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Hype Cycle

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Shiny Baubles

I guess it is time to actually start writing this morning, considering I have stared blankly at the screen for roughly fifteen minutes.  A bunch of storms blew in over night, and I am guessing they woke me up because I feel like I just did not get a single bit of rest last night.  I struggled quite a bit to actually go to sleep, and in the in-between time of laying down and conking out I spent some time browsing the 3DS Nintendo eShop looking for Pokemon Sun and Moon.  I guess somewhere in the whole mix of discussion about the various starters… that I apparently missed that this game is not releasing until November.  The amount of hype floating around twitter yesterday made me think that clearly I had apparently missed the launch date.  However it was just apparently an announcement of the three starters which caused folks to go running and screaming in the aisles.  The amount of pre-hype surrounding games has reached a critical point, and I am just as guilty as anyone.  I pre-bought Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Overwatch…  because it gave me goodies in game immediately for doing so.  That is ultimately the hook that gets me is when you offer something limited that I potentially won’t be able to get any other way than the pre-order something.

However I feel like today it reached a new level with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, considering all that has been released is essentially a description of the game and a few screenshots… and it is now 3rd place in the current “top sellers” list on Steam right now.  I mean Bethesda did something similar with Fallout 4, but the pre-orders didn’t start until after the e3 demonstration that gave us a few hours worth of video outlining all of the features going into the game.  It feels like you could hold up a crudely drawn picture of a famous franchise, and money would literally start being thrown at the screen.  Don’t get me wrong… I know that more than likely I too will order Civilization VI because its Civ… and that game makes me lose entire weekends.  However the big takeaway for me is that I have is that I ultimately played way more Civilization IV than I ever did of V.  There are just too many things competing for my attention, and I feel that this is happening to pretty much everyone.

Digging a Hole

I remember a time in PC gaming where you could go several months between the launch of big titles, but now companies seem to revel in stacking similar titles on top of each other at exactly the same time.  I am certain that this information trickle about Civilization VI was to combat and somehow sour the milk of all of those folks thoroughly enjoying Stellaris right now.  It gets frustrating to see this play out,  when everyone is fighting for our very limited amount of attention.  Battleborn is probably a good game, and the little bit of it I have played in the PVE campaign has been enjoyable, and has the same sort of Borderlands style humor liberally sprinkled in.  However its launch has completely been gobbled up by the Overwatch hype machine.  I’ve heard many folks utter the words “oh wait, Battleborn is out now?” or the equivalent because its launch week was completely consumed with the release of Open Beta for Overwatch and the floodgates opening allowing all of the folks who never managed to get an invite into the game.  Now roughly a week after launch, this title that in any other Climate would have drawn huge attention due to it’s pedigree lists below Civilization V in the 16th spot on the current top sellers list on Steam.

It just feels like we are reaching a point where the games industry as a whole is going to eat itself.  What I am seeing is the level of marketing bullshit associated with video games that I last saw prevalent during the big reality television boom of the 2000s.  For all I know a ton of marketing flacks from that era took up roots in the gaming industry because it seemed to provide more stability… which in itself is a stretch given that very few of the folks I know in gaming have been in the same position for more than five years.  What I find frustrating the most is that I say all this… and I still find myself wanting to pre-order this or that title so I can get the shiny bauble or widget that gets discarded about two hours into the game because it is now utterly meaningless and replaced by actual progression loot.  I am very much part of the problem, and I have a disturbing back log of games sitting in various states of minimal play.  Instead I keep logging into Destiny or Diablo or the MMO of choice this month… and spending hour after hour treading the same ground instead of truly giving the new games a chance.  I’ve dug a hole that I will never be able to dig myself out of, because the amount of time needed to finish all of the games in my backlog is more time than I probably have years left to live… given that I have to you know work and stuff.

I don’t have a brilliant conclusion that I can tack onto this discussion like a pretty bow, it is just what happened to flow out of my fingers when I sat down at the keyboard this morning.  The only way things will change is if we stop giving into the pre-sale cycle, but the problem is that the current financing model for games… depends heavily on that early trickle of money.  So this is both “why we can’t have nice things” and “the only way we will have nice things”.  Ultimately it feels like the Video Games industry is being propped up by the same sort of hedge fund shenanigans that lead to the great recession.  There was a time where I thought it would be amazing to work in the Games Industry, but now… I am thankful I chose another path.  I also need to credit Talarian who ultimately planted the seed of this mornings post in my head yesterday, which then I started going over in my head as the night went on.

Fickle Electron

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Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal

Fickle Electron

Yesterday was the final day of this brief vacation, and I knew that unlike Monday I needed to actually get some adulting done.  So I scurried around like mad in the morning and knocked a dozen things off of my list all before eating breakfast.  The day was going to be awesome, and to make things even more interesting it turned out that yesterday was “Spindle” day, meaning that the Lost to Light mission was the daily heroic.  Now the Black Spindle weapon in Destiny has been the bane of my existences for some time.  I’ve spent probably a grand total of ten hours working towards getting one now, in the various weeks that it has been available.  Always something goes wrong, and either the group I have managed to assemble doesn’t stand a chance due to low light levels…  or we struggle and get super close to pushing across the line but never quite get it.  On my best attempt we had two mobs left standing at the end of the mission.  The worst part of it is that trying to get folks for this mission is like pulling teeth…  because nobody likes it.  It is that one mission that no one wants to do but everyone feels at least slightly obligated to help with.  So I feel horrible anytime I even begin to ask.

One of the big problems with my clan is that so many of them are only online during what is my “daytime”.  So with me being on vacation I was hoping that would mean that pulling together a crew for it would be easier.  Initially I got pulled into a Challenge of Elders group and then as we were waiting in orbit for someone to take a bathroom break…  there was a power spike.  Instead of the power coming back on…  it flickered a few times and then was off for good.  Sure enough there was a major power outage.  There is a local website where folks post rumors of stuff going on, and it turns out that most of my town was without power or at least most of the shopping district.  This was just too much after the internet outage the other night killing my plans, having a power outage do the same was just frustrating beyond belief.  I reported the outage and the power company was unable to give me any sort of an estimate as to when it might be back on.  I mean I guess it could have been worse… and the outage could have happened at night.  So I went downstairs and fixed myself a sandwich resigned to wait for the power to come back on.

Civil War

Fickle Electron

It was around then that I got an idea and called the local movie theater to ask if they had power.  Sure enough they must have been on one side of whatever the divide was that flicked off the power to the rest of the town.  I had been planning on going to see Captain America: Civil War at some point over the minication so in theory there was no better time than while the power was out.  I normally shun watching movies in 3D but the showing this time was an hour earlier than the non-3D one so I went for it… and resigned myself to wear an awkward pair of glasses over my glasses for the entire film.  Now some theaters have glasses that have actually taken into account that someone might not have perfect vision and wants to watch a movie, but ours has the cheapy disposable RayBan look-a-like glasses.  In any case I sat down to watch the movie without realizing that it was roughly three hours long… and this would ultimately gobble up any time I had left in my day off.  The positive is however that the movie was really good, but I guess the bar is pretty damned high at this point for the movies in the Marvel franchise.  Awhile back I created a playlist in chronological order and it takes over 26 hours to chew your way through it.  This is not taking into account either of the television shows or any other potential direct tie-ins.  This makes this quite possibly the most massive movie series ever created…  and honestly the general high level of quality across all of the movies gives me some huge hope for what Disney will do to the Star Wars franchise.

As far as the movie itself…  how do I talk about it without spoilers.  There are a lot of references to Empire Strikes back during one part of the movie, and I feel like this is apt.  This is very much the Empire Strikes back moment of this series.  It is the first time in the series where there are more unanswered and unsolved problems at the end of the film that were before it started.  Previously each movie was this call to action that was more or less neatly wrapped up by the end credit roll.  Now of course traditionally there are after credits sequences that open up a whole new can of worms and tee up the next film, and this does that nicely.  What it does not do is give the viewer closure.  Things are still pretty screwed up at the end of the movie, and it feels natural that we have another movie waiting in the wings to fill in the rest of the details.  I was honestly afraid that having this movie essentially cut and half and spread between two different years would make it feel like the Harry Potter finale did where it felt like things just were abruptly cleaved in twain.  Instead this feels like a complete movie, but one that we know there will be another complete moving coming behind on its heels to finish things up.  The pacing is much slower as well, which fits the Empire Strikes Back comparison but it happens in a way that adds weight to the movie and not one that makes things feel stretched thin.  In any case it is well worth your time going to see it, but I highly suggest you watch the rest of the series… because this one makes so many references to past movies that I feel like someone might be lost if they started here.  As far as the rest of my plans yesterday…  they more or less didn’t pan out and once again Lost to Light passes without me getting a Black Spindle.

Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

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Overwatch is Kind Of A Big Deal right now. Blizzard is breaking into a new IP and new genre with its super-stylized team shooter, and it’s a rather good game. It’s not a game for everyone, but I think it’s a game worth trying, because it does a bunch of things *just* differently enough to be compelling.

Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

Let me cut to the chase: Overwatch is Team Fortress 2 as done by Blizzard. Same bright colour palette, same stylized art, same overall sense of winking fun while also being a tight, well-tuned shooter. The main thing it adds to Team Fortress 2 is movement, which is significant. Lots of shooters have been playing with the idea of movement as a significant verb, and Overwatch is no exception– different characters move differently and this is extremely significant. I’ve talked before about how important new verbs are to games, and while certainly a newer game, Overwatch is more fun out the gate than TF2 was, and a huge part of that is that it adds that verb. Indeed, a lot of the gunplay in Overwatch is LESS satisfying than TF2, but it matters a lot less because there are other things going on.

For a while, I’ve lamented that MMO game design has been co-opted by virtually every other genre out there while apparently learning nothing from the advances elsewhere in the industry. It’s not super surprising to me, then, that a game made by the company that basically defined MMOs for the last decade draws heavily on MMO design ethos. Overwatch feels more like a team PvP match in WoW than it does a more ‘traditional’ shooter. Working together is always important, but in Overwatch this is accomplished through abilities that work together in intuitive ways. Overwatch breaks its characters down into MMO-style roles, and even if the abilities and armaments of a given character aren’t immediately apparent, by seeing what role they’re labeled as, you can get a sense of how to play them. It’s very MOBA-esque, although significantly more intuitive than most MOBAs.

What really sets Overwatch apart, though, is the same thing that sets Heroes of the Storm apart: accessibility. Team shooters are hugely inaccessible games for the most part: an exercise in new player frustration as they die and lose repeatedly without a good sense of why or how to improve. This kind of frustrating experience is really bad for a game’s health, however much a certain player mentality really likes to say “oh, you gotta get your lumps in at first”. Trying to sell someone on something “fun” but telling them they’re going to have to suffer before they get to “the good part” is a fairly outdated mentality at this point, and Overwatch does everything it can to eliminate it.

Overwatch pops up helpful player tips constantly. It will give you tips on how to fight the character who just killed you, it will suggest team compositions, and it draws lines through the map at the start of the game so you know where you’re going. Map knowledge is important for playing the game well, but playing competently doesn’t require that you memorize every map before jumping in. Adding to this, the way maps connect together is intuitive– there aren’t a lot of obscure passageways to hunt down in order to reach hidden snipers.

Adding to this, the characters are simple but deep. There’s no ironsights aiming, virtually no weapon switching, very few complex weapon interactions, no difficult comparisons between similar weapons– what you see is what you get, and this helps the game a LOT. The nuance in each character comes naturally as you play them, not in complex pre-planning. Making a character shine often requires good teamwork, and it’s apparent how to make that happen. One character has a gigantic forward-facing shield that blocks incoming fire. It’s great for protecting an advance, since your allies can shoot through it but your enemies can’t. It leaves you open at the sides and back, though, so your team needs to cover your flanks. This is REALLY OBVIOUS the second you see this character in action, and doesn’t require some deep knowledge of the ability to function.

The sense of accessibility permeates through every level of the game’s design. The game is chock-full of positive feedback, and eliminates a LOT of standard first-person shooter tropes, especially in the UI, in order to promote teamwork and prevent the kind of statistical comparisons that create toxicity between players. There’s no kill feed, except in spectator mode, and if you pull up the scoreboard, it will show you your statistics and the current top statistics in the game, but not EVERYONE’s statistics. There’s no distinction between kills and assists. The game operates at the team level, and when it displays the top players, it shows off almost entirely random-seeming stats. If you’re losing, or failing with a given character, you can swap out during a match, in your base, rather than being stuck until the end of the match. All of this promotes as much of a positive upward spiral as possible, and keeps the game fun and intuitive.

Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

At the same time, it’s a surprisingly deep game. Very simple characters offer a lot of nuance, especially in a group. One of my favorite characters is D. Va, a mecha pilot tank-type. Her mechanics are really simple: she has rapid-firing shotguns that are strong in close, she’s got a forward conal shield that will block incoming fire, and while her base movement is somewhat slow (slower while shooting), she has a rocket boost that lets her fly around very briefly at pretty high speed. When her mech takes fatal damage, she’s ejected and becomes a much smaller, much faster target with a surprisingly powerful and accurate sidearm– survive long enough in this form and she can resummon a new mech. Her ultimate sets off the self-destruct in her mech, creating an enormous, super-damaging explosion that will kill virtually anyone it hits (including you, if you’re too close). In practice, this creates a really slippery tank class that can absorb a shocking amount of punishment between deaths, and is a really strong flanking tank that can hit an enemy from unexpected angles and (with her ult) is great at cracking dug-in enemies. She’s a lot of fun to play because you can stay in the fight for an incredibly long time, and you’re doing very different things while in the mech vs out of it. Working together with teammates means you can push harder than other tanks, since if you go down you’re still contributing to the team on foot, and then can fairly quickly get back into a new mech at top form. Right as you break through an enemy blockade, you can swap to flanking mode and make sure your team can lock their position. Alternately, you can blow up your mech in a group of enemies as the spearhead to a big push, especially if you have another more standard tank to help out.

My initial question when I started seeing Overwatch stuff was “why would I not just play TF2?”, and over the past few days I’ve gotten a really clear answer. It’s a fun, accessible game that adds movement as a fun new dimension to an otherwise lighthearted, casual experience.

No Internet Blues

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Vault of Glass

I am on vacation the next two days, so as a result you are getting a post a bit later than normal.  I had every intent of getting up like normal, but the world was rainy…and the bed was warm, and the room nice and dark so I just kept sleeping.  I got up long enough to make my wife some coffee and then went right back to bed, and while I thought I wasn’t really asleep I apparently missed her departure.  I largely survived the moms day festivities and other than getting choked up due to some backwater yokel burning wet leaves…  thing went pretty smoothly.  So much so that I thought we would be back home at a decent hour last night.  My Destiny clan does a Sunday night Retro raid trip through Vault of Glass, and I am in desperate need of an Aetheon kill so that I can finish my No Time To Explain exotic pulse rifle quest.  Generally speaking Sunday is television night in our household, but given that te rest of the day was kinda messed up I decided to take a pass and instead signed up for the raid.  It was going to be awesome to finally have that quest out of my log.

When we got home from an extended dinner/conversation with my parents, I went upstairs and sat down at my computer.  I brought up a single website…  the one that allows me to sign up for a clan event.  When I then turned around and hit the Bungie website to transfer some items I got a no internet connection error in Chrome.  Sure enough I was setting the caution light symbol on my ethernet, and it was around this point that I noticed the cable modem disconnected.  I fiddled a few times to try and get it reconnected, and then hollered down at my wife to check the cable.  Sure enough the television part of the equation was out too.  The biggest frustration is that there was an error messaging showing up on the television with a phone number, but when we called that number and waded their their annoying menu of options, we finally received an answering message stating that the office was closed.  At this point it is 8:30, and the raid starts at 9 pm…  so a mild bit of panic is setting in but there isn’t much I can actually do about it.

Life Without Internet

Thankfully our mobile phones were working because my wife managed to find a different tech support number, and we called that.  Once again we had to wade through a frustrating sequence of message prompts.  We finally get to someone and sure enough there is a major outage in our area, one that is not planned to be resolved until 10:06 so an hour after the start of the raid.  I manage to fiddle with the mobile app for the clan and de-register from the event, and sit there resigned to my fate.  The problem with our modern connected society is that most of the things that I like to do… simply don’t function without internet.  Thankfully I had managed to log into the PS4 before the internet went out and it seemed that Ratchet and Clank didn’t care about having connectivity.  I ended up playing that for a bit until at some point  looked to the side and the blue lights were back on our cable modem.  My Wife verified that in fact we did have cable television back as well, and things seemed pretty peachy.  It seems like they managed to fix the issue by 9:30 instead of 10 something whcih was awesome, but unfortunately the Vault of Glass raid didn’t actually make.

Instead we ended up watching the rebroadcast of Fear the Walking Dead, and then going to bed a it later than we normally do.  Losing internet is this strange roller coaster of emotions which I guess in some way troubles me that this one thing is that important.  We found out that apparently there was a lightning strike that took out a connection point for both the power and cable, and that a large swath of my town was out of power.  I remember the thought going through my head of “Whats the use in having power if we don’t have internet” which when I thought it kinda jarred me.  I guess it was a weird conclusion to what was ultimately a really strange weekend.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad strange, just way busier than we are used to.  On a positive note my “flower children” seem to still be happy and we have failed to kill them off in the week we have had them.  They require way more water than I had originally thought which has me watering both morning and evening to keep them looking healthy.  The “Sunpatiens” especially seem to need a thorough soaking both times to make them nice and happy, which was not something I was expecting.  I had always been told that over watering was just as bad as not watering at all.  However it seems like whatever we ended up with combined with Oklahoma temperatures really need that water.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal gaming style posts, but this is all I really had for today.