Fallout: New Vegas continues to dominate my gaming time as I continue my adventures in the Mojave. At this point I've hit level 24 and the main storyline has me going to meet Caesar (not to self: bringing Boone to this meeting is probably a BAD IDEA). Mostly though, I'm running around doing side missions, and in doing so I found someone whose presence in the game made me incredibly happy.
They even got Michael Dorn to voice him again.
Marcus was one of my favorite companions in Fallout 2, and seeing him again, even just as a regular NPC with one quest to offer, was awesome. All of the references to the first two games that show up in New Vegas are like that to some degree; it's enough to give me the urge to break out the original Fallout once I'm done with New Vegas. Even though I know that going back and playing them might be a bit rough given their age.
Playing Tron 2.0 again has had a little bit of that. I still enjoy it, but I know a lot of that is because I love the original movie, warts and all. There are a lot of aspects of modern FPS games that simply didn't exist yet in 2003, and it can feel weird and a little clunky not having them. Control standards have changed over time too so I had to relearn, for instance, that the mouse wheel zooms in, not the left mouse button.
I'm hoping there'll be some good discussion about how things have changed over the years when we talk about Tron 2.0 for this week's podcast. I have to admit I'm a little terrified that nobody will have played beyond the first couple levels and everyone will have hated it. I just can't divorce my view of the game from Tron as a whole, so I worry that folks without that attachment just won't get into it. I guess we'll find out this weekend.
Yesterday I saw the above video pop into my subscription feed on YouTube, and since Pixel is awesome and was a Blaugust participant I of course watched it. In the video she talks about a problem of shunning going on in the “girl gamer” circles, and it prompted me to write yet another one of these pieces. While I absolutely see the issue happening in that community, I also think the issue is inherent in all “geek” communities, and it becomes pretty damned frustrating. For awhile now I thought I could blame it on my generation. As far as video games go, we are essentially patient zero. My folks had a pong system, then I graduated to Atari… then to Nintendo… and pretty much every gaming fad in between. So for awhile now I have felt this strange sense of responsibility for apparently being part of the generation that created this broken model. I thought maybe the gatekeeping came from the fact that for many of us we have experienced a bit of shame over our hobbies, or at least being treated to those “you are not normal” type of looks on a regular basis.
I wear my “geekdom” on my sleeve but once you leave the development row at work… I am absolutely “not like the other kids”. I have Lego MiniFigures instead of pictures of kids, and I have to explain so many of the assorted items of kitch on my desk. Weirdly enough pretty much everyone knows what a Creeper from Minecraft is however, but I guess if folks have kids… that makes sense. The odd thing is… I remember a time when it wasn’t like this really. I remember when you went to someones house and saw an Atari… you were essentially instant friends because you had a fast point of reference. Same thing happened for Nintendo, and everyone would huddle around the lunch room to talk about this game or that. It wasn’t just a geek thing, it was an every kid thing. Hell my wife does not consider herself a gamer at all… but she had an Atari and a Nintendo and played both. Her favorite game growing up was Snoopy and the Red Baron, and at some point I am going to find one for her for no reason other than sheer nostalgia. So I guess the question is… what happened?
Forming Camps
The very first time I can really remember any tension forming, came from the early Sega versus Nintendo rivalry. I mean during the Atari era there were other console systems like the Colecovision or Intellivision, but ultimately it didn’t really matter that much. At the end of the day we were all playing the same ports of arcade games, which seemed to be universally offered on all platforms. The first party title thing didn’t seem to really matter… that is until Mario and Sonic. The advertising was constantly and obnoxious and full of partial truths. I grew up in a small town, and quite literally no one that I knew could actually afford both a Super Nintendo AND a Genesis, so it ultimately meant you had to place all of your hope in one console or the other. I don’t remember any fights breaking out but it was really the first time I can remember such a thing as someone owning the “wrong console”. I had a friend with a Sega Master System, and I remember one birthday party where everyone was disappointed that he didn’t have a Nintendo to play. No one really wanted to try this “other” thing, because everyone wanted to play Super Mario Brothers.
I could drive myself insane trying to trace the roots, but regardless of how we ended up in this situation… it isn’t a great one. Any system where we claim that Gamer A is not as much of a gamer as Gamer B because they like this thing or that thing… is a really bad system. I guess the part about it that I don’t really get is when did we start competing with each other on everything. Can’t it be enough that you like a thing, and want to do a thing… without having to feel the need to shit on everyone who is doing something else? I mentioned Minecraft earlier, and that game honestly gives me a lot of hope. A friend of mine was telling a story the other day, about how their kid bumped into some other kids while on vacation. Somehow the topic of Minecraft came up, and suddenly all of these random strangers were instant friends. Games have the power to bring people with no other shared interests together, and honestly most of the people I know on the internet… I know thanks to gaming. So I see the potential that this shared interest has to unite us all… and it just makes me even the more depressed when I see people fighting over this game or that game. Does it really matter if you prefer Call of Duty to Battlefield, or if you happen to like a PS4 over an Xbox One? Can’t we all just be okay with saying “these are things I like” and be equally okay when someone else happens to like different things?
I Have No Answers
I have no real answers at the end of the day. Lately I have seen a lot of angst in the World of Warcraft community as people disappear from that game. I was absolutely part of the problem during the first great exodus to Rift, and I feel bad for it. Ultimately what I want is for people to do whatever makes them happy, and play whatever game they are passionate about. Similarly when they stop being passionate about it… it is perfectly okay to walk away with zero shame. Just because I am in a down cycle where I am not all that interested in World of Warcraft it doesn’t mean that I wish the game harm. Sure there is a bit of schadenfreude occasionally over the earning reports, simply because I have felt for awhile that the staff doesn’t really get what players actually want. I keep hoping that they will right the ship and turn us back to a game that I would be happy to play again. At no point however do I want the game to go away or am I willing to actively rail against people for playing it. I guess what happened to change my opinion… is that I started to see the alternative.
During that first parting of ways… we had not seen the consequences of when a game stops being supported. Ask the folks who played Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes or Vanguard how they feel about having a game world disappear. After watching several worlds just simply vanish… it has made me quite a bit more respectful of whatever game anyone happens to be playing. We invest so much of ourselves in the games that we play, and whatever it is that you happen to be passionate about is awesome. The gatekeeping and the “you must be this tall to ride this ride” signs that we seem to constantly be willing to tack up all over our landscape are counter productive. I original thought it was my generation that broke the system, but now I am just not certain any more. Maybe tribalism is just something that is naturally going to happen in any system when it gets too large. Maybe “gamer” isn’t even really a thing anymore… and video games are just something that everyone does. We don’t have a title for folks who watch TV, because that distinction is utterly meaningless. Just because we both own a TV does not mean we are likely going to be watching the same shows… but by the same token no one is expecting us to. Maybe we need to shed the notion that we all have this common point of reference, and maybe we just need to accept the fact that we are all going to like different things. Maybe in another generation this question just simply won’t exist any more because gaming has become so mainstream that nobody even thinks about it as an identity. Whatever the case… for the time being… I just wish we could treat each other better.
Star Wars Fever seems to be going around the Aggrochat crew, and we’re all dealing with it in different ways.SWTOR has been a thing for several of us, as has Disney Infinity 3.0 (AKA the one that added Star Wars characters). Another thing is that because we’re about to hit a point of relative calm in Shadowrun, we’re looking at spinning up a Star Wars game. Character Creation is interesting here, so let’s take a look:
Concept
I’m going to cheat a bit here and just use the character I played in the Saga Edition. For some background, Aragos was a bounty hunter who was first and foremost, a sniper. Thanks to background, he was also a bit of a survivalist and big game hunter. As the game went on, he acquired more technical ability and eventually silly movement tricks. (In a game where standard movement was 6 squares, Aragos could move about 30 in a turn and still act.) But for now, we’ll start with the base. Our Saga Edition game used rolled stats, and Aragos ended up with all of his stats in the 11-15 range, so I was able to get fairly well-rounded despite the racial -2 INT.
Mechanics
There’s a suggested order for character creation that I’ll be largely ignoring, it’s more helpful when you don’t have a concrete concept in mind. As such I’ll be starting with species. I didn’t stat out a Cathar for nothing, so we’ll be going with that. Edge of the Empire also provides the useful Bounty Hunter career. Aragos had a bit of both the Survivalist and Assassin specializations, but Assassin fits better as the starting one. Skills come along with this: 4 from career, 2 from specialization, and one from species. These are going to be Perception (career), Streetwise (career), Vigilance(career), Ranged (Heavy) x2 (career, specialization), Stealth (specialization), and Athletics (species). It’s worth noting that the second rank in a skill is normally more expensive if taken later, so any ability to double up like this can save you XP in the long run, at the cost of reducing the breadth of your starting abilities.
That still leaves 90 XP to spend on attributes, skills, and talents. It’s worth noting that the only time you can spend XP on attributes is character creation, so you may want to dedicate a decent portion of your XP to this. Attributes aren’t cheap, at 10 times the new value. They’re also limited to 5 at creation. Career skills are 5 times new value, but cannot go above 2 at creation. Non-career skills cost 5 extra points per rank, so you should think long and hard if you want to take any of these (especially if you intend to take a specialization that includes them as career skills later, or you’re in one of the specializations that contains the “Well Rounded” talent). An exception might be for a combat skill if you are in one of the careers that doesn’t have one. For Aragos, we’ll buy off that intellect penalty and then some, spending 50 XP to get Intellect up to 3. 40 XP goes into putting more eggs in the “solve problems by shooting things” basket and raising Agility to 4. (Aragos did not start as a nuanced character.)
More to come…
I’ll go into Obligation and starting gear next time. From here, character creation diverges a bit depending on which book you’re starting with. The “mechanic” for Edge of the Empire is Obligation, so we’ll see what impacts that has on creation.
Last night was a bit of a mixed night, in that I logged into Final Fantasy XIV early in the evening… and then spent most of the night with my chair turned to the side playing Destiny instead. I largely logged in when I did to be available for any raid shenanigans later that evening and also be available for various folks who were wanting to get friends invited to the guild. So I sat there with my headphones on attempting to monitor both games at the same time and doing a fairly poor job of paying attention to guild chat. I gotta say I am enjoying the Titan again now that I gave up on the whole defensive thing and went back to striker. There is something gratifying about doing Fist of Havoc in the middle of a pack of mobs and walking away to tell the tale. Largely I spent my evening working on quests and bounties. There are a handful that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to complete… what the fuck is an “attachable grenade”? I thought at first it was the lightning grenade that “sticks to any surface” but after a bit of reading this morning apparently it is the FIRST grenade option… which I don’t think sticks to anything.
Can’t Go Wrong With Black
At this point I am level 30, which I have to say really quickly how much nicer it is to have a simply leveling curve instead of that light bullshit. Having to sift through items and find the one with the highest light amount… was maddening especially when it often meant you were maybe turning down an otherwise superior item. The only thing I question at the moment is the fact that all of this “leveling” gear is upgradeable… whereas I am swapping out gear pretty much every single time I go out into the world, so upgrading it really is meaningless. The only thing I am still holding onto right now is my exotic gun, and that is simply because I have not found anything with higher damage. The moment I find a hand cannon with better stats, this exotic will likely get chunked in the bank for nostalgia reasons and I will happily use the next gun with better stats on it. I am still fairly firmly attached to a Hand Cannon as my primary weapon… or as they for some reason occasionally refer to them as “Sidearms” instead. As far as secondary and heavy… I am pretty partial to the Sniper Rifle and the Machine Gun because that combo gives me a strong way to pick mobs off at range… with a heavy with some serious stopping power. Stopping power that you need for the Taken invasions that seem to spring up at random in every single open world zone in the game. I stuck around on Mars long enough last night while working on a “kill champions” bounty last night, that I got to fight the same event several times in a row. The giant Taken Vex Minotaur thing… is freaking brutal. I don’t think it is quite as bad as a spider tank, but still pretty horrible to content with especially when there are not a ton of players around.
Taking Down Skywhales
While fiddling around with Destiny a large gathering of folks started showing up in Final Fantasy XIV. After a bit Kodra being the awesome person that he is, took it upon himself to try and make a group happen. I am super thankful that he did… because I was absolutely not paying a whole lot of attention because I was busy trying to headshot Taken. It turns out we had a few people who had not managed to get Bismarck Extreme yet, so that set our course for the evening. Learning nights are interesting when you are teaching a handful of people a fight, because it ends up shifting the balance for the rest of the group as well. Players who were the newbie last time, step up and become the experts and I saw that happening quite a bit last night. Bismarck Extreme is still serious business even though we have downed it several times now, and I went into it knowing that it would take a few tries before we finally got it down. On our first attempt we predictably missed the back on the first try, but after that we adjusted and started hitting that first hurdle pretty reliably.
The hardest hurdle as always is getting down the two snakes in time. The challenge there was simply a matter of keeping all of our dps alive and busy killing sky snakes because during that phase if you lose a single player it is highly unlikely that you will be able to pull it out. We are quite simply not geared enough to be able to carry that objective too hard. In truth we downed the boss the try in which we kept everyone alive. That just happened to be about 15 minutes before the instance timer ran out. I think it was a pretty great night though all things consider and we broke a few more players into the rigors of end game Final Fantasy XIV content. For the time being Monday night raids are on hiatus until November when the 3.1 patch lands, and I think in the mean time we are going to use Monday nights as a sort of “get stuff accomplished” night for whatever anyone happens to need. I would not mind farming more Bismarck or even getting a group back into Binding Coil of Bahamut. Cosmetic gear is always a strong draw to get me back into a place.
