had to repair every component on my ship due to a graphics glitch. Not into computer science myself, I can't tell you exactly why it happens, but it might have something to do with this:

No, that's not actually the voxel cache size upon crashing. Just what I'd accumulated after clearing the cache (so I could log in) then a week of running around on foot without even passing through any major spaceports. While Novaquark will inevitably hide behind being officially in open beta (though "beta" is a meaningless term these days) and have promised to address the issue of clutter and loading times in future patches, at some point the sheer scale of such a problem makes scaling it down highly improbable. This is in beta. Even if you pare the issue down to a tenth of its current impact, are you not banking on getting ten times as many active customers in the future?

 

On the same note, at the moment it seems only small surface deposits of baseline minerals respawn in DU, meaning planets have already been getting mined hollow by large player organizations. While this is obviously meant to drive competition away from safe areas to the outer reaches of space, it's backfiring stupendously in that any new player will soon find himself staring at barren prospects while his neighbour's sitting on an immutable 25 percentage of a planet's material wealth. Novaquark obviously intends to release new mineral sources as old ones get depleted (to secure their continued relevance as content developers) but what will this yield except masses of players gold-rushing in whenever a new planet's announced only to then sit on their pile of loot hoping to starve out their competition? This is somehow even worse than Darkfall's infamous favoritism of zerg guilds.

Dual Universe is primarily and overwhelmingly an EVE-Online copycat, as shown among other things by their implementation of the market system before all other considerations. Mine resources, build and sell goods. Good, clean fun. However, DU tries to approximate the scale of EVE's lovably multi-tiered production while having basically the same number of raw materials as EVE did at launch... when production had a single tier. So, while EVE's crafting eventually tied together many resource streams, DU's merely has you re-combine the same 8-12 minerals, mined in exactly the same fashion, at every production tier from cement to rocket engines. Instead of an engrossing, multifaceted system allowing participation in various steps of production or none at all, it comes across as deliberately time-wasting.

Also, if my little plane above looks like a simple plank with some engines and wings glued on... that's because it is. Instead of combining modular components, DU makes a big deal of having players sculpt the body of their vehicles, "voxelmancy" as the fanboys call it in an apt summation of its mystical obtuseness. While it sounds great in theory, in practive it makes a nightmare of even linking two objects diagonally, as many long-winded YouTube guides can readily demonstrate. Along with mandating LUA scripting for spaceship actions, this reiterates a repeated issue with computer game designers' conceit in their own specialty, sort of like a doctor demanding you pass a cardiology college course before he'll deign to hand you your arrhythmia meds. Or, as I put it before, about as realistic as a musician expecting you to figure out his song's rhythm is an in-joke about Gregorian chants. A game should reward general knowledge, yes: geography, algebra, history in broad strokes, Newtonian physics, a basic notion of profit and interest, core biological precepts like cell division, etc. but as a rule it should not require specialized knowledge. There's a reason why the most time-honored PvP games in human history like chess or go deal in abstractions and not inside knowledge of the jogging styles of bishops or of phalanx flanking maneuvers. 3D modelling and LUA scripting are not general knowledge and if my success in your game is to be measured by them... well, you've limited your customer base to college sophomores in IT, before they move on to misconceive their own games.

Oh, but wait.

All this is just window-dressing. The big issue is yet to come.

I said DU apes EVE, including in the worst way possible.

One of my very first complaints back in 2012 had to do game developers finding it more profitable to sell cheats than to sell products, and even last year I had to admit the greatest impediment to the establishment of persistent virtual world games is the lack of Byronically chivalrous humans willing to play fair. DU copies EVE's business model of selling multiple accounts. It has the same offline skill training, and with heavy scripting of ship actions you'll likely see even more PvP multiboxing. While at the moment it's not a large issue, the advantage of those maintaining multiple accounts will only grow with time.

So, OK, let's assume you learn all you can about herding voxels and scripting luaus, you drive your graphics settings down far enough that your game doesn't freeze on contact with an inhabited area, Novaquark gets a robust enough server infrastructure to prevent lag from preventing interaction and manages to perfectly time the release and distribution of new resources to drive players toward consumption instead of hoarding.

None of that will matter.

Because nothing you do as an honest player with one account will ever match up to someone with thirteen accounts mining and producing ships on six different planets for his own private armada.

 

When cheating is the ultimate virtue, everything else is rendered moot.

 Sorry, one more current event, just one more:

 

There's no such thing as a crowd crush. There is such a thing as stampedes, of varying condensation and mobility, but terminology counts here. Stampedes are what cattle do. You are cattle. This is the behavior of cattle. It's no accident that such events are most closely associated with the exercises in group belonging and mass hypnosis favored by the degenerate mindless masses: sports, concerts and religion. Humans, by and large, are herd creatures of bovine intelligence.

I'm Getting Paranoid about Conspiracy Theorists

"Sideways for attention

Longways for results

Who are you going to cross?"

 

Marilyn Manson - KILL4ME

 

 

Before I get back to video games and science fiction, I do have to break my usual "no current events" rule for a comment on anti-vaccine paranoia. Three weeks ago I got my first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, which was a surprise as middle-aged men had previously been told we'd have to wait a few weeks longer. Apparently the health department spontaneously discovered some unexpected vacancies in its schedule. This can mean any of three things:

1) The health department here in Podunk never bothered to count its residents. Definitely within the realm of possibility for these yokels.

2) Someone torched a nursing home... sadly, once again not completely out of the question - but I checked and Metamucil's still selling so we're safe on that account.

3) "People" (to use the term loosely) are refusing to be vaccinated.

And, Last Week Tonight did a mildly amusing show trying to reassure people that "mRNA" is not a codeword for injecting you with X-Files-grade alien babies or whatever bullshit Alex Jones has been spewing. So, whilst we all sit back and enjoy the gentle rumblings of Edward Jenner spinning in his grave, I might as well add my irrelevant voice to the chorus stating the obvious: get your damn shots.

I won't try to convince you why the various vaccines are safe. For one thing, it's impossible to prove beyond all doubt that they don't contain all of the autisms, or devils or thetans or jabberwocks or whatnot*; for another, paranoia is not susceptible to carefully considered evidence. It's a reflexive flinch, an attempt to assert control over one's environment by defining a tangible enemy, in this case the evil** pharmaceutical corporations, and to borrow oneself importance from transmundane powers, instead of admitting to being a disposable, unwanted dingleberry clinging to society's taint, buffeted by the indifferently broken winds of chance.

I will however point out that as inherently anti-intellectual science denialism, anti-vaccine propaganda clings to that flimsiest pretext of ignorance. To reiterate my rant about neurophobia "I am sick to death of hearing phrases like "we don't know what the long-term effects will be" from cretins who don't know what the long-term effects will be without it either, who in fact don't know much of anything about anything."

- or -

if you'd prefer the same statement from a more credible source who speaks in conciliatory palliation instead of lycanthropic snarling, take it from Doc Shmerling blogging on this topic for Harvard Med. three months ago: "There are pros and cons to any new medical treatment. But remember there are also pros and cons to declining treatment."

 

To put it another way, if ignorance is your issue, then consider that while this particular coronavirus is a fairly new and therefore inevitably poorly-studied disease, vaccine side-effects are much better known. Take even the extremely unlikely (to the point of being hardly demonstrable) ten-in-a-million cases of allergic reactions or clotting. For one thing, that's still literally at least a thousand times less risky than COVID-19 itself. For another, you're trading an unknown risk (COVID) for a known one (jabbing yourself with an EpiPen) or in other words factoring an incredibly complex problem down to a known one.*** If "we don't know" were an honest point of contention, the champions of ignorance should be the first ones rushing into clinics.

Of course it's not. "We don't know" is a pretext to act like precious preening prima-donna, to puff yourself up pretending you're going toe-to-toe against Pfizer an' da gummint when all you're really doing is threatening to murder someone's grandmother by sneezing on her.

 

I happen to like my grandmother.

Get your damn shots you retards.

 

Hell, I'm three weeks past my first dose and I'm

feeling fine

doing great

perfectly normal

no crazier now than I was last year.

 

 

 

____________________________________________________________

* The fearsome and surreptitious whatnot has been known to stalk prey for years before downing it by an inscrutable arsenal ranging from but not limited to railway accidents, heart disease, spontaneous combobulation and random acts of goad. Truly a magnificent predator, the whatnot, yet let us weep for its impending endagerment as science encroaches on its plentiful habitat of human stupidity.

** Note: I am not putting that word in scare quotes. Yeah... we know they're evil. It's just irrelevant in this case.

*** Sure, wolfman, that's how you're gonna relate to the paranoid imbeciles: algebra references. Can you smell the Pulitzer?

Happy -

The pocket-knife you got as a present, lengthwise.

The bottle, cleansing of you.

Pick one.

The stepping stone, one level past last.

The bag sealed tight.

Pick one.

Arm yourself with a license.

Arm yourself without a license.

Pick one.

The car and a garden hose.

The celebratory tank of lightness.

Pick one.

The long dive and long exhalation.

The longer walk in the geat outdoors.

Pick one.

Minnesota in the winter.

Arizona in the summer.

Pick one.

The bus.

The train.

Pick one.

The cliff.

The ravine.

Pick one.

The cops.

The thugs.

Pick one.

The soldiers.

The rebels.

Pick one.

A generous insurance policy and a gold-digger to pick for you.

You're so long overdue, so many dues to pay.

Pick one.

It's already been over for so many years.

Pick one option.

You've already known it, day by day, every day, inescapably. You already know all the options, have known them for a span, a useless, worthless span. Just pick your only option.