Frostpunk: Refugees

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This is the last scenario in the base game, and I’ve taken a solid swipe at it now.  What’s left is the Endless mode, where there are no win conditions, only failures.  Given that the scenarios are always against a clock, and primed full of crises, you’re never really in a balanced mode.  Sure, you may have all your coal needs covered, but odds are you’re low on food, or steel.  Given enough time though, getting balance across everything is absolutely achievable.  Maybe I’ll give it a shot later on.

Refugees

The idea of this scenario is that you’re given a tight build space, few resource to start, and LOTS of people showing up to the door every 2 days.  These people often show up sick too, and with poor housing, you’re going to be rolling in sick people.  And the children, good golly the children that show up.

Combined, for practical purposes you need to pass the Child Worker (kids can work safe jobs) and Overcrowding (double medical capacity) laws.   That raises some interesting design choices in this game I’ll get to later.

This particular scenario best exemplifies the needs of the people, how long you can ignore them, and what you can do manage discontent.  You can go a couple days without food.  You can’t go a night without housing someone or they will get ill.  Ill people can stay at home.  Places with people should never be lower than chilly.  Even though the game says you’re in a bad state, it’s often just a warning rather than a failure.

The “trick” to this particular scenario is all about getting through the first two nights without a ton of sick people.  Everyone needs a place to live, you need a medical spot, and you need to have gathering huts to build it all.

There are 10 sets of basic refugees (and some at various explored outposts), then some lords show up in the final quarter.  If you’ve got the first 10 groups under control, the lords are easy enough to manage.  Faith/Order keepers are needed to break up any conflicts – and they are generally required for other bits anyhow, so you’ll have them.

The last few decision points should be taken at the management level, rather than the personal one.  You’re presented with moral choices, and the decisions here have some minor ripple effects.

Overall it took me 6 tries to get through the first 2 nights, and the rest fell into place without too many hiccups.  The scenario is a good step up from the Ark in complexity, but there’s a lack of decisions at the start that have long term impacts.

Scenario Comparison

In terms of difficulty, it would go Ark, Main, Refugees, passing a kidney stone, Winterhome.  Since you need to get to day 20 in the main campaign to unlock any of the others, you’ll have a relatively solid foundation.

In terms of complexity, it would go Ark, Refugees, Main, Winterhome.  The last 2 demands a fair chunk more planning to get through, and curious decisions points that have longer term ripple effects.  Winterhome in particular has 3 specific choices that mostly eliminate the ability to get the best outcome.  You don’t know that until the end, which makes victory bittersweet.

Overall Tips

There are a couple starting guides out there, but they all generally sum up to:

  • Gathering huts >>> picking from piles
  • Understand the day/night cycle.  People work during the day, and do not work at night.  They don’t sleep, they just don’t work.  If you plan to upgrade buildings, best to do it at night with plenty of free labour and no impact to production.
  • 1 hunting hut per 50 citizens
  • Coal Thumpers are amazing (and don’t cost cores)
  • Wall drills are better than Sawmills (takes 3 cores to max out one wall drill)
  • For most of the game, people are nearly twice as good as automatons in terms of productivity per hour.  Automatons don’t need heat, and work 24/7.  Having them work nights and people during the day is a very effective strategy.
  • Priority research is the beacon, above everything else.  Heaters are next, then get some resource production going.
  • Get an expedition team going ASAP.  The resource gains at the start make a huge difference, and it’s the only way to get more cores.  Ideally you can run 2 teams, with a speed boost.  You also move faster to known locations, so use them as midpoints for longer runs.
  • Outposts for cores only.  The rest you can make on your own.  One exception to this in a specific scenario.
  • Pass laws at every cooldown.  Of great value are Extended Shifts (for workshops) and Soup (25% more food).  Radical treatment + prosthetics gets people working again.
  • Faith laws help manage Hope/Discontent, while Order best manages productivity.  Productivity is an issue in the early part of the game, when you can’t pass the laws anyhow.
  • Hunting huts, beacons, and storage do not require any heat to operate.  This fact saves an insane amount of building space for houses.
  •  Only research things you need, when you need them.  Bunkhouses shouldn’t be researched until you’ve unlocked the ability for houses.

Frostpunk is a solid game.

WoW Realm Pops

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Cause I’m a numbers guy.

This isn’t a comparions, just some analytics triggered by Bel’s recent post.  Data points are taken from WoWProgress, since the previous wowrealmpop was apparently sold.  Only for US servers to simplify things.  These are not distinct data points, only indicative.  It’s based on active characters, not players.  Still, the ratios help.  Alliance is listed before Horde for alphabetical purposes.

A few notes to start though.  When WoW launched, it had a tight focus on the Alliance vs. Horde conflict – made sense as it was a followup to Warcraft 3.  The world was more or less split in the middle, with spots in the mid 30s where both factions started meeting each other.  I won’t go into why PvP didn’t work as planned, as that’s a book’s worth of musings.  I can say that expansions alternated between the factions teaming up, and then breaking up. Feels more like a rom-com in that sense.  BfA isn’t any different – it started as a conflict and it’s now in group-hug mode.

Dev choices over the years have broken down these faction barriers, so that the world has been “shared” since MoP.  WoD is a slight deviation, given the 2 faction specific zones, but it also kicked off with a faction war…  At the game stands today, the faction split is a mechanical one.  People can’t group together cross-faction, or effect trade (the AH does work).  Aside from that, the factions are cosmetic and story based,

Why does any of that matter?  Because in early WoW factions meant something game-impacting, while today it only impacts the players you can play with.  In open world content (yes, that existed), you’d be fighting against the other faction for the same resources and no way to really communicate about it.   Nowdays, it’s about server population balances.  If you want to actually see other people and want to play Horde, you’re not going to roll on Stormrage.

Curious Data Points

Onto the stats

  • There are ~505,000 characters.  220k are Alliance (44%) and 285k are Horde (56%)
  • There are 120 servers.  The average would be 4,200 characters per servers.  The median is 2,100 due to overloaded servers
  • The highest pop servers are, with an Alliance / Horde % ratio:
    • Stormrage (PvE) – 26,000 (97%/3%)
    • Area52 (PvE) – 24,000 (1%/99%)
    • Illidan (PvP) – 22,000 (2%/98%)
    • Sargeras (PvP) – 18,000 (94%/6%)
    • Thrall (PvE) – 17,000 (3%/97%)
  • The lowest realms are all connected and around 1,000 characters each.  Except Tol Barrad (PvP) with 548 characters (62%/38%), and Garrosh, which has 864 characters (34%/66%).
  • In general, if a server has ~1,000 characters, it is a connected realm.  The connections are meant to balance the faction ratios.
  • The top 10 servers in population account for 16% of Alliance and 22% of Horde
    • 50% of the Alliance is spread in the top 21 servers
    • 50% of the Horde is spread in the top 14 servers
  • The largest imbalances, for non-connected servers
    • Alliance (all above 90%)
      • Stormrage (PvE) – 97%/3%
      • Proudmoore (PvE) – 94%/6%
      • Sargeras (PvP)– 94%/6%
      • Frostmourne (PvP) – 93%/7%
      • Kel’Thuzad (PvP) – 91%/9%
    • Horde (there are 12 above 90%)
      • Mal’Ganis (PvP) – 0%/100%
      • Area 52 (PvE) – 1%/99%
      • Azralon (PvP) – 2%/98%
      • Illidan (PvP) – 2%/98%
      • Barthilas (PvP) – 2%/98%

Analysis

While not in the list above, WoWProgress lists server ranks in terms of raiding progress.  If you value progression raiding, you do not want to be on a connected server, and you want to be on a faction-friendly server (e.g. don’t roll Alliance on Illidan).

PvE servers tend to favor Alliance, while PvP servers tend to favor Horde.  Racial abilities are the main argument for this items being created, and even if they were removed entirely tomorrow, there are few drivers that would make a dent in this balance.  BfA’s daily quests have highlighted this fact (zone zerging).

PvP servers that have large imbalances as effectively PvE servers.  Which is nearly half of all of the PvP servers.

Character volume has a direct impact on the economics of a server, in both the material aspects (gold/auction house) and players to play with.  If you want to play the auction house to trade for WoW tokens, you want to play on a relatively high pop realm and on the appropriate faction.  The highest pop servers are a double-edged sword in that regard, as you will be competing against many more people for the same resources.

High pop realms are more likely to have stability issues due to the server architecture.  These will hit during expansion launched, large patches, and on weekly maintenance cycles.

New players are better off taking a connected realm, as there’s a better balance of factions and players.  I don’t think there are too many people left on the planet who a) have not played WoW, b) don’t know someone who has played WoW, and c) would start playing WoW cold without knowing someone already playing.

Guilds are the lifeblood of any server.  They have players who are active in group content, and in the markets.  There are multiple examples of servers “dying” due to guild migrations.  This bit of info is a main reason for connected servers.

Connected realms are for all purposes but name, merged servers.  The names have not been merged in order to avoid having to rename thousands of existing characters.

Conclusion

Blizzard’s main tool to keep populations stable is to charge people to move.  For individuals, this isn’t too hefty a price (1 character per faction is sufficient, as you really only need to migrate gold, capped at 1 million).

While the data indicates that people can roll on the “wrong server”, the reality is the number of people impacted by this is minuscule.  That said, WoW could certainly do with a server recommendation based on faction/playstyle.  Or a pop up warning when rolling a new character of the wrong faction on a server.

That’s if factions even matter anymore.  If it doesn’t, then allow cross-faction grouping and a shared auction house.  Keep factions cosmetic and applied to PvP.

Frostpunk : More Scenarios

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Once you get through to day 20 (of ~40) in the main scenario, Frostpunk opens up other alternatives.  Instead of starting with nothing, you have a different initial set up, different quests/events, and a different goal.  I’ve closed out two of the 3, and they are wildly different.

The Arks

You start off with a rather simple base, an Automaton, and 4 seed arks that must be kept above cold or it’s game over.  You’re limited in the number of people in the city, and the only way to get more automatons is to to exploring.  In that sense, this entire scenario is more scientific in nature, and the best choices are the most logical.  Get more scouts, increase ability to heat the arks, automate as much as possible.

If you’re able to clear the main scenario, then this one feels like easy mode.

Fall of Winterhome

In the main scenario, around a specific day, you get a visitor from Winterhome that says the city is gone.  It also triggers the Londoners arc in the main quest, which is the intro for the Purpose (Faith/Order) laws.  The Fall scenario explains what happened to Winterhome.  And whooo boy, did it ever happen.

The starting conditions are painful.  There are laws that are passed that you can’t revert, half the city is burnt down (and preventing you from building), the other half is poorly designed (freezing, no food), there 3 dozen amputees (no prosthetics), and a few dozen sick people.  Oh, and the generator is broken.

So you’re dealt an amazingly poor hand to start, barely enough resources to get things going, and at least a half dozen crises to manage every single day.  I tried at least 8 times to get this scenario started properly – and that deals specifically with the best approach to clear the crap and what to research.

I’d like to say that it went well after that.  It did not, and I found myself saving every 2 days in game, as a sort of fall back if things just snowballed downhill.  Which it did, often.

Eventually you come to realize that there’s no way to fix the generator – it will eventually blow up.  You’re tasked with evacuating as many people as possible, but that requires send fuel, food stores, and build quarters to house them.  The last one has 4 levels of success, the final 2 being extremely difficult to achieve.

Expeditions are not as useful here as in other scenarios – you’re given quite a few choices to collect or leave things.  For example, I made a choice to pick up an automaton, and it didn’t cause massive failure, but I do know it prevented me from getting the best possible outcome.

City building itself takes time, since you’re always starved for resources.  There is never a time where everyone has enough heat, or is healthy.  You need a ridiculous amount of space to heal people, which either takes engineers or cores.  The game makes both of those options nearly impossible.  That makes the Faith purpose mandatory so you can get Houses of Healing (fits 10, can be manned by anyone).

There comes a point where you’re just scraping by, things are bad, but not horrible.  Then you reach a point where evacuations start and people start freaking out (naturally).  You are presented with the best-of-a-bad-situation decision points, where they have massive consequences.  You’re pressed to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few, and those decisions are just painful.  And everytime you evacuate people, that’s people no longer able to help stabilize the city.

The entire scenario feels like you’re on an out of control train, heading down a mountain, with no brakes, and certain death.  You’re job is to get as many people off that train.

When it was all over, I saved 200 people.  Nearly 100 people died before evacuation, and another 200 could not be saved.  I don’t know if I’d call that winning.

Meta

Frostpunk is a stressful game.  You’re always trying to think 2-3 steps ahead, and needing to keep dozens of plates spinning at any one time.  The game has a knack for continually knocking those plates down.  So you’re always adjusting, never quite sure what’s around the next corner.

I can’t see how anyone could “win” a scenario without first “winning” the first 3 nights.  Those are make/break milestones and have cascading effects on the rest.  That provides a TON of foreknowledge on what the real scenario is within the game.

When looked at comparatively, the Ark and Fall scenarios are just different side of the same coin.  Both deal with crisis management, but one deals with science while the other deals with psychology.  Heck of a difference…

Gamer Profile

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I’ve done so many personality profiles now, I may be one of the baselines.  My work related profile is almost entirely red (get things done), with a decent amount of blue (get the details).  My green (want to be included) and yellow (include other people) barely register.  Pretty sure that puts me in the psychopathic tendencies.  The context of that profile is that my work generally deals with no-fail projects that are not progressing.  When you enter a building that’s on fire, you don’t go asking people how’s the weather.  Once the fire’s out, so am I.  Rinse and repeat.

I remember when I received one of my first complete reports.  I read through it, about 40 odd pages, and highlighted 2 sentences out of all of it I didn’t think applied to me.  Showed it to my wife and she started laughing about how accurate it was.  I can still recall people in my group highlighting entire pages.  Either they lied on their answers, or they are in a river in Egypt.

That said, I’ve found it very useful to run these tests on my teams, not so much to pin people into specific colors, but to better understand what approach works best with them.  If someone needs a pat on the back to get motivated, then for sure I’ll do that.  Also helps them understand how I work too.

 

Gaming profiles have some interest, as they are still being developed.  I’m used to seeing the 4 axis model (Bartle), where I tend to fall into the achiever/explorer type.

Quantic has a 6 axis model, and that level of added granularity makes it easier to explain.  My results here.  You can run your own report from the same link.

quantic basic

This is the basic profile view.  Given I like RPGs and strategic games, this aligns fairly well.  The social aspect is more for the online part, I like single player games more so that multiplayer.  I don’t play for PvP or explosions.

 

quantic secondary

This one is more nuanced, and therefore more exact in the descriptions. Achievement is a good example of that, where I am driving from a power increase perspective rather than getting 100% done.  I have ZERO drive to “platinum” anything.  I’m also driven by community building rather than competition.  A crystal clear penchant for strategic decisions rather than just pure excitement.

The interesting part here is that if I mixed my gaming profile with my work profile, you’d find some correlation.  The mastery & achievement align tremendously well with getting stuff done.   My focus on details at work is a blend of creativity & immersion.  I clearly like building things with people –  I wouldn’t be a volunteer coach otherwise – so that reflection is fun to see.

Quantic is onto something here, as they ask for your top recent games, and some other recent favorites.  Thematically those games help.  I picked God of War, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Outer Wilds as my top 3.  That’s certainly some variety.  The list of questions that follow are straightforward enough, but don’t really loop back on themselves as most profile tests tend to.  That exists because people’s memories are finicky – you may like blue at the start of a test, but all of a sudden another question talks about bananas, and now you like yellow.

It’s an interesting exercise to take.  Certainly made me take pause and think about the games types I do enjoy, or why I may only enjoy one part of a game but not another.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

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The announcement came out yesterday.  The setting isn’t surprising, nor is the timing of the launch.

 

I am perhaps getting too old for this sort of stuff. Cinematic trailers for near yearly IP releases do not cause any rise.  Having played Origins and Odyssey, I have a darn good idea what the game will look like visually.  Horses, boats, large battles, sneaking, eagle view points.  More or less a reskin.

Where this breaks is in the actual location – Britain.  Origins was in Egypt, so there wasn’t much boat work, aside from rafts.  Odyssey was an archipelago, the large ship was a key piece of the content.  Now when you think Vikings, you think shore raids.  Boats are certainly part of it, but not in the ship to ship combat, simply as a means of transportation.  I’m curious as to how this model, and the projected base building, gets implemented.

I’ve always found the AC games focused on the nomad/explorer type.  You never stick around anywhere for long, what with all the assassinations you’re doing.  You’re a small part of a hidden faction in a larger setting.  AC3 broke that a bit, but the revenge was from inside the larger setting.  Here, it appears that you’re the invading forces which is a new twist.  You’re not set up against a bad Viking, you’re a Viking going against the king of Britain.

One of the cool bits from the last 2 AC games was the supernatural aspects. Both Egypt and Greece have mystic lore coming out of every pore. Britain in the 10-12th century didn’t really have this.  Druids maybe?  Haunted castles?  Sea creatures (Loch Ness is northern Scotland… not sure that’s in scope).  Maybe it will just be epic 1v1 battles against beefed up Brits.  Most likely it will be the Norse gods, there’s ample material there.

The last few AC games have been quite good, so I’m cautiously optimistic that this one will continue that trend.  Plus, it would be neat to dual wield shields.

 

Frostpunk

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I picked up this game a while ago based on Syncaine’s recommendation / praise.  I played about 2 hours, couldn’t make heads or tails of the systems, and moved to something else.  I knew that it was a mash of crisis simulator / city builder, and what better time to play that than now!?

Premise is simple – its the 1800’s, the world is frozen over, and you’re leading a small group on rebuilding a single city.  Steampunk + extreme cold = wordplay.  The actual gameplay is a spreadsheet manager, where your pivot table keeps messing up.  But it looks pretty.

Where normal city builders have you starting small, and the only real chance at failure is a lack of funds, Frostpunk has you in a continual downward spiral of not having enough resources.   While doing A, B suffers and vice versa.  You end up doing a bit of A, moving to B before it gets critical, then back to A before that gets critical.  When you think you have a handle on it, the game throws in something to mix it up.  Either it gets so cold no one can work, a bunch of injured people show up, the population demands resources, or a long list of other items.

Resources are managed through an underlying source of heat.  The generator in the middle of the map provides heat for those nearby, and humans can’t work if it’s too cold.  There are many ways to improve this – either more heaters, hubs, insulation, overdrives.  They all consume coal, which you need to harvest.  Building / research material is a combination of wood and steel, also things to harvest.  Food you need to hunt (and a TON of it), then cook it.  You need people to do all of this, and you rarely have enough of them.

One add-on here is automatons. These robots can replace humans gathers, work 24/7, and don’t need heat.  Making them requires a core, which is a very rare resource.  If you get enough of them, and the right buildings, you can basically huddle down the humans permanently.

These things are painful, yes, but they are not game breaking.  If 90% of your population died, that wouldn’t be game over.  Instead there are two larger metrics – Hope and Discontent.  The former is how people feel about their chances of success, and there are a ton of variable to make it move.  Discontent is how upset people are with the current state – too cold, not enough food, bad laws, criminals and the like.  If Hope reaches 0 or Discontent reaches max, you lose.

Every in-game 18 hours, you can pass a new law.  Either these are Adaptation laws (thin the food, make children work, bury the dead) which have very long term consequences, or they are Faith / Order laws which primarily govern Hope / Discontent.  This part gets neat, and quickly.  You may think you are a good leader, and would try to help everyone.  But when you don’t have enoguh food for half the population and a group of 30 show up at your door… do you have everyone starve to death?  Do you make people work a 24 hour shift so that there’s heat for everyone through the night?  Do you triage the sick, so that only those with a strong chance survive and the rest pass?

Or maybe discontent is so high that you need to pass laws on protestors, and publicly execute someone.  Maybe you become a prophet for the city and simply avoid discontent altogether, as anyone who doesn’t follow you is exiled.  Are there bad choices when it comes to survival?

So that’s the real goal of the game – letting you try your hand at managing a non-stop crisis.

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The gameplay itself is generally solid.  The graphics represent the activities going on, people picking up wood, or heading out to hunt.  You get heat and religion overlays.  You get to see where people are working.  You’re presented with generally enough data to show what’s going on at any given point.  What you don’t see are the things that are about to happen.  If you’re in the day, maybe that part of the city is warm enough, but at night it will freeze the bones of someone.  Maybe half the people in a building are sick, dropping productivity.  And when people get sick, that has a cascade effect on others… production slows, other people get sick, and then woosh.

The game does a decent job at explaining what a Law will do, in the immediate sense, but doesn’t really go into the long term effects.  Child daycare may seem a great idea, but then you realize they eat all your food, live in the least insulated buildings, and don’t produce anything – ever.  Like a near permanent hole in the dam.

The game also doesn’t do a very good job explaining what the buildings do, or how it impacts the long term city viability.  Hunting huts never require heat, but you’d never know until you turned heat off for them.  Cooking huts require TONS of heat.  Mines can be rotated before building to make them much more accessible.  Roads… holy crap it took me forever to realize how to build them.  What’s the difference between a Coal Mine and a Coal Thumper?  Is a Wall Drill better than a Sawmill?  How does exploration work?

It is hard to articulate how important these items matter.  If you’re going into this cold (heh), you can’t make educated decisions.  You will fail, multiple times.  The initial 3 days have cascading effects for the rest of the game.  Passing laws before you need them has by far the largest of all consequences.  Ignoring research + related buildings focuses your resources on much better things.  Building “permanent” hot zones for residents, and working “hot zones” for gathers has a major impact on coal management.

From a gameplay perspective, it is incredibly frustrating not to have that balance ahead of time, or the information at hand.  From a simulation perspective, it makes total sense.  People managing a crisis rarely have all the facts at hand.  You can only prepare so much for a crisis, and once it hits, you realize how everything is so interconnected.   You’re going to have protestors who are thinking about themselves rather than the city.  You’re going to see really hard decisions made, based on the goals of the person making those decisions.

My first successful playthrough (I failed a half dozen times before) had over 600 citizens, 1 death, laws focused on hope (extended shifts, child shelters, amputation, soup), and a faith-based hope system, without New Faith (where hope is replaced with devotion).  I won’t lie, the mechanics and planning required to get to this point where substantial.  At the end of the scenario (~12 hours), you get a video of your city building over time.  When it was over, I felt relief and some measure of pride.  I did it, the way I wanted to.

Coping with Chaos

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Blapril is around, and I was totally in the dark, for reason explained later.  What was initially seen as a long weekend has moved into purgatory.  First world problems abound here, where mental stress is taking a toll.  (I say this, because there are people arguing to get haircuts… which is just, wow.)  The good news of living in Canada is that there is a heck of a lot of financial support for those who are struggling – far from perfect, but it’s there.

Dealing with this is a personal thing and depends a whole lot on your social context.  I come from a lower-middle class background, where money was tight.  I’ve had to make interesting decisions on food vs having a roof.  From that, I don’t put a lot of value in material things (acquiring them), and tend to maintain the heck out of them and try to repair rather than replace.  I brown-bag my lunch, make my own coffee, that sort of stuff.  The majority of my expenses relate to social settings – like having a beer after a hockey game.  My household budget is a tight spreadsheet.  Organized without being anal about it.

My day-job is a non-stop sequence of meetings, often conflicting.  I wake up in the morning, review my calendar, mentally prep for each, then just cascade through them.  It’s highly structured, and I have more work than time.  If you’ve read the 7 habits of highly effective people, that would describe my ability to get through a day.  I’ve further taught myself to speed read, and all this online gaming and blogging has a neat benefit of a crazy high words-per-minute typing ability. Within those work hours, I’m a highly regimented and effective person.

Outside of work, there’s the eternal list of to-dos.  For the winter, it’s hockey (2 kids + me) about 10 times a week – which is close to 25 hours if you include travel/prep.  There’s other kids activities, social events, prepping food, chores, projects, and piles upon piles of things.  When you’re in it, it seems normal.  Looking back, the reality is that there was perhaps 2 nights a week where things were open – and we worked to fill them.  Having an entire day off, that was like a vacation!

Today, work is pretty much the same, except my commute time is measured in seconds instead of minutes.  I need to switch from work to home mode, multiple times.  Up until this last weekend, it was close to 7 days a week of work.  Trying to help kids with their own work is crazy, and my wife is doing an amazing job at that (on top of her work as a teacher).  Time outside of work is harder to juggle, since I’ve now got no extra activities, and limited options for the social stuff.  I’ve had to include a new workout regime to compensate for the lack of sports (that’s working out rather well, if I havent’ had a 12 hour work day).  We take more time to prep meals, often eating much later.  Time just seems to be flying.  Most nights past 9, I’m on some game trying to ramp the brain down from the day’s events.

My mental stress is not due to finances.  There are no health issues.  Food is still relatively easy to access.  It’s not due to boredom.  It’s not cause my wife cuts my hair (which is pretty sweet, and my mustache is kick butt). It’s due to having an even busier schedule than before, and a lack of previous social outlets.  It’s managing other people’s stress in the house, and helping them cope.  The super mega great news on that front is that I love my wife and kids, and being locked up with them is cool.  Getting to spend more time with them is a damn perk.

There are days that are tougher than others.  Where work just drains me completely.  I let the wife and kids know (they aren’t mind readers, at least I hope not), and they 100% respect that and let me recharge.  I get back into it.  I’m conscious that my situation is likely the best of nearly all possible variables.  I’d sure as heck like to get out of this house and have a pint on a patio, but all things considered, I’m in a really good spot.

 

 

Tales from the Loop

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You may have seen Simon Stålenhag‘s art in the past.  It’s post-modern, where technology is disused and strewn about, but technology we don’t yet have access to.  I think it looks really neat.  The artist has a foundational world he builds from, where a company called the Loop has driven most of this.

Amazon picked on the idea and built a series from it.

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What follows next will include some spoilers, and as with most sci-fi, it’s a good idea to avoid it.  tldr; it’s closer to golden age sci-fi, with a slow burn, self-reflection, and not a whole lot of answers.

*spoilers ahoy*

The first episode wastes little time in taking advantage of the sci-fi setting.  Mysterious object + little girl = cool adventure.  If you’re following along, then you see the twist before it happens, but it still resonates.  The framing of this episode keeps in that “weird things are normal” for the rest of the series, and gives a Loretta the anchor position.

Second episode tracks an old trope of body switching and goes to the logical conclusion.  Which is distressing, quite frankly.  More like Black Mirror than what people are used to.  It leaves some giant unanswered questions.

The third one takes a familiar short story trope and teens into it.  But not teens in the stereotypical sense, more so in the sense of lack of experience.  Everyone can identify with this story, as we all go through our own growth, and how it seems completely isolated from the rest of the world.

Fourth explores our ability to cope with death at different states of our life.  I rewatched this episode, because it felt like too much to absorb in one sitting.  The premise of a bound lifespan and knowing this, is a freaky concept.

Fifth loses steam compared to the others, as it relates to episode two and the lengths a grieving father/husband will go to protect his family.  This is a hard concept to pull off, since many people can’t empathize quickly enough with the situation, and the actions taken rely more on sci-fi knowledge than human instinct.  Since the setup is weak, the follow-through doesn’t hit.

Yeah, I didn’t like this one either.  The idea is really cool, what if you travel to a parallel dimension and meet yourself.  Would you get along at all?  Where did the dimensions split to make another you?  Could you fit in?  All great questions, but the writing and acting here isn’t very good.

Every series needs a flashback episode to contextualize a given character, and this is the one that does it for one-armed George.  The story tried to hit a few too many beats at the start, making for a muddy middle.  The final act opens up a whole different set of questions for the world.

The final episode tries to close up as many of the questions as possible.  Where every other episode is more of an anthology, it’s not possible to watch this one without having watched all the other ones.  As a parent, this one hit me like a damn truck.  The series went full circle, going back to its tenet that time is a curse.  I reminded me a lot of the intro for Up, where in a seemingly simple montage, an entire life story is told, and you get to feel every bit of it.  The thing that really hits, is that no one questions why or tries to correct it, they just accept the fate and try to make the best of it.

Which is a general character theme throughout.  When people try to fix a problem, they generally make it worse.  Those that accept that life has given them a bad hand and move forward all seem to get better.  It’s not a world of regrets, it’s a world of growth.  Even if that growth is not what people wanted or planned.

 

Tales from the Loop is a solid series.  It’s not for everyone because it doesn’t fit the mold of sci-fi in 2020, with Michael Bay blowing everything up.  It’s a story about people, dealing with people, and making the best of a bad hand.  Optimistic in the tragedy.  I could use more of that.

FF12 – Post Game

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I guess it’s a Final Fantasy tradition that there are post game activities to complete.  Well, not in the sense that you complete them after the last boss, but more in that the last boss is considered easy mode to the post game stuff.

The Hunting system (it’s much more than a mini-game), adds challenges at every level from the first real battle on well past the final boss.  At nearly every occasion, if you can take down a hunt when its offered to you, that means the “regular story” combat is going to be very easy.

FF12’s final boss is targeted for the mid 50s.  You can do it earlier with a bit more planning (and items), or you can do it later and destroy the bugger in a few hits.  Levels make a very big difference in FF12, damage scales tremendously well.  In truth, I think this is FF’s easiest final boss.  You’re just dealing with damage, which is easy enough to mitigate.  Status effects… those are the things of nightmares.

FF12 adds status effects to increase difficulty.  The optional bosses all make liberal use of these to make life painful.  In order of most painful to least:

  • KO/Death
  • Inverse (swap HP with MP)
  • Disease (can’t heal)
  • Reverse (damage heals, and heals damage)
  • Reflect (enemies cast on you to heal themselves)
  • Stop (can’t move)
  • Confuse (hit others, likely killing them)
  • Sleep (wake up on damage, but healers dont normally get damaged)
  •  Silence (can’t heal)
  • Drain (removes all MP)
  •  Sap/Poison/Stone/Doom/Blind

FF staple the Marlboro has a habit of casting many of these in a single attack – as a regular enemy.  Thankfully they have low HP and with a (buffed) Remedy you can clear most of it in a single turn.  Bosses… that’s different.  Let’s start with Zodiark, the “final” esper.

Zodiark

Just getting to him in the Henne Mines means you’re in the mid 60s, as it’s the highest level zone in the game.  Zodiark uses Darkja, which deals a ton of dark damage (can 1 shot) and has a good chance to instant KO.  Losing all 3 team members in a shot should be expected.  If the entire team has dark absorbing gear, then he casts Darkja twice as often.  He also comes buffed with Reflect/Haste/Shell/Protect, which if you dispel he casts a damage immunity spell.  He avoids evasion (ignoring shields).  He casts AE (Scathe) at multiple targets for very high damage.  Gravija to drop team HP to 25%.

He’s a high group damage boss, with the ability to randomly KO the entire team.

Shadowseer

The penultimate hunt requires you to clear the bottom of Pharos.  Clearing that out is an exercise in frustration, as there are multiple enemies that can cast different status effects.  And it’s more than probable that even at max level, you’re going to have a squad wiped out if they can be inflicted by Stop/Disease/Silence.  That’s a good prep for the actual boss.

The actual boss takes all of that and dials it up to 11.  He summons previous 4 previous marks, all leveled up for the fight.  He himself goes immune to everything for 2 minutes.  And he’ll keep wailing on you (combos up to 11!) during the fight.

He has high damage group attacks, he dispels, he slows you, he prevents you from moving, he inflicts disease, he removes all your mana, and he casts invert.  The math on those last 2 are the worst.  He’ll remove all the mana from your entire squad, then invert 1 character’s HP/MP.  So you end up with 2 people with no mana, and one with no hit points – and primed to die due to a fart in the wind.  Doesn’t matter what level you are – you are going to die.

Hell Wyrm

A hidden boss that you need to clear for getting the Yiazmat hunt.  He’s the first boss you fight with multiple HP bars, since he has nearly 9m HP.  Shadowseer by comparison has 300k.

He’s more of a battle of attrition due to pure damage output and liberal use of Stop. Near the end, he uses Invert and the -ga spell series to do a really good job of wiping out your HP.  If your “tank” dies, there are pretty good odds that everyone else is going to die in 1-2 melee hits.

Yiazmat / Omega Mark XII

In the original release, due to damage cap (9,999) it took about 4 hours to kill Yiazmat due to his insane HP pool, and his random KO attack.  Omega Mark XII is just pure damage – killing a maxed out level 99 character in 2 hits.

The former requires significant planning in the damage dealing departments (TZA has no damage cap thankfully, so it’s only about 2 hours now), ideally  high combo character with a darkblade (his weakness), haste, and beserk.

The latter requires a sacrificial lamb + healer + someone who can chain cast Wither – a hard to find ability that reduces enemy attack power.  You need to get those attacks to under 1,000 damage total to have a chance to get through it.

Trial Mode

FF12 comes with a trial mode, where you’re in a gauntlet of battles against tougher foes, saving every 10 levels.  Stages 51-60 are in line with the regular game difficulty.  61-80 are tough hunts.  81-90 is the difficulty of Hell Wyrm.  91-100 includes (with no pauses between):

  • Magic Pot
  • Shadowseer
  • lvl99 Red Chochobo
  • Gilgamesh
  • Ultima
  • Abysteel
  • Zodiark
  • Yiazmat
  • Omega Mark XII
  • 5 level 99 judges (this is pretty much the equivalent of the Moroes fight of Karazan in WoW/TBC, where you need to take out a crazy group of enemies with deadly AI)

That was long

I didn’t expect this to be such a long post. It does go to show that FF12 put in some big efforts to have content outside the main story line to challenge players.  Without the Gambit system, each of these battles would have been insanely tedious start/stop to get the right actions going.  The game does a really kick butt job of throwing the kitchen sink at you AND giving you the tools to deal with it.  This game scratched a heck of an itch.

 

FF12 – Closing In

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FF6 pushed a lot of exposition in their cutscenes.  With no voice overs, you were reading text and listening to MIDI tracks.  Still, if you’ve played that game, guaranteed you remember the Opera scene.  I’m of the strong opinion that SquareEnix (SE) has been chasing that specific moment since then.  The plates falling in Midgar in FF7.  The Black Mages falling from the sky in FF9.  The water scene with Tidus & Yuna in FF10.  They are not moments of story expedition – because there’s no text or words.

I’m nearing the end of FF12 and realizing that the nature of the game doesn’t really allow for this, outside of the overall bookmarks (intro and outro).  There are plenty of in-game engine scenes, trying to follow Ashe’s quest to follow a ghost prince (man, that sounds so FF when written out).  There are cinematic cutscenes, which generally provide an area context shot (like a really big skyship), since those models didn’t exist in the game engine. But to say there’s a defining moment, I can’t really say I’ve found one.

That’s not say there aren’t impressive moments in the game, cause there certainly are.  The skyship that blows up is neat.  The scenes before the last dungeon are wild.  The vignettes for the first time you entre each zone are solid.  Even the tougher hunts have some cool backstory (Gilgamesh is great).  I guess I’ve come to realize that FF12’s defining mark is that there are smaller peaks and troughs.

FFX was a 5 minute custscene, then 30 minutes of RNG battles, then a boss, then repeat.  It was like watching a movie, then grinding for a boss fight.  FF12 changed that because enemies were on-screen.  It wasn’t an exercise in frustration getting from A to B.  And by putting in the AI portion (gambits), it made the “regular” battles that occur seem like minor speed bumps.

And the bosses in FFX were gimmicky, which made sense given it was turn based combat.  If you had infinite time to think, then yeah, make good choices.  The Yunalesca battle is a damn good example. With a more active battle system, you have much less time to think, and the fights become more about being prepared at the start, then reacting accordingly in the fight.  Did SE get this right?  Hell no.  The initial release had a very early “exploit” that worked for 90% of the game.  Put on a specific belt, throw a specific item, and nearly every boss got neutered with every status ailment possible.  It also made skills available really early in the game, making you effectively gods by the 1/2 way mark. The TZA release made that belt unavailable for most of the game, that item require skill investment to use, and split up all skills across classes and the game.  Very well balanced, and the combat requires a whole lot more thinking.

The last bit here is the horizontal gameplay.  Most FF games keep their sidequests for the end, with the exception of a mini-game that’s introduced at the start (e.g. blitzball, tetra master).  The mini-game here is a set of hunts for difficult targets.  These targets require specific scenarios to even get them to spawn, then a good build & gear, and finally some quick thinking to get through the fight.  You usually end up with some decent gear by the end, a new subzone to explore, or a new summon.  It is an amazing system, providing a great challenge/reward system throughout, and reason to go back and explore zones.  The Bazaar is a weird system where you sell specific items to get access to other gear.  Hell, even figuring out how to find something like Gemsteel is a major pain. This one I really don’t like since you need a wiki to really use it properly, because you can’t tell what items give what rewards.  FF13 used a similar system, but it was more transparent about it. (More props to FF13 for the stagger system.)

I’m at the last dungeon now and this game is playing better than my memory recalls. The game manages to be continually engaging, both from a system and story perspective.  Rare that time is kind to a game that’s nearly 15 years old.