Fallout 76 Thoughts

Fallout 76 Thoughts

If you have been completely disconnected from gaming media then you may not have known there was a pretty significant announcement yesterday from Bethesda, or at least a very tantalizing teaser.  The truth is this started several days ago when they began a live stream that simply focused on a color test pattern with a vault boy bobble head beside it.  During the stream various weird things happened and you can see a run down of these clips over on Polygon.  There were apparently over 2 million people who at least watched some of the stream and at the very end…  we were treated with a teaser for a new game called Fallout 76.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

This morning I am going to dig into some of the details of the trailer.  It opens on an old pipboy setting off an alarm that plays Take Me Home Country Roads which gives us I believe the location of the vault…  as 76 was rumored to be a “control” vault in Virginia.  The song itself says West Virginia… but the majority of the topography that it describes is actually in Western Virginia.  As the image continues to slide into frame we can see a clock denoting that it is October 27th of 2102…  6:34 in the morning if that matters.  This is significant because this places Fallout 76 is the earliest fallout game to date.  Here are some important dates in the fallout universe…

  • The Great War – Saturday October 23rd 2077
  • Fallout 76 Trailer – Monday October 27th 2102
  • Fallout 1 – 2161
  • Fallout 2 – 2241
  • Fallout 3 – 2277
  • Fallout New Vegas – 2281
  • Fallout 4 – 2287

Fallout 76 Thoughts

Basically Fallout 76 is taking place 25 years after The Great War that started and ended the same day as the bombs fell.  In theory Vault 76 was supposed to open 20 years after the destruction of the world so that folks could go reclaim the wastes.  So we are left with a conundrum…  because if you see the scene with the Reclamation Day celebration, it does not look like those are leftovers from 5 years ago.  If you look at the balloons there are some with air and some without…  so unless  balloons work vastly different in the post apocalyptic world that would lead me to believe this is a few days after the Reclamation Day party…. which would make a sort of sense given that it would be 5 days after the 25th anniversary of the Great War.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

There is a poster on the wall showing that Vault 76 was created to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which syncs up with the Mothership Zeta references from Fallout 3.  Past that I am not sure what else can be gleaned about it other than I just think its cool to see all of the things we have found from other games still in a relatively new state.  Granted 25 years have passed but I think in the most part we are seeing a vault before the systems start to break down.  In truth probably the same Overseer is in place that was put there the moment the folks went into the vault, and most of the administration is likely all the same.  Sure there might have been some children of the vault in that time frame but for the most part the people who are exiting are the ones who entered in the first place.  According to the Citadel records there were supposedly 500 individuals in the control vault giving you a nice big number of potential people to go out exploring the wastes as.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

In this shot you see Jangles the Moon Monkey and on the bed is a fedora and a fully loaded backpack, which tells me that we are seeing the player character just about to embark out of the vault, gathering up their stuff.  This syncs up with the final shot in the trailer of a person in a Vault 76 jumpsuit slapping on a pipboy…  likely the one from the table and preparing to leave.  Again most of these establishing shots seem to exist for fan service, so we can see what the vault looks like before things start going to hell.  All of the things we regularly pick up as junk are shown…  from an Abraxo box to some Sugar Bombs…  and of course the ever present Nuka-Cola.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

There is a trophy case that is way too blurry to read at 1080 p or lower resolution, but I was able to crank the video up to 4k and capture a decent shot of what at least one of the awards says.

Outstanding Achievement Award

In appreciation for your commitment and dedication to our isolation program.  Sacrificing many so some can live.

The Excellence in Bravery award is a little harder to read but it seems very similar… and you can notice at the top of the shot an award for the “Annual Vault Halloween Costume Contest” which I guess might explain why there is the head of what looks to be some sort of a gopher mascot character on the top of the bookcase in the image with the 1776-2076 poster.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

So ultimately what does all of this mean?  This is a new Fallout setting that is far enough out of band with the rest of the games…  as to give it some legs to stand on its own.  This is set 59 years before Fallout 1 the earliest entry in the franchise and 185 years earlier than Fallout 4 the latest incarnation.  Jason Schreier the Game Developer Whisperer mentioned yesterday that the game would have some sort of an online component, and that this is what the Battlecry team in Austin has been working on.

A follow up tweet provides some additional details…

Fallout 76 Thoughts

To make things even weirder…  there is an Anonymous redditor on December 28th of 2017 posted “Fallout 76, a fallout themed rust clone coming soon”.  This was largely ignored by the community however because who the hell trusts an anonymous poster on reddit?  There have been so many things supposedly leaked there that turned out to be complete bullshit.  However in hindsight…  the person got the title right and if you combine that with the various comments from Schreier it has a little more weight to it.  I guess the ultimately question is… is that a game I really want to play?  I have never been a huge fan of the Rust/Ark/H1Z1 competitive survival game genre, so I think ultimately for me… it will depend on how much forced player versus player interaction is in the game.  If there are straight PVE servers (or the ability to roll custom servers)… then yeah I will probably be happy as a clam to play this game.

Unfortunately I think I would have rather had just a straight MMORPG conversion of the Fallout universe ala Elder Scrolls Online than some sort of a survival building game.  If I was putting on my wishing hat and going for broke…  I would have loved for Fallout 76 to be a small scale group/solo game along the lines of Destiny/The Division set in the Fallout universe, where you roam around a big open world wasteland with MMO style player progression but a more drop in/drop out sort of ethic and seamless 10-20 player instanced pockets.  Sure base building would have been probably a big part of that given they have really amazing tech to let us have essentially “player housing” but the focus would be on exploration and completing of story content rather than on killing other players.  I really hope the progression is not based on killing other players.

I’ve devoted entirely too much time this morning to tearing into this…  so what are your thoughts?  Are you excited for the June 10th pre-E3 Bethesda press conference?  Are you excited about the prospects of Fallout 76?  Are you afraid this is going to be another fucking Battle Royale game?  I have some mixed thoughts after more additional information has come out about it, but that said… I will still be watching on twitch as the official announcements are being made.

 

In Home Streaming

I have what one might call unusual needs when it comes to gaming.  My primary gaming systems are all up in my office hooked up to the same 43 inch 4k television that I have written about in the past.  That said I maintain a laptop downstairs that I can game on while hanging out on the sofa with my wife and either watching television or just functionally being in the same room.  This has been one of the secrets of our marital bliss is the fact that several nights a week I hang out downstairs within easy talking distance rather than being completely sequestered up in my office all of the time.  This means that I ultimately need to maintain two different gaming setups and end up splitting resources between the two of them.

The biggest issue with this equation is that gaming laptops are horrible.  What I mean by that is that while yes they are more powerful than a normal laptop…  they also have a greatly stripped down feature set of a gaming desktop.  They usually run some sort of mobile specific version of a graphics card…  which tends to perform roughly the same as one product generation lower.  What I mean by that is my current gaming laptop has a 960M in it…  which instead of performing like a GTX 960 it performs far closer to a GTX 760 (given that they jumped the 8 series of cards).  Similarly the processors also suffer from this same issue with a mobile i7 greatly under performing a desktop i7.  Then of course there is the fact that you are ultimately going to pay a significant premium for a machine that is pretending to be extremely high powered but that is a whole other discussion.

One of the core problems that I am dealing with right now is I am starting to reach the end of the viability of this laptop for any sort of modern gaming.  Sure it can run older games just fine and does an admirable job at a lot of the MMORPGs that I enjoy playing, but I have a long string of games that just will not function on the device.  The first game I encountered like this was Dishonored 2… which I still have not finished playing through because it simply will not run in anything other than the most potato of resolutions on the laptop.  Traditionally the downstairs experience is where I play a lot of my single player titles…  and with the inability to actually do this thing games like Dishonored and Assassin’s Creed Origins that will not run on the laptop at all just sit there un-played.

Steam In-Home streaming I thought originally was going to be a unique tool that I could employ to stream games from my Desktop to my Laptop and be able to skirt all of these problems.  However after years of piddling with it… I still have issues.  There are times where a game window may get stranded or launch in a weird resolution and with that not being an actual remote desktop tool there is little way to right the ship once it capsizes.  I’ve read of individuals having good luck with Splashtop desktop/streamer but the latency there was so high that I simply could not handle it and now only use it as a way of remoting in to the gaming machine if I am absolutely in a desperate state.  Even if I could get Steam In-Home streaming working…  there was always the problem of not being able to easily run all of those games that I have that for one reason or another do not go through the client (I am looking at you Dragon Age Inquisition).

In Home Streaming

This is where in my travels yesterday I happened across a mention of a product called Parsec.  The company effectively does a couple of different things, the first being rent virtual boxes that you can use to install all of your games on out in the cloud and then remotely connect to.  The second is that they have very highly tuned and low latency streaming software that allows you to connect to a machine, be it one of their virtual machines or your home machine and play games off it.  Lastly they add additional functionality of being able to play the couch co-op experience remotely through a social and online play system.  While I was supremely jaded by my other experiences I gave it a shot last night.

In Home Streaming

The setup is pretty straight forward in that it requires you to install the parsec client on the host machine and the client machine.  They have clients for Windows, MacOS, Android, Linux and Raspberry Pi 3…  which gives you a few options for even creating your own homebrew Steamlink sort of device for streaming to a television.  For me I wanted a pretty straight forward set up of installing the software on my gaming desktop upstairs and adding it as a host…  that you can see in the client above.  Yes I named my gaming desktop Serenity…  I love me some Firefly.  Then downstairs on my laptop I installed the client again but this time just connected to the Serenity computer profile by hitting play.  Immediately I was presented with a remote desktop like experience that allowed me to pretty much launch whatever the hell I wanted to on my machine.

In Home Streaming

It was at this point that I just started testing all sorts of  games… I played some Crucible in Destiny 2 with no noticeable input delay in a fashion that was comfortable enough to actually do competitive tasks.  I played some Dauntless where I took down the stupid thunder lizard Drask that had been giving me fits before.  Essentially any game that I launched was able to run just fine and in a completely playable and honestly beautiful state.  I had some issues with Steam games at first, but after troubleshooting that came down to something I had done yesterday in trying to set up my iPad as a third monitor.  Apparently the software that is involved with that does not play nicely with the Steam DRM.  However after uninstalling and rebooting all of those steam games that I struggled with before like Dishonored 2 and Assassin’s Creed Origins worked lovely as well.

I am known for doing some silly things… but there is a level of madness with Parsec that I am not entirely sure if I am willing to go through.  They have a blog post up outlining how they have managed to get a console working through the Parsec software and I would absolutely try this…  if it did not involve two hardware purchases that I do not currently have.  I have been wanting to get an Elgato Pro…  so this might be something I do at some point.  This would honestly be the perfect set up if I could somehow get all of my consoles playing through Parsec as well.  I have wanted a sort of virtual KVM for consoles for years…  and in theory I might be able to actually make this thing to work using Parsec.  If nothing else however I thought I would talk about my experiences this morning in case someone else out there is looking to do something similar.  I am greatly pleased with this process and I play on fiddling around with it some more tonight…  maybe actually working on some of those single player games that I have failed to make much progress in.  At face value though… I am supremely impressed with Parsec and will definitely be following their updates.

Coping Mechanism

Coping Mechanism

I had originally thought I would end up writing a big post this morning about my thoughts regarding the Dauntless launch.  Instead however I am writing a different post because reasons.  This weekend was mostly about recuperation for me personally given that last week was an extremely stressful one and due to the condensed nature of the coming week I expect it to be equally stressful.  As a result you are getting a picture of my goofy upside-down Kenzie girl to kick off this post.  The weekend was odd given that we spent a significant amount of time looking at cheap laptops and scouring their details.  I wrote a bit about this on twitter but my wife has a need for something new to travel with, at least in part because she cannot synchronize her FitBit with her android phone alone.  She has explored all of the avenues available through the manufacturer and she is basically stuck until at some point when she gets a new phone because for whatever reason it just doesn’t work on hers.

The problem that I find infuriating is that she has a long list of asks but doesn’t really want to pay much money for any of them.  There were folks on twitter who asked what that list entailed so I figured I would kick off this mornings post by trying to catalog all of it.

  • Windows 10 based device
  • 3 or more USB ports
  • Non-Streaming device (streambooks are out)
  • 11 to 13 inch in size
  • extremely lightweight preferably in the 2 lb range
  • preferably as thin as possible
  • 2-in-1 Touchscreen device if possible
  • real hard drive space – 500 gb or more
  • two finger scrolling on touchpad – pinch and zoom a plus
  • cheap…  she doesn’t want to spend more than a couple hundred bucks

Now I can find devices with all or at least most of those features…  but it is generally that last piece that completely destroys the process.  You can’t get much of a machine for only a couple hundred bucks.  We spent a good chunk of yesterday for example going to a couple different Best Buy locations and checking out their open box machines.  Sadly Craigslist has not exactly be a hotbed of listings for what she is wanting either, and we don’t really have any good aftermarket “wholesale” options…  the one we do have tends to be a scam.  So as a result my weekend was a constant string of looking at things my wife linked me and having to diagnose what the weakness in every option was.  Do you know how infuriating it is to try and diagnose the equivalent speed of a bunch of low end market processors?  The problem is she is coming from a Chromebook right now as her travel machine… and I am afraid she isn’t going to find a “real” laptop that is anywhere near as portable.

This weekend we recorded a podcast as usual, but towards the tail end of the show we got into one of the more dark and raw topics we have discussed.  I queued up the YouTube link to start round about when the conversation happens.  Prior to starting up we kicked around the notion of recording a bit about using games as a means of escape from real world problems.  This was largely kicked in because it seems like this is something fairly new to Kodra…  but man did it take a more serious and extreme bent because Grace and I are pros at using games to escape the anxiety and stress of the real world.  My good friend Nyn mentioned that this might be a decent topic to talk about in blog form so here I am doing this today.  First off one of the things you need to know about me is that while I might seem to have my shit together on a regular basis…  I am consistently teetering on the edge of a breakdown.  I go through these periods of “turtle mode” that I have talked a bit before on the blog about where I extract myself from the world and try and pretend that it no longer exists.  Twitter tends to be the only social network I can regularly engage with… and even then it is largely because even when I am saying words…  it feels like I am doing so at comfortably arms length.  I can drop a comment that I want to make into the ether… and then walk away choosing whether or not I actually interact with anything that comes from it.  Even then favoriting a comment has become this sort of minimum unit of interaction that I can still reasonably do even when I don’t have a lot of words to say in return.

The problem comes with the fact that I can only really handle chaos in one of my environments at once.  What I mean by that is I need some sense of change free stability in the three environments that I interact with:  home life, gaming/internet and work.  The longer one of those goes into a state of disrepair…  the more likely it is going to trigger a turtle phase when I for lack of a better term “literally can’t even”.  The problem that I am dealing with right now is my work is undergoing some massive chaos as part of a restructuring, and just being social and supporting in that environment drains me of all available energy to where I come home a husk of a human being.  My home life also has been chaos…  because the teacher walkouts required me to step up and take over almost all of the home care burden because my wife was left trying to condense an entire years worth of training in a very short abbreviated schedule.  This has continued because she is still in school and staring down the barrel of having to go way longer than normal…  and get out without any real time to prepare for her long summer trip to grade AP exams.

My gaming life has also been in turmoil because I am finding it extremely hard to really stick with any one game for any length of time.  For the last decade I have had this rich community that relied on me to play games with… either in the form of House Stalwart or later AggroChat and the offshoot Greysky Armada.  The problem here is that I seem to want to play games that are not nearly as sticky with that community as a whole.  When we started recording AggroChat we were a combination of east coast and central time zone players, and over time three of the six of us have moved to Seattle leaving a massive gulf of time between our regular playing schedules.  Grace suffers from the same sort of periods of “unable to deal with humans” that I do, and Thalen has largely been knocked out of the mix as he enters parenthood.  This chaos has basically decimated all of the normal patterns of game play that I have been used to…  essentially throwing that world into chaos as well.

Then there is the internet as a whole… which has been a relatively horrible place to be with events that started with GamerGate but have continued forward with Police Violence, Trump and School Shootings and everything in between.  I just don’t have enough free bandwidth to care anymore.  There are so many things that I know I should feel passionately or deeply about… but I am just numb.  So just the act of trying to go to my happy place that used to my by twitter timeline…  is an act that takes so much effort to keep from running screaming into the night.  The thing is… it isn’t like I could just disconnect that one social feed and be okay…  because the problems are everywhere.  Even NPR another one of my bastions of sanity is no longer a place that gives me more good than it takes from me to just keep listening.  So as a result… when these turtle modes kick in it seems like it takes me way longer to get out of them than I used to… because my entire world feels like it is in an amorphous state of change.

Ultimately I need gaming as a sort of crutch to get me through all of this.  Even though it is harder and harder for me to reach that ascendant state… I still need to try and find a place where I can escape from all of the horrible nonsense happening in the real world and blend into an environment where I can in fact right the wrongs and be the hero I wish I could be in real life.  Playing games and trying to shut off the noise in my brain while doing so… has become my primary way of coping with existing in the world.  I don’t sleep well, and often sleep in hour or two hour bursts scattered between the hours of 10 pm and 5 am, and I think in some ways…  gaming is filling the role that deep sleep might be of keeping me sane.  I am not even sure if that makes any sense, but by zoning out completely while gaming it allows my brain to enter a world where muscle memory is taking over and I can relax completely.  Ultimately it allows me to rebuild the walls that keep my psyche safe from the constant onslaught of existence so that I can keep going one more day.

Coping Mechanism

Since this has been another fairly dark post… I figure I would end things with another of my adorable cats.  This is Mollie and she is still not 100% sure what she thinks of the world.  She will follow me around the house but is still super skittish when it comes to directed attention.  At the time of taking this picture she was having none of my shit.  Then moments after I put the phone away… she was up and running around and following me like a little lost puppy.  She is a weird cat, but then again all of my babies are a bit odd in their own special ways.  The thing is with this post…  I am opening up about my struggles because in part I want you to see that it is perfectly okay to have issues.  We all have them and mine are built up from years of other issues that I don’t really want to go into in blog form.  Basically we are all weird and broken in some manner and the most important thing… is that you find your own way of regenerating the damage that has been dealt so that you can keep putting one foot in front of the other.  The salve for my wounds is gaming… and if I flake out on you when I just can’t handle human contact…  I am sorry.

AggroChat #205 – Behemoths and Escapism

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat205_720

Tonight we change things up a bit and instead of recording the Game of the Month show…  we are in fact doing a normal style show. By normal… I mean we are recording with a Tam who has been day drinking.  We start off the discussion with Dauntless that just launched on the 24th… and by launch I mean it is a free to play game going into open beta which is absolutely a launch.  Ash talks about Hyrule Warriors on the switch and his experiences playing through it and all of the new content that came from the 3DS version. Tam talks a bit about Far Lone Sails a game where you drive a sailboat train and constantly keep moving ever steadily to the right.  Finally we talk about games as escapism and this turns into a far darker discussion than I had intended it to. We each sorta talk about how we use games to cope with whatever we are dealing with.

Topics Discussed:  

  • Dauntless
  • Hyrule Warriors – Switch
  • Far Lone Sails
  • Games as Escapism