#i have been playing Skyrim for nearly a decade

[landgraabbed]

it's been a while since i last shared the game that currently has my attention, and currently that is outward: definitive edition (dev: nine dot studios). this got long, so i'll put it under the cut. the short of it is that i am in love with this game that is catered to freaks like me in every way!

the game was first released in 2019, and the definitive edition including all dlcs came out in 2022, and i'd say this game was on my radar since 2020-2022, but i never really played it until now. i've been enjoying my time with this game, and what a game it is! it makes me feel like most of my favorites do: scrabbling for victories, being forced to get by the skin of my neck, and having to always play past my mistakes. in many ways it reminds me of favorites such as dragon's dogma, morrowind my heavily modded skyrim, and souls games to an extent, but with survival elements added on to it.

to set the stage, this game puts you in the boots of a gender neutral Just A Guy™ who is saddled with debt incurred by their grandmother and is on the verge of losing their lighthouse home. in aurai, actions that damage the community may incur what is called a blood price, meaning a bloodline may have to pay the price of said actions even decades or centuries removed from the action. the first chapter of your adventure sees you attempting to repay a parcel of the blood price on your bloodline by whatever means possible within 5 days, after your hard work was lost in the same shipwreck that nearly took your life. and off you go to do that. you can approach this goal by whatever means you can come up with and you can also fail to do so, and the game will continue. where i am currently, i managed to barely make the deadline and have been exploring the world. there are currently four factions i can approach in order to advance the plot, but i am taking my time to meet all of them before i make a decision. they each are tackling different issues in aurai at the moment, such as the holy mission's quest to fight against the scourge.

the moment to moment gameplay is very engaging to me. it really is a game that anyone who knows me knows that of course it will appeal to me. navigation reminds me of morrowind with npcs giving you directions and a complete lack of quest markers (or even an indication of where you are in the map! you need to orient yourself using landmarks and road signs). combat is brutal and best avoided at most times. you need to manage your inventory and loadout for the climate and your needs, as well as what you expect to encounter in your journeys, where the weight of your inventory is very important. your stats will become burnt (i.e., you will have a temporarily reduced maximum stamina until rest) the more you use them, greatly emphasizing how you're just a rando. there is magic in this world, but you don't start out with mana needed to cast spells and must perform a difficult pilgrimage to the center of the mountain that dominates the landscape of the first area. and even then, you must sacrifice your precious hp and stamina to build a mana pool. the tradeoff: magic has been absolutely fun and op in my experience. the game rewards preparation and knowing when the fuck to leg it most of all. and if you meet your untimely demise, you're not sent to the last checkpoint. instead, the game rolls one of the appropriate defeat scenarios appropriate to your current situation which can be a boon or a curse (and honestly must have been the inspiration to the alternative death system part of this skyrim mod). the game constantly autosaves, so savescumming isn't a possibility. most of all, you wander in a lovely environment to the sound of bangers.

pictures were only edited to add some small grain and are at the native resolution of the steam deck since it's where i've been playing! i do want to look at it on my laptop too. it also features online and splitscreen co-op, but i haven't tried that out. i do hear it's a great way to approach the game. another thing i really enjoyed learning about is the studio's investment in promoting a crunch-free, ethical philosophy to game development, and extending that over their publishing efforts in order to foster the development of more indie niche games developped ethically.

[thatonespawnling]

Starfield & The Importance of Beginnings

SPOILER WARNING FOR STARFIELD!! DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS ON THE BEGINNING

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Looks like we're good to go! Okay, so I've recently been dumping a steady amount of hours into Starfield. It's been fun, how they've evolved their character creation is fantastic, I've had a decent amount of positives. Throughout the six and a half hours I've played, there is only one thing that I have a problem with. That problem? The beginning of the game, particularly the first two hours. I understand that Bethesda games often have mediocre main storylines with characters that lack deep characterization. However, one thing about the main story that Bethesda writers usually do well is that beginning.

Skyrim is a notorious beginning. A decade after its release, the first two minutes of that game is still remembered. It is still celebrated through memes and video edits, references by other media. It does a lot of things right for an RPG! It provides just enough worldbuilding to give the actions of those surrounding you meaning, it gives you a purpose of being there without defining your backstory, and it provides an easy way to get the player from point A to point B without making the player feel dragged around. Oblivion works in a similar fashion. It doesn't work nearly as well as Skyrim's beginning, there is too much of it that relies on happenstance. However, it is still a rather solid beginning. Even Bethesda's Fallout games has some nice beginnings with Fallout 3. What matters the most with these beginnings and why they function is that, ultimately, the player feels like they're involved in what's happening. This is where I feel Starfield fails.

Starfield starts us off by putting us in the position of a miner riding an elevator down to the mines with a humorous veteran known as Heller and the stoic leader of the operation called Supervisor Lin. They seem to give you words of encouragement as you are carried down, dropping mentions of some of the more prominent factions of the Settled Systems along the way. For the next thirty minutes you're mostly following NPCs as they talk to you and order you to do tasks without much agency. This all goes until you touch the Artifact, an odd rock that is almost magical in nature. When you come into contact with it, you are almost blinded. Your vision is ejected from your body, flying through very matter itself until the whole universe is revealed to you. Then you are called back, told it was a hallucination, and provided the character customization menu through your employee file meant to remind you of who you are. After that you accompany the operations leader to hand the Artifact off to Barrett, a space explorer part of a legendary exploration group known as the Constellation. After the initial conversation and an unsuccessful raid from pirates, he invites you to join the Constellation on account of you "seeing what he's seen". He gives you his ship, his robot, and walks off.

After that, you run into some pirates, are lead to take down a pirate outpost, and the first quest ends there. That is considered your tutorial. There is a main story after that which can act as introductory quests, but the game lets you explore and accepts quests as you wish from this point. There are issues with this beginning, issues I have. First off, there's the more obvious problem of you not really being in control of what happens. There's no small choices you can make that give you that sense of agency. You are brought from story beat to story beat with no real care for investment. Even in terms of your "decision" to accept Barrett's invitation, there's no negotiation there. If you refuse, Supervisor Lin tells you that this is your purpose now and you should go along. There's not even really a way to ensure Barrett can get back home, you simply take his ship and fly off. That also runs into the issue of why Barrett would even lend you the ship.

He could fly you back and through him we could be provided important information on how the galaxy works. We could be informed what all these terms and factions being thrown at us during the tutorial and character customization even mean. What are these religions we can choose to align ourselves with? What are these places we can choose to hail from? What are the factions and how do they defer? We could've been told all this through Barrett and even have someone that could vouch for us to the Constellation. As the game is now, the Constellation accepts you immediately with no real resistance. If Barrett were to come along with us, it could provide an interesting dynamic where the Constellation is initially unsure of if you should be welcomed into their ranks. You along with the praise from Barrett could convince them to let you join, allowing the beginning to break from the "Chosen One" narrative it falls into far too readily.

I could go on about what Starfield could've done, like how being one of the Crimson Fleet Pirates taking Barrett's ship the "Frontier" would've provided an interesting hook and give you a more realistic route to get the ship and run off with it. Simply being there when Barrett was killed and escaping the planet as the mine is overrun with pirates would work much the same way and even provides minimal changes to how the story plays out in the next few hours. However that's not the point of this little rant here. The point is to showcase the flaws of the game's beginning. The game's story shows a nice amount of promise so far, being opted as an explorer gives you sufficient reason to run off and interact with the side content that often defines these Bethesda Game Studios games. However for any work the beginning is the most important. It is the first impression of your game. If that first impression is lacking in any way, the player could be made to feel like the rest of the game will follow its example. The beginning is the easiest time to lose your player and it deserves care. Starfield's beginning lacks care. It feels like it's almost treated as a second thought, which is such a travesty in a big budget game.

[skyrim-special-edition-cadj]

skyrim special edition cant download mods mod menu VFA&

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 I found a fix on Reddit. After trying and failing to DL a mod, go to the main game menu and switch profile to guest which will create a duplicate user name with. One thing that worked for me was attempting download: the operation can't be completed, back out of the mod screen to the game menu, Click the. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is the only version of Skyrim that features the in-game mod menu. You can install mods by following the process. No, the mod section in Skyrim Special Edition is inside the game. You need to have an account at , because the mod section in the game needs to. Update your mod manager: If you're downloading with a mod manager, please ensure you have the latest version. You should also try and download. Bethesda has re-released Skyrim for every electronic device in living history, including the trusty microwave. As for the Special Edition on PC, many wondered why the company even bothered since graphics are only marginally better, but what makes this latest version so good is the addition of bit support. This unlocks the full potential of Skyrim and its modding community, enabling for a more stable experience. We'll show you how to install mods and completely change Skyrim. In this guide, we'll be using Vortex previously called Nexus Mod Manager , which is universally recommended to keep things organized and to make installing larger packages an absolute breeze. Nexus is a dedicated platform for modders to release and update their mods for various titles, including Skyrim Special Edition. As well as publishing their content, Nexus also enables for discussion, feedback, support, and more. The website is fairly easy to navigate with most mods correctly categorized for convenient filtering. We need to run Skyrim SE to the main menu before activating mods, so give the game a boot to initial menu through Steam and then quit. This will create the much-needed. Now it's time to select and install some mods. We rounded up some of our favorite Skyrim mods to get you started. Once you have a few mods downloaded you may notice the load order start to populate. This list is important because some mods and files need to be loaded by the game in a specific order. Mod authors generally offer information in mod descriptions on the Nexus should their files require to be configured in a set order, and there are even tools available like LOOT that can check to see if there are any problems with your setup. Modders create and release extra content for fun and for the love of scripting, but leaving an endorsement or even a donation can provide much-needed feedback, especially if you've enjoyed hours of entertainment because of said mod s. Leaving a few dollars can really make their day, but do consider at least leaving a comment and endorsing their work. Skyrim wouldn't be the same without its excellent modding community. Skyrim has been around for nearly a decade, which is hard to believe for some who have poured thousands of hours playing as a character in the Nord world. Playing on PC allows you to install numerous mods to further enhance the experience and allow you to continue playing way beyond completing the main questline. Skyrim offers hundreds of hours worth of entertainment, which can be further expanded through the installation of mods. Whether you enjoy wielding massive axes, conjuring deadly spells or sneaking around and silencing your foes, there's a playstyle for everyone to enjoy, allowing anyone to craft their own adventure in this massive fantasy world. If you plan on modding Skyrim, you'll need a GPU like this to handle more heavy installations. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him over on Twitter at RichEdmonds. Windows Central Windows Central. Skyrim Special Edition. One of the best RPGs on the platform Skyrim has been around for nearly a decade, which is hard to believe for some who have poured thousands of hours playing as a character in the Nord world. Rich Edmonds. Topics Skyrim. Windows Central Newsletter. Get the best of Windows Central in in your inbox, every day! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. Thank you for signing up to Windows Central. You will receive a verification email shortly. There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again. The best wireless keyboard deals in October Microsoft increases availability of Windows 11 Update. Minecraft reveals the Rascal for Mob Vote

[imogenkol]

Our hero, our hero, claims a warriors heart

I tell you, I tell you, the Dragonborn comes

Yrsa Gunnr

Race: Nord

Date of Birth: 19th of Evening Star, 4E 175

Special Status: Dragonborn, Werebear

Occupation: Blacksmith Apprentice, Woodworker

Affiliations: Stormcloaks (former), Companions, Thieves Guild

[autumnslance]

About Plagiarism

I left a long, planned essay on Twitter tonight. I will copy the meat of it here for y’all, as recently a friend was copied (a rarer ship in the fandom, so very noticeable by the writer and their regular beta reader) and it seems we need a Talk, kids. Links and screenshots and my rambling underway.

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Apparently we need to discuss what is and isn’t plagiarism. Especially in FanFic where we're interacting with the same characters, settings, ideas. Let’s start with the dictionary and continue the thread from there (I like the word origin/history personally):

Definition of plagiarize

transitive verb  : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive verb : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

The Kidnapping Roots of Plagiarize

If schools wish to impress upon their students how serious an offense plagiarism is, they might start with an explanation of the word’s history. Plagiarize (and plagiarism) comes from the Latin plagiarius “kidnapper.” This word, derived from the Latin plaga (“a net used by hunters to catch game”), extended its meaning in Latin to include a person who stole the words, rather than the children, of another. When plagiarius first entered English in the form plagiary, it kept its original reference to kidnapping, a sense that is now quite obsolete.

“Ideas” is fuzzy in the Merriam-Webster definition. There are story archetypes that exist in many forms. Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth/Hero's Journey outlines many famous stories. And it's popular to say that “Avatar” is “Dances with Wolves” is “Pocahontas” is “The Last Samurai” etc.

But note how while those films have similar plotlines--”Military Guy falls for Native woman, learns to appreciate her Culture, stands up to Evil Bosses”--none of them execute those ideas in the same way. Sully’s story is different from Dunbar’s not just cuz one’s a Science Fiction epic and the other a Western. Disney's “Pocahontas” Very Loosely takes history and uses the same story beats. The Last Samurai uses the Meiji era Westernization. Same ideas, different executions, even beyond settings.

None of these are plagiarizing each other though the ideas are similar. They’re told in their own ways, own language; both in the genres they belong to (Western, Pseudo-History, SciFi, Animated) and how characters interact with each other and settings. Original dialogues (variable quality).

We also see this in books as similar novel plots get published in waves so we end up with bunches of post-apocalypse teen revolutionaries or various vampires or lots of young wizard stories all at once. Sometimes ideas just happen like this; multiple discovery, simultaneous invention, concurrent inspiration, cognitive emergence are all phrases I’ve seen for it. So it happens in original content as well, and legality gets fuzzy (Also why you don't send authors your fanfic ideas).

In existing properties, this gets trickier but even “Elementary”’s Holmes and Watson are nothing like the BBC’s “Sherlock” characters. Who are nothing like other versions of the Detective and his Doctor pal over the decades in various media properties.

FanFic's in a similar position where like Sherlock Holmes we play with the same characters, setting, and storyarcs but give our own spin to them. People can and will have similar ideas about plots. Trick is to use your own words. Take the characters and make the story your own.

I have a good example courtesy of @raelly-writing​. We both ship Wolcred. We both wrote soft post-Paglth’an scenes with Thancred and our WoLs. Both features the couples helping each other undress, examining injuries, bathing, bantering. My fic was written soon after 5.5 part 1 came out. Dara’s is much more recent. Yet at no point reading hers did I feel she was copying my words. The PoVs differ. Our characters focus on different things. Mine has a mini-arc concerning the Nutkin.

The links for comparison’s sake (and maybe leave kudos/comments if so inclined please and thanks). Note while the scenes are very similar no phrases are written in the same way. Mine: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25417882/chapters/76059467 Dara’s: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26067565/chapters/81832915

Dara and I both hang out in certain Discords and I know conversations about Thancred and WoL caring for each other post-battle has come up in those channels and we've both participated. It’s a stock FanFic scene to boot. Cuz it's soft and feels warm and snuggly.

I HAVE been copied before, back in WoW. My case is pretty clear cut so here are the images of my old RP Haven profile (1st, old RP website) and the plagiarist’s RSP (2nd, an in game mod to share descriptions and basic info). 

This was a decade ago on Shadow Council and I think the character deleted so any Availa’s in WoW now aren’t the same person. I left the names to point out what changed. Just the names and a word or 2 to make sense for the class changes as well. Otherwise lifted directly from my RP profile.

The funny part is how the person got caught. Literally walked into our weekly RP Guild meeting that I was running and asked to join. Folks noticed right away the similar backstory; after all there may have been more Outland-born Azerothians. My initial excitement at a character I could weave into our story turned to gut-twisting rage and grief as I recognized my own exact words though. Words I’d carefully crafted and constantly iterated on to improve over time (before and after this incident, until the site died).

When caught they tried to claim their significant other had leveled the character for them and made up the backstory based on Skyrim. If you know WoW’s Outland story and Skyrim’s plot you know how ridiculous that is. Also tried to lie about other drama I knew about thanks to roommate's characters but hey. I had to be blunt that I’d shared the info with Haven mods and other guild officers Alliance and Horde. That we would not “laugh about this” one day though lucky this was “just” RP not original or academic work. Cuz if it'd been monetized or academic I would've raked them through the coals.

I felt violated. Hurt. Had anxiety attacks. They took MY WORDS and tried to claim them as theirs. Have another character born in Outland trained by Draenei; Awesome! Our characters have an instant connect in similarities and differences of that experience. Don’t steal my characters wholesale!

Then the audacity of trying to come into my guild as if no one would notice. ShC wasn’t a large server by then, still active but not nearly Wyrmrest Accord or Moon Guard big. My character was well known due to my writing and RP. Speaking of how easy it is to get caught in specific spaces...A case of a self-published novelist getting noticed for plagiarizing fanfic was discovered recently (explicit erotica examples through the thread).

One way they got noticed was how much content they put out in only a year, lifted from fandom. The examples in Kokom’s threads show how the material was altered but still recognizable. In some cases, just the names are changed as in my experience. In other passages more has changed but you can still see the bones of the original fic poking through in the descriptions and character interactions, even with adjustments made.

Similar ideas happen. Similar plots exist. Same 'ships with friends are fun! In FanFic we’re working with the same material. It’s possible to write a similar scene differently. To make that scene and characters your own. All we’re asking is not to copy others' words. Others' characters. Others' specific phrases and descriptions used to bring those words, those characters, to life. Use your own. In the end you’ll be happier.

I get wanting to have what the perceived “popular people” have. I get seeing concepts others succeed with and wanting some of that too. We all get a bit jealous now and then for various reasons. Sometimes we don't even realize it, consciously. But do it in your own way. Maybe check to see if you’re getting a bit too close to the “inspiration” you admired, maybe reread often. Don’t hurt your fellow creatives. If you do and get caught don’t try to double down. Have the grace to be abashed at least and work to do better. Eventually you WILL get caught. All it takes is once to throw all else you've done into question. Ao3 doesn’t take kindly to plagiarists. Nor do a lot of fan communities focused on writing and RP. Getting back that trust is hard. The internet doesn’t forget easily, for good or ill.

[its-sixxers]

OC Interview - Tandreth

name ➔ “Who’s asking?” he grins. “Indoril Tandreth, if you’re Velothi. If you’re one of the jarl’s men, I’m no one.”

are you single ➔ “Quite. Why, are you looking to change that? I’m a hard man to tie down.”

are you happy ➔  “My coinpurse is full, I have a collection of various artifacts and treasures, someone to warm my bed every night - I suppose I can’t complain.” The smile leaves his eyes, however.

are you angry ➔ “I’m Velothi. It’s in the blood, so they say.” You can’t imagine the aloof man in front of you furious by any means, but there’s a bite of challenge to his tone.

are your parents still married ➔ “Hah!” he laughs. “They never were. Everyone calling me a bastard is right in more ways than one.”

NINE FACTS

birthplace ➔ “The Ashlands. Northwestern Vvardenfell, back in the day - now the entire island’s ash.”

hair color ➔ “Black, but I’m told the sun turns strands brown if it’s bright enough.” Tandreth combs his fingers through his curls. “I bleached it white, once upon a time. Didn’t want to look my sister, you see.”

eye color ➔ He flutters his eyelashes. “Red as Azura cursed them.”

birthday ➔  “The tenth of Sun’s Dawn. Year 430, of the Third Era.” Tandreth waits for the math to be done, eyes twinkling playfully. “I look good for my age, don’t I?”

mood ➔ “They change like the weather. Now? Or most often? The answer to both is bored.” He tries to look at the sheet of paper and the notes upon it. “Tell me you have something better to ask.”

gender ➔ It’s not the interesting question he wanted. “I’m a man. Not that the local Nords seem to believe me.” His smile grows wicked. “Their wives do.”

summer or winter ➔ “They’re the same thing, here in Skyrim.” He sighs. “Summer. I like to be able to feel most of my fingers.” You note his left pinky is missing.

morning or afternoon ➔ “Morning. I like to watch the sunrise before I turn in for the night.”

EIGHT THINGS ABOUT YOUR LOVE LIFE

are you in love ➔ “Always am.” he sighs dramatically, lounging further back in his chair. “How can anyone not be? Tamriel is filled with the beautiful.”

do you believe in love at first sight ➔ “Now we’re at the interesting questions.” Tandreth kicks his feet up on the table. “Of course I do. Love at first sight, hate at last sight - isn’t that how it tends to go?”

who ended your last relationship ➔ It catches him off guard - he’s leaning his chair back on two legs, and nearly falls over. The front feet of the chair connect with the floor loudly as he settles himself. “The law.” he answers simply. “And gold.”

have you ever broken someone’s heart ➔ The next question quickly repairs his high spirits. “Dozens, I’m sure. Don’t mistake me for cruel - I’ve never been dishonest about what I am. I can’t prevent others from lying to themselves.”

are you afraid of commitments ➔ He rolls his eyes. “You sound like Raansi.” he mutters. “I’ve spent the last fifty years in Skyrim, I think that’s commitment enough.”

have you hugged someone within the last week? ➔ Tandreth opens his mouth then frowns. “... you know, I haven’t.” he realizes aloud, and is clearly troubled by it. “Maybe I should give that great dragonborn ox a hug. I’ve gotten good at dodging her hammer, you know.”

have you ever had a secret admirer ➔ “I like to collect the letters.” he grins from ear to ear. “They don’t stay secret for long, if I can help it.”

have you ever broken your own heart? ➔ Those red eyes of his drop to his nails, where he makes a display of picking at his cuticles. “Don’t be foolish.”

SIX CHOICES

love or lust ➔ “Lust is simpler. There’s less tears involved, much more fun for all parties. I don’t need someone simpering over me to feel like a whole person.” he answers, perhaps a tad defensively.

lemonade or iced tea ➔ “Iced tea offers much more variety in flavor. That’s a drink for Hammerfell or Elsweyr, not this frozen tundra.”

cats or dogs ➔ His mouth twists. “I don’t keep pets. Humans live short enough lives, animals are asking for heartbreak.”

a few best friends or many regular friends ➔ “I have a very large circle of acquaintances and paramours. Does that count?”

wild night out or romantic night in ➔ “A wild night out, of course. It helps one feel alive.”

day or night ➔ “As much as I hate the cold, night. Have you seen a full moon over the snow on a clear night? As bright as day, and clear as crystal.” There’s a dreamy expression on his face.

FIVE HAVE YOU EVERS

been caught sneaking out ➔ “Several times. Not all for troublesome reasons, I assure you.”

fallen down/up the stairs ➔ “I am the pinnacle of grace.” Tandreth looks almost offended to be asked.

wanted something/someone so badly it hurt? ➔ “There was this necklace I tried to steal from a sleeping beast of a woman, and I nearly had my nose broken for the trouble.” You think it’s a joke, but the grave quality to his tone suggests that Tandreth takes any threat to his nose very seriously.

wanted to disappear ➔ “Wanted to? I can.” Perhaps he is dodging the questions.

FOUR PREFERENCES

smile or eyes ➔ “They’re intertwined. Part of a smile is in the eyes, you know - and they’re at their best when smiling.”

shorter or taller ➔ “Taller.” he answers first, then wrinkles his nose - his reflexive response has brought up something uncomfortable. “I don’t mind either way.” he adds hastily. “I’ve been very happy with people of all sizes.”

intelligence or attractive ➔ “You must think me vain indeed.” He tilts his chin upward. “But aye, I’ll say it - beauty. Not all can find tomes to pore over or tutors from the imperial province. Beauty isn’t just in the face, or the form, it’s an energy all its own.” He gestures vaguely with his hands. “A school of magic, perhaps. Difficult to define. It’s why I love it so dearly.”

hook-up or relationship ➔ “I’m a hard man to love.” he says with a dramatic shrug and an affected sheepish smile. “But I don’t leave my bedmates wanting.”

FAMILY

do you and your family get along ➔ Tandreth exhales shortly. “I liked the other questions.” he mumbles. “Presently? Only my sister’s left of it, and we’re not on speaking terms.”

would you say you have a “messed up life” ➔ His smile is entirely without humor, a grim thing that ages him by decades. “Don’t worry, dearest. I live my life to the fullest.”

have you ever run away from home ➔ “I think every young lad does, at some point.” He’s picking at his nails again.

have you ever gotten kicked out ➔ “By my family? No. But there’s a few cities I’m not allowed to set foot in - do you have the time to listen? ... no? Pity.”

FRIENDS

do you secretly hate one of your friends ➔ “What intrigue!” Tandreth’s good humor returns. “I’d have to have them to bear some secret distaste. The people I hate in my circle I make no secret of.”

do you consider all of your friends good friends ➔ “I’ll stretch the definition of friend to play along with your questions. No. You don’t live as long as I have by trusting anyone but yourself.”

who is your best friend ➔ For a moment you think he’s about to say ‘no one’, and you’re correct - but the pause before he says so is notable indeed.

who knows everything about you ➔ “My sister, I suspect. We’re twins, you know - she’s an hour older. Will never let me forget it.” He snorts. “You’d think she had decades on me, the way she carries on. She knows everything - so she might was well know everything about me.” You sense he’s a little bitter.

He offers to take you to a play in town after your work day is complete. You respectfully decline, and he respects your professionalism - but he still winks on his way out.

[renthony]

Recently I was chatting about Skyrim with someone and they mentioned that they basically grew up on the game and I had to sit and buffer for a minute because I forgot that it’s been nearly a goddamn decade since it came out and 20 year olds are absolutely old enough to have grown up with it.

The fuck.

Skyrim was my university depression haze game. I bought it the day my grandmother died in December of 2011 and played it nonstop as a coping mechanism. How in the actual fuck has it been that long?!

[aethuviel]

TES Elves lifespan and fertility

I’ve been playing Skyrim for four years, and am fairly new to TES lore. One of the things I wonder, like many others, is how long do the races of mer (talking the three now, falmer and orcs don’t count) live, and how do they avoid overpopulation with their obviously lengthy lifespans (and as horny as they seem to be)?

I’ve read around on various discussion forums where people ask these same questions, but never found a satisfying answer.

The common answers to the lifespan questions are “up to 1000″, sourced from The Real Barenziah, but this was just written in an in-universe book, which makes it unreliable at best, and the second common answer is “max ~300, unless they’re using magic to extend their lives”, because an official quote from Bethesda goes like this:

"Elves live two to three times as long as humans and the “beast-races” (Orcs, Khajiiti, Argonians). A 200-year-old Elf is old; a 300-year-old Elf is very, very old indeed. Anyone older than that has prolonged his or her lifespan through powerful magic."

But I call BS on this, because it’s broken by the world itself.

Examples (all powerful mages and wizards are excluded, for obvious reasons):

- Avrusa and Aduri Sarethi are Dunmer farmer in the Rift, and according to Avrusa, she used to have a shop (meaning she was an adult) in Morrowind before the eruption of the Red Mountain, 196 years ago. That puts her and her sister at well over 200 years old, and Aduri gives the impression of being young (her girly voice). - Lleril Morvayn and Adril Arano (and add to that Adril’s wife Cindiri) have ruled Solstheim together for 136 years, Lleril taking over after his mother’s death, and they show no sign of being particularly old. - Legate Fasendil is an Altmer soldier who was “stationed in Hammerfell” (meaning, an adult) 159 years ago, and he does not appear old.

- The only one I can find to sort of confirm the Bethesda quote is Elynea Mothren, mycologist at Tel Mithryn, who says she remembers the eruption of Red Mountain as a “little girl”, and that she’s “an old woman now”, which she certainly looks like. She would be perhaps in her early 200s.

The third common claim about mer lifespan is from a quote that follows like this:

Well, I'm fifty, done my twenty years in the Service, and I'm in the prime of life. I expect another fifty good years, and then I'll be old, and slow, chatting with gaffers around the hearth for another twenty, thirty years. I've known mer still mind-sharp in their late hundreds, and heard of folk 200 and older. My family usually makes it to 120-130, providing we don't get sick or poked in the eye.

But this brings us back to The Real Barenziah. Many claims are made in it, such as...

"I think Straw will be a very old man before 'someday' comes, Berry. Elves live for a very long time." Katisha's face briefly wore the envious, wistful look humans got when contemplating the thousand-year lifespan Elves had been granted by the gods. True, few ever actually lived that long as disease and violence took their respective tolls. But they could. And one or two of them actually did. 

Now, this book was approved by Barenziah herself, but that does not assure us of its accuracy, only that she liked it.

But I think this is still closer to the truth than “a 300 year old elf is very, very old indeed”, because of all the things that are unreliable in TRB, what is set in stone is the birth year of Barenziah and her children.

Barenziah and Symmachus had Helseth (now one can doubt whether Symmachus is actually Helseth’s father, but that is for another time) in 3E 376, when Barenziah was a whopping 379 years old. She then had two more children in the next couple of decades, her third and last child born when she was 394 or 395 years old.

There is to my knowledge no claim at all that Barenziah was using magic to extend her life (nor Symmachus for that matter, and he was three decades older than her, slain in battle at the age of 422). And it is confirmed by the lore that she became a mother of three at nearly four centuries old. So this wipes that quote by Bethesda completely, in my opinion.

TRB quotes on elven fertility:

"You ought to meet some nice Elven boys, though. If you go on keeping company with Khajiits and humans and what have you, you'll find yourself pregnant in next to no time."

Barenziah smiled involuntarily at the thought. "I'd like that. I think. But it would be inconvenient, wouldn't it? Babies are a lot of trouble, and I don't even have my own house yet."

"How old are you, Berry? Seventeen? Well, you've a year or two yet before you're fertile, unless you're very unlucky. Elves don't have children readily with other Elves after that, even, so you'll be all right if you stick with them."

And later, after banging Talos for a time...

"You appear to be with child, young as you are. Constant pairing with a human has brought you to early fertility.”

Barenziah then marries Symmachus immediately following Tiber Septim’s death. This is said to be “half a century” later, which would put Barenziah at almost 70 years old, but the actual year Tiber Septim died was in 3E 38, when she was ~41 years old. Anyhow. (Goes back to how unreliable the books are.)

The years passed swiftly, with crises to be dealt with, and storms and famines and failures to be weath­ered, and plots to be foiled, and conspirators to be executed. Mournhold prospered steadily. Her people were secure and fed, her mines and farms productive. All was well -- save that the royal marriage had pro­duced no children. No heirs.

Elven children are slow to come, and most demanding of their welcome -- and noble children more so than others. Thus many decades had come to pass before they grew concerned.

Some three centuries later...

Directly after the Nightingale's theft of the Staff of Chaos, Symmachus had sent urgent secret communiques to Uriel Septim. He had not gone himself, as he would normally have, choosing instead to stay with Barenziah during her fertile period to father a son upon her.

Speaking about the Nightingale some time later, when Barenziah was pregnant...

"Dark Elf in part, perhaps," said Barenziah, "but part human too, I think, in disguise. Else would I not have come so quickly to fertility."

From this we can draw that, 1) Elven women become fertile around the age of 18-20 2) They conceive easier with other races, rather than with male elves (implying that both sexes have low fertility), and can even be brought to fertility faster by sleeping around a lot with other races 3) And by her eventual pregnancy leading to the birth of Helseth, we are to believe that the Nightingale didn’t touch her, but that simply the passion she felt for him made her fertile, after centuries of no results.

----------

And when Tiber “Talos” Septim forces a child (as he viewed her) to have an abortion (I am forever disgusted with Talos for this), the Altmer healer says:

"Sire. It is her child. Children are few among the Elves. No Elven woman conceives more than four times, and that is very rare. Two is the usual number. Some bear none, even, and some only one. If I take this one from her, Sire, she may not conceive again."

It is widely quoted but again, a book in-game is not a reliable source, and while looking around Dunmer names in ESO, I found a fellow named Quell Andas, who has four siblings.

Unless, for some reason, they are called siblings but there are at least two mothers involved (i.e. half-siblings), or they’re lying, this is a case of an elf woman bearing five children. I’m sure there could be more cases among any of the mer if I looked further.

So that healer was at least not being entirely truthful.

But it does make sense that the mer would have much lower fertility, on both sides (males and females), simply as a price to pay for their long lifespans.

Humans live for about seventy years. Women are fertile from about 15-45, a 30 year “baby bearing window”, if you will.

The fact that Barenziah was pregnant three times in her late 300s, says not just that they live that long, but that she had not entered menopause - if elves even have that.

Her first pregnancy was when she was 17-18. Her last, at 394-395. That is, for her, a “baby bearing window” of at least 376 years. And there is nothing, I might add, in the books to imply surprise or shock that Barenziah bore children at that age.

With a human’s 30 year fertility window, in a world of no contraception, some rare women can have 20 or more children.

Now increase that to 300+ years, and if elves were as fertile as humans, an elf woman could birth a hundred children in her life, as easily as a human could birth ten. This would lead to an insanely unsustainable population growth, as elves are people(!) and we cannot compare them to animals that have that many offspring (since those are typically unintelligent animals where almost all die soon after birth).

Since they live for centuries but can have children at twenty, this also means children can be surrounded by a long line of ancestors. Not just grandparents, but great-great-great grandparents, and so on, people living on and using up resources for much longer. This means population growth has to be slow.

So, to keep a normal population growth at 2-4 children for most people (with some having more and some having none), elves naturally have to be much less fertile to “pay” for their lenghty lifespans.

We don’t know why, if it’s by some divine power, nature, or whathaveyou, but I imagine (absolutely no source on this, just my imagination) mer women might have much rarer ovulations, like once a year instead of once a month (imagine only some 3 fertile days per year instead of some 36 days), or requiring some special “event” to ovulate (as TRB implies), and that male mer have heavily reduced sperm counts compared to other races.

That would make sense, but is only my personal speculation.

And as for lifespan, I still choose to believe TRB, as while statements in it are unreliable, we know a woman had multiple children near her 400th birthday, with no known magical intervention to slow down her aging. That couldn’t have happened unless all elves could live to a thousand, but most die during the centuries from injury or disease.

[aaami]

Oh whatever, here’s a “shorter” version of the Cicero headcanon stuff I started writing, but then lost. 

Some of these heavily involve my ocs as well, especially Kajo (obviously haha).

Anyway, yeah, these are my headcanons. Or at least some of them, I might be missing something.

Cicero is from Bruma. Or that’s what he says, he doesn’t really know is he originally from there as he was an orphan and never knew his parents. But that’s the place he remembers and it’s where he first joined the Dark Brotherhood.

Has always liked reading and despite being an orphan was lucky enough to learn reading and writing from the elders of the town.

Picked up odd jobs here and there, just trying to get by. Even resorted to thieving, which he doesn’t reminisce very fondly. Realized that killing is his art, when he one night got caught stealing something and half accidentally murdered the person. Never got caught, but the local Brotherhood did pay attention and invited him to join the family. He gladly joined, finally feeling like he belonged somewhere and had stable roof over his head.

In his youth he was somewhat quiet person, fitting the “mysterious, silent assassin” mold pretty well. Later he is way more talkative and laughs at even the smallest things. Has always been relatively well-spoken, silver tongued even, especially when he can gain something from it. Very observant, often notices things that many others might not pay attention to. Smarter than he looks, has noted that playing dumb can be very useful. Used to be pretty even-tempered, but things changed, now can flip even from the slightest offense… or not. It’s always a mystery how he’s going to react to something.

Very enthusiastic about pretty much everything!!

Busybody, always doing something.

In his early twenties when he moves to Cheydinhal, mid-thirties when arriving to Skyrim. Looks little bit older than he is, probably because he’s always lowkey tired. (Also spent nearly a decade underground apparently with very little contact to outside world, bitch probably has a lack of vitamin d. More like lack of everything, how are you even alive?)

*Insert the “this is fine” meme here* mental health stonks are Bad. Traumatized by losing his DB family twice, probably has some sort of abandonment issues. Subconsciously doesn’t like getting attached to people too much, always lowkey fearing that he will be all alone again – better not be too attached, so it won’t hurt that much, right? Hates silence and loneliness.

Trying to listen to the Night Mother and not finding the Listener broke the camel’s back.

During his lonely years in Cheydinhal he began implementing the jester’s characteristics into his own personality, thinking that it’d somehow make him less lonely and more positive or something. Slowly became the person he is now. Doesn’t like thinking about his past, it’s just filled with darkness. Likes his current self more.

Bit of a “dad body”, was more toned in his youth. Has a nasty looking scar on his stomach, thanks to Arnbjorn. Freckles!!

Was kind of surprised that Kajo didn’t kill him. In her shoes he probably would’ve killed. Did get slapped across the face by her, though, and later he feels like he maybe deserved it. Just maybe.

For some time thought that Astrid was all wrong and was very offended by her reluctance to go back to the old ways, but Kajo tells him about Astrid’s last words and he forgives her, hoping that she has found peace in the Void.

Still very devoted to his duty as the Keeper, but it’s so much fun to adventure around with the Listener. Back when he first was appointed as the Keeper, he didn’t get to do much besides his new duties.

Due to his reluctance to deal with such feelings, has hard time accepting that he has developed romantical feelings towards the Listener. He first realizes it when Kajo leaves to fight Alduin, absolutely hating the thought of not having her in his life. At first he thinks it’s because she’s the Listener, but then understands that it’s way more personal. Doesn’t plan on doing anything about it, because he doesn’t even know will she return (so what’s the point of planning anything), but then she does and turns out that the feelings are mutual. However, it takes them some time to be able to talk about it, since they’re both very awkward when it comes to romance and stuff. They do hold hands, hug, sleep next to each other, open up about things they don’t talk to others about and even kiss sometimes and so on, but making it “official” is difficult. It’s only during their adventures in Solstheim when they put everything into words and pretty much decide that they are together.

Always happy that Kajo is ready for pretty much any shenanigans with him. Really enjoys her bubbly personality, but has grown to appreciate her calm side, too, as it can be very soothing when he's having bad time dealing with ups and downs of his mental health and she's there to help him calm down. 

Doesn't really understand what the whole “dragonborn” deal is about, but tries his best to help Kajo solve whatever trouble she's gotten herself into. He does practice the dragon language with her and ends up learning it faster than she does. Can read it and even speak it a little, but no shouting.

Kind of worried that Cailon will murder him one day. He won’t, that’s just how he always looks.

Thinks that Neyon is a good bean. Uses big words, though.

Cicero doesn’t interact with Rali often, usually only when it’s absolutely necessary. She tried to stab him once when he pulled a friendly prank on her. Dangerous.

Halla looks like trouble, but is actually pretty nice to him.

[norsecoyote]

PGD #11: Fallout: New Vegas

(part of a self-indulgent post series about my personal top games of the decade)

What is there to say about this game that hasn’t been said hundreds of times over by now? I certainly don’t claim to have any original insight into it, so I’m just going to hit the highlights of why this now nearly ten-year-old game remains one of the best I’ve ever played.

The world feels real. Not just (or perhaps not even) in the sense of graphics, although those help too -- I’ve always loved the landscape of the American southwest, and while the graphics are very, very brown that’s for once both appropriate and evocative -- but in the sense that everything has a reason to be where it is. Allowing the designers the liberty of dramatically condensing distances, New Vegas borrows the more-or-less actual geography of the Mojave desert region, which means that the settlements in the game follow real-world logic for their placement, rather than being scattered randomly like confetti across the map (what’s more, you can literally go visit most of them!) Moreover, the logistics of the game world inform the plot: rather than using “clean water” as an otherwise meaningless macguffin, the game focuses on energy, and wouldn’t you know it the issue of energy and how to produce it keeps coming up in the locations and quests you encounter. The world feels built and not just thrown together.

The side characters and companions are uniformly fantastic. Skyrim also had some pretty good worldbuilding, but I couldn’t tell you the name of any single human character from that game, while I remember not only all the party members from New Vegas but a good number of the NPCs as well. Not just their names, either, because New Vegas was busting with arcs. Everybody had an arc! Everybody had interesting motivation and backstory! Everybody had an actual interesting ethical question to ask!

The main plot arcs were also kind of incredible. People have written at length about how Caesar’s Legion is one of the best “evil” factions in game history, because Caesar actually articulates a genuine case for why his approach is the best one for a post-apocalyptic wasteland -- it actually manages to drive a plausible wedge between moral rights and utilitarianism. What was great, though, is that all the major factions had that sort of trade-off; neither the NCR nor House nor going solo was unambiguously the Good Route. (I went with House, fwiw, although I did have to think about it a lot, but I remember (still!) that my choice boiled down to, “this dude is the only one with an actual plan for what to do next”)

To close this useless ramble of a post: of the dozen or so open-world RPGs I’ve played, Fallout: New Vegas remains the only one I’ve completely finished. I don’t think there’s anybody reading this who needed to hear this, but: game good.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: Dragon Age II

Dragon Age is a series very near and dear to my heart; ever since playing Origins back when I was in college, I have been inspired by the stories, characters, and lore. Hell, Origins alone is a huge inspiration to my writing, and why wouldn’t it be? It has great locations, deep lore, a core main party without a single weak link with each and every party member you have being unique and entertaining in their own right, and an epic story with all sorts of twists and turns. And it only has two really shitty segments in the whole game! It’s truly a great first entry in a series.

But despite my love for it, I put off playing the sequel for most of the decade, only playing it for the first time this year. And why is that? Because… the critics said it was bad… yes, unfortunately in my younger years I took what critics said without any grains of salt. Dragon Age II was not very popular back around the time it came out, mostly because of its radical departure from the style of the first game, with more hack-and-slash-esque combat, a much more simple and self-contained story, and a cast of characters far more divisive than the first time around. It’s only over time that people have started to give it the respect it deserves, but much like fellow fantasy series The Legend of Zelda it comes at the cost of the current game being bashed.

So how is this red headed stepchild of a sequel, anyway? Did the critics have a point, or is this really an underrated gem? Well, I’m happy to report that this is indeed a fun and fantastic game, and I heavily regret being kept apart from the lovely Merril for so long due to poor critical reception, but there are a lot of problems too. For everything it does really well, it kind of shits the bed in other areas, and a lot of that can be contributed to a rushed development cycle that got this game churned out just over a year after the first one, leading to things like all items lacking the detailed descriptions they would get in the first game, which doesn’t sound like much, but then you get an item called something like “Uncle Horky’s Spanking Rod” as a magic staff and there’s no explanation as to why it’s called that and you have to imagine up some ludicrous backstory for it.

The lack of flavor text is a minor gripe, though, compared to the obnoxiously repetitive environments of dungeons. Reusing and flipping dungeons around and reusing assets would be one thing, but here they literally just take a map, flip it a bit with no changes to the details of the level, and just block off doors that lead to areas they don’t want you going. The worst part is on your mini map you can see the blocked pathways you likely saw ten minutes ago in another dungeon, which just makes a lot of the missions feel bland and samey. It also doesn’t help that enemy types are rather paltry, so you’ll be fighting a lot of the same mooks in the same maps over and over as you grind for items, gold, and EXP.

And then there are some of the characters. The worst of the bunch are sadly two characters who are returning from the first game and its expansion Awakening – Anders and Isabela. Isabela is arguably worse, because she honestly seems rather fun and nice at first, if overly and aggressively flirty, but as the story goes on, it’s revealed that she is actually the cause behind some of the biggest issues in the first few acts, which she neglects to tell you until it is far too late and unless you decided to maximize your friendship with her, she will run off and never return to your party. I can’t deny that this completely soured me to her, and at the end of the quanari invasion of Kirkwall I was only upset I couldn’t find her in act three and kick her ass for what she did.

Then there is Anders. Poor, poor Anders. In Awakening, he was one of the most funny and charming characters, a nice little substitute for Alistair that I actually ended up liking for than the Weenie King of Ferelden. Here though? Anders can not go one fucking conversation without bringing up how oppressed mages are and how much the templars suck and blah blah blah. The worst part is I do agree with him, but he’s just so whiny and obnoxious about it I left him behind all the time, dooming my party to having no healer even as I fought high dragons, blood mages, and Corypheus. It was worth it to not hear Anders bitching about templars and insulting Merril and Fenris. Oh, and Anders nukes the chantry and sets off a civil war. Isabela may be a nasty bitch, but Anders definitely comes out looking like a huge cunt by the game’s end.

The entire endgame is kind of an utter mess too, seeing as no matter whose side you join you end up fighting the same two bosses, with one of them just not making any sense whatsoever. And then the game just sort of ends on a very unsatisfying cliffhanger. And as much as I just complained, all of this stings because really, the rest of the game is quite good, and the story is fun if scaled back from the epic tale of Origins.

Let’s get the obvious best part out of the way: Varric. Varric is literally the best part of the entire Dragon Age franchise. He’s a snarky, wisecracking surface dwarf with no beard who writes best-selling novels, constantly has his shirt open to show off his magnificent chest hair, and has a crossbow named Bianca that he is uncomfortably attached to. He is one of the greatest characters ever created, and there was not one single moment I left him out of my party, because he is a blast to have around, and what’s more, if there’s ever a situation where the dialogue wheel pops up and you can let him talk… you’ve won. This guy can talk his way out of any situation. There’s nothing bad you can say about Varric, and he is in fact the only companion in the game I can wholeheartedly stand behind as a paragon of great writing.

I love the other characters, don’t get me wrong, but they have their issues. Aveline and Fenris in particular, with Aveline being a bit too by-the-books at times to the point where she exacerbates the quanari conflict by demanding that elves who killed a guard who raped one of their own be turned over to her after they converted to the Qun. This is all despite her knowing full well that the poor elf girl would have otherwise gotten no justice seeing as how city elves in this setting are second class citizens at best. Still, she has a rather adorkable romance questline where you hook her up with one of the guards, and she’s not a bad person, just a touch misguided at times.

That last sentence can also apply to Fenris, but on a grander scale. He’s a cool, edgy, brooding elf who absolutely fucking hates magic with every fiber of his being. He is the Anti-Anders, though he’s far less annoying about it, and it’s hard to really blame him for being bitter seeing as he was a sex slave for an evil wizard for most of his life and then just had misfortune after misfortune piled on him. I really hated how mean he was to Merril, but otherwise I warmed to him and befriended him.

And that brings us to a very special girl, Merril. Merril is an adorable, klutzy, scatterbrained blood mage elf who is hated by her people due to the lengths she is going to repair an ancient artifact to bring a piece of her people’s heritage back. While she can be a bit arrogant and stubborn about the whole thing, it’s mostly due to how no one around her seems to believe in and support her; naturally, I believed in and supported her, and while things still managed to go south, she seemed at least to learn a little bit. Overall I found her to be an absolute sweetheart, and she never left my party, much like Varric; frankly, I was going in expecting not to like her and was going to romance Fenris instead, but as it turns out Merril won my heart immediately and my Hawke went lesbian this playthrough.

On that note, as much as I like how Merril, Fenris, Isabela, and Anders can be wooed by either gender in principle, I do kind of feel making everyone bisexual with no rhyme or reason kind of cheapens things. It’s weird for me, a bisexual myself, to be saying that, but it just feels off to be able to get together with everyone, with everyone being Schrodinger’s Bisexual until a romance is initiated. It’s nowhere near as bad as Skyrim, but I just feel it kinda cheapens the romance options. I prefer Origins and Inquisition in that regard, where you don’t have all the options but you do have some unique choices. But, hey, at the end of the day I’m hardly complaining that my Lady Hawke got to polish Merril’s Eluvian, if you know what I mean.

Aside from the characters, I think the game’s real strength lies in its story, which is fitting since the entire game is framed as a story being told by no less a storyteller than our pal Varric. It has a three act structure, with each act detailing a different year in Hawke’s rise to become the Champion of the city of Kirkwall, which is a crime-ridden wretched hive of scum and villainy. The first act mainly has Hawke making a name for themselves, living in the slums with their uncle, doing dirty work to try and get back a little prestige, and recruiting all of their allies, with the act culminating with a trip to the Deep Roads, every DA fan’s favorite location. It’s a nice setup for a lot of twists and turns later in the story, and choices you make in certain dialogue options or quests actually can change what sort of quests you get later. Then again, this is Bioware, so this sort of “action have consequences” gameplay is expected.

Act two deals with just how Hawke becomes the Champion. Rich from the expedition into the Deep Roads, Hawke gets to do all sorts of fun things, such as track down a serial killer who ends up murdering their mom, being stabbed in the back by one of their friends, accidentally inciting a race war that nearly burns down the city, and having to duel the warrior leader of the qunari to the death in combat. Yeah, act two really piles it on to Hawke, but it does tie into the game’s themes of how no matter the level of success, great actions will also come with great consequences, even actions meant to better one’s lot in life, which also resonate in the personal quests of characters like Merril and Fenris, who despite ultimately achieving their goals in the third act feel hollow, lost, and even broken by the end, and that’s not even getting into what Anders does. However the conflict with the qunari is resolved, Hawke is declared the Champion, and things seem ok.

But then comes act three, and boy do things go wrong. Knight-Commander Meredith has gone cuckoo for Coco Puffs and conflict between templars and mages seems inevitable; this act is basically wrapping up hanging plot threads and companion quests until Anders finally nukes the chantry and all hell breaks loose, leading to the final battle. The ending here isn’t particularly happy, with Hawke ultimately ending up a fugitive in the epilogue, and things can get even worse if you make poor choices in Inquisition, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Here’s the thing: everything I just said? It could be entirely different from my playthrough depending on the choices you make. Sure, some things are inevitable, like Anders committing terrorist acts, Hawke’s mother dying, and Meredith going absolutely bonkers and making you fight statues, but depending on how you play, maybe you’ll like/romance Isabela, maybe you’ll resolve things with the Arishok differently, maybe you’ll side with the templars… the story ends the same but there are so many ways to make your story different. Throw in some great lore, some fun DLC that reveals some shocking truths about the lore, and the fun albeit simplified combat, and you’ve got a game here that has a lot of replay value if only to see where all the plot threads can lead.

I definitely think this is a good game, even a great one. It has its share of problems, but so did Origins, and frankly I’d sooner put up with the backstabbing pirate hooker and the pissy mage terrorist again then go through the fucking Fade and Deep Roads one more time. If you liked the first one, definitely give this a shot; you may end up liking or disliking some of the stuff I dislike and like. That’s the fun of these Bioware games, different aspects are going to appeal to different people. The question is, do I find it better than Origins?

In some respects, yes; I much prefer the simpler combat here, and I like the more down-to-earth story in this one, but at the same time Origins just had stronger characters overall and I’m a sucker for “save the world” fantasy tales. While Origins infamously had some real mind-numbing slogs in the form of the Fade sequence and the Deep Roads, while those environments were tedious at least they weren’t boring. But on the other hand… Origins didn’t have Varric.

 It’s really a tossup, frankly, and I love both games a lot. I think each of them has their place and each of them brings something interesting to the table for the series. It’s one you really need to play for yourself to get a good grasp on; don’t be like me and put it off for nearly ten years, give it a go right after your done with the first game and see how you feel. Your experience is going to be a lot different than mine, that’s for sure.

[thatoneshadyshop]

You know I’m gonna win, right?

“You know I’m gonna win, right?”

“In your dreams, little brother. This one is all mine.”

“Ah, right of course. Like it was last time. And the time before that. And that time in Bravil…”

“You can’t use that one! It didn’t count. I was injured! It’s not like you can be seductive when you’re half wrapped in bandages!”

“Half wrapped in bandages, Arkay’s foot! You’d sprained your wrist, that was all, and if you’d just let me…”

Lillandril smiled to himself as he took a sip of his wine, watching his children bickering. No matter how old they got, they seemed destined to never stop teasing each other; at least now they were older, it was taken in the right spirit. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to stop them tearing seven shades of Oblivion out of each other if they started fighting like they used to.

The tavern was nearly full, which given the foul weather outside, was hardly a surprise. The slightly damp smell of drying clothes and soggy boots was mixing with the smoke the fire from the pit was producing, the hisses and pops of the logs burning mixing with the sounds of conversations, laughter, and drunken boasts. The Nords of Whiterun remained as they always had for as long as Lillandril had dwelt among them: open, honest, and full of life.

“Alright, alright, no need to go on about it!” Gwemba slammed her fist down on the table, grinning at her brother broadly. “That was before. Tonight is my night, little brother. I promise you that.”

“Oh, just like to promised to pay the tab back in Sentinel?” Birk laughed, his eyes glittering with humour. He leaned forward slightly to pick up his tankard of mead, his free hand scratching at the dirty blonde hairs on his chin. “But fine, fine, tonight is going to be your night. Except it won’t be. Because it will be my night. Again. Standard rules?”

“Standard rules,” Gwemba agreed. Where her brother was all handsome features, light with his blonde hair and blue eyes, she was all dark, broad and bristling with barely contained energy. Combined with the scars that crossed her brow and cheek, and the slight crook to her nose where it had never properly heeled, the effect made it clear that she was a woman used to looking after herself. If her brother was the image of a courtier, dressed in colourful doublets and soft materials, she was that of a brawler, and an unapologetic one at that. “But who calls the winner? Ma’Riahni isn’t here this time.”

Raising his brows, Lillandil coughed slightly. Both children turned to look at him blankly for a moment, before realisation dawned on them, a glance passing between them.

“Ah, so, erm,,, no offence, Atta,” Birk began, flashing Lillandril an apologetic smile, “but it seems, well, just a bit odd for you to call the winner. I mean, you did raise us after all, and well…”

“You can’t,” Gwemba interjected. “You wouldn’t know what makes a prize woman if she came up and pushed your face in her melons. If you had to choose between him pulling a burly Orc missing all his tusks, or me going off with the most gorgeous Altmer maiden this side of the Topal Bay, you’d call the Orc the winner every time.”

“Well!” Lillandril huffed, drawing himself up in his seat and doing his best to look unimpressed. “That is simply not true. One might not choose to indulge in the dubious joys of womenfolk oneself, yet tis hardly as if one cannot appreciate the female form! One can appreciate the art without having to touch it! Tis hardly as is…” He trailed off, noticing the look Birk and Gwemba exchanged again, an entire conversation between them.

To think. The two children he had taken in from the streets had managed to grow into the two adults opposite him. The pair of them had gone on the spend years wandering the length and breadth of Tamriel, taking on odd jobs as mercenaries and caravan guards, seeking out adventure and sights they had heard of in their parents’ stories, or that Birk had read about in his books. More than once they had taken to the ocean with the self styled Pirate Queen of the Topal Bay, reaving the waves at Ma’Riahni’s side.

Lillandril worried about them, of course, but he was also deeply proud. Gwemba had grown into an accomplished warrior and hunter, while Birk was as adept a human mage as Lillandril knew; moreover, his son simply had a way with people, a gift for speech and calming tempers that gave him some surety they could avoid any serious trouble. 

Not that they could avoid all trouble, of course. Gwemba had scars aplenty from near misses, and to hear the stories, had been saved more than once by Birk or Ma’Riahni being nearby to apply healing magics. Birk had his own injuries too, a faint line that followed his jawline from chin to ear, and a few burn marks here and there from spells gone awry. The pair of them had limped back home more than once to recover, clutching their aches and taking to their beds for weeks on end. The residents of the Den were well primed to expect their appearances, and knew that anything serious was to be reported to Lillandril immediately. 

“Alright, alright, it can’t be one,” Lillandril conceded, lowering himself back down in his chair. “But if not one, how about Sildras?” He waved his hand across the table where the young Dunmer had just taken a gulp of ale; as he realised that three pairs of eyes were suddenly turned on him, Sildras turned the gulp into a choke, and began coughing violently, waving his hand around in front of his face as if to ward off the very suggestion of his involvement. Lillandril sighed. “Never mind.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Birk said, turned his attention back to his father and sister. “We can decide ourselves who wins. We both will know, after all. And if we really can’t agree, then we roll it over to next time. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Gwemba nodded emphatically, banging her fist on the table again for good measure. “Right then. Standard rules. One person only, male or female, race doesn’t matter. They have to stay until morning, or it doesn’t count. They can’t be too drunk to know better, or under some sort of charm or other magical rubbish. No money either. It doesn’t count if you pay them.”

“Or if they pay you.” Birk had half twisted in his seat, his eyes sweeping the tavern back and forth. “No matter how good it is.” The small Bosmer trader by the window who was gazing absentmindedly into space, the pair of Breton’s sat sharing a meal under the eaves, the cook’s assistant just visible beyond the bar, stopping to wipe sweat from her brow and readjust her apron.

“Right.” Gwemba grinned broadly, her eyes mirroring Birk’s as the leapt from person to person. The Nord with the black hair in the corner strumming the lute, the Imperial moneycounter with the close trimmed beard and rubies dancing on his fingers, the buxom tavern maid weaving between the patrons and their grabbing hands - for a moment, her eyes stopped on the knot of Companions by the door, stood in a tight circle while one of their number regaled them with tales of vapour, and then they swept on.

Lillandril smiled to himself, settling back into his chair and taking another sip of wine. They might only be passing through the area, stopping only for a couple of days out of duty to see their father, yet the old Mer was glad to see them both. He had thought them far to the south, seeing out the late autumn in the sun of Valenwood or Hammerfell; that they had found work as guards on a ship sailing from Anvil to Solitude had been pure chance. It did his old heart good to see them both. It felt like it had been decades since their last visit, and while he could not blame them - he hardly wanted to be in Skyrim himself, never mind expecting them to choose to return - it was good to see them safe and healthy. Good to see them at ease, relaxed, enjoying themselves, playing their games. It put him in mind of his youth, of time spent prowling docks and entertaining would be patrons, of camping under the stars and of being able to simply leave cares and worries behind.

“Right then.” Birk brought his attention back to his sister, pausing only to drain the remainders of his drink. “Shall we say six hours past sunrise? It seems fair with it being so late already, no?” He held his hand out to Gwemba, who reached out to firmly take it.

“Agreed. Six hours past sunrise.” She flashed another confident grin, squeezing her brother’s hand slightly. “You do know I am going to win, right?”

“In your dreams, older sister. In your dreams.”

[lechevaliermalfet]

Pistols at Dawn: A Look at Doom and Marathon

In the mid-1990s, the first-person shooter genre was born with Doom. It wasn't the first game of its type.  Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold preceded it.  Catacomb 3D came before either of those.  And you can trace the lineage further back if you like.  But it was Doom that saw the kind of runaway success most development studios live and die without ever attaining.  That success spawned imitators.  It was the imitators and their imitations – some of them using the very same engine – that made it a genre.  It's how genres are born.

It was interesting to watch that happen in real time.

But that's the PC side of history.

If you were a Macintosh user, you were probably sick to death of your PC-owning friends crowing about Doom, all the more because it wasn't available for your system of choice. Doom would eventually make its way Mac-ward... after its own sequel was eventually released for the system first.  Absurd as this sounds, it didn’t really matter too much.  Story, and the importance of continuity between games, wasn't exactly a big concern in Doom.

But Mac users had little reason to despair.  Because although Doom was and is rightly remembered as a classic, Mac users were privy to a game nearly as good – probably even equal, maybe even better, depending on who you talk to.

That game was Marathon.

More below the cut.

It's hard trying to justify comparisons between Doom and Marathon, because despite their similarities, they aren't really in the same league.  It's hard to compare any game that became the jumping-off point for a whole genre to its contemporaries.  But as much as I lionize Doom, and as much as everyone else does the same, it's perhaps helpful to think that this is done with the benefit of hindsight.  Today, in 2018, we've had nearly two-and-a-half decades of Doom being available for almost every single thing that could conceivably run it.

Remembering Doom in its time, it would have been hard to predict that it would go on to achieve quite the level of adulation it's garnered over the years. It's not that Doom doesn't deserve it.  It's more that any game attaining this level of success both in its time and in the long term is basically impossible to predict.  Doom was much talked about, it was wildly popular, you heard rumors of whole IT departments losing days of productivity to it in network games, but...  Well, it was just one game.  Later two.  It was perfectly valid to suppose, in the mid-90s, that some developer would surely supplant it with something even better.  That's just the way things worked.  It's just that Doom was well-made enough, well-balanced enough, that "something even better" didn't come around for a long time.  

Still, the Macintosh is not where I would have expected to look for real competition for Doom.

The Mac wasn't actually a barren wasteland, game-wise.  It's just easy to remember it that way, especially if, like me, you grew up playing PC games.  Most of the games we think of as being influential in the realm of computer gaming tended not to come from that direction.  Mac users made up a smaller portion of overall computer users at that point.  PCs (still often referred to as "IBM/PC compatibles" at the time) being the larger market and thus a source of larger potential profits, that was where the majority of developers focused their attention.  The hassles of porting a game to Mac, whether handled by the original developer or farmed out to somebody else, were frequently judged not to be worth the potential profit.  At times, it was determined not to be profitable in the first place.

There were a few games – Myst comes immediately to mind – that bucked this trend, but most Mac games only became influential once they crossed over to PCs, like...  Well, like Myst did.  The Mac ecosystem just wasn't big enough for anything that happened in it exclusively to influence the wider world of PC gaming.  

Actually, let's go with that ecosystem analogy for a minute.  

Mac gaming in the early 90s was sort of like Australia.  It's a tiny system that only accounted for a small percentage of the biosphere. It had its own unique creatures, similar to animals occupying equivalent ecological niches elsewhere in the world.  But on closer inspection, these turned out to all be very different from their counterparts, often in fundamental ways.  And then you had some creatures with no real equivalents elsewhere.  There was a lot of parallel evolution.  

Case in point: Marathon.

Being released a scant eleven days after Doom, you definitely can't accuse it of being one of the imitators.  It didn't happen in a vacuum, though.

Its creators, Bungie, were a sort of oddball company whose founders openly admitted that they started off in the Macintosh market not because of any fervent belief in the superiority of the platform, but because it was far less competitive than the PC market at the time.

They started off with Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a multiplayer-only (more or less) first-person maze game, and followed it up with Pathways Into Darkness.

Pathways was meant to be a sequel to Minotaur at first, until it morphed into its own thing over the course of its development.  In genre terms, it's most like a first-person shooter.  Except there are heavy adventure game elements, nonlinearity, and multiple endings depending on decisions you make during the game, which are pretty foreign to the genre.  It also features a level of resource scarcity that wouldn't be at all out of place in a survival horror game.

Incidentally, I would love to see a source port of Pathways Into Darkness. It is its own weird, awkward beast of a game, and I would dearly love to be able to play it, after having seen only maybe ten minutes of gameplay at a friend's house one time when I was about twelve.

They followed this up with the original Marathon.

Doom is largely iterative.  It follows on from a tradition of older FPS games made by its developer, like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D. Like those predecessors, it relegates the little apparent story to pre-game and post-game text, and features a very video game-y structure that relies on discrete levels and fast, reflex-oriented play.  It adds complexity and sophistication to these elements as seen in previous games, introducing more enemies, more weapons, and more complex and varied environments, then layers all of this on top of an already proven, solid gameplay core.

Marathon, by contrast, simplified and distilled the elements of previous games by its developer.  It opts to be more clearly an FPS (as we understand it in modern terms) than any of its predecessors, shedding Pathways' adventure elements and non-linearity while increasing the player's arsenal.  However, it's still less straightforward than Doom's pure level-by-level structure.  Marathon presents itself as a series of objectives given to the player character (the Security Officer) by various other characters to be achieved within the level.  These can range from scouting out particular areas, to ferrying items around the level, to clearing out enemies, to rescuing friendly characters, and so on.

Marathon's story, unlike Doom's, is front and center.  Where Doom leaves the player to satisfy themselves that they are slowly progressing toward some ultimate enemy with every stage, Marathon gives the player concrete goals each step of the way, framing each objective as either a way to gain advantage over the enemy, or to recover from setbacks inflicted by them.  Doom's story is focused on the player character and their direct actions. For narrative purposes, anything happening beyond your ability to observe is irrelevant.  Marathon instead opts to give the player a feeling that although they are the one making crucial things happen in the story, they are not directing the action themselves.

Which brings me to something interesting about Marathon's story.

The player character, the Security Officer, has surprisingly little agency within the narrative.  At a guess, I'd say that's because it would be almost impossible to express his own thoughts and emotions with the way the plot is relayed.  It's true that most games -- especially in the FPS genre -- tell you what to do.  Rescue the princess.  Save the world.  Prevent nuclear catastrophe.  Etc.  Etc.  But this is normally done in an abstract sense, by presenting you a clear goal and some means to achieve it.  Even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have an overarching goal that you're meant to be slowly working your way toward.  

But while your actions in a given game are generally understood to be working toward the stated goal, the player is usually presented in the narrative as having a choice – or perhaps more accurately as having chosen prior to the beginning of the game proper – regarding whatever path the game puts them on.  Mario has chosen to go save Princess Toadstool.  Link has chosen to go find the pieces of the Triforce and save Princess Zelda.  Sonic has chosen to confront Doctor Robotnik.  Even the Doom Guy has chosen to fight the demons infesting the moons of Mars on his own rather than saying "fuck it" and running.  The reasons for these choices may in some cases be left up to the player to sort out or to apply their imagination, but the point remains.  These characters have chosen their destinies.

The Security Officer from the Marathon trilogy, by contrast, does not.  Throughout the games, he is presented as following orders.  "Install these three circuits in such-and-such locations".  "Scout out this area". "Clear the hostile aliens out of this section of the ship". And so on, and so forth.  Even in the backstory, found in the manual, the character is just doing his job, responding to a distress call before he fully realizes the sheer scale of the problem.  The player, as the Security Officer, is always moving from one objective to the next on the orders of different AI constructs who happen to be in control of him – more or less – at a given time.  The Security Officer is clearly a participant in events, but he lacks true agency.

In fairness, it must have been hard to figure out how to tell a compelling story within the context of a first-person shooter back in the early 90s, which is why so few people did it.  

I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to explain it well (understatement; I'm not any kind of programmer), but the basic gist of it is that games like Doom weren't technically in 3D.  The environments were rendered in such a way that they appeared in three dimensions from the player's perspective, but as earlier versions of source ports like ZDoom made clear, this was an illusion, one that was shattered the moment you enabled mouse aiming and observed the environments from any angle other than dead-ahead.  The enemies, meanwhile, were 2D sprites, which was common in video games of any type for the day.

This was how Marathon was set up as well.  It's how basically every first-person shooter worked until the release of Quake – and some after it.

The problem is that this doesn't lend itself very well to more cinematic storytelling.  Sprites tended not to be very expressive given the lower resolutions of the day.  At least, not sprites drawn to relatively realistic proportions like the ones in Doom and Marathon. So you couldn't really do cinematic storytelling sequences with them, and that left only a handful of other options for getting your story across.

You could do what I tend to think of as Dynamic Stills, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES.  At its best, it enables comic book-style storytelling, but that's about as far as it goes.

You can do FMV cutscenes, which at the time basically involved bad actors in cheap costumes filmed against green screens or really low-budget sets.  CG was relatively uncommon (and likely prohibitivesly expensive) even in the mid-90s.

You can do mostly text, interspersed throughout your game.

You can just not have much story at all.

Doom opted for option four.  John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in video games is like story in porn.  Everybody expects it to be there, but nobody really cares about it.  

I disagree with this sentiment pretty vehemently, as it happens.  There are some games that aren't well served by a large amount of plot, and Doom is definitely one of them.  But to state that this is or should be true for the medium as a whole is frankly ridiculous.

There's something refreshing, almost freeing, about a game that has less a story than a premise. Doom starts off on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has been invaded by demons from hell.  They've gained access by virtue of human scientists' experimentation with teleportation technology gone horribly, horribly wrong.  The second episode sees you teleported to Deimos, which as been entirely swallowed up by Hell, and which segues from the purely technological/military environments of Doom to more supernatural environs.  Episode 3 has you assaulting Hell proper.  Doom II's subtitle, Hell on Earth, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the setting and premise of the game.

That's it.  There are no characters to develop or worry about.  It's just you as the lone surviving marine, your improbably large arsenal, and all the demons Hell can throw at you.  Go nuts.

Bungie, meanwhile, took a different approach.  I can't seem to find out which of their founders said it, but they have been on record as basically being diametrically opposed to Id Software in their attitude about story.  "The purpose of games is to tell stories."  I wish I knew who at Bungie said that.

Marathon is very much a story-oriented game.  Of the aforementioned methods of storytelling, they opted for option three: text, and lots of it.

Marathon's story is complex and labyrinthine, especially as it continues through the sequels (Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity), and is open to interpretation at various points.  Much is left for the player to piece together themselves.  Aside from the player character, the story mainly centers on the actions of three AI constructs: Leela (briefly), Durandal, and Tycho.  Their actions, in the face of an invasion by a race of alien slavers called the Pfohr, drive the story.  

Their words and actions are relayed to the player by way of text at terminals scattered throughout the game's environments.  Some of these take the form of orders and objectives given by the AI to the player character, the Security Officer.  Some of these are more musings or rants (two out of the three AIs you work for over the course of the Marathon trilogy are not exactly all there), which serve to flesh out events happening beyond the player's observations, and help build the world.  Some of these are seemingly random bits of background information, presented as if they were being accessed by someone else (often an enemy) before they were distracted by something – usually you, shooting everything in sight.  

Design-wise, there are some interesting differences.

Doom is old-school from a time when that was the only school, with levels that strike a nice balance between video game-y and still giving at least a vague sense that they were built to be something other than deathtrap mazes.  But what makes them old-school, at this point, is the fact that they're levels, with discrete starting and ending points, where your goal is to move from the former to the latter and hit the button or throw the lever to end it and begin the next one.

There's no plot to lose the thread of, no series of objectives for you to lose track of if you put the game down for a week, or a month, or longer still.  It's extremely pick-up-and-play, equally well suited to killing twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, as you like.

The appeal (aesthetics aside) of Doom is also at least in part its accessibility.  It has a decently high skill ceiling (which is to say, the level of skill required to play at an expert level), but a surprisingly low skill floor (the level of skill required to play with basic proficiency), which has lent it a certain evergreen quality. And Id Software has been keen to capitalize on this.  Doom is one of a small number of PC games (Diablo II is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head; what is it with games that have you fighting demons from Hell?) that have been commercially viable and available basically from the day they were released.  In addition to DOS on PCs, Doom was rejiggered for Windows 95, and also (eventually) saw release for Mac.  Also, it's been sold for multiple consoles: the Super NES, the Sega 32X (regrettably), the Atari Jaguar (also regrettably), the PlayStation, the N64, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox One (the 360 version again, via backward compatibility).  And source ports have kept the PC version alive and kicking, adding now-standard features like mouse aiming, particle effects, and support for widescreen displays.

The result is a game that, if you don't mind pixelated graphics, is as ferociously playable today as it was twenty-four years ago (as of this writing), and has enjoyed a kind of longevity usually not seen outside the realm of first-party Nintendo classics.

Marathon by contrast is somewhat less inviting.  

From a technical standpoint, Marathon is more or less the equal of Doom. The environments throughout the series are rendered at a somewhat higher resolution, but the enemies are less well animated.  Marathon also introduced the idea of mouse aiming to the FPS genre, and allowed the player to use that to look (and aim) vertically, which hadn't been done before either.  Even Doom, though it also introduced more vertical gameplay, locked the player's movement to the strictly horizontal; vertical aiming was accounted for automatically, although source ports have modernized this. Marathon leans into its verticality a little more as a result, and level layouts are more complex, bordering on the impossiblely convoluted without the aid of your automap.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marathon would classify as a survival horror game, there are some elements of that genre in it.  This is almost certainly unintentional, and I'm identifying them as such retroactively (the genre hadn’t really arrived yet). Still, they exist.  Ammunition is more scarce than in Doom, forcing the player to lean on the lower end of their arsenal far later into the game than Doom does. Some weapons also feature alternate fire modes, which was a genre first.  

Health packs are nonexistent; instead, the player can recharge their health at terminals designed for this purpose, usually placed very sparingly.  Saving is also handled at dedicated terminals – a decision better befitting a console game, and somewhat curious here.  In addition to health, there is also an air gauge, which depletes gradually whenever the player is in vacuum or underwater, and which can be difficult to find refills for.

Marathon also marks the early appearance of weapon magazines in the first-person shooter genre.  Doom held to the old design established by Wolfenstein and older games that the player fires their weapons straight from the ammo reserves.  If you have a hundred shotgun rounds, then you can fire a hundred times, no reload necessary.  The reloading mechanic as we would most readily recognize it seems to have been added for the genre with Half-Life, for reasons of greater realism and introducing tension to the game.  

Marathon's version of this, as you might expect for a pioneering effort, is pretty rough.  There is no way to manually reload your weapons when you want.  Rather, the game will automatically cycle through the reload animation once you empty the magazine.  It does helpfully display how many rounds remain in the magazine at all times so you know how many you have left before a reload, and can plan accordingly. But it still exerts the familiar reload pressure, just in a different way.  Rather than asking yourself whether you have the spare seconds for a reload to top off your magazine, now you have to ask yourself whether it's wiser to just fire the last few rounds of the magazine to trigger the reload now, when it's safe, so that you have a full magazine ready to go for the next encounter.  Marathon's tendency to leave you feeling a little more ammo-starved than Doom makes this decision an agonizing one at times.  

Id's game is pretty sparing with the way it doles out rockets and energy cells for the most high-powered weapons, true.  But the real workhorse weapons, the shotgun and the chaingun, have ammo lying around in plenty.  Past a certain early point in any given episode of Doom or Doom II, as long as you diligently grab whatever ammo you come across and your aim is even halfway decent, you never have to worry about running out.  Marathon, by contrast, sees you relying on your pistol for a good long while. Compared to other weapons you find, it has a good balance of accuracy and availability of ammunition.  

The overall pacing and difficulty of both games is also somewhat different.  

Both games are hard, but in different ways.  Doom has enemies scattered throughout a level in ones and twos, but most of the major encounters feature combinations and larger numbers.  But the plentiful ammo drops and health packs mean the danger of these encounters tends to be relatively isolated, and encourages fast maneuvering and some risk-taking.  If you can make it through a given encounter, you usually have the opportunity to heal up and re-arm before the next one.  Doom is centered around its action.  It gives you the shotgun – which you’ll be using for most of the game, thanks to its power – as early as the first level if you’re on the lookout for secrets, and by the second level, you really can’t miss it.

Marathon, by contrast, paces itself (and the player) differently.  Ammo gets doled out more sparingly, and health recharge stations are likewise placed few and far between (rarely more than one or two in a stage, at least so far as I’ve played, and small enough that they can be easily overlooked).  Save points are likewise not always conveniently placed, and the fact that the game has save points means that you can’t savescum, and dying can result in a fair amount of lost progress.  The result is that, unless you’re closer to the skill ceiling, you tend to play more carefully and conservatively.  You learn to kite enemies, stringing them along to let you take on as few at a time as possible.

The tactics I developed to play games like Doom and later Quake didn’t always serve me very well when I first started playing Marathon. The main danger in Bungie’s game is the death of a thousand cuts. Where Doom attempts in most cases to destroy you in a single fell swoop, Marathon seeks to wear you down bit by bit until you have nothing left, and you’re jumping at shadows, knowing that the next blow to fall may be your last.  It encourages more long-term thinking.  Similar to a survival horror game, every clip spent and every hit taken has meaning, and can alter your approach to the scenario you find yoruself in.

In short, if Doom is paced like a series of sprints, Marathon is, well... a marathon.

Another interesting difference is how both games deal with their inherent violence.  

As games which feature future military men mowing down whole legions of enemies by the time the credits roll, violence is a matter of course. It becomes casual.  But both games confront it in different ways.

Doom was one of the games that helped stir up a moral panic in the U.S. in the early to mid-90s (alongside Mortal Kombat, most notably).  While I don't agree with it, it was hardly surprising.  Doom gloried in its violence.  Every enemy went down covered in blood (some of them came at you that way), some of them straight-up liquefying if caught too near an explosion.  This is to say nothing of all the hearts on altars or dead marines littering the landscape to provide the proper ambiance.

The idea was simple: You were surrounded by violent monsters, and the only way to overcome them was to become equally violent.  The game's fast pace and adrenaline-rushing gameplay only served to emphasize this.  Doom isn't a stupid game by any means – it requires a certain amount of cleverness and a good sense of direction in addition to good reflexes and decent aim to safely navigate its levels -- but the primary direction it makes you think in is how? How do I get through this barrier, how do I best navigate through these dark halls, how do I approach this room full of enemies that haven't seen me yet?

Marathon asks those questions as well, because any decent game is constantly asking you those questions, because they are all variations on the same basic question any game of any kind (video games, board games, whatever) is asking you: How do you overcome the challenges the game throws at you using the tools and abilities the game gives you?

The difference (well, the narrative difference, distinct from all the rest) is that Marathon also talks about the violence seemingly inherent in human nature as one of a variety of things in its narrative.  

To be fair, Marathon brings it up pretty briefly in its terminal text.  But one of the terminals highlights Durandal's musings on the Security Officer, and humankind in general.  

Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?

Indeed, it may be seen as not just useful, but a necessary and essential component of humanity.  Certainly it's vital to the Security Officer's survival and ultimate victory in the story of the games.

And yet, on the whole, Marathon is a less violent game.  Or at least, it glories in its violence less.  Enemies still go down in a welter of their own blood, because that happens when you shoot a living creature full of bullet holes.  But it's less gory on the whole – bloody like a military movie, bloody as a matter of fact, in contrast to Doom's cartoonishly overwrought slasher-flick excess.

And yet it's Marathon that feels compelled to grapple with its violence, to ask what motivates it, not just in the moment, but wherever it appears in the nature and history of humankind.

On the whole, I think I come down on the side of Marathon, personally.  Its themes, its aesthetic, and its characters are more to my liking.  True, part of this is simply because Marathon has characters. Doom has the player character and a horde of enemies.  Even the final boss of each installment has no narrative impact to speak of.  They simply appear in order to be shot down.  They're presented as the forces behind the demonic invasion, but aside from being bigger and stronger than all the other demons you face, there's no real sense of presence, narratively.  And that's fine.  But on the balance, I tend to prefer story in my games, and Marathon delivers, even as it's sometimes a bit janky, even as I get the feeling that Bungie's reach exceeded their grasp with it.

I can recognize Doom as the game that's more accessible, and probably put together a little better, and of course infinitely more recognizable.  Id still sells it, and generally speaking, it's worth the five whole dollars (ten if you want Doom II as well) it'll cost you on PSN, or Xbox Live, or Steam.

Bungie, meanwhile, gave the Marathon trilogy away for free in the early 2000s.  It's how I finally managed to play it, despite never owning a Mac.  There are source ports that allow it to be played on PCs (or Linux, even).  About the only new development in the franchise was an HD remaster of Marathon 2: Durandal for the Xbox 360.  In the same vein as the remasters for Halo or Halo 2, this version changes nothing about the original except to update the graphics and adapt the control scheme for a 360 controller.

I'd love to see a remake of Marathon with modern technology, even though I know it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen.  Bungie's occupied with Destiny for the foreseeable future.  The most we've gotten in ages is a few Easter eggs.  343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo featured Durandal's symbol prominently on his mechanical eye, which fueled speculation for a little while that perhaps Halo took place in the same continuity.  There's another Easter egg in Destiny 2 that suggests two of its weapons, the MIDA Multi-tool and the MIDA Mini-tool, fell out of an alternate universe where Marathon's events occurred instead of Destiny's. But that's been it.

The tragedy of Marathon is that it wasn't in a position for its innovations to be felt industry-wide.

Doom had the better overall playability and greater accessibility.  If you were to ask where a lot of FPS genre innovations came from, the average gamer would probably not point to Marathon as the progenitor of those things.  Quake would probably get credit for adding mouse aiming (even though it wasn't a standard menu option, and had to be enabled with a console command), or else maybe Duke Nukem 3D. Unreal would most likely get credited as the genesis of alternate firing modes, while Half-Life is probably the one most people remember for introducing the notion of reloading weapons.  I'm not totally sure which other FPS would get the nod for mainstreaming the greater presence of story in the genre – probably Half-Life again.

But since it's free, I would strongly recommend giving the Marathon trilogy a spin.  It's a little rough around the edges even judged by the standards of its time, but still eminently playable, with a strong story told well. And if it seems at times like the FPS That History Forgot, well, that's because History was mostly looking the other way at the time. It's part of the appeal for me, too.  It feels at times like a "lost" game.

Let that add to its mystique.

[vespaertine]

shit my groupchat has said - an ask meme

this ask meme is very long, and very nsfw! there are currently 88 starter sentences, and more may be added. apparently, when you scroll up in discord far enough, your computer will lay down and die. anyway, have fun with this, and feel free to change things up or add your own to the list!

“that’s so southern of you.”

“we’re close enough friends that i can just post tit pics and it’s no big deal.”

“i’ve become she-woman man-fucker.”

“why would i want to fuck him? he looks like a thumb.”

“the highlight of that trip was having very loud sex at a family resort.”

“do you ever just read something and immediately wish the hag would come of of her cave and just kill you?”

“i have a feeling that you aren’t about that, judging by the spaghetti dog.”

“your mom is the ultimate wing man.”

“her dress looked like a fancy latex sex dungeon get up.”

“she looks like a raw squid.”

“i’ve got 20 barrels of grog and some bombs.”

“my brand of romance is accidentally meme-ing while nearly sexting.”

“...the rest of the brain is devoted to stupid, ape stuff. like eating.”

“you’re the soft butch we all need in our lives.”

“bobby flay better not fuck my grandma.”

“fucking help me fend off the straight boys.”

“i’m attracted to the fish prince.”

“can you girlfriend her and have her send me some edibles? thanks.”

“this is the world’s okayest pie crust.”

“i’m proof that aquarians have god complexes.”

“i just realized that it’s a full moon AND mercury is in retrograde.”

“we all fuckin’ weebs.”

“i just need lobster when i get to the east coast, and then i’ll be gucci.”

“we all just wanna get topped and loaded like a bacon cheese baked potato.”

“fucking. unicorn skin armor.”

“war ... playing with anime tiddies.”

“you’re out here making me gayer than i already am.”

“he had a dirty foot kink and it kind of made me want to die.”

“i’m getting a bad dragon soon. i’ve waited all year for tax returns.”

“you look like the butch of my dreams.”

“Ayyee our periods are aligned!”

“i don’t have enough alcohol in my system for this.”

“it’s awkward when an ex of yours likes your nudes.”

“somehow golden showers came up in the radio room yesterday.”

“this is why you should keep multiple boyfriends.”

“i want him to kick me out of bed and into a wall.”

“cannonballing a dick would hurt so bad.”

“you’re not a real gamer unless you’ve eaten todd howard’s ass, thanking him for his 6th release of skyrim.”

“i’m not into that, but i’ve got an open mind.”

“the sparkle dog community is wild.”

“no offense but i want all of the aliens to raw me.”

“i don’t need a man. i need a swamp demon from the bayou.”

“as a furry, i have seen dark things that no man should see.”

“shut up i’m pissing. fuck i actually really have to pee.”

“that boi got the entire trans-alaskan oil pipeline in his shorts.”

“i would have fucked him, but then i heard him use the word ‘bro’ unironically in a phone conversation.”

“accept the granite.”

“my panties have been destroyed. vanquished.”

“apparently social justice summons me.”

“take a swig of some 90% isopropyl alcohol. down the hatch.”

“i always get my way ... except for the times i don’t.”

“i think i saw him have a mini funeral with his pot stuff over the trash can.”

“i die when the cornbread is in me.”

“mothman seems like the type of cryptid who waits until marriage and just wants to take you out for ice cream.”

“i’m a bowser fucker.”

“this candle is rainbow for gay intent.”

“you can catch me spooning sangria right out of the pitcher.”

“i see absolutely no downsides to prison.”

“if you decide to go with tax evasion, you get sent to a fancy federal prison.”

“do you want to see something galactically stupid?”

“hog tie me in the middle of the target wine isle.”

“i sucked his dick and he nutted in 2 minutes flat.”

“if you want the puss you’ve gotta, like, do something.”

“i went to the gym with a bottle of water, and returned home with a bag of chips and a coke.”

“i’m here, i’m queer, and i’m a little bit sad.”

“i feel like at this point we need to move out into the middle of the forest, dump everyone, and start a coven.”

“these are naturally flavored ranch chips. as opposed to unnaturally flavored.”

“i’ve had panera once and i don’t even remember the experience.”

“no, i don’t smoke pot. it’s for the aesthetic.”

“who knew that raccoons and walruses were so closely related via dick bone.”

“the aura of that google docs is so cursed, my internet went offline for a minute when i tried to open it.”

“ye olde condom and nutella life hacks.”

“can you hold on to a bull with a rope tied around its nuts for 8 seconds? i don’t think so.”

“he ain’t allowed in my vuvuzela.”

“get your applesauce injected intravenously.”

“we’re the sister wives, without the husband.”

“somehow i ended up listening to three days grace and this lyric video is done in comic sans.”

“if you can find andy warhol’s diary, he legit talks about having pubic lice for like five or six pages.”

“you had me at ‘victorian lesbians’.”

“there’s something so romantic and quaint about letters, my dude.”

“i love how decadently filthy this is.”

“just let my sad, writhing, angry body glide through space for eternity.”

“tell him to try dipping his nuts in milk.”

“welcome to the femslash fun swamp.”

“i just got like 8% more gay.”

“not gonna lie ... i wanna date mothman.”

“i just read a discussion talking about getting trapped in the fairy realm after having a fairy nut in your mouth.”

“four dads at home depot? no. four moms in a sunroom of a suburban home having an orgy.”

[tristinai]

Life Update

Month three in Japan and things just keep getting crazier.

I dumped my girlfriend on Sunday. So far, my post-survival breakup kit has consisted of:

1. Skyrim 2. Depressing fanfiction 3. Pocky 4. Red wine 5. Consuming said pocky and red wine while writing depressing fanfiction and being angry at the world.

I am without vegan ice cream but I did find some nice dairy-free sorbet at the nearby grocery store. Close enough.

Pocky is not vegan but I made the switch from vegan to vegetarian when I came to Japan. Though I still don’t consume dairy since I am severely allergic to it so ice cream would have done more damage to me than pocky with trace amounts of milk powder.

Anyway...

Break-up happened because I am a callous jerk. The conversation was pretty much:

Her - “I’m not happy, not that you care.”

Me - *not taking the passive aggressive bait because I really don’t like when people try to trap me in an argument* “Okay, let’s break up.”

Her - “Shouldn’t we talk about this?”

Me - “I don’t see the point.”

And then we were done. It was done by text and she was trying to get me to meet up to talk over things...I don’t know if it’s because she didn’t want to break up? Or because she wanted to have a conversation in person to make things amicable?

But whatever the reason, I really just didn’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with a family issue for the last few weeks and I haven’t had the energy to pacify someone else’s insecurities because I don’t PDA enough, or constantly compliment their appearance, or take the bait whenever they go on about other women trying to date them and go on a jealous rampage. I’m not that kind of person and the more pushed I feel into indulging in behavior that I don’t like, the more closed off I get. 

But I understand how hard it can be to date someone like me since I can come off as cold. Not mean. Just...distant. And for some people, they can’t handle that I don’t obsess over my romantic relationships, that I am just as content on a Friday night to spend it at home by myself, reading or playing video games, as I am with hanging out with them. I don’t think I’ve even exhibited jealous behavior in nearly a decade because I just think it’s weird and childish to tell someone what they can and can’t do when they are not with you. If someone cheats on me and I find out, I just dump them. Broken trust = deal breaker. 

And these were things she didn’t like. She wanted me to be more emotional and she wanted me to be jealous sometimes and I felt that I couldn’t do those things on a whim.

So instead of arguing, I broke things off. 

I was still a bit upset and angry over it, even though I refused to talk about it with her. But I think it’s better this way.

And now, the real problem that’s been distracting me:

I received a call from my brother nearly two weeks ago. He was having issues with his medication and he was crying over the phone about how he doesn’t know what to do anymore. His paranoia is getting worse and he was worried he was going to hurt himself. I think he was having trouble with voices again, though I tried to talk him down from his panic and after a while, once I got him calm, we discussed how he could go about getting better medication.

It...I don’t know. It was a rough conversation and for all of last week, I felt numb to everything else. I’m the closest person to my brother and the only one he feels comfortable discussing his mental illness with. I think that other people may hear the word “Schizoaffective” and they might think something really terrible. So since he has no one else to talk to, except his doctor, I made sure to call him a few times last week. I plan on calling him again tomorrow to see what the doctor said and how he’s feeling.

I’m just...really worried. But the worse case scenario, if he needs my support, I will quit my job in Japan and head back home. I’m not gambling his health over my job. 

[illusivegore]

Eight to Consider: Games of Last Generation – Part One

I’ve been pondering over this list for some time now. I’ve wanted to discuss my favorite games of last generation, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. As you may or may not know, Eight to Consider is an ongoing feature here at GAJ and usually consists of a list of eight items related to a certain topic, but with all the games I had to choose from, eight just felt too small. I didn’t want to bog the list down with too many games, but I wanted to discuss a good number. I ended up deciding on 20 because it just felt right to me, so let’s just pretend the title of this article actually makes sense.

The next question I had to ask myself was, “What exactly should be considered last generation?” Should I include PC exclusives or handheld games that technically haven’t changed generations? Should I consider the Wii as last generation or the Wii U or both since there’s a bit of a grey area there? Should I include HD re-releases or compilations? Well I went with what I felt was the most obvious way to handle it. I decided to keep the list strictly confined to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 library (since that’s where I played a majority of my games anyway) and if it was on the system at any point, it was fair game. This includes all retail games, as well as games available exclusively via download from PSN and XBLA.

(Shout out to the original The Binding of Isaac because it never made its way to consoles, so it doesn’t fit the criteria for this list, but it’s fantastic and you should play it.)

With all that out of the way, what follows are my favorite games from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (as well as a few extras sprinkled throughout). Here are the first 10 of 20 games from last generation for your consideration.

20. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

Platforms: PSN, XBLA, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows RT, Steam, iOS, Android

Starting things off is a fantastic entry in the Pac-Man series. Championship Edition DX is, far and away, the best Pac-Man game I’ve ever played. By taking the great foundation that the original Championship Edition built and ratcheting the intensity up to 11, DX is a truly special game. It is all about memorizing patterns, while traversing each maze at insane speeds and was some of the most fun I had on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

19. Fable II

Platforms: Xbox 360

The Fable series is a bit of a divisive one. I never played the original Fable and Fable III left much to be desired, but Fable II hit all the right notes for me and I fell in love with it. It was the perfect blend of adventure, RPG, and action, just deep enough to keep things interesting, but not overly complicated like so many games of the genre tend to be. Now that it is backwards compatible with Xbox One, it might be one of the reasons I end up picking up Microsoft’s new console.

18. South Park: The Stick of Truth

Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

South Park: The Stick of Truth might just be the biggest surprise on this list. With all the ups and downs it faced during development and with it being a licensed game, the fact that it turned out well was a bit of a shocker. Not only did it turn out well, it’s actually pretty damn great RPG. As a long time fan of South Park, getting a game that actually did justice to the show was a long time coming and well worth the wait. Granted, The Stick of Truth probably isn’t for everyone, but if you’ve ever enjoyed an episode of South Park, do yourself a favor and give this one a try.

Honorable Mentions: Batman: Arkham Asylum | BIT.TRIP Presents…Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien | Borderlands 2 | Braid | Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons | Castle Crashers | Child of Light | Costume Quest | Darksiders | Dragon Age: Origins | Dragon’s Crown | The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

17. Rock Band 2

Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Wii

This right here was, in my humble opinion, the pinnacle of the rhythm game. Some believe Rock Band 3 was the best in the series, but I felt it got a bit watered down with the addition of the keyboard and because of that the game’s track list suffered. Rock Band 2, on the other hand, took everything great about the original game, refined it, and made a near perfect experience. While the track list wasn’t quite as good as the first game, being able to import the original’s songs made for a complete and satisfying rock show. On top of all that, the sheer amount of downloadable songs made Rock Band 2 a game with nearly endless replayability. Perhaps the greatest attribute of Rock Band 2 is all the fun times and good memories it help create and for all those reasons it more than earns its spot on this list.

16. Resident Evil 5

Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Shield Android TV

Resident Evil 5 isn’t quite as good as its predecessor, Resident Evil 4, but it’s still a great, underrated game. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for RE4 coming before it, RE5 would probably be a much more lauded over game. Granted, the addition of co-op wasn’t welcome, thanks to the terrible AI. Outside of that one complaint, Resident Evil 5 is and will always remain one of my favorite action games from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation and if you’ve never played it you can even pick it up Xbox One and PS4 now.

15. Tomb Raider

Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

The 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider is another game that surprised the hell out of me. I’ve never been a big fan of the series, for a variety of reasons, so I was skeptical about this reimagining of Lara Croft. Well, it turns out that Tomb Raider is one of the best action games to release in years. There is so much to love from the exploration to the combat to the actual tomb raiding. It’s a nearly perfect experience and another game you can check out on current generation consoles if you missed it the first time around.

14. Bastion

Platforms: Xbox 360, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, iOS

Bastion is the total package. It’s gorgeous, has one of my favorite soundtracks, and is an absolute joy to play. I’ve played through Bastion at least half a dozen times on a variety of platforms and each playthrough is always just enjoyable as the last. With a variety of upgrades and challenges, multiple endings, and combat that never gets old, there are plenty of reasons to consider Bastion one of the best games of the past decade.

Last Gen’s Biggest Disappointments

Batman Arkham City | Brutal Legend | Dead Space 2 (Let’s not even talk about Dead Space 3. Gross.) | Dishonored | Fable III | Resident Evil 6 | Shadows of the Damned | State of Decay

13. Shatter

Platforms: PSN, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux

What a game. Shatter is fantastic and did something I never thought a game could do, it made me enjoy breaking bricks. It’s a unique take on the Breakout style of game that changes up the types of environments you play in, allows you to manipulate how your ball travels, and even throws in boss fights for good measure. All of that is great, but perhaps Shatter’s best feature is its amazing soundtrack. Seriously, have a listen to this sweet tune.

12. Super Meat Boy

Platforms: Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Android

In 2010, Super Meat Boy was the best platformer I had played since Super Mario Bros. 3 and to this day that remains true. Thanks to its tight, precise controls, quality level design, superb soundtrack, and brutal, yet fair difficulty I’d consider it a modern day masterpiece in game design. I’ve never completed the final level (apparently my skills peaked just prior to finishing the light world), but that has not and never will diminish my love for Super Meat Boy.

11. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, Android, PlayStation Vita

I am terrible at strategy/tactical RPGs, but I still love playing them. Something about the combat is just so satisfying, but I couldn’t pull off a proper strategy to save my life. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is an unforgiving game, even on its easiest setting, but I couldn’t stop playing it until I saw it through to the end. If I’m being completely honest, I think Enemy Unknown is the only strategy/tactical RPG I’ve ever finished. There’s just something so addictive about building your own base, developing new tech, and of course the turn-based combat.