Further to yesterday’s topic, there’s a whole lot of SMH going around.  All of a sudden the internet has turned into counter-terrorism expert central.  I’m not an expert, so I won’t even bother with it.  Suffice it to say, that if you have an opinion and it isn’t supported by facts, then you’re that crazy uncle everyone has.  We’re all crazy uncles about something.  Just need to pick which thing.

Also, I really feel bad for the US right now.  Like in that way you feel bad for your friend, whose parents are nutjobs, and then they don’t have a choice to live with them or head out on their own.  Apparently the 30,000 deaths per year from guns are not something worth talking about, or the 1,000 per year killed by police, but something that happened overseas is enough to have emergency action.  It feels like that ol’ Amy and Seth bit on SNL – Really!?!

Factions in Fallout

I haven’t focused much on leveling or questing, so I’m only level 21 and up until the last session, I had only unlocked the Minutemen and Brotherhood of Steel factions.  Well, now I’ve unlocked the Railroad, finally found Diamond City, Goodneighbour and the Institute.  I’ve only complete a single quest for the former mind you.

And that was a weird quest.  Maybe I just ran it incorrectly but there were master and expert terminals/locks everywhere, blocking my way forward.  I’m not sure if I was supposed to ask for help from Deacon or not but since I had already unlocked those skills I went ahead.  The alternative path was to run in guns blazing through a mine field.  I’d be curious as to the alternate path.

From the non-spoiler information I’ve read, 3 of those factions are exclusive past a certain point.  The nuances between each seem interesting.  One is focused on brute strength, another in subterfuge and the last one in moral ambiguity.  I’ll be honest and say that I’m rather interested in the benefits of a given faction, rather than their moral causes.  Too much gamification for me, granted, but it actually shows a poor level of balance.  Reminds me a bit of the Dark/Jedi/grey zone issues SWTOR had for a while.  I’m personally a fan of putting in non-power related rewards for these types of decisions, and instead focus on the story.  I seem to be more comfortable with losing access to content than to statistics – or in FO4’s case, losing both.

I also picked up a pretty crazy gun in Vault 81 I had missed the first time.  It’s sold by a vendor, and I typically skip those folks.  Well, this one is a semi-rifle that fires 2 bullets per scoped shot.  I’ve further modified it so that the base damage is 113.  I need to be level 24 I think to get to the next rank of mods.  Caps out at 233 from what I can see.  The difference in damage is just seems like a massive bug.  I took out a legendary enemy in a single snipe, where normally I’d take 5-8 shots.  I’m looking at the various perks and companion bonuses too, and from what I can tell I should be able to hit somewhere near 5x the sneak damage.  And that’s not counting the VATS bonuses to aiming for headshots from another perk.  It’s surreal, enough to the point where if I can see it, I should be able to take it down in a single shot.  That is a drastic change in play and one I’m thinking of just putting aside in order to restore some challenge.

Also, in a touching piece to the game, I found Edwin’s house and Annika’s locket at Chestnut Hill Reservoir.  There’s zero gameplay impact but the story on the terminal in the house and the nearby lake really makes you stop to think about the types of people in the story.  As much as there are ghouls, mutants, raiders and giant insects… there are people around too.  Just normal people, having normal lives, and then tragedy.  I just stopped for few minutes and let that sink in.  By not applying any game-related content, other than lore, it really applies a different focus and makes you think.  Pretty neat.

Bhag has a post that got my fingers twitching on MMO persistence, or more accurately, why he won’t play Fallout 4.  Truth be told, when I hit the clickbait article title, I figured his PC was dead.  Or as Isey put it, he’s a hipster.  But we were both wrong.

There’s a chunk to digest in there but the core argument is as follows:

What matters is not that the worlds are still there, waiting, when I come back to them. No, what matters is that they won’t wait. With me or without me these worlds move on. Even my characters change in my absence. Those infuriating flurries of pop-ups and tool-tips that greet the prodigal player, informing him of the myriad changes to systems and processes and items and expectations that have happened behind his back are evidence of history, of existence, of a kind of ethereal solidity that mirrors life.

I am not quite sure what games Bhag is playing (other than GW2) but I can count on a single hand the MMORPGs (that distinction is important) that actually had stuff occur while I was away.  Or had stuff that I did in the game that actually mattered. I’d certainly like that to be the case!

I remember back in EQ, farming Nagafen (or heck, Plane of Fear).  For the first bit, it was a free for all since you had to wait a week for him to respawn.  Then rotations came into play.  Now EQ has instanced all these world bosses because they can’t manage expectations.

Aside from the e-peen of world first, what exactly did the Nagafen kill do to the world?  It was an empty hall for a week, then it restarted.  When I decided in BG2 that I wasn’t going to help Viconia… she was gone for the rest of the game.  All 100+ hours of it.  When I blew up Megaton in Fallout 3, it didn’t just magically respawn 2 weeks later.

You remember when Stormwind was attacked by Deathwing at the start of Cataclysm? Do you know when the walls were repaired? (answer: 4 years later).  It didn’t matter that for 3 years he had been dead. When you log in to WoW today, as long as you’re in the same expansion, 99% of the content is identical.  Mekgineer Thermaplug has been the end boss of Gnomeragan for 11 years.  He’s died thousands of deaths and Gnomes still don’t have a place to call home.  MMORPGs are meaningless skinner boxes, where your actions have no impact on the world.  The only people who have an impact are the devs.

Sure, the devs might come in with an expansion (or 20) but that’s no different than the modding community for single player games.  Oh wait, it is. You don’t wait 18 months between mods. What MMOs offer is the complete persistence to an old saved game.  It’s not much different than groundhog day (or a skinner box).  It’s like reloading a checkpoint, for months.  Or re-running that hard Super Mario level for the 100^th time.

If you’re playing WoW, you could leave for a year and not see an iota of difference.  Most others are in the 6 month range of “new content” not necessarily “changed content”, which is typically reserved for expansions.

The true benefits, to me at least, as two-fold.  First, is the financial model allowing for a game’s life span to significantly stretch longer than a typical SPRG.  Mind you, that’s offset by sequel-itis (*cough* call of duty *cough*) where each iteration keeps enough of the core to be familiar but revamps other systems.  Sure, you get to keep your character name and acheivements, but they are by and large meaningless in the expansion (hence the sale of max-level characters).  Anyhoot, the finances make the game stable.  And to be quite honest, it’s rare to find a SRPG that passes the 100 hour mark (the same can be said of quite a few MMOs).

Second and most importantly, are the people, and the variable to the equation they become.  Meeting new people, engaging and having experiences with them, not seeing them online and then being happy when they do show up… that’s the benefit MMOs bring.  EQ was a glorified chat box where you spent half the time staring at a frigging spell book to get mana, might as well chat it up.

Would people play MMORPGS if everyone else was a bot or AI?  It’s the same game right?

NOTE: I am clearly generalizing.  Minecraft, EvE, ATitD, Istaria (Horizons), SWG (pre-NGE) are clear examples of how players impact the game – or more practically, are the game.

It was a busy and slow weekend, so I guess that evens out.  Sunday I spent a fair amount in bed resting up from a long Saturday of making tourtières.  For the past 7 years now, 4 of the guys get together to make a bunch of meat pies.  This year we ended up with 43 total, which is a pretty solid run.  We had to tweak the pastry recipe a bit and 2 of the guys had to bow out from rolling.  I kept at it and once the grove was set, it wasn’t so bad.  It was long mind you, well over 4 hours straight of rolling, but the end result was great.

The day started just before 7 and I didn’t hit the sack until near 11.  The beer and wine throughout certainly didn’t help much.  Still, it was a good day.  The wife came over and helped babysit the squirts, we had a lot of laughs and the food was great.  Can’t really ask for more.

Fallout

I’m not the world’s biggest IGN fan but Dan Stapleton is one of my go-to folks for RPGs.  In his Fallout 4 review, there’s one particular quote that rings – and I’m paraphrasing – “I feel like a kid at Easter, whose parents did a really bad job at hiding the chocolate”.

I am completely incapable of completing tasks in any reasonable sense of order.  I’ll get a quest for a given spot on my map.  I’ll quick travel to the nearest spot then start walking over.  In nearly all cases, I see a proverbial SQUIRREL!! and sure enough, I’ve been sidetracked.  It could be a dock and boat.  It could be a 3 storey building where I’m being sniped.  It could be a factory of robots.  It could be a new radio signal.  Maybe Dogmeat found me some more loot.  Next thing you know2 hours are gone, I’m waist deep in ghoul guts, have too much crap looted and need to run back to town to unload. Then I repeat the quick travel option and try again.

There’s clearly an end point here.  A time where I’ve explored it all; where I see that building, check my map and it says [complete] and I keep moving.  A time when I’m no longer wondering how many super mutants can actually fit into a closet, or how a Mireluk can fit into a puddle.  But that’s not today and likely not tomorrow.

The worst part of a suspense movie is the silence.  You’re on edge, not trusting the tranquility.  You know something has to go wrong.  The whole edge of your seat aspect sure does get adrenaline going.  Once the surprise finally reveals itself, the rush of panic/adrenaline is what people get a kick out of.

Fallout 4, as much as it’s an action game, it’s also one of suspense.  You’re never really quite sure what’s around that corner.  In most cases it’s some interesting form of death.  Mole rats and radscorpions are a great example of that.  They can burrow and be silent, travel large distances and show up behind you in a flash.  Heck, I found a building that had bags of meat at the front door and not a sound heard in the place.  I knew instantly that I was in Super Mutant space and hoofed it out of there. There are plenty of “oh crap” moments in the game, and I know in my case, it’s the reason I keep playing.

And this brings me to Vault 81.  I won’t go into complete spoiler territory but I think this is a perfect example of the suspense/surreal aspect of the Fallout universe.  People that have played in the past know that every single vault was in reality a social experiment.  Either their water would fail, their doors had issues, psychological testing would take place or any other weird mix.    In Fallout 3, while it seemed normal, in fact the doors were never supposed to open.  The overseer changed that.

Vault 81 seems entirely normal when you visit it.  The people are normal, and I don’t mean freakishly so.  There’s a cheating couple, a drug user, kids, a doctor, cooks and a balanced overseer.  You run a few quests, get introed to the group and the entire time you’re looking at the corners for something to go wrong.  The music is even calming and quiet.  You’re always looking for something bad to happen, and it never does.  It’s like an eternal tease.

And of course, the shoe actually drops and you get to explore the “bad side” of the vault and get a new companion for your troubles.  It’s really like a mirror universe, truth be told and very surreal.  If each environment was taken on their own, then it would be easy to digest.  Taken together, it really highlights a big gap between both.

Pacing is key, and more so in suspense.  Fallout 4 is hitting the right notes for me.

So let’s forego the usual pretext and jump right into it.  Fallout 4 is great.

It’s not perfect, there are still the usual bevy of Bethesda bugs (ooh, that was nice) and the pacing/long-game has weird stretches, but the impressive majority of the game is of high quality.

The game uses the same engine as before, the same interface for lockpicking we’ve had since Oblivion, the same computer hacking password guessing mini game as well.  VATS is back, PIPBoy is near identical to before, body parts, physics, enemy types (more or less), quest volumes, hidden nooks, books and bobbleheads abound.  There’s a lot of “the same”, but when that stuff was working before, why throw it out the door (looking at you Blizzard and Ubi).

Instead, the various systems are augmented.  VATS isn’t a freeze-time attack anymore, things just move in slow-mo.  Weapon diversity is through the roof, with the additional of weapon/armor modifications.  Enemy AI is better, where they attack from multiple sides, use cover more often and hide if they can’t reach you.  It still goes full Gump from time to time but overall it feels like you’re climbing a mountain.  A dumb super mutant still hits like a freight train (or a mini-nuke train since they carry those too).  Creating a settlement seems pretty neat but even after a fair chunk of time, I’m not quite sure of the purpose – or how to get the various settlements to work together, even with the appropriate perks.

And perks are a bit of a weird one for me.  RPGs are about numbers, but the only real numbers you have control over are your items.  I honestly have no idea what a character with 3 perception looks like compared to one with 9.  I do know that they can unlock more perks, but the base stat certainly has some effect.  Perks themselves are neat-o, and it’s a novel approach to show everything under the covers from level 1. It’s a massive wall of perk options and you get to plan your way through it.  Gone are the days of hitting level 18 and realizing to get a perk you needed to start specializing at level 10.  But that’s the general feel of the game, saturate the player with information, let them make informed choices.  So while it was certainly jarring to see, it’s very welcome.  It’s a game that’s less about the now and more about the way forward.

The less obvious stuff is also quite improved.  Controls seem a lot tighter, and firing from the hip actually works now.  The music is still well above the norm and very mood appropriate.  Character animations have moved out of the uncanny valley, voice overs are delivered by humans rather than robots and the art style has moved out of the “grey, grey everywhere!” phase we’d been stuck in.  Death is everywhere this time, with a notably higher difficulty level than before.  Companions are actually useful.  Quests are multi-tiered, usually letting you move around and explore on the way to the next goal.

And I think that’s really the theme here, continuous movement forward.  The BoS motto ad victoriam is the heart of the game, ever moving forward towards the next goal, the next victory.  I am far from complete in the game but what I’ve seen so far is very impressive.   I’d be surprised if by the tail end of this I don’t end up with over 100 hours.