25 Mar 2022
War Crimes are bad.
The first episode of the very long awaited Halo(tm) show is out, and I have some thoughts, as delivered while watching the show.
Spoilers Ahead.
- Never trust Burn Gorman.
- This show definately isn’t trying to get down to an M rating.
- Sound and special FX are fairly accurate to the games, which is nice.
- Why do guns that have no effect on Covenant Elites become automagically more powerful once a Spartan holds them?
- What the fuck is up with the Elite’s armour, it’s worse than the Halo 5 designs.
- Never trust Burn Gorman.
- Elites are dumb as fuck; “Hey there’s these four Spartans killing everything I’m going to ignore them and try to kill a girl under a truck instead”.
- That’s not Halsey’s character in the slightest. (Game Halsey: “Fuck you I do what I want.” Show Halsey: “Yes maam, I am your faithful servant who does whatever I want but secretly”)
- High Charity looks like a goddamn mushroom.
- The Prophets’s design is fine, I guess. The human character makes no sense considering the mainline story of how the Covenant works and what the Prophets want to do but whatever. That outfit is ridiculous. “Oh, she’s reading a human book? Take your bets on when she flips sides!”
- This is also not Miranda Keyes. (Game Miranda: “Nobody dies on my watch, and fuck the Covenant” Show Miranda: “I’m sad that we commit War Crimes”)
- Oh god whenever John talks or walks my subwoofer goes nuts.
- This is NOT FUCKING JACOB KEYES EITHER. (Game Keyes: “Nobody dies on my watch except for me!” Show Keyes: “Whoops, this teenage girl is slightly difficult to handle, time to kill her!”)
- Okay John has a joke that’s actually kind of funny.
- Why did they write the UNSC as complete bastards?
- Even Parangosky isn’t really right. (Book Parangosky: “Fuck you, I do what I want.” Show Parangosky: “Gotta look good for the cameras!”)
- Hey a suitup sequence, nice.
- Why do they keep calling a Pelican a Condor? (looks it up, oh, a Condor is a long range Pelican.)
- Oh boy that was awful , I want to see more.
- Also Mass Effect reference lol.
12 Mar 2021
Chilling out, listening to a podcast.
In 2004, Bungie released an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to help promote Halo 2’s release called “I Love Bees”. The game involved players interacting with a website to recieve GPS coordinates to go to specific locations and answer payphone calls to uncover more of the story. While some of the ARG’s contents is still available to people - ilovebees.co is still online and you can still listen to the rather good radio drama - a lot of the ongoing plot was transient. The experience of playing the game isn’t available anymore except through other people conveying what the game was and what happened.
Bungie has always liked bleeding their games into the real world, even back in the Marathon days. There were posts from the AI on the bungie.org pages for Marathon, and even posts from Cortana for Halo 1 there. Microsoft even made another ARG for Halo 3’s launch - Iris. The studio has always had a level of interactivity with it’s community that was rarely seen, and the community has always deeply appreciated their efforts - just look at /r/RaidSecrets, they go rabid for that stuff.
In 2014 Bungie released Destiny, a “shared world shooter” that has maintained a large following for people who fell in love with it’s Sci-fi weirdness, a mixture of technology and magic, and it’s (in my personal opinion) unparalleled gameplay, where gunplay and abilities blend together in an addictive way. It’s also what’s known as a “Games as a Service” (GAAS) title, in which content is added to and updated on a reasonably frequent schedule. This game was successful enough over time for Bungie to then release Destiny 2 in 2017, which originally followed much the same formula - reasonably frequent content additions on a seasonal basis.
After the second year, though, this changed. In year 2 of Destiny 2, under the Forsaken expansion there were three seasons over the next year that each added an activity for players to play through and earn new equipment. In year 3 (Shadowkeep), however, there were still the activities added in each season, but once that season left so too did the activity - content added and then removed. This changed again in year 4, with all of the year 1 and a lot of the year 2 content that was added being “put in the content vault” - seemingly borrowing an idea from Disney, where they would release their animated movies on a drip feed on VHS and DVD and then stop selling them for a few year - putting the movies in the “Disney Vault”. Seasonal content that is added from the start of year 4 would stay around the whole year, unlike in year 3, but still go away at the end of the year and… yeah, this gets kind of complicated.
The point is that the content in Destiny 2 is transient and a new player to the game won’t have anywhere near the same experience as a player that’s been there the whole time (Destiny 1 alpha veteran here, move aside peons). There’s a lot to the game that isn’t nescessarily accessible to a new player inside the game, even if we’re just talking about plot. There’s blog posts, videos from content creators that aren’t Bungie’s employees (My Name is Byf is a good place to start), reddit posts with entire discussions about puzzles, and just piles of things going on that, even if you put aside the FOMO issue that this model has, you kind of have to do a lot of legwork outside of the game just to catch up.
And that kind of feels like an ARG to me. Bungie has essentially created a game that to get the full experience you kind of have to be playing the game on a weekly basis, and keep track of what’s going on in the community, and if you don’t you’re kind of not getting the full picture. Alternately, I could be talking out of my ass because I’m that sort of person and I can’t see further than my own colon. I do love it though. Thanks, Bungo.
20 Jun 2018
Totally Fair Matchmaking.
Anyone that pays attention to my twitter would be well aware when I’m trying to play Competitive crucible in Destiny 2, mostly because of my complaining about being constantly matched against full sweaty four-stacks when I’m running solo. A question about this came up on the Crucible Radio podcast:
Q: What kind of things were you concerned about or are you concerned about now about getting people into the idea of going into comp rather than hesitant if they don’t have their full stacked maximum tryhard team, is there anything that is coming up right now?
A: We’ve gotten a tonne of that feedback, but I’m going to give you the honest perspective, and this is as someone whose played a lot of FPS’s and definately played a lot of Halos, and we’ve seen the feedback online about fireteam versus solo matching and I’ve even seen people disparage people who go in stacked and it like, it’s ranked play, like this is the “win matters”…
it does not matter to me if you decide to not run stacked I’m running stacked I’m running with my full team because I want to win. Because that’s the point of this. The point of this is to win, and I will do what it takes.
And yeah, we’re trying to take efforts to make solo play fair and better that was part of the TMM stuff that went online a couple of weeks back. If you want to ensure your best chance of doing awesome and winning, which is the goal of that mode you have to come in with a full fireteam. If you’re not interested in doing that, if you’re not a player that wants that, that’s why we offer the Valor rank, that’s why we offer the rewards in the Valor rank, there is something for you to chase on a seasonal cadence.
But at no point, from the get-go, we’re like ‘this is for this type of people, and this is for this type of people’, we were specially trying hard to not comprimise either those experiences because we felt like ranks were super sensitive to that, people wanted those to be as pure as possible.
Link to recording: Crucible Radio 154 - Bungie Talks Pt. 1 (49:22)
I have some issues with this attitude. Not the “it’s competitive so people should use the best tools available”, no, that’s reasonable. It’s the attitude that ‘solo players should just suck it up’. There’s already a sweaty-try-hard-bring-your-fireteam mode in the Crucible, it’s called Trials of the Nine. And now you’re telling me there’s a not-so-secret second one? So why can I still queue into the play list solo? Why shouldn’t I expect that when I come to competitive that both teams are on an even level playing ground?
Why should I be okay with expecting to lose, not because of my admittedly mediocre but getting better skill, but because the matchmaker says “yeah, no”. Why are you okay with gifting free wins to fireteam players? This wouldn’t be so bad if it was the occasional four-stack landing in the matchmaker, but it’s constant. Even in Quick Play, it’s constant four-stacks versus random solo players. I even got matched with the same four-stack twice in a row for some reason, even though they just stomped us. Destiny 1 matchmaking actively avoided that kind of matchmaking, so what happened? Bungie, I think you need to review your ‘TMM Stuff’ because it’s not working.
It doesn’t feel fair, it doesn’t feel competitive, it feels like I’m actively being punished for playing the way I want to play, the way I can play. I’m not the type of person to use third-party fireteam sites, and the people I play Destiny with aren’t as interested in Crucible as I am. I’m basically losing Glory points for daring to select the “Launch Matchmaking” button. At least put a Competitive Mercenary playlist in and let solos derp with solos competitively. Heck, make it a separate ranking if it’s that important to you.
Come on, let me play the way I want to. You seem to want to let everyone else play they way they want to.
I’m going to summarise this in a community feedback / bug report sort of way:
I have an issue with:
When I play competitive as a solo player and a team of random players that include me get matched up against a fireteam of four organised players.
How it makes me feel:
Frustrated, as if the game itself doesn’t want to provide a fair or winnable match.
How frequently does it happen:
It feels like pretty much every game in the Competitive playlist. It is rare for it not to happen.
My suggested fix:
It’s competitive, so I don’t see a problem with if you run a full fireteam, the matchmaker should only match you against other full fireteams. That, or a Competitive Solo playlist.
PS: Let Valor get earned in any playlist, including Iron Banner. At least that way I can progress towards something while geting my butt handed to me.
17 Apr 2018
The best boy.
I’ve finished the main storyline of Far Cry 5, and I Now Have Opinions about it.
WARNING
Spoilers about the plot INCLUDING THE ENDING of Far Cry 5 below. (and the previous Far Cry games as well)
You’ve been warned. Despite the following, I still recommend playing Far Cry 5, and you would be better off playing it spoiler free. The gun play is fast and fun, the flexibility of the sandbox is unparallelled, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had this year yet. The fact that I’ve written this much about the issues I have with it should say something about the game and what it does.
However…
So the main story of the game is about you, the Deputy Sheriff that was part of a group that came to arrest the leader of a cult called ‘Eden’s Gate’. In the attempt to arrest the leader Joseph Seed, his fanatical followers cause your helicopter to crash, capture the rest of your crew, and you get rescued by an old man in a bunker on an island that is a) conveniently in the middle of the map and b) right next to the evil guy’s island.
The cult, called “Peggies” because they’re part of Project Eden’s Gate (PEG), have taken over the three parts of Hope County, and have begun actively killing, kidnapping, looting and generally causing hell for the residents of the area.
So your objective throughout the rest of the game is to liberate the three sections of the map by systematically pissing off Joseph’s Lieutenants (John, Jacob and Faith Seed) and causing confrontations between you and them ultimately ending in you killing them, blowing up their bunker, and liberating the area, trying to rescue your co-workers on the way.
While you’re doing this, you’re subjected to three different forms of attempting to control you. John tries to get you to submit with torture and intimidation. Faith tries to use Bliss, a mind control drug. Jacob uses classical conditioning, where he implants a trigger in the form of the song “Only You” by the Platters to cause you to go into a fugue state to kill targets that Jacob points you at.
Once you’ve killed all three, which you can tackle in any order, you can finally directly attack Joseph himself, bringing the entire confrontation to a head. During this confrontation, he’s managed to capture all the friends you’ve made along the way, and he presents you with two choices - either you resist him, or you walk away.
If you walk away, you take your sheriff friends and leave Joseph to his own devices. However, on the drive out, the radio in the car is turned on and plays “Only You”, your vision starts to turn red and then the game fades to black.
This ending, however, is not the canonical ending. If you pick this ending you can go back and choose the other ending - it is worth noting if you choose to resist, you cannot go back and pick “walk away”.
If you pick resist, a boss fight starts between you, Joseph, and the blissed-out friends you’ve made along the way. You can turn your friends back to your side by downing and reviving them - once you’ve revived them they’re free of Joseph’s influence and will fight on your side. Once you’ve freed all of your friends, you take out Joseph and proceed to arrest him.
That’s when the bomb drops.
A literal bomb. A nuclear bomb goes off in the distance. You and your friends make a madcap scramble for the nearest bunker, only to hit a falling tree on the way. Joseph drags your body to the bunker with him, and it ends with you handcuffed to a chair and him monologuing at you being his new family, you having killed all of his previous family.
Narratively, you don’t get much of a hint that this will happen. Joseph and his minions keep telling you that he’s right, their ‘collapse’ is coming. However, they being the usual sort of generic nutjob cult you ignore them. A lot of the county are ‘preppers’, and there’s a tonne of gun and gear stashes across the place for you to loot. You can basically chalk this up to the usual rural paranoia though, and keep going.
The only actual hint that this is going to happen is if you do two specific actions - a side quest to remove radio jammers that the cult have set up and if you listen to a specific radio station in the car. If you do this you can hear news reports that things are going south globally - Russia has been bombed, the President has been ushered away into a bunker, and the major cities have been put on alert.
Otherwise, nothing. A literal gut punch out of nowhere. The bomb isn’t even really Joseph’s doing - while his family’s bunkers are all nuclear missile bunkers, they’re likely all old decommissioned bunkers that they’ve purchased off the government. They don’t want to cause the ‘collapse’ to happen, they’re just going to be damned sure they’re ready when it happens.
Far Cry is no stranger to pyrrhic victories. Pretty much all of the games in the series have you pay some great cost for the victory - two has you winning but in the terminal stages of malaria, three has either dying or escaping inexorably altered by the experience, and four has you ceding control of the country to either drug lords or religious zealots. However in all of these, you actually win.
In Far Cry 5 you literally can’t win. Even the secret ending has you walk away leaving Joseph alone to his crazy shit. That sucks, given everything you’ve done up to that point.
So basically, no matter what you do, you lose. You’ve spent the last 30 hours claiming back the county bit by bit, paying a large price along the way, and in the end you still lose to a monologuing jackass. Everyone is (probably) dead or dying, your war with the Peggies having a severe toll on the resources of the county, and once you’re about to win, you lose. Your reward is that the title screen changes from an idyllic shot of the main town to a blasted landscape, and you can go back into Hope County, pretend the ending didn’t happen, and finish off side-quests.
The plot of Far Cry 5 ruins Far Cry 5. The game doesn’t know what it wants to be; a stupid sandbox, or serious critique of the American condition? It has tonal shifts throughout; one mission has you collecting bull testicles for a festival, and next you can be trying to rescue residents from one of the Seed’s attempts at kidnapping, brainwashing, and torture. It’s biggest sin is a lack of a commitment to character.
The quest giver and support characters have a handful of missions each to establish them, and then the game dumps them for the next set with very little interplay between them. The majority of the character investment sits with villians, giving them big lengthy monologues, and your silent protagonist sits there, saying nothing. I had to start my own commentary back at them, and there were so many moments in the game where all I wanted was for my character to tell them to shut the fuck up.
When I finally killed John Seed, it unsatisfyingly happened in a cutscene and I was left standing in a random intersection in front of his body. It’s a testament to the writing of his character that the next thing I did was pile every explosive device I had on his body and set the whole damn thing ablaze. I was severely pissed off when the game robbed me of the chance to do the same thing to Faith, and by the time I got to Jacob I was pretty much worn out of the game doing that to me that I just wanted the whole thing to be over.
I should have seen it coming.
Maybe it’s the psychopath in me, maybe I’m just too conditioned to games, and maybe I sound like a giant neckbeard, but I say this to the writer of Far Cry 5:
You stole my catharsis from me when I couldn’t ever kill Joseph Seed, and I can’t forgive you for it. You ruined an otherwise excellent game, and I hate you.
I can’t help but wonder if that was the point.
12 Jan 2018
Not pictured here: r/destinythegame
It would be a slight understatement to say that the community for Destiny 2 has been underwhelmed by the game’s total package. While I personally am relatively happy with the game’s offerings, there are both major and minor … oversights … that can restrict the enjoyablility for some. (The precise details of which is outside the scope of this article)
The big issue with this, as far as I’m concerned, that the internet has a really bad habit of taking problems with something and blowing it widely out of proportion with a melodrama lens that would make Shakespeare lean back and go “geeze, tone it down, would you?”. Net result being, the major subreddit for Destiny (and pretty much Destiny’s first point of call for the online community) becoming somewhat akin to a “Toxic Hellstew”. The whole place just became an incredible self-feeding feedback loop of negativity and … salt … and it just wasn’t fun anymore.
So what did you do?
It took me a while, but I eventually recognised that the attitude of the community was reflecting into me quite badly. I’m not exactly known for my long fuse when it comes to these sorts of things, you see. So when I recognised the behaviour in myself, I took a simple step to try to help it - I found the unsubscribe button, and clicked it. I already knew about other subreddits (by the way, when your ‘community’ needs another community literally called r/lowsodiumdestiny, you might have a problem) so I just subscribed to those instead. Problem mostly solved, right?
For me, sure, why not.
Then I forgot I followed the mods of the main sub on twitter.
And?
So the main subreddit mods were having a little congratulatory twitter round over the fact that they had reached the 500k subscriber mark. Me, being my usual irascable self, may have subtweeted this in a sort of response:
And a couple of days later, I got this reply from one of the mods (god I hate people who scan the timeline for relevant terms) and roundly ‘liked’ by the rest of them:
Which drove me into a goddamn rage; not because of the reply itself (well, that too) but because I wasn’t going to let myself respond. That’s just rage bait to me, which I promised to myself I was going to try to not get into internet arguments anymore. Which is why I’m writing this, and not posting it on twitter. And thus the title: Catharsis in Text Format - because I really need to write this down.
And so here is the response I’m not going to write:
Diplomatic Version:
This is why I left r/destinythegame, as we have a difference of opinion about how a community should be managed, and that is your community, so I left for greener pastures.
Not so Diplomatic Version:
It’s not a binary choice - there are places inbetween those two options that mean that your community doesn’t spill it’s salt bags all over the place. You can contain and control, and direct discussion to more fruitful places. Your sub is not a healthy community - and one of the reasons why I snarked in the first place is that you might have reached your 500k milestone sooner if this all hadn’t happened. I know that Bungie hasn’t exactly made your lives easy, and this isn’t a paying job, but you have put yourself in a position of stewardship over the direction over a very large community and I feel that you have done them a massive disservice. I feel that you have done me a massive disservice, and that is why I have left.
There might be a even more less diplomatic version, but I’m not writing that. I am very specifically not writing that, because I am trying to not be that person.
sigh.
One day I might be able to skip this step.
So I wrote a thing. I wrote this thing. It’s the digital equivalent of yelling into the void. My ego won’t let me write anything and not try to show this to anyone, so I’ll post it to facebook at 1:30 in the morning where nobody will really see it.
I’ma go back to playing Destiny 2 now.