I started watching the Fallout TV show and it has me thinking about the future the Fallout series envisions. Unlike a lot of other post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the Fallout media doesn’t take place until decades or even centuries after the disaster has occurred. The on-going danger of said disaster has fallen to reasonable levels and while things aren’t pleasant for anyone who lives in the world, it is tolerable. More in some places than others. Throughout it all, though, is the constant messaging of humanity being doomed to repeat its past mistakes via on-going abuses of what power remains, conspiracies to hoard resources and technology for those deemed “worthy,” and the constant strife of people struggling to survive when there’s only so much to go around. All of which is a bit farcical once your suspension of disbelief ends or you start thinking about the world and its stories outside of the context of the video games they were originally created for. I mean, I enjoyed the episode of the show I saw and I still plan to watch the rest of it when I’ve got the time (and access to a PrimeTV account), but thinking about the way the narratives shift to accommodate what we’d expect from a TV show has really highlighted the ways the series doesn’t really work for me on any kind of deeper level. At least in terms of post-apocalyptic ideation. I still enjoy playing the games and will probably enjoy this show.
Continue readingFallout
When It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath
In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
Continue readingFalling Asleep To Fallout 4
I have returned to playing Fallout 4. One of my friends reinvested himself in the franchise and, after we had a lengthy talk about it one day, I found myself wishing to return to the world. I’ve played it before, even doing a fun punching-only build with a character who looked like Superman/Clark Kent, but I’ve never beaten the game. Like Skyrim, there’s just so much to do that I never quite get around to chasing down the main quests. Or most of the major side-quests. I don’t think I even reached the point of the game where you have to pick a final faction. I have, however, always enjoyed the game and it’s low-stakes combat on a moderate or lower difficulty makes it a perfect game to doze off to.
Continue readingFallout 76 is Challenging my Expectations
I bought this game the day before it came out so I could play with my roommates and friends. I played it the first night people could access the servers and not much since then, thanks to National Novel Writing Month. That being said, most of what I’ve learned about the game has been from my solo playing after the brief introduction with my friends and from watching my roommates play it. Well, plus reading about it online because it is currently the internet’s favorite thing to love to hate right now. While I don’t have as many hours as I’d normally like in the game before reviewing it, I really think that it needs to be talked about.
First of all, it plays like pretty much every other Fallout game. There are a bunch of minor variations, like V.A.T.S. (the auto-targeting system that lets you use character stats to shoot or hit things instead of your ability to aim) not pausing time and jumping costing Action Points, but those seem like fairly obvious concessions necessitated by the change from a single-player game to an online multi-player game. You can’t pause the world if someone on the map is using V.A.T.S. and it’s unreasonable to expect the developers to find a way to pause time for only your character. Other than those two things, it feels remarkably like Fallout 4. Maybe even disappointingly like Fallout 4, since I was really hoping for a change in color. You get bored with browns and washed out blues or greens. I was hoping for some orange and yellows, maybe, or some vibrant color variants. It is a solid entry in the same vein of most Fallout games, simply trading one contrived plot for another, one vault for another, and one location for another. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. I quite enjoy all the Fallout games even if I tend to get bored of the endless side missions and weird power curves before long.
The biggest downside to this being a standard entry in the Fallout line of games is the number of bugs. There have been tons of them and even the most forgiving players would characterize Fallout 76’s first month as a “rough start.” That being said, it’s still managed to pull off a multiplayer online game while avoiding all of the worst problems. Griefing people is difficult, since the Player versus Player combat rules require two consenting adults to shoot at each other before removing a huge set of damage reductions on either character. It is still possible, of course, but there’s no way to stop a determined player from griefing someone if they want to. The lack of a good, in-game reporting feature is concerning, but the fact that they can real-time track every player, who is doing what events, and how your individual actions might set up the environment for a player passing through later is monumental. We expect it because we’ve been spoiler by online multiplayer games that are good at faking it, but we actually get the whole thing here. There have been myriad issues with the gameplay itself, things like players getting trapped in their Power Armor or the one player whose character is unable to die. There are a lot more bugs attributed to the game acting weird than issues arising from it being an online game, which has so far shocked no one but the people who’d never played a Fallout game before this one.
The internet has been going on about this game a lot. Most people seem to absolutely hate it or love it, which seems to be a theme of internet culture these days. Everything is all of one thing or it’s all of the other. There’s no room for middle-ground or change over time, everything either sucks or is the greatest. To be fair to the haters, Bethesda kinda deserves it. There have been issues with pre-orders, people feel like they were misled about the game they were getting, some of the pre-order people received sub-standard items with their pre-orders, and people feel like the game is limiting them from actually enjoying their online experience because of the rough start to the game’s release. At the same time, not all of the criticism is as valid as the rest. Advertising a canvas bag in one of the top-tier pre-orders and sending a low-quality nylon bag instead is dumb. They either should have had the prototypes and pricing done before they advertised, or they should have sucked up the cost and given people what they were promised. Being mislead about the game they were getting isn’t really valid. Sure, people expected a fully finished game on launch, but I think people’s expectations are wrong in this case, especially seeing how the video game industry has changed over the years.
Sure, there’s the basic change of development from risk-taking hobbyists to corporate profit-chasers that has resulted in micro-transactions and a “new” Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty game every year, but that’s about how the industry makes its money and what sort of staple games appear. What I’m talking about is the way games are delivered and what is handed to us when we download it. Back in the day, there wasn’t a way for games to get an update so they’d take a few years to create despite being relatively simple. No amount of computer tools makes a 3D model easier to create and animate than a sixteen-bit pixel model and every level in an old game was a two-dimensional surface with shading to give it a sense of depth. The games took longer and were as complete as possible when they reached our hands because they had to be. The games that weren’t that good have gone down in history as being enormous flops or cult classics. Sure, everyone probably remembers the Missingno trick from Pokemon Red and Blue, but not every realizes that doing it wrong or making a poor choice at any time could have really screwed up your game. I mean, I played Majora’s Mask for a week, trying to get to the first save point before my game froze on the N64 and I only ever saw it as a challenge I had to overcome. Our expectations were different back then. The only games that were “perfect” where the ones that were too simple to mess up, and even most of those had bugs or exploits for whoever went looking for them. At some point, we got it into our heads that games had to be perfect when they come out and it’s ruining our ability to enjoy perfectly playable if buggy games.
In addition to that, the product being delivered to us has changed. Gone are the days when we expected a game to stay exactly the same as when we bought it. There are still some games like that out there, but most of our big games change overtime. Almost all of our online multiplayer games shift as time passes, introducing new events and story tidbits for us to enjoy. Look at Destiny 2. The game has an entire year of additional content planned. Most of it isn’t story content or anything that’s really going to change the game for us (we already got our big chunk of story content and changes to the game this year, so that’s all for us until the next expansion), but it’s still new activities and weapons and so on. Look at World of Warcraft and the way they spread the pieces of a new expansion out over the course of several months. Look at literally every multiplayer online game out there. We, as consumers, have grown to expect this, and yet the entire customer base loses their shit when a game isn’t perfect the minute it releases. For whatever reason, we love a story that unfolds over months but can’t stand a game that transforms from a basic, ambitious concept to a fully realized constantly developing world that ceaselessly incorporates community feedback in its decisions about what to do next? That’s ridiculous.
I think that we, as a whole, need to cool our jets and just enjoy the alright Fallout game we’ve got as the development teams continues to improve it. It is far from unplayable and the fixes they’re delivering are a sign that they’re listening to what the community wants, even if they’re slower about responding to it than we’d like. People should just play what they can and give the game a chance to live up to our expectations rather than trying to shut it down the moment it fails to conform to our desires. I think people will be presently surprised at how much the game has grown if they return to it in the spring.
NaNoWriMo Day 11 (11/11)
I didn’t get much done last night. All of my effort and pushing caught up with me. Despite a steady influx of caffeine and a manageable but still significant amount of productive anxiety, I struggled to finish my cleaning chores. I had a lot, since I had been putting off cleaning my room for a very long time (a few weeks, at least), and I had piles of new books that needed to be sorted and shelved. Not to mention all the laundry and bird-dust that had accumulated. Cockatiels are lovely birds and can be quite companionable, but they don’t shed feathers so much as they just generate heavy dust and fluff. In only a few short weeks, they can coat any near surface in mausoleum-grade dust.
I did some writing though. Prepped my prompts, inspiration, and tips. Wrote a few hundred words. I’m still super far behind, though. I’m pretty sure that, by the end of the weekend, I’m supposed to be at 20,000 words. I’m at a little under 30% of that. If I did nothing but write for these two days, I could get there. But I’ve got plans. More D&D (and I actually get to PLAY this weekend! Not just run the game) and a Saturday just chock full of social engagements. At least, it’ll be full from some time in the afternoon onward. My plans are still rather loose at the moment.
I don’t mind that I’m going to have to work my ass off to finish in time. As I said during my book club meeting at work (and this is totally stolen from The Oatmeal’s “How to be Perfectly Unhappy”), I don’t need to be happy or feeling good. I need to feel challenged and fulfilled at the end of a project. I don’t do this because I enjoy every moment of the process. I’m exhausted. I’m not sleeping enough and my neck is just one giant rock of tense muscle. I definitely don’t enjoy the feelings of nagging obligation that keep me from my bed on cold, peaceful nights. I don’t do this because its fun, I do it because it makes me feel fulfilled.
It was nice to talk about my vocation at work today, to talk about what I care about more than almost anything and why I care about it. I was fully myself today with my coworkers, no longer the quite but steadfast worker who chimed in with a contribution every time the discussion began to stymie, but someone who had a commanding presence and spoke at length with a great deal of passion. It was also received very positively. I had a coworker remark that if I wrote nearly as well as I spoke, he was looking forward to the day that he’d be able to buy a copy of my book.
Throw in the blog comment I got yesterday (I love getting comments and talking to readers) and a comment I got from one of people in my support community and I’ll be riding this feeling of fulfillment for a week at least. As tired as I am, I feel more fired up and excited to write than I have since I came up with the idea for the support community.
Daily Prompt
One of the best ways to extol or even just show the features of a character is to set them up with a foil. If you’re not certain, a foil is a character that contrasts with another character and thus emphasizes particular characters or qualities. If your story has a solo protagonist, a good foil can be rival or a villain with whom they have a strong relationship or history. If you have multiple protagonists, a good foil would be another protagonist contrasting with them as a result of the situation they’re in together. Today, pick one of those types of foils (or both, if you’re feeling particularly ambitions) and write a scene that emphasizes your character.
Sharing Inspiration
Every so often, someone does something wonderful, weird, and down-right inspirational on the internet. One of my favorite instances of something like this is the YouTube video titled “Wazer Wifle!” It is a rap with accompanying music video made using footage and mods from a Fallout game about a gun from the same game. It is super catchy, right up my weird and nerdy alley, and it shows that someone once cared enough about a game I like to make a music video and entire rap about it. It always reminds me that if someone could make something as popular as this, maybe I can as well.
Helpful Tips
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your set up if you’re struggling to stay focused or get through your daily word count. Once I figured out that candles help me focus (as a result of the fact that I used to use them in my meditation), I started buying large, unscented pillar candles so I can set them all over my room when I can’t focus. Then, I can turn off all the other lights and just exist in a warm cocoon of flickering light that matches the current f.lux setting of my monitors. There are other ways to experiment as well. Hemingway once said to “write drunk, edit sober” and, while I wouldn’t recommend doing that, I am also aware that I write my fastest when I’m half asleep and barely able to focus on the keyboard. Just try different things until you find what modifiers can help you do what.