#i should take the difficulty down but i just moved on to playing fallout 4 instead lmao

[itsjamieithink]

need to seduce that malewife mage in baldurs gate 3 but unfortunately i just don't get the combat. girl why is this so hard

[gothamcityneedsme]

I saw this bouncing around my dash and decided to fill it out myself for fun :)  I decided to not double-list any games, and I tried to mix up the companies I used too so that the list would be more unique.

Long post, so I’m doing a readmore for my longwinded part lol.

(read more)

Favorite Game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords - I could talk about this game forever.  How it tears apart the Star Wars universe from within, how it creates a compelling story while challenging the usual themes, etc.  I could talk for ages about the characters and how their motivations slot in place, and how this game lends itself to interpretation and analysis alongside roleplay.  It’s just a wonderful game, one I deeply love and will always love.  It’s a game that isn’t afraid to have you talk to other characters for twenty or thirty minutes at a time and honestly I’m always riveted at every line.  This game deserves the cult fanbase it has, but I think there’s a lot the fanbase misses in appreciating this game.  (Note...gameplay is a little janky and a community made mod restores a lot content that was cut before shipping-the game wasn’t properly finished).

Best Story:  Fallout New Vegas - It’s the setting that makes the story here, and all the moving pieces and factions alongside the main conflict really make this game stand out.  There’s so many little pieces to find along the way in the world and the way the main quest splits based on who you want in power feels important--and you are choosing a future for this whole region.

Favorite Art Style: The Witness - This game is peacefully wonderful with its visuals.  There are wonderful nature scenes and nests of wires and panels spreading in various parts of the island that are fascinating to look at.  The environment is half of the gameplay in most areas, so it’s important to look around even though exploration is not really the gameplay.  You find puzzles in the world, even in nature, and it’s fascinating.  The colors are bright and beautiful.  There is even a map in the middle of the island inside of a lake that helps you track your progress if you notice it (it isn’t like a normal ‘map’).

Favorite Soundtrack: Shin Megami Tensei IV - I love video game soundtracks, but SMTIV is something special.  The music booms in ways that make you really understand the atmosphere of the world, and there’s a great mix of different kinds of tracks for different places.  I love the tracks for the other worlds you enter, and the themes of the different routes are done so well.  Some of the music draws from past SMT games, but the remixes done for this game really are stunning to me, and there’s so many fantastic original tracks.

Hardest Game: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - I love this game but I literally never touch it without a walkthrough, which is why it gets to be the hardest game on the list, despite being a point and click adventure game lol.  Also just emotionally this game is challenging too, but I definitely mean this more in terms of getting a ‘perfect run’.

Funniest Game: The Stanley Parable - Trying to make this list has taught me that I don’t really play many ‘funny games’.  I don’t know if a game where multiple endings demand that you kill yourself should count as a ‘funniest game’, but it is also a game where the narrator tells you to stare at a fern and memorize its features, so....it counts.

Game I Like that is Hated: RWBY Grimm Eclipse - I’ve been playing this game since it was in early access and have loved it the whole time.  I find the gameplay soothing and fun, and I like playing the different characters.  It’s a game I play to chill out and just enjoy some fun battle mechanics.  It’s a fun game and I’ve spent over 100 hours in it, so I hope I like it, lol.

Game I Hate that is Liked:  Nier Automata - Neither this game’s gameplay or story impress me, and the fact that you have to replay basically the same stuff from a more boring-to-play-character’s pov in order to SEE all of the plot is a huge damper on the experience.  The story, to me, someone who engages with a lot of robot-focused fiction, is far from impressive or new, and it hardly engages with genre specifics at all, let alone in a new or interesting way.  I view this game as ‘a story with robots in it’ rather than ‘a story about robots’, which, to me, is a detriment.

Underrated: Nevermind - This game is amazing and very unheard of--and when it is heard of, it has been marketed incorrectly.  Nevermind seems like a horror game, and does market itself as one a bit, but it’s much more than that.  It’s more about trauma, recovery, therapy, etc.  This is a game that is so mindful about the topics it engages in that I am impressed by it every time.  It’s heavy with symbolism and character, despite lacking conversations or other similar game mechanics.  This is a lovely game that I really wish more people knew about-`p5-all of the patients are so interesting, and the focus on recovery and mental health is impressive.

Overrated:  Fire Emblem - I sort of mean this as the series as a whole really.  I have enjoyed the entries I have played somewhat, but I overall consider the series much less impressive than I was led to believe by others.  The gameplay especially is not impressive to me in any regard, even though I sometimes do find myself enjoying it.  The stories are alright, but many of them are weighed down by the gameplay and as a writer and person who likes to analyze writing, it’s very hard to do so when it isn’t able to fully exist under the chains the gameplay forces on it.  There are ways to mix gameplay and story well, Fire Emblem has not really done that in any of the entries I’ve played.  That being said, I don’t regret playing them, and I will occasionally replay, but I consider them mediocre games at best.

Best Voice Acting: Devil Survivor 2 - I love the voice acting in this game.  I feel like all the characters are really suited to their voices, and it’s really easy for me to visualize their voices.  They really bring the game to life and make both the dramatic and the funny scenes more enjoyable.

Worst Voice Acting: Jedi Knight Jedi Academy - I love this game, I really do, but some of the voice acting is janky.  Some of it is okay too--I think Kyle Katarn’s voice actor does fine, and some of the others I like NOW but hated when I was a kid, but the male protagonist voice in this game is just awful.  Which is bad when Jennifer Hale is the female voice actress lol.  His performance is passable though unless you’re playing darksided--the darksided ending to the game lacks all punch when you’re playing the male protagonist.

Favorite Male:  Battler Ushiromiya from Umineko no Naku Koro Ni - He’s the protagonist for most of the visual novels and I adore him utterly, especially once you move past episode 2.  He’s a wonderful character who I care about deeply.  I love his drive and how he fights--he’s someone who is easy to cheer for.  He matures well throughout the series and his character development is just wonderful.

Favorite Female:  Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 - I really like how Naoto fits so well in the game, especially for being a final recruit--oftentimes the final recruit of Persona games (post 3) have a bit of a more difficult time feeling right with the group.  Naoto works really well though, and I love her struggles and story as well.  I think the difficulties she has concerning living as a woman in her field hit very deep to a problem that has existed for a very long time.

Favorite Protagonist: Connor of Daventry from King’s Quest 8 Mask of Eternity - I’m like, one of four fans of this character in the world, lol.  KQ8 is not a very well liked game and it does have a lot of issues, both with age and with how much of a departure it is from the series prior to it.  It’s strange to take a puzzle adventure game and make it a hybrid with what basically is a shooter, and it doesn’t really work.  Add to that the fact that you spend most of your time in the game without anyone around to talk to and it leads to this really polarizing and weird experience.  For me, Conner goes through what I would consider to be the ‘Ultimate Nightmare Scenario”.  Everyone in the world is turned to stone except him (and he survived out of mere chance) and so now it’s up to him, practically alone, to save the entire world.  There is no game lonelier than this.  I adore him for his bravery in the face of it, and how he just picks up to do what must be done because someone should do it, and if no one else can, then he will.  I also really love how he apologizes to people who are encased in stone while he takes money from their houses to help him on his journey.  I really do think he went back after the game was over and gave everyone heaps of gold to pay them back with interest lol.

Favorite Village:  Oakvale from Fable - The first Fable is the only one I really like, and it was one of the games I played when I was little, so the hometown in the game always meant a lot to me.  I like how you grow up there and how your tragic backstory is there--and then how you get to return to the town years later after you’ve come into your own, and you can see it completely rebuilt.  I like to spend a lot of my time in this town, just wandering around it and playing the minigames.  Even though I have a house in every town, Oakvale is where my hero calls home.

Most Hated Character:  Merril from Dragon Age 2 - I don’t really want to lay into how I feel about Merril, but what I will say is that it was suggested to me that I totally ignore her when playing, and I did so.  I only met her for her quest, dropped her off in town, and literally never spoke to her or interacted for the rest of the game.  I had a much better experience for it, honestly.  She appeared after I made my choice in the end of the game, which felt weird since I hadn’t spoken to her in several ingame years, but other than that, the game was totally fine without her.  I sort of just wish you could kill characters in DA2 the way you can in DAO, then I’d just do that, tbh.  It doesn’t suit very many (or any) of the characters I rp in DA2 to keep her around or support her in any way.

First Game I Played: Mixed up Mother Goose Deluxe - I’m not actually sure if this is the FIRST game I’ve ever played or not, but it’s one of the first I played alone as a kid.  I really loved it--this is probably what created my love for point and click adventures, and the game was very silly and fun.

Favorite Company: Bioware - I’ve always been a sucker for Bioware games, ever since Knights of the Old Republic 1 was my favorite childhood game.  I love how they do stories and party members, and while I’m not a fan of all of their games, I really love what they’ve made and their style of storytelling and character driven plot.  Even though sometimes their stories get cliche, I think the suit video games well and most of my early gaming was within their games.

Hated Company: EA - Bioware truly only started to go to shit after the EA acquisition, so I fucking hate EA.   I know Bioware had issues before EA too, but I definitely don’t think EA has helped the situation whatsoever.

Depressing Game: The Beginner’s Guide - I relate to this game as a creator and a writer, and it affects me deeply because of the story it tells and the questions it raises.  It makes me reflect on how I think of myself as a creator, and it reminds me of friendships I used to have.

Creepy Game:  The Path - God, I love this game.  It’s just aimlessly wandering around and finding symbolic scenery and watching your current character comment on it.  Then, you go off to find your girl’s wolf, and each one is different and unique to her, and you watch it ‘kill’ her--and facing her wolf is the only way each girl can truly mature.  Whenever you get to grandmother’s house, the camera switches to first person, and your eyes keep closing, so you can only see while clicking to move.  It forces you to keep moving so that you can see, but since you are moving, you only get to see things somewhat vaguely.  It’s got a great atmosphere, and I love the symbolic storytelling.

Happy Game: Eastshade - This game is so sweet.  There’s some drama around to with many of the quests, but I like this as an rpg without combat, and I think this would be a really good kids game.  There’s a lot to see and explore, and the game was made to be really pretty so that you want to paint several aspects of it.  It’s really lovely to just wander around in this game and bike around the area, painting anything that suits your fancy.  As long as you don’t finish the main quest, you’re free to wander, and materials do respawn, so you essentially can infinitely paint once you get far enough.

Favorite Ending: Virtue’s Last Reward - I love the questions this game asks and where the ending goes.  It thematically ties together--the whole reason the game itself exists is to get the attention of a ‘higher being’--the player, essentially.  I love how it plays with that concept, and even though the final game in the series doesn’t entirely pick this idea up where this game left it, standalone this game is stunning in how it comes together.

[warsofasoiaf]

Have you played Fallout 4? What did you think of it?

Joseph Anderson had a phenomenal video on Fallout 4. Although it is enormous, so be careful. Overall, there were things to like and things not to like about Fallout 4. I’ll start with what I liked first. Throwing a cut in here because it’s long.

Combat in the first-person Fallout games has always been clunky, and enemy AI relatively largely consisted of straight charging or shooting from as maximum range as possible. Difficulty came primarily from enemy quantity, high damage output, or incredibly enemy hitpoints. The last of these has been a particular Bethesda problem in their games, with enemies being incredible damage sponges, making late-game fights a boring slog as you slowly whittle down their health while being impossible to damage in any meaningful capacity. While enemy variations aren’t nearly as high as the game’s fans would have you believe if you conceive of them as AI patterns, the AI activity did have some nice variations. Human enemies used cover, ghouls bobbed and weaved as you shot them, mole rats tried to ambush you. It’s got nothing on games with fully realized combat system, but it does make the combat that you do engage in much more enjoyable. 

All of the random crap you can pick up in a Bethesda game having a purpose is another positive. It is a true nuisance to find out when playing a game that I hit my encumbrance limit only to find out it’s because I’ve picked up a bunch of brooms, bowls, and other garbage accidentally while grabbing coin and other worthwhile treasures. Actually having these things mean an object is worthy mechanically, aside from level design; typewriters are useful as items as opposed to something that shows you that the ruined building you’re in was formerly a newspaper. As crafting is a big portion of the game, having these things provide component parts that you use for crafting on their own creates more utility in these elements of clutter which still require modeling, rendering, placement, etc. Now if you need aluminum, you’ll try to raid something like a cannery because it will have aluminum cans, which is an excellent way to create player-generated initiative. It also reinforces one of the primary themes of the game which is crafting and design, where even the trailers of the game suggest building as a key idea of the game. Certainly sensible for a post-apocalyptic game to focus on building a new society upon the ruins of the older one, and given what the game was trying to do with their four factions mechanic, it’s clear that this was their intent, and good job for trying to ensure that things factor back into their principal intent. 

Deathclaws look properly scary, the animations with Vault Boy were funny, there’s some pretty window dressing. The voice work wasn’t bad, the notable standout being Nick Valentine. The Brotherhood airship was an impressive visual. I had a little fun creating some basic settlements, particularly in Hangman’s Alley where I tried to create a network of suspended buildings and Spectacle Island where I had room to grant every prospective settler a shack. Bethesda clearly looked to create a game with mass market appeal, and I believe the metrics bears out that they succeeded in that regard. The robots in the USS Constitution quest were very funny, the writers were able to make the absolute ridiculousness of the situation work (curse you Weatherby Savings and Loan!) and framed it well as a comedic sidequest, with a final impressive visual if you side with the bots and the ship takes flight.

Now that this is out of the way, I think that a lot of what Fallout 4 did was not the right move. 

The quest design was particularly atrocious in this regard. Most of the radiant quests boiled them down to a simple formula - go to the dungeon, get to the final room where you need to either kill the boss or get an item from the boss chest, return. In this game though, the main story quests often were boiled down to just this simple formula. You need to find a doodad from a Courser to complete your teleporter? Go to the dungeon, kill the boss, recover the item. The Railroad needs you to help an escaped synth! Do it by going to the dungeon and getting to the final room. This really hampers the enjoyment of games because the expressiveness of the setting and elements of an RPG is often explored through quests. Quests are meant to get you out into the world and give you an objective, but they are also meant to connect you to the people that you’re dealing with. If every quest is boiled down to the same procedure, that hurts the immersion, but the bigger sin is that when you return you have another quest waiting for you. That robs the player of the sense of accomplishment because there is no permanent solution to problems, even for a minute. There is no different end-state for the player to see the transition from one to the other and feel accomplished that they were the ones who did it. Other RPG’s always understood this - a D&D game might have a party save a town investigate an illness dealing with a town, take out an evil druid who has charmed the wildlife into attacking supply and trade shipments, slay goblins who are raiding cattle, there are a lot of possibilities that might even feel samey: if you’re killing charmed dire wolves or goblin cattle thieves, you’re still going to the dungeon and fighting the boss, the usual flair and variation came from encounter design. After you’d do that though, the NPC’s might say “Hey, Mom is feeling better after you cured that disease, she’s starting to walk again,” “Hey, we were able to send a shipment of wine from the vineyards out to the capital, here’s some coin for the shipment as reward for your service,” or even just a simple “Hey, thanks for taking out those cattle thieves.” There’s a sense of accomplishment even if it’s a fleeting “we did a cool thing.” Computer RPG’s are tougher in this regard, part of the sense of accomplishment in tabletop gaming is also with your friends, it’s a shared activity, but usually in that the reward was some experience and character growth and going to new content. There isn’t new content here in Fallout 4 though, because of the samey quest design and lack of progression.

The conversational depth was also ruined, with so much of the voice choices mangled by the system of conversation they designed. By demanding a four-choice system, they limited themselves to always requiring four options which completely mangled interactivity. The previous menu design allowed for as many lines as you wanted, even if the choices were usually beads on a string. The depth and variation, however, are even lower than what could be found in games like Mass Effect 3, and the small word descriptions were often so inaccurate that it created a massive disconnect between myself the player and the Sole Survivor, because they weren’t saying what I thought they would be saying. That prevented me from feeling immersed, because a “Sarcastic” option could be a witty joke or a threat that sounds like it should come out of a bouncer. The character options were already limited, with Nate being a veteran and Nora being a lawyer, but this lack of depth prevents me from feeling the character even moreso than a scripted backstory. You get those in games, but being unable to predict how I’m reacting is something that kills character. 

Bethesda needs to end the “find (x) loved one” as a means to get people motivated to do a quest, or if they don’t want to rid themselves of that tool in their toolbox, they need to do a better job getting me to like them. More linear games can get away with this, but open world games encourage the sort of idle dicking around that doesn’t make any sense for a person who is attempting to find a family member. Morrowind did this much better, where your main task was to be an Imperial agent, and you were encouraged to join other factions and do quests as a means to establish a cover identity and get more acquainted with combat. Folks who didn’t usually ended up going to Hasphat Antabolius and getting their face kicked in by Snowy Granius. Here though, what sort of parent am I if instead of pursuing a lead to find my infant son I’m wandering over east because I saw what looked like a cool ruin, and I need XP to get my next perk (another gripe, perks that are simple percentage increases because they slow down advancement and make combat a slog if you don’t take them, depressing what should be a sense of accomplishment). By making us try to feel close with a character but by refusing to give us the players time with them, there is no sense of bonding. I felt more connection to James in Fallout 3 than I did for Sean, but even then, I felt more connection to him because he was voiced by Liam Neeson than because of any sense of fatherly affection. The same goes for the spouse and baby Sean, I feel little for them because I see them only a little. I know that I should care more, but I also know that I the player don’t because all that I was given is “you should care about them.” You need time to get to know characters in game, along with good writing and voicework. I like Nick because he quoted “The Raven” when seeing the Brotherhood airship and I thought that was excellent writing, I didn’t have any experiences with Sean to give me that same sense of bonding. 

They’ve also ruined the worldbuilding. The first-person Fallout games have always had a problem with this, with Fallout 3 recycling Super Mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, and other iconic Fallout things into Washington D.C. Part of this is almost certainly the same reason that The Force Awakens was such a dull rehash of the plot of A New Hope, they wanted to establish some sort of continuity with a new director to not frighten off old fans who they relied on to provide a significant majority of the sales. The problem of course, is that this runs into significant continuity problems, now needing Vault 87 to have a strain of FEV and having a joint Vault-Tec/US Government experiment program there on the East Coast, so we can have Super Mutants. Jackson’s chameleon isn’t native to Washington D.C., but we need to have Deathclaws because they’re the iconic scary Fallout enemy, as opposed to creating something new with the local fauna, which is only made worse because they did do that with the yao guai formed from the American black bear (the black bear doesn’t typically range in the Chesapeake Basin near DC these days, but it’s close enough and given the loss of humans to force them back they could easily return to their old pre-human rangings). Some creatures are functions of the overall setting and can be global, ghouls are the big one here since radiation would be a global thing and fitting considering Fallout is a post-apocalypse specifically destroyed by nuclear war. Others though, are clearly mutated creatures and so they would be more localized. Centaurs and floaters were designed by FEV experiments and collared by Super Mutants, they should really only be around Super Mutants. Radscorpions shouldn’t be around, there would probably be instead be mutated spiders. Making things worse are that the monster designers do develop some excellent enemies when they think about it. Far Harbor has a mutant hermit crab that uses a truck as a shell (a lobster restaurant truck, which is passable enough for a visual joke even if it falls apart when you think about other trucks that they might use) and a monster that uses an angler lure that resembles a crafting component - these are good ideas but the developers needed to awkwardly shoehorn in iconic Fallout things that have no place there. This isn’t to say that I’m in love with a lot of Fallout’s worldbuilding, a lot of the stuff in Fallout 2 I found to be kind of dumb particularly the talking deathclaws, but as the series went on it took objects without meaning. The G.E.C.K in Fallout 3 was pretty much a magic recombinator which makes no sense as a technology in a world devastated by resource collapse, something similar can be said about the Sierra Madre vending machines. 

Fallout 4 though, had a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies that really took an axe to the setting. The boy in the fridge outlasts the entire Great War, but apparently never needed to eat or drink water. This is, of course, stupid, because ghouls have always been shown to need to eat and drink - Fallout 1′s Necropolis section has a Water Chip but if you take it without finding an alternate source of clean water, the ghouls will die. Ghoul settler NPC’s that flock to your player-crafted towns require food and water. The entire thing was ruined from a complete lack of care, to build a quest where you reunite a lost boy with his still-alive ghoulified parents. I think this one bothers me not simply because of the egregious worldbuilding which isn’t even consistent in the very game it’s written it, but it’s done so frivolously for a boring escort quest. It feels scattershot, and that’s the problem I think with a lot of Fallout 4′s quests. They feel disconnected, like every writer worked in a cubicle without talking to any of the other writers. Same with things like the Lady in the Fog.

Are we done with that? Good, because now we’re going into the parts that I really dislike - the main quest and the factions. These are just awful. The developers took what folks really liked when it came to Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (Fallout 1 did have interesting factions but they were largely self-contained, more towns than anything else) and completely botched it. New Vegas was the clear inspiration for these factions, with the four faction model of NCR, Legion, House, and Indepenedent meaning that there were four different ways to go forward into the future, so we get three factions that fight each other and a fourth more player friendly faction that roughly resembles the Independent Vegas where you can pick and choose which factions you bring in with you and which you get rid of. Thematically, this fits in with the core of the game, crafting is a big portion of what you do and so crafting what sort of world the Commonwealth would be is simply a logical extension of it. The factions aren’t presented well though. The Railroad are impossibly naive and don’t demonstrate any rougher edges like denying supplies to humans in order to fuel their synth effort, even though such a thing should be evident if the post-apocalypse of the Commonwealth is to be believed. The Institute are sinister murderers and replacers without bringing any of the advanced technology that could provide some benefit such as the gigantic orange gourd that can grow. So much of their kill-and-replace mentality seems to be done for no great overarching purpose. The Minutemen are basically blank, pretty much just a catch-all for the player-built settlements, though the player as the leader of the Minutemen ends up getting bossed around by Preston to the point of the faction rejecting your commands to proceed with the main quest, a significant problem with Bethesda factions where you are the leader but never get any actual sense of leadership. There doesn’t appear to be any addressing of the failures of the previous Minutemen whether that be the previous summit, or new problems such as settlements feuding with each other requiring the general to intervene and mediate. The Brotherhood come the closest to a real faction with advantages and drawbacks if you squint, they are feudal overlords with the firepower to fight Super Mutants and other mutated nasties, but also violently reject ghouls and synths as part of their violent dogma except for seemingly not caring when you bring a companion around or killing ghoul settlers in settlements they control. But even then, we don’t really see the Brotherhood providing protection to the settlements that they demand for food, the typical radiant quest to destroy a pack of feral ghouls or super mutants is directed from a Brotherhood quest giver to a randomly determined location, hardly a good way to illustrate whether or not the Brotherhood is actually protecting settlements that they administer. We see little change in the way of the Commonwealth save that certain factions are alive or not because the game needs to stay active in order to perform radiant quests, so not even the signature ending slideshows can give us the illusion of effects building off of our actions. This is contrary to the theme of building a better world in the Commonwealth because there is no building. 

Special notice must be given to the Nuka-World raiders because they show the big problems with the factions. You can be a Raider in Nuka-World but only after becoming the Overboss, which is fair enough. But you’re already a Minuteman, but the Minutemen don’t activate any kill-on-sight order and Preston still helps you out. The game is so terrified of people losing out on content that they make permanent consequences rare, and when you do something like order an attack, it can be rescinded automatically if one of your companions is there. As an Overboss, you do grunt work in the Commonwealth, and the factions get mad and pissy if you don’t give them things despite even if you only give one section of the park to one of the factions, that’s more than they got from Colter. It’s like they don’t exist until the player shows up, which is exactly how a lot of modern Bethesda character and faction building seems to be. While in most computer games a sort of uneasy status quo is the desired beginning state because it gives the protagonist the chance to make ripples while justifying the existence of a status that allows the player to change it, it has to be applied consistently. 

The main quest itself is silly. There’s a decent twist with Sean becoming Father that sort of works, which would have worked much better if we had actually gotten a chance to bond with him, although the continuity of everything gets wiggy quick. When he said that he looked over the world and saw nothing but despair, I was wondering if they were going to actually bring a big question up and a debate between Father and the Player, the idea of what worth the people on the surface have, but it goes nowhere, it’s a missed opportunity. The main quest is just a means to meet all four factions and it’s a barebones skeleton at best. There are some interesting concepts they try, but what they do often falls flat. They try to establish some sort of empathy for Kellogg in the memory den, but it’s lazy and cheap because he kidnaps a baby and wastes your spouse, a wasted effort of empathy only made worse when you get criticized for not showing any sympathy. Kellogg then shows up in Nick’s memory for one second and then that little story nugget is ignored. The half-baked nature of the story keeps being brought back up, which is a pity because we actually saw them do a competent job in Far Harbor. The Followers of Atom are crazy and they really aren’t sympathetic in any way, but some of the folks inside the sub aren’t so bad that it might prevent you from wanting to detonate the sub, or at least you might think enough that you look for another solution. DiMA did some monstrous things, and if you bring him to justice, the game actually takes the time to evaluate whether or not you helped out Far Harbor, with meaningful consequences being taken if you took the time to do the sidequests which imparts far more meaning to them. 

While there’s a lot of problems that show up in terms of binary completion, the question of whether to replace Tektus and turn the Children of Atom to a more moderate path is a good question, it actually gives a lot more merit to the Institute if they were ever to have been shown to enact the same level of care. That only makes the Fallout problems stand out more, because it shows that they were capable of it but didn’t. This isn’t the only missed opportunity, synths themselves become a big problem. The goal was to create a very paranoid feeling but it was so sorely under-utilized that I never grew suspicious of folks because the game never gave me enough incentive to be suspicious of them. I didn’t think that Bethesda made synths that would give you false information or ambush you because that would have been potentially missed content. The idea of whether you are a synth or not is clearly an attempt to give the game more depth than it is presenting. You’re not a synth, Father’s actions make no sense if you are one, and DiMA attempting to make you think you are is silly because you know you aren’t one.

I think the game would have been much better if they had dropped the notion of Fallout entirely. If they had instead looked to create an open-world post-apocalyptic game focusing on crafting and building towns, perhaps with an eventual goal state of building many towns, establishing transportation networks, and rebuilding a junkyard society as a decent place (or going full Mad Max Bartertown complete with a Thunderdome for players looking for an evil and over-the-top option). That might have been an interesting game for Bethesda to potentially develop a new IP, even contracting with smaller studios for those who wish to tell story-heavy games in the setting. Instead, they applied Fallout like a bad paint job, cobbling together weak RP elements and story that made the game feel like a hydra that couldn’t recognize it was one being with multiple heads, constantly tearing the other parts of itself to ribbons. 

If I wanted to further improve it, I think I would have instead made the spouse a synth. It would require some serious reworking, but I would have made it so that Sean did believe that synths were people, or that they were real enough that the difference was negligible, they had free will. During the initial grab, the Institute took the entire cryopod where Sean was, baby and parent both. They used Sean to create the next generation of synths, but something happened with the parent, and they died during defrost. Sean hates the Institute for what they did, but what happened was truly a medical complication, not malicious in any way. When he learns that the player character is active, he creates a synth programmed to believe they are the spouse. He believes that exposing who he really is to the surviving parent would be traumatic, and as he hears that the player character is thriving, he wants to give them a chance at a normal life, and to alleviate the loss that he had in his life with the loss of his own parents. So the spouse is sent to you, and for a long time, you and the spouse have no idea. You adventure together, you build settlements together, the game encourages you to have a good relationship. It doesn’t have to be hunky dory, and I’d argue it’s actually better if it’s not. Have the spouse be programmed with some rough experiences in the Wasteland, so they’re nervous, skittish, maybe even a little resentful that the player character snoozed their way through everything, but slowly rebuild the relationship. That way, when the quest eventually comes where you find the truth, the player character has to confront that reality. Then when you confront Sean, Sean explains himself and the player is given the choice to forgive him, be understanding but still angry, or be hugely pissed at the manipulation. That’s drama that uses the core theme of what synths are about with the whole kill-and-replace motif the Institute does. There’s a plot twist that batters the player, there’s one that’s just messy and gross and tough to reconcile. There’s one where the conclusion the player comes to is valid because it’s the player themselves deciding what the meaning of it is.

So overall, I see Fallout 4 as a bunch of missed opportunities and clumsy writing wrapped up in the popular shallow open-worlds that triple-A games end up having. 

Thanks for the question, Jackie.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[abacys]

7 Days to Die - Play Conditioning

I’ve been thinking about 7 Days to Die a fair amount recently. I got the game in mid-to-late 2016, shortly before the Alpha 15 build was released. I enjoyed it for a while, but after a couple of days, I moved on to other games, as I am wont to do. However, last year, I decided to revisit it and try out surviving on my own again. While I was wandering around the world, my father happened to ask what the game was like. He used to play his fair share of video games, but hadn’t stuck to anything much in recent years. He had tried out some games here and there, Civilization VI comes to mind, but never played for very long. I mentioned a few aspects of the game I thought he would find interesting and recommended that he try it out. Now I have over one hundred and fifty hours in the game, he has banked almost nine hundred, and various family members and friends have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours playing. This has left me wondering what exactly it was that had pulled them so far into this experience that other games had lacked.

The first time you play a new game plays a large role in how you will interact with it as you get further in. The experience at the beginning of the game will contextualize the rest of your time playing. This concept is an element of game design known as Play Conditioning, invented by Harris Brewis, also known as HBomberguy.

First, I should explain what 7 Days to Die is. 7DtD is a post-apocalyptic, open-world survival horror game published by The Fun Pimps, released in 2013. From some statements made by the developers, it is revealed that the third world war has devastated the earth, with nuclear weapons destroying most traces of civilization. In the fallout, a virus of unknown origin has spread, bringing the dead back to life as zombies. Your task is to survive in this increasingly hostile environment. The game takes place in Navezgane, a fictitious county in Arizona, known as “one of the last true Edens on Earth.” 

Now, let’s take a look a way that the first hour of gameplay might play out.

You wake up in a forest near a road that has a frame of a car and various pieces of trash strewn about. you are greeted with a note with a threat written on it, a few basic supplies, and a short set of tutorial quests to get you started. You get to work on completing the quests. 

The sun is now higher in the sky, and the tweets of the of the birds has quieted down.

After you complete the quests, you're pointed in the direction of the nearest trading post, but are otherwise left to your own devices, free to do what you want in the world. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn’t last. 

You quickly notice that you only have one can of food and water, which do not seem to recover much.  As it is the first day of the game, there are two options to to get more. They are to try to make it to the trading post or scavenge for supplies in various locations throughout the land. You take the second option, as you have nothing to purchase food with.

The sun is now directly overhead, and you can now hear wind whistling through the trees.

Upon finding a house, you enter and try to find food to prepare for the coming days. Encountering a few zombies, you to take damage and start bleeding. After beating them back, you use the only bandage you have. This recovers some of your lost health, brings the maximum back up from where it had fallen, and stops your bleeding. Now there is no way of recovering lost health other than waiting, and nothing that can help you if you start bleeding again. You gather some of the supplies now that the area is clear, and obtain some food, water, a cooking pot, and a painkiller in case you have to get into another fight. You set out to find some weaponry in order to be able to manage future encounters more safely.

The bright sunlight has given way to the dimmer yellows and oranges, and you can now hear crickets start to chirp.

You come across a new house, and spot a few boxes on the roof. You go through the building, dispatching the zombies inside with caution. Recovering lost health with the painkillers generates a lot of thirst, requiring you to drink more of your water. After making your way through the building, you end up on top with the stockpile of goods, and a large group of enemies protecting it. Fighting proves difficult, causing an infection and more wounds that you will have to deal with when you get more medicine. Luckily, you can now loot the containers they are guarding, providing you with a better club and bow, and a little more food to tide you over.

While you walk to the trader, an ominous noise plays, and the clock at the top of the screen strikes 22:00.

It’s now night, and you spent the whole day focusing on gathering supplies. This is when you find out the consequence of not staying indoors. Zombies now are faster and stronger, and you don’t have shelter to deal with them. Running away from the nearby zombies that have picked up on you existing takes a lot of time and stamina, increasing your hunger and thirst, making it harder to continue running. Trying to fight them is punishing, causing you to lose a significant portion of health. Now crouching around, trying to sneak past all of the enemies that are around you, there is little that you can do to avoid the feeling that you are powerless until the next day. Any sound you make can draw zombies to you. Trying to go to a new house will just put you in close quarters with more enemies. The only thing now is to sit and wait in the darkness, preparing to run at any time that something notices you. Besides that, you just watch the clock.

After a painfully long amount of time, you hear a tune play, marking 4:00 and the end of the night. You survived though the first full day. However, now you are infected, wounded, starving, thirsty, and without shelter.

Not only does this set a mood for the game, but it also trains the player on how they should play the game by punishing prioritizing the wrong things. The game gives them the base concepts of what they need to survive in the quests, such as getting weapons, clothing, a place to stay, and a way to make food, but don’t enforce those concepts too strongly, allowing for more player freedom. That doesn’t mean that every option the player can take is a good one. Many things they can do, like going into places they are not prepared to enter or engaging in too many fights, will kill them. If they don’t find shelter, they will be in a very dangerous position come nightfall. If they don’t get ample amounts of food an water, they will be less equipped to deal with the tasks they need to handle, or they will just die of starvation or dehydration. The game teaches the player to strike a balance of their needs by making it tangibly more difficult to play and showing what is needed to fix that added difficulty. Every time that the player starts over, or continues past a difficult period of survival provides more knowledge on what they should do to survive, but the first steps give them a baseline of get food, water, and shelter, while avoiding many of the unnecessary risks that you can take. Making the game more difficult or killing the player work as great deterrents to careless play, and showing the steps on how to avoid that help to train the player on what they should do to survive, while not just stating it outright, giving them more of a feeling of actual personal growth and learning to survive in a harsh world.

Even if this is only one aspect of how someone comes to interact with a game, I still think it is very important to how people come to interact with it. There are other things I may come to talk about in the future regarding this, as there are many other things that I believe contribute to the interest this game pulled to those I know. If you can, I would check out the game yourself to see what I mean, and I hope that this admittedly long piece of writing provided some food for thought about these concepts.

[less-than-hash]

Point(s) of No Return

I finally got real internet in France, so the first thing I did was purchase Final Fantasy VII Remake. 

A few days and 10 million Cura spells later, I finished it. (Term used loosely. I got to the credits.) 

It’s fantastic in many ways: gorgeous, obviously (I didn’t experience any of the texture issues (beyond some occasional  pop-in) that others have complained of); charming and funny; deeply stylish. 

I never knew how much I needed more Moulin Rouge in my FFVII.

I’m perfectly comfortable with what the ending did, though I’m not wildly impressed by the execution. And I’m excited for what comes next while holding considerable reservations about how it’ll be handled.

I also found it an incredibly frustrating game in a lot of ways: every time FFVIIR surrenders camera control to the player, for example, you can feel the game’s resentment; there’s a fair amount of repetition of spaces that doesn’t serve the action; while a lot of people seem to like the combat, I found it pretty messy, inconsistent, and frustrating (though loads improved from FFXV), to the point that I turned down the difficulty towards the end just to spend less time fighting battles. 

But none of that’s what I’m here to talk about today. I instead want to discuss a suite of specific design decisions that, in my opinion, really hampered the narrative flow of the ending of the game.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS under the cut.

Many games, especially RPGs or other games with open worlds, display a confirmation UI or impress upon the player through dialog (or both!) that the player has reached what we’ll be calling a Point of No Return. 

Though sometimes awkward to experience, this is a Very Good Thing (tm): it lets the player know that they’re about to depart the meat of the game for its conclusion and that if there’s anything they’d backburnered and want to take care of, now’s the time to do it.

Theoretically, this also allows the developers to pace the ending of their story in a way that builds towards a climax, something that’s otherwise difficult to do in an open world game due to the player’s nigh-complete control over the pace of play.

And while FFVII:R is by no means open world, it has some open world elements, especially towards the end of its second act. It’s no surprise that it fires the expected Point of No Return bulletin.

But later it does so again.

And again.

And again.

The first of these is frustrating for a number of reasons, not least of all its dubious accuracy. 

When the characters decide they’ll go after Aerith at the beginning of Chapter 14 (IIRC), the game suggests that doing so will instigate the endgame. This is not true. 

What this moment actually serves to highlight are a bevy of new sidequests. Thing is, there should almost certainly NOT be a bunch of new side content dropped on the player at this point. Not because that content is bad (some of it is quite nice), but because the game has just significantly increased the stakes and the pace of its main narrative, and taking time to futz around the slums looking for things to do dramatically undermines that pacing.

I’m not suggesting that this content shouldn’t be there at all - if the player takes time to explore and find sidequests, it’s nice if there’s something there to reward them; otherwise the world might feel empty and unreactive (to the massive tragedy that just occurred). Alternatively, this content could have been placed between (or before) saving Wedge and deciding to go after Aerith (in the period of the game that’s actually focused on the fallout (no pun intended) of the Sector VII Plate).

But having the game beat the player over the head with it right after saying “we’re gonna go storm Shinra now!” (and using Tifa, a character almost as invested in saving Aerith as Cloud, as the mouthpiece to do so) strains character verisimilitude and kicks the legs out from under the story.

But I suppose that’s kinda her bag.

The second Point of No Return comes after returning from, er, the return to the sewers. 

This is the actual Point of No Return from the open(ish) world, and the game does a very good job of stating both explicitly through UI and dialog that that’s the case (while going so far as to justify it in the fiction). Had it not been for what came before or after, I’d’ve said “well done” and been on my way.

(I could be wrong here - it may be that some of the Chapter 14 sidequests close off after the return to the Sewers, but if that’s so, it doesn’t seem necessary. Certainly one of those sidequests requires the player to do the return to the sewers, making that initial Point of No Return warning misleading.)

The game then progresses into its Final Dungeon, a sequence at turns confounding and at others fun and impressive. A few hours (and sixty flights of stairs) later, Hojo traps you in his lab and makes you jump through hoops to get out. I have a lot of issues with this section in general, the one most germane to this conversation being the obliteration of the pacing. The game has quite literally told the player to “get to the choppa,” but instead throws them through a pretty low-stakes series of trials without much sense of pressure from time.

Like this, but forever.

Still, the designers manage a couple of tricks towards the end of this sequence to ramp the energy back up (Red XIII’s fall, the big fight with the blade fish). 

Then you hop in the elevator, realize that Jenova’s missing, find a trail of alien goop to follow, and make your way to the exit...

Only to hit Point of No Return #3: This Time, For Reals Though.

I like this one as a teaching example, because it’s very clear what the intention is and how it might tweaked to flow a bit better:

What the devs needed to accomplish, in no particular order:

Let the player know that they’re leaving the more open area of the Shinra Building. (Or possibly just Hojo’s lab... you might not be able to backtrack to the lower floors. If that’s the case, I’d argue for cutting this Point of No Return entirely.)

Set up the encounter with Jenova in the next space.

Raise the tension and the stakes. Jenova is clearly an entity of horror. Horror is about tension.

How FFVIIR approached this in the shipping game:

The player finishes the lab area’s final fight, the two parties are reunited, and they take an elevator to Jenova’s tube in the central lab.

Player finds Jenova missing. 

Player locates elevator to Shinra’s office.

Game produces a “Point of No Return,” explicitly telling the player that if there’s anything left to do below, they should go do it.

Player may go looking for new stuff to do (or stuff they left undone), ballooning the time between step 2 and its pay off while dramatically undermining tension.

I’d argue that this flow could have been made dramatically better by setting the point of no return prior to returning to Jenova’s tube.

Like so:

The player finishes the lab area’s final fight, the two parties are reunited, and they find the elevator that will take them up.

The game fires the Point of No Return. This makes a lot of sense narratively, too, because last time the party was up there, Sephiroth was up there, too. (This elevator also goes up or down from this floor - the only elevator in the lab that does so - making it a perfect place in the level to put this kind of choice.)

Player can put off the return upstairs for a time if they want.

Player takes elevator up and finds Jenova missing.

Player takes elevator up to Shinra’s office and 4 pays off without the loss of tension.

BAM!

Anyhoo...

We can play backseat developer all day. I’m sure there were reasons this choice was made the way it was, and I’d be surprised if this exact conversation didn’t happen in someone’s office at some point. 

I don’t know what the various moving pieces were that led to the choice that shipped. It’s just not the choice I’d’ve made in a vacuum, because I’m confident in saying that - whatever the decision was made in service to - it harmed the narrative’s pacing.

And that’s something that happens. Development is give and take, and sometimes (often) narrative hangs lower on the priority pole than other things.

The last Point of No Return occurs right before the final boss. 

Like the first, I’d argue that this one’s unnecessary. The player’s forced by the level design to pass immediately by the very vending machine the Point of No Return suggests that they use, and there’s nothing else for the player to do in that map prior to confronting the Big Bad. The narrative has made it plenty clear that there’s no telling what’s on the other side of that light. 

(I actually thought it was a portal to the ending cinematic and credits prior to seeing the Point of No Return text, and would have been very pleasantly surprised by the twist of facing another challenge. Albeit frustrated said challenge was yet another combat in a system I was entirely over by then.)

An autosave at that point would have protected the player’s experience without interrupting flow.

Like whatever hidden trickery moves Cloud from that hole to the top of the slide.

So to bring this to its conclusion:

Points of No Return, while wildly useful, can dramatically interrupt the player experience and undermine narrative tension. They probably shouldn’t be viewed as an opportunity to unlock a bunch of side content, and they should definitely be placed prior to a series of interconnected events rather than in the midst of them.

Until next time, <3 <3 <#

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 4x02 Heavy Lies the Crown

The season 4 premiere wasn’t that great, but this is much better and much more typical of the overall quality of season 4.

The Polis storyline is, for a change, actually quite good. I’ve always thought that season 4 did a much better job with most Grounder characters than season 3 or even season 2. And the storyline in and in relation to Arkadia is great, with Bellamy, Clarke and Raven having to do make difficult choices. In particular, Bellamy finds himself in the position to make a really tough choice, and the choice he makes really encapsulates his leadership style and worldview.

The title is another literary reference – after Dante and Poe, now it’s Shakespeare – although it is a misquote of the line “Heavy lies the head that wears the crown” from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. They supposedly chose to name it that way because they thought it sounded better – or maybe they just thought that would make it more obvious to the viewers that the theme of the episode was the difficulty of being a leader.

The flashback that opens the episode would have fit better as the opener of 4x01, which was much more about the fallout of the City of Light and people who died because of ALIE. (No surprise, since it was originally meant to be in 4x01.) It’s the introduction of another interesting new Grounder character, Ilian, whose family suffered a really tragic fate – ALIE made Ilian kill them or torture them in order to force his mother to take the chip. Seeing it all happen helps build sympathy for Ilian and makes it easier to understand his later actions. It’s also one of the few times we see Grounder farmers. I like the fact that the show isn’t focusing just on Grounder warriors  anymore and that we get to see more and more of Grounders of different professions and worldviews.

In Polis, the leader who has to make decisions is Roan, who is preparing to meet the challenge of an ambassador of one of the other clans, Rafel, who is trying to use the fact that Roan is still recuperating from his injury and isn’t full strength, Roan is a good character to watch because he’s smart and capable, and morally grey – he isn’t one of the bad guys, but he can be ruthless and sneaky if he has to. The fact that he’s a very different leader from his mother certainly helps. This is emphasized when Echo, who is sparring with him, goes on about how awesome Queen Nia was, in her mind, for being so ruthless and murderous and not giving a damn about anyone other than Azgeda; After being questioned why he decided to accept the Sky people as the 13th clan, Roan finally tells Echo the truth about Praimfaya and that they need Sky people to survive it.

Talking about Roan’s chances in single combat, Octavia says Lexa kicked his ass when he wasn’t wounded, but she doesn’t know that the Nightblood basically gives you superpowers, which is only revealed later during S4

Kane is again the Chancellor – but we don’t learn if another election was held or not. He is mostly acting as a diplomat, however – he’s more of an ambassador, while Clarke pretty much acts like acting Chancellor in Arkadia.

Kane tries to reason with Rafel, and makes the good point that, if they are going to blame Sky people for the City of Light, they should also credit them for destroying it. But don’t expect Rafel to listen to reason. So Octavia eventually solves Roan’s and everyone’s problem by murdering Rafel, which is later portrayed as a heart attack. I should be generally against assassinations and Octavia using violence and murder to solve problems, but, you know what, I liked this solution.

Major development forward for the Kabby relationship: After the kiss last season, there’s a rather steamy, by CW-standards, sex scene and, while there is no “I love you” in so many words, the relationship between Abby and Kane is strongly affirmed. Initially, after their sex scene, we see that Abby used to wear her wedding ring on a necklace. She’s unsure or uncomfortable with putting it on again, as Kane sees it, but Kane tells her Jake is a part of her, But later Kane realizes that she is not wearing it – and they kiss, as Abby has just shown him that she has really moved on from Jake and committed to him.

Abby decides to go back to Arkadia to help Clarke and the rest find a solution for Praimfaya

In Arkadia, Clarke, Raven and Bellamy arguing over what to do; Raven is concerned thatthere are not enough volunteers to repair the ship. She also has insecurities and feel she shouldn’t be main engineer - Sinclair should be, but he is dead, Clarke replies that she’s in a similar position since she’s no Chancellor. However, they’re all basically back to their own season 1 roles, when they were the only ones on the ground and leaders of their people.

One of the most pleasant surprises about season 4 is that it found a purpose for Jaha and started using his character in a much better way, and even managed to make me finally interested and enjoying his character, even though he hasn’t actually changed his personality. This is probably because 1) he is not in position of power now, 2) he wants to and manages to be useful – as an engineer, which is his original profession, and 3) most importantly, he has a number of interesting interactions with the main characters that he didn’t get to interact much before, like Clarke, Bellamy and Raven. In the season when they are faced with particularly difficult leadership choices, which are similar to the situation on the Ark – having to make choices who will live and who will die because it’s impossible to save everyone; having lie to people in order not to cause panic – Jaha is both there to offer his perspective and advice (which may be good or bad), and as a cautionary tale: he is what they all used to hate and what they really don’t want to become, but now they are afraid they may be becoming like him.

The crux of the episode is Bellamy’s mission (with Monty, Harper, Bryan and Miller) to go into the Azgeda territory, to the remains of the Farm Station that Azgeda occupied, and retrieve a hydro generator that would help produce water for the people in Arkadia during the five years of radiation. They start off hoping to get it peacefully, by showing Roan’s seal. They get a hostile reception instead, but eventually the head Azgeda guy agrees to it. However, things change when they learn that the people working at the station are slaves…

…Let’s take a moment to emphasize the fact (for the benefit of all of those who like to portray Sky people/Arkers as the Bad Guys and Grounders as Good Guys, that, in addition to everything else we know Azgeda did under Queen Nia’s rule, like killing Arkers indiscriminately, including children, from the moment they landed, and blowing up a bunch of Arker civilians as a part of a political power play that wasn’t even about them, they also practice slavery, enslaving both Arkers and other Grounders.

…This is a big moment where the group has to decide whether to prioritize getting the hydro generator, or blowing it up to free the slaves. Bryan argues in favor of the latter, especially since he recognized one of the slaves as a friend of his, called Riley. (Now, I know that the fandom likes to make fun of Riley because of the way that this character was made important in spite of never being heard about before, but this is more of a problem in 4x05. I don’t see any problem here – we never saw any of the Farm Station before season 3, either, and we knew very few of the people on the Ark in season 1, and many we knew are dead. And the actor does a good job playing someone who has been traumatized and beaten down by slavery and abuse.) The group split votes – Bryan and Harper for freeing the slaves (Harper compares their fate to her experience of being put in a cage in Mount Weather), Monty and Miller for getting the hydro generator, so Bellamy makes the decision and chooses to free the slaves.

This decision is something I need to talk about a bit more. I love the way season 4 in particular has so many situations where there is no obvious right or wrong choice - neither choice is great and wrong in some way while good in another way, and you can make good arguments for either alternative. This is one such case. Personally, while I understand and respect the position that the hydro generator should have been the priority and slaves ignored, I was happy with Bellamy's decision, was rooting for him to make that choice, and it's what I would probably do. Regardless of how things turn out in the end, I think this is the better principle to live by: "We save who we can save today". (Which also reminds me of the decision Bellamy made in 2x04 – save the person who is in the most immediate danger and need.) There are many leaders in this show, maybe too many, who advocate the Big Picture thinking, which is a legitimate position if moderate, but taken too far, it can lead to (in the name of some hypothetical better future) present oppression, killing the people you're supposed to protect, executions for all sorts of silly reasons as on the Ark, letting innocent people die from enemy bombs, or cold blooded murder of an innocent person for "pragmatic" reasons - as Jaha did in season 2, using the motto "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". I don't trust anyone who uses that motto to justify killing other people rather than sacrificing themselves (which was how that character we all know and love used it in that well known movie that the quote comes from). And I don't fully trust anyone who does things in the name of an abstract notion of "people" or "my people" while not caring enough about individuals that make up that abstract collective

I liked Bellamy’s decision before I knew how things would turn out, and would like it regardless of the eventual consequences. But as it turns, out, if they had saved the hydro generator, it would have been for nothing, since Ilian will blow up Arkadia in a few episodes. This way, those people who had been slaves a couple of months of nice life back with their families.

Another minor in-character moment: when they are about to take the Grounder ex-slaves to their villages, Bellamy is again taking care of a little girl in the group.

Raven is angry over Bellamy’s decision, and Clarke at first seems to disagree, but eventually accepts it, and Bellamy he sticks to it and takes full responsibility. Clarke finally decides to tell people a half-truth: she tells them about Praimfaya, but claims they will be able to save everyone, even though, without the hydro generator, they can only save 100 people there. Raven gets to display my least favorite character trait of hers, getting all judgmental and b1tchy and sarcastically telling Clarke: “Your father would be so proud!” I dunno, Raven, if you think the people should be told the truth, why don’t you simply tell them? No one is stopping you.

Both Raven and Jasper compared Clarke’s decisions to that of Jaha and the rest of the Ark leadership. Except they forgot the minor detail that she hasn’t executed anyone, imprisoned anyone, or sent anyone to die.

Jasper is now in a very different, but still similar mindset from the one from season 3: he has embraced the “Seize the day” approach, and seems very cheerful, having a shower, singing, asking Monty to bring weed, and telling Clarke he doesn’t want them to survive, he wants them to live. But he is like that only because he knows it will all be over in a few months.

The song Jasper plays is “I Don’t like Mondays” by Boomtown Rats, which includes the line “Silicon chip inside her head”…

This is the last episode where Bryan appears, which is a shame, because he was an interesting character, and his and Miller’s relationship actually got some focus and development, unlike Miller’s mostly off-screen later relationship with Jackson. The actor got a role in another show, but instead of getting killed off, he was just written out quietly – he simply never appears after this episode, and we never learn of his fate. The first time I watched this, I didn’t even realize that the argument between him and Nate at the end of this episode was the end of their relationship, so I was later wondering “so where is Bryan?” when Nate and Jackson became a couple out of the blue. Rewatching this, I can see how this was the end of the relationship. I like the fact that Bryan (who, we have it confirmed now, is now the only survivor, aside from Riley, from the initial number of around 160 people who were on the Farm Station when it fell to Earth) refuses to condemn Pike and still feels loyalty to him – because it would be really unrealistic if everyone now had the same opinion about him. Bryan confirms that he basically never stopped supporting Pike, who he felt loyalty to because he saved his life and they spent several months fighting together, and simply chose his boyfriend over him. But I think the main reason why the relationship broke was not just political differences, but because, after Miller didn’t support or understand Bryan’s decision to prioritize freeing the slaves, Bryan felt that Miller doesn’t understand what he went through with the rest of the Farm Station people in those 4 months and the trauma and effect it had on him.

Timeline: It has been 9 days since the season 3 finale, which means it’s about 8-9 days since 4x01.

Body count:

In the flashback (which is technically in the timeline right at the end of season 3 or the beginning of 4x01), Ilian’s father, brother and mother got killed by ALIE-controlled Ilian. Add them to the list of people who died because of ALIE, We don’t see how the father died, but Ilian killed his brother and almost killed himself, and tortured his mother, and she eventually died of injuries.

Rafel, Trishanakru ambassador, killed by Octavia. (Good riddance- he was really annoying. We’ve seen way too many irritating whiny Grounders who rant about how Sky people are to blame for everything. That’s so last two seasons.)

Several Azgeda slavers got killed in the explosion of the hydro generator.

Tybe the head slaver, beaten to death by the freed slaves. Bryan revealed that he was the one who killed Monty’s father, saying he was therefore Monty’s kill, but Monty chose to do justice in a different way, letting the ex-slaves decide Tybe’s fate.

There are some pointers about the number of surviving people – from a list that Clarke made of the number of people that need to be saved. It’s a partial list: we learn that there are about 500 people Arkadia, 4000 in Polis (out of which 400 children), 300 in Tondc, and we see several smaller places with just a few people. Just counting the numbers we see, we get 4877 Grounders  in addition to 500 Arkers (obviously, neither are exact numbers, since the numbers for Polis, Tondc and Arkadia were rounded), but it’s clearly not a full list, as we don’t see the numbers for,  e.g. Boat people, Shallow Valley people, and many other villages and towns, so I don’t know if the numbers of Grounders in this part of Northern American territory is around 5000-6000 or more like 10.000.

Rating: 8.5/10

[wanglivingston72-blog]

Vital Pieces of Fallout 76

Upon logging back, should there be an additional base placed exactly in precisely the same spot, it is going to be possible to recreate the base by means of a blueprint anywhere else on the map at no price. Rather than being strange bedfellows, you'll now be given the opportunity to move everything to a totally new location at no cost. At the front part of the control center, below the green tactical map, is going to be the terminal you need to access. While it is going to be good to have quite a few extra unique circumstances, there's sufficient right here for each of the Pip Boys and Girls to acquire pleasure from post-apocalyptic gaming classes round their tabletops. Sometimes all 3 things are there. The psychology of a busted heart is still a small mystery to modern medication. Things You Won't Like About Fallout 76 and Things You Will Naturally, there's a process involved with getting past the velvet beta rope. What's more, players will want to team up to fight powerful new mutants in addition to conquer enemy bases. It's area-based so that your capacity to hear different plays will be different. Which in some respects is a little bit of a buzzkill. HSWhen you choose a class to play, there's a great chance you can just run one viable archetype because that's the way that it's designed and supposed to be played to win. Take a look at the trailer here. It's not that I feel the standard of Fallout ought to be built on free content. It's an enormous change for that specific mod, which is wonderful to see. Read the entire article at EuroGamer. Fallout 76: the Ultimate Convenience! Fallout's world has ever been mine. Joke, joke it's the deepest disappointment for me in the last couple of years. Love isn't something you can merely stop on a dime. Attempting to recoup a part of the net profits would have been even harder. As stated previously will need to contact some Black Titanium so as to craft the Excavator Power Armor. The variety of items will be different depending on the creature's difficulty and level, as stated by the patch notes. Finding Fallout 76 This informative article will aim to provide some well-deserved acclaim to a choice of great gaming composers. Users also commented they enjoy Steam because all their games are up and prepared to go when they sign on. Full instructions about how to grab the game are available here. Since you may see, the game isn't actually well-defined. Remember it's a survival game. The standard of an item also translates to the standing of the corporation. So it's the gaming industry which affects the amount of computer chips, the access to software engineering jobs, etc. Players have the capability to build wherever and whenever assuming they possess the resources to achieve that. Also, it's packed with many features and effective editing choices. There's still one key aspect I need to learn about this game, which is whether it will be cross platform. Search engines have such deep accessibility to mountains of information about each and each one of us and consequently our personal content preferences. There were so many men and women. Turns out that there's a very good reason for it. You may even need to pay to be able to stream yourself, making it tougher for anyone seeking to earn a living from it. If you keep in that world, you can put your C.A.M.P. back down at no cost. Let people understand what you are a specialist in. Some tips for people that are only starting out is to not be fearful of being themselves. Lies You've Been Told About Fallout 76 It's correct, Bethesda games have a little bit of a reputation for being buggy at launch, and that's not something which goes over well in an on-line atmosphere. Most would agree that, out of each of the important press conferences at the beginning of the week, Bethesda's was the very best. It needs to step it up when it comes to visuals. Head to the Games menu, and you'll locate your freebies in your account, prepared to be set up. It appears that codes will be handed out at the beginning of the new calendar year. Black Friday 2018 looks promising. Fallout 76 - the Story Playing with others online involves lots of bandwidth. Amazon Echo isn't only a speaker, it is a true intelligent vocal assistant that could speak for you, give you information and even anticipate your wants. A number of us believe gaming is a huge portion of the future retail company. There are specific perks that you're able to gain to assist you grow your set of Fallout 3 caps. There are lots of weapons in Fallout 76, a number of them are good, some are bad, and there are some that are the very best. Finally, many players that are engaging with Fallout 76 wish to dwell in a wasteland at the place where they can take part in PvP, but it's an underdeveloped system. Eagle-eyed Fallout fans ought to be nominally mindful of Vault 76. Overall the game is really simple to get started in, even when you are a newcomer to the Fallout series. Comparable to Metroid Prime 4, nothing should be shown.

[casualarsonist]

Monster Hunter World review (PS4)

My first interaction with the Monster Hunter series was way back in 2000-and-something as I watched a mate of mine play Monster Hunter Tri briefly on his Nintendo Wii. I’m not going to lie - I wasn’t that impressed. Not that I watched for long enough to get more than the most brief impression about the game, as his girlfriend turned it off on him before he managed to save because there were ‘guests’, and the entire room uttered a collective gasp of disgust. In any case, while I didn’t feel motivated to buy, I was intrigued by the series’ rather unique premise, and was always tangentially aware of its existence and the zeitgeist surrounding it. So along came Monster Hunter World this year, and along with it came lashings of praise from every angle. Having no experience with the series, I had no context for the compliments it was getting, but I knew more or less immediately that at some point I was going to play this entry, and given the post-release hype, I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to enjoy it. And then I bought it on PS4...

The first thing that struck me as odd when I started the game was the ad for PSN membership that popped up when it tried to log me in online. After having subscribed for a month in order to play Titanfall 2, and then being robbed by sneaky recurring payments that I wasn’t being notified about for another 6 months after that, I refused to buy a PSN subscription ever again. So loading up a brand new game, and having it immediately stop itself to advertise Playstation subscriptions to me felt grotesque. Next came the first cutscene, which I enjoyed right up until the characters started talking and I realised that the lipsyncing hadn’t been localised, meaning that the game looked like a poorly-dubbed Japanese film. Then came the loading screens, and as I sat in front of my console for two minutes and thirty seconds waiting for the first level to load, the incredulity in me rose. And then I entered the opening hub level. And the game ran somewhere around 25 frames per second. And at that point I tried to get a refund, but it turns out that you can’t refund PS4 games after you’ve downloaded them, meaning they could be broken as shit and you’re stuck with the product anyway because fuck you. And I genuinely thought Monster Hunter World on the PS4 was broken, because it ran almost as bad as Mass Effect Andromeda - one of the worst game I’ve ever played. So, barely 10 minutes into my first time playing, I turned off the console in disgust and walked away. So after I researched Sony’s refund policy and discovered that it was utter dogshit, I realised that I was stuck with the game and I sat back down and gave it another go. And...well, it’s okay. Just okay. 

I fully accept that this is my first foray into an established series with established mechanics. I hate it when games I enjoy dumb themselves down for a mainstream audience (*cough* Fallout *cough*), so I don’t criticise the game for taking some time to get used to. However, there are some real quality of life issues here that simply shouldn’t exist in this day and age.

First of all - it looks like shit. Not it terms of its design, but in terms of the quality of the visuals. Poor frame-rate aside, the graphics are heavily washed-out, which is a big disappointment given the lush forests and crystal clear waters of the first area. I don’t know whether the colour palette could be balanced better on PC, but there’s a flatness to everything on the PS4 that leaves the beautiful, evocative locales feeling drab and lifeless. This is purely a stylistic choice, and I cannot understand why they would go the trouble of crafting such a vivid landscape, only to broadcast it through what feels like a white filter. Turning the brightness all the way down helps, but there’s no reason why this should be a problem in the first place.

Secondly, Dark Souls and Bloodborn exist, and a number of copycat games like Nioh have proven that there’s no excuse for a game to be clunky in order to be difficult. Difficulty should exist in the gameplay balance, not in dated control systems, and this is a big stumbling block for Monster Hunter World. The larger monsters all have certain weak points that can be broken or severed in order to weaken them. The problem is that attacking these weakpoints is easier said than done when the lock-on system barely works, and the directional controls feel like the nine-point directional system of a PS1 game. Attacks cannot be stopped once they’ve started, meaning that you need to master your timing in order to be an effective combatant, but they also cannot be rotated once you’ve initiated them in a particular direction, so if pointing your character in the right direction is a chore, your attacks will often fall slightly to the left or right of where you intend for them to go. Coupled with the fact that the creatures move at speed, this means that finesse goes out the window and much of your initial combat experiences will involve getting as close to the target as possible simply so you can’t miss. Now don’t get me wrong - there is a sense of skill-building and personal improvement once you start to get used to this system, but it does feel extremely dated in a way that doesn’t inspire nostalgia. If a retro first-person-shooter had no mouse look, you’d be up in arms. So too does this feel like less of a design choice and more of a glaring failure to adapt to modern conveniences.

The last big issue is that the game isn’t marketed as a multiplayer game, instead being sold as a single player drop-in-drop-out experience. Which is true, to a point, yet every time you load it up it freezes to connect to the Playstation Network, and then advertises a PSN membership to you if you don’t already have one. Once you’re playing, the game will constantly remind you that other people are playing online, even going so far as to tell you who is joining your ‘session’ - a session that you aren’t in if you don’t have a PSN subscription. And to top it all off, you can’t simply select a mission and then expect it to start straight away: instead you have to wait while the game ‘prepares’ the mission as if you were in multiplayer lobby, even if you’re playing offline. This can take up to a minute or more, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So even if the game detects that you have no PSN account it will still connect to the internet, then force you into either hosting or loading an online game, then tell you all of the people who are joining a session that you’re not playing in, and then put you in a mission lobby when you’re not waiting for anyone to join. It’s the cherry atop a cake baked ten years ago and marketed as a 2018 release. It's absurd. It’s as if the game was created by people who couldn’t fathom a world in which players wouldn’t play alone, and yet the game is, largely, played and sold as a single-player experience - just like all its predecessors. The greatest effect of having other people join in is that your experience bonus is split between you all instead of going solely to you, and that’s not a bonus, but a deficit. 

These issues make me wonder how the game has come to be critically acclaimed at all, at least in terms of this particular version. I hear the PS4 Pro version can run at 1080p60, and I assume the PC version can as well, although I’ve heard there are some connectivity issues with the PC servers, but my immediate impressions of the standard PS4 version are near appalling. Spiderman runs flawlessly as you swing across the entire city of New York - I didn’t see a single frame drop in my entire playthrough, and yet the detailed but limited-scope environs of Monster Hunter World bring the console to its knees. This, more than anything, speaks to the decline of the console’s relevance as modern graphics capabilities increase. One of the important selling points of the consoles was the fact that you could count on them to run stably, even if their games were technologically inferior to their PC counterparts. If they look worse AND play worse, then what’s the point of owning a console at all? If you have to upgrade to a mid-generation PS Pro now every few years just to be able to ensure your games are going to work, then why not just buy a new graphics card for your PC for the same price, not have to subscribe to the fucking scam that is the Playstation Network, AND have a better quality experience while you do it? Aside from the exclusives, the Playstation 4 is redundant, in my opinion. I can’t think of a single reason to invest in the next console generation, because you know that whatever machine you buy is just going to be obsolete in a few years’ time anyway. 

I’m sure that, all the gameplay quibbles aside, Monster Hunter World is perfectly fine to play on a more powerful machine, but I still cannot see why it has garnered such praise. It’s still a niche game, and it’s okay for what it is, but it’s not at all the force to be reckoned with the reviews make it sound like. It’s stuck in the past mechanically, and has the bare minimum of localisation, and while it is fun after you pass a certain teething point, I find that the ultimate experience is defined not what it is, but what it is not. My rating here is for the PS4 version, so take that as you will, but as it is, the PS Store really needs a proper refund policy.

6/10

[melonbreadreviews-blog]

Playing ‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’ Three Years Later

I’ll admit, I’m often late to the party on major title releases in gaming. I’d like to tell you that it’s an intentional choice of mine, that it’s in my best interest to let the best and worst parts of these landscape altering pieces of art simmer in a pot together. I picked up Bloodborne on a whim three years after its release, and after about a two hour play session, I decided it wasn’t for me; three months later I was glued to my TV every night after work searching every nook and cranny that the hunter’s dream had to offer me.

My point is that buying a game upon its initial release is a commitment to either loving or hating that game. I often feel compelled to shower praise on the solid parts of games that I love, and pressure to explain with hyperbole the games I just couldn’t vibe with. Playing Bloodborne years after its release at a much lower price allowed me to put it down when I didn’t enjoy it, and pick it back up when I needed it. The parts of it that I didn’t like weren’t exacerbated by a pressure to validate my own experiences relative to the gaming community. Likewise, when i picked the game up again, I loved it not because I thought I should, but because the experience itself was legitimately breathtaking.

Three months later, set against the familiar hum and drum of my slowly dying Playstation 4, my experience with CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt begins. I tried to begin this same journey a few months earlier, but that run died on the starting line in a messy tutorial and a post-Bloodborne haze. One enormous Dragon Quest XI run later, and I’m finally ready to give this journey three years in the making a chance. My expectations are a mixed bag; I carry with me the influences of a thousand burning reddit threads and the weight of an inescapable question: Has this game aged well?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Witcher franchise (I’ve never read the series or played a mainline game before touching The Witcher 3, so you’re not alone!), the main plot of the game follows the journey of a Witcher named Geralt as he searches for his protege and ward Ciri while also fending off the primary antagonistic force of the game, the Wild Hunt. Witchers serve as bounty hunters of the region, often dealing with the monsters and villains ordinary folk are incapable of handling themselves. Throughout the game, players can feel the tension in the air between Geralt and the people around him, often including the ones he saves. Witchers exist outside the realm of normalcy in this universe, and to some extent the amount of agency the franchise gives you over the lives of the people who exist around you is a direct cause of the aforementioned tension. Though the social world Geralt inhabits mirrors the dangers of the physical world around him, there are romantic options in the game that allow for a deeper understanding of his character and The Witcher universe. The lore aspect of this game really separates it from similar titles in the same genre.

My first memories of the game still hold true, though my feelings about them have changed. I love the comic style art that flashes across the screen as the game loads, not because it matches the aesthetic of the game, but precisely because it does not. If I compare The Witcher 3 to other iterations of the same genre like Skyrim or Fallout, I find myself enjoying that not every moment of The Witcher is something that I need to take seriously. Sometimes, it’s okay to be reminded of the fact that I am actually playing a game and not living and dying by the decisions I make in this world.

That isn’t to say that decisions in this game don’t matter, though; I find that The Witcher 3 places weight on its decisions in a similar fashion to Mass Effect, rather than Skyrim or Fallout. There are several moments in the game that require a timed quick response in conversations or during action, and those quick responses sometimes dictate both the flow of ongoing dialogue and possible relationships with the characters around Geralt. There are even dialogue options that seem quite diplomatic on the surface, but end in brawls or even death for characters that the player did not expect. These moments are meant to teach the player just how much agency they have over the lives around them; sometimes Geralt feels like a god, and sometimes he feels just as vulnerable to the whims of the world as the people around him.

Normally, worlds that freely give that sort of agency to the player overwhelm me. I feel paralyzed by just how much my choices matter, and my love for the friends I’ve made throughout the story keeps me from playing the game as intended. Through the use of guides and reddit threads, I orchestrate my game in order to keep those characters alive, and that leaves me with less of an experience in the end. The Witcher 3, however, doesn’t leave me paralyzed in the same way. Because much of the main narrative is decidedly linear, Geralt is free to explore the world around him, which includes contracts to kill creatures and free spirits and occasional games of a fairly fun but not too complex card game called Gwent. Not every decision has a role to play in the main story, and the ones that do feel natural in the game’s flow. Geralt is both insanely powerful and incredibly vulnerable, but I never fear for the outcome of his story while enjoying the fun of making decisions.  

The skippable tutorial of the game remains not so skippable considering the amount of experience I have with The Witcher 3’s combat, but I appreciate that I have the option of ignoring it if I decide to run through new game plus. It’s here that the meat of the game comes to the forefront. The reason I initially put down The Witcher 3 was because I didn’t enjoy the flow of combat, which includes the two primary slashing attacks with two variants of weapons, a myriad of magical powers called Signs, and the use of items like bombs, crossbows and oils which can be applied to Geralt’s main weapons. If you’re just judging the combat of the game on the first few hours, The Witcher 3 may not meet your expectations of a major title release. When disjointed in the name of learning, the combat feels clunky, and the first few contracts in the region, especially on higher difficulties, are a major challenge for the uninitiated.

But in the same way I came to love Bloodborne, I’ve come to adore The Witcher 3 because of my journey with it. Sitting through the first few hours of the game, especially in 2018, can be sort of a grind. The story has yet to materialize, the combat is underdeveloped, and Geralt himself can seem unrelatable, but as the hours move on, the game opens up in parallel fashion to the world it encompasses. The combat itself feels incredibly fluid, each piece of it tied together in a way that challenges the player to learn how to be a Witcher, while also rewarding enough to encourage growth and not detract from the side-questing and story that make this game fun. The Witcher 3’s systems include a hearty dodging mechanic that feels clunky outside of battle, but seamless in it, and a parry system that is absolutely necessary on higher difficulties. Geralt’s magic, Signs, interact with objects in the world, but they can also be morphed and shaped into crowd control devices. The ability tree is extensive, but in a way that represents a mixing of action and role-playing. Each playthrough can be different, but Geralt remains much of the same, just upgraded.

Though not combat in a traditional sense, I think The Witcher 3’s in-game card system, Gwent, represents an entirely different method of fighting for players. Though not required, there are various quests given to Geralt in different regions of the game which involved beating skilled Gwent players at cards. While the game involves a little bit of strategy, it’s never overwhelming, and because Gwent isn’t a major factor in the story, it’s skippable for fans who don’t enjoy it. I found myself going from inn to inn, challenging keeps to games for their best cards, and I really came to love a part of the game I didn’t enjoy all that much at first. It’s a missable portion of the game, but it definitely adds dimension to the gameplay without requiring too much effort on the part of the player.

Much of the game’s story is very compelling, and it isn’t saddled with an extensive lore that the player is forced to grapple with. There is lore, yes, but that lore is discoverable all over the world, and it’s the player’s choice to explore it, or not. There is a distinct moment in the first 20 hours or so of the game that allows the player to learn about about Geralt’s relationship with Ciri through dialogue options with another character. The player can listen to all of the heavy lore in the dialogue, or simply skip it. The Witcher 3 is chalk full of story, but it never asks the player to share the burden of that story. In much the way you can flow in and out of the narrative of the story through side-questing and contracts, you can simply choose not to pay attention to certain parts of the main quest line.

That isn’t to say that the story is lacking or is unfocused. There are reasons to want to stay on track, including a wide array of characters who are, though not as interesting as Geralt, incredibly complex. The Witcher 3 does a fantastic job of presenting its best qualities though, and those qualities encourage players to explore the world around them and creative a narrative journey that varies significantly from player to player. Whether or not a player values that storytelling approach, though, depends on their own taste. Personally, I found that I could have my fill of Gwent and monster hunting, and then pick right back up where I left the main story.

The Witcher 3 is not without its faults, despite my glowing praise up to this point. While the world itself is rendered beautifully, I found the interactions with other characters to pose the biggest problems for the game’s graphics. There were times where Geralt’s face would simply teleport all over the screen until the game was able to settle into the set animations for the dialogue, and I distinctly remember an interaction between Geralt and Triss Merigold which involved Triss pressing a hand to her face that was stuck in the Igni battle animation for fire. While these graphical glitches don’t detract from the overall product, they are wrinkles on the surface of the game that begin to show its age. I was surprised that the world remained incredibly stable, save for a few times I found my horse could fit between a clustered group of trees better than I could, while the dialogue options proved incredibly difficult for the animations in the game. It reminded me a lot of my time with Mass Effect, in both good and bad ways. There was a certain novelty, but maybe that novelty is a bit too dated for a Playstation 4 title.

I’d like to end this review where I started, and that is on the subject of playing games years after they’ve already debuted. I wish I was a strong enough person to not feel the pressure that comes with making a commitment to a new title, but I often let reviews and recommendations, either positive or negative, affect the way I experience games. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a near perfect example of my current status as a consumer, because I’ve been able to enjoy all the good that the game has to offer without taking the bad bits too seriously. I did expect the game to be great, of course, but I didn’t expect it to be perfect, and that’s partly because I don’t have a need to be justified in having purchased it. I haven’t tasked myself with deciding The Witcher’s place in history; that’s already been decided. So, for now, I feel quite content to stroll along cobblestone city roads and swampy marshes, living life as a Witcher.

[waringawaw153-blog]

How to get Farming Simulator 17 Free

Although simulation activities have been known for ages, Farming Simulator kicked off the farming genre. Other farming games be, yet nothing competes with this iconic series. FS17 brings mod foundation and fresh attributes to Xbox One also MACHINE, but is that enough to substantiate passing over the money?

The Farming Simulator series created with Farming Simulator 2013. Since then, sequels have happened every a couple seasons for LAPTOP and console. Farming Simulator 16 was a harbor of 15 for mobile and PlayStation Vita.

Everybody understands this is a simulation activity in which people desire tractors and other farming machinery, grow plants and stock, and handle the fiscal aspects of a farm. So let's look at most of this time new functions and how much they improve the game.

In the two included maps, Goldcrest Area is mark new and set in the USA. The other map, Sosnovka, develops with Asian Europe. Originally published as downloadable articles for Farming Simulator 15, it has been remastered with greater idea quality. Farming Simulator games always launch with no more than two places, which is a bit skimpy.

For the first time in the chain, we can want to participate because also a man or female farmer. This will make the game more compelling to new audiences. It's definitely a step up the right way. However, the game still gets place for further variety.

The two characters you can choose from, one per gender, are both white. You can't change their skin color, but you could pick out the color of the shirts. Giants Software is situated in Switzerland, a mostly white voters. In games like this, targeting a global audience, developers must think players of new races as well as their own.

The overall goal in Farming Simulator has always been to buy all the takes on the place and spread the farm as large as possible. That stage in '17, but the developers added a hail dose of form using the new assignment system.

Each buyable scenario of earth is owned by a player who offers to pay people for finishing missions. These missions become an excellent way to make money. After you've completed all of a farmer's missions, he'll push the topic designed for a much worse cost than if you'd wanted to get this outright.

Drivable trains add a fun another factor for the sport. Players have several files on all place. You don't have to get them before pay maintenance costs, and you can jump directly in them by wherever on the map.

Cruising in now trains and having the landscape is enjoyable on its, but they're also a great way to transport materials with wood for sale. You use a claw-game like crane to weight stuff onto the exercise and then head to the adjoining selling point.

Farming Simulator 15 was not the interesting up for. The worst offender became its surface maps. Comparing ground textures between '15 and '17 on Xbox One, I detect a little increase with attribute. The textures in '17 live precisely below standards to the console, which is a real shame. Still, '17 does apparently have strengthened mip mapping, so textures retain detail at the higher space than now '15. Foliage is slightly more described, and pale has found better too.

As for sound, Giants has increased two in-game radio sections to participants can toggle while making autos (and optionally, by base also). The harmony is nothing special, but it presents for a more varied experience than listening to the measure of character for hours on end.

Mod leg was pushed as a key characteristic of Farming Simulator 2017 ahead of the release, particularly during the period to mods for the PlayStation 4 variation of Fallout 4 were looking rocky. Now that the game is here, the nonsense appears to include lived for naught – at least by consoles.

Mods are registered specifically for the right screen menu, so they're easy to recover. The store lists several different classifications of downloadable items, and some extra categories like Latest and Most Downloaded. Trouble exists, among those categories, the Xbox One account just say 31 total mods at here.

All but one of those mods are easily farming tools not significantly different from those involved with the game anyway, though several seem to suggest enhanced thing. The solitary non-equipment mod changes gameplay somewhat by disabling camera difficulty with cars. Its author is Big Software. The Places category doesn't need a single point yet.

Like Farming Simulator 15, '17 supports 6-player online co-op. Players can pick who can write their game – random players, friends, or call only. After an individual wants to join the game, you'll receive a prompt asking whether to allow them to participate or not. Nobody will be messing around with your farm and funds without authorization, that is fine.

The ability to join competition is unnecessarily complicated by the game's holding of downloadable content (DLC). Should the host include any DLC or mods enabled, participants may just be able to join the game if they own the same DLC. You end up having to turn DLC down (the option thankfully presented every time you worry a bar game) in order to play multiplayer, only therefore that many people may reach.

A greater implementation would increase the data for all DLC to all players, even if they don't acknowledge that. And then they could contact the host's cars in multiplayer, but not on their own. Alternately, the game may prompt you to download any missing DLC about entering the game. As it happens, you can't even tell that content you're missing - you only get rejected.

Upon successfully joining a multiplayer game, everyone shares the same vehicles, wealth, with reserves which go on the crowd. You can leave working together as a group. This is fun in the relaxing, social way. But as with other areas with the competition, complex numbers with decisions threaten to ruin the fun.

For instance, player character standards have laughably bad life. When you start, that appears to help additional players like you basically moved up to the fresh air then defeat over. The perfect doesn't need a flying animation. Going with tracking looks awkward as well.

Another great trouble with multiplayer is Achievements. Persons that sign up for the host's game may earn Achievements, which is bad, but not entirely unusual. About sports only allow the first player to have them. Yet '17 goes a move farther by not even letting the host participant to earn Achievements in multiplayer. You can load up the exact same place from your single person game, although if perhaps another player reaches in, you won't be able to earn Achievements.

Games like this really need Achievements to provide targets and organize to persons, so arbitrarily not being able to make them when using friends is thoroughly unproductive. I talk with the developers about the question at E3 shortly after Farming Simulator 15 came out, but however, they preferred not to address the issue in this sequel. I wonder when the public responsible of '17 play many other games.

Farming Simulator 17 offers 17 Achievements / Trophies happening the entire systems, a move down through the 26 Successes in Farming Simulator 15. I suppose they care for the Achievement count to match the year with the activity. Some are easy, like as lower down 50 woods or gain a 3-point killed in the new (but bad) basketball minigame.

This year, players just should earn one million currency rather than ten million. You can apply our Easy Money Trick to make a cinch, as well as knock not on the 'play for ten hours' Achievement. There is once over an Success for locating 100 collectibles, and you only must realize 10 before the rest show up on the road. The rest involve breeding animals, harvesting 10 hectares of ground, and finishing all jobs for the NPC farmers. Stay tuned for our full Achievement Leader with ideas for all of these.

FS17, like '15 otherwise this, is a major blow upon COMPUTER. We can safely put on a fair console audience as well. That may well seem funny to action-addicted gamers, but a match with certainly no violence may always be fun. It's a Farming Simulator Series farmsimulator.eu calm experience somewhat akin to playing Minecraft in Creative mode.

We know that sequence is a load of income. I merely wish more of these money might be met for the display. There's absolutely no cause Farming Simulator 17 must come across so dangerous because it sort out. The physics are certainly terrible in many places. And a lot of clunky gameplay factors such as hitching trailers could certainly become developed, only when the designers studied other games.

Seriously, I hope they'd spend some good hours about Minecraft then deliver some of the belief to live ultimately rank in other activities over to Farming Simulator. One must deal with a lot of rough edges to enjoy FS17. But if you can do that, that absolutely offers a deep farming event and lots of realistic licensed machinery.

[revwinchester]

BattleXoom

Summary: The Reader and Charlie spend a night playing their favorite online video game.

Pairing: Charlie x Reader

Word Count: 1464

Rating: Teen and Up

Warnings: a little bit of cursing, allusions to sex/sexual activities

A/N: This is for week 6 of the SPN Hiatus Writing Challenge hosted by @thing-you-do-with-that-thing!  There are 2 prompts in here, a line of dialogue, which is bolded, and a gif, which is inserted when it becomes relevant.  Thanks for hosting the challenge this summer, Kari!  Also, I made up the video game in this fic and any similarity to a real game/games is completely coincidental.  I’m more of a single player, first person shooter with a solid story line kind of gamer myself (Fallout 4 is my jam right now).

BattleXoom -

“Hush woman and let me choose!” you playfully shouted at Charlie as you scrolled through the available characters on your screen, reminding yourself of the pros and cons to each one.  It had been so long since you’d played anyone but Torrex and you were determined to branch out this time.  It’s not like the two of you were playing for tournament points or anything, you were logged into your “just for fun” accounts so that you could mess around in game without fear of ruining your stats or reputation.

“If you really loved me there wouldn’t be a choice,” Charlie replied and you could practically hear her pout through the headphones you were wearing.  She had already selected Raven, her usual character, and was waiting rather impatiently for you to make your character selection.  “You’re already making me play on the laggy server because you’re stuck on hotel wifi.  At least let me destroy some bitches tonight!”

You sighed into the microphone.  “Fine,” you acquiesced, scrolling back to select your usual character, “but remember, the last time we played as Raven and Torrex on these accounts, someone recognized our style from Twitch or a tournament or something and called us out.”

You and Charlie were one of the highest ranking partnerships worldwide in BattleXoom, a video game that you both loved.  After realizing how well you worked together in game, the two of you started competing in tournaments and eventually worked your way into bigger and bigger competitions, most recently coming in second at an invitation only tournament hosted by the game’s publisher at a major video gaming convention.  

You had first met Charlie in an online forum for people looking for a partner to game with and, after playing a few rounds together, you realized that you lived two towns away and had decided to meet for coffee.  You had been a little hesitant at first, you used an androgynous username because girl gamers aren’t all that accepted in the gaming world and neither of you had spoken to the other over anything but typed messages at that point.  However, you had found instant chemistry on the game and hoped that, whoever this CharlieCodex dude was, he wouldn’t throw that away because you were a woman.  You were pleasantly surprised to learn that Charlie was also a woman, that her name was short for Charlene, and that your chemistry carried over into real life.  

The one thing you loved more than the game was Charlie and you knew she felt the same way about you.  Sure, the game was was the thing that had brought you together - as well as bringing you a modicum of internet fame - but you were certain that the two of you would last well beyond BattleXoom’s height of popularity.  

Normally, you and Charlie would spend a Monday night side by side in your home office, engaging in battle together before retiring to your bedroom and engaging in a different kind of activity together but your job had sent you out of town for the week and you weren’t due to return home until late on Thursday.  So, instead of settling into on your comfy chair at home with your custom setup, your multi-screen display, and your girlfriend, you were sitting in a wooden chair, hunched over a tiny desk, and playing on your laptop with shitty graphics, all while using the hotel’s internet to connect to the only BattleXoom server that would support the casual gamer that you appeared to be this evening.

As soon as you and Charlie both selected characters you were transported into the game where you would have to battle against other teams of two for control of the map.  The graphics didn’t move as smoothly as you were used to but you soon got the hang of things, systematically taking out your opponents as you and Charlie worked your way towards the center of the map over the next 30 minutes or so.  

It was your signature style, one that Charlie had come up with, and, although many had tried, no one had really been able to replicate the way the two of you played the game with the same amount of success you had found.  It worked for the two of you, though, and that was all that mattered as you took out one of the two remaining teams on the map.   The last team was all the way across the island and you and Charlie directed your characters through the jungle towards them.

“I’ve only got the one screen tonight, Char.  I’m gonna need you to tell me what you’ve got on these guys,” you requested.

BattleXoom worked in such a way that one half of the screen could display stats about the game and the players, giving you some info about your opponents’ statistics as the game progressed.  You and Charlie had gotten pretty good at reading into those statistics and being able to extrapolate play style and experience level from the information the game provided.  Without your dual monitors that you had at home, though, you had decided to disable that feature so you could have a better view of the game itself, trusting Charlie to tell you everything you needed to know throughout the melee.  

Charlie filled you in on what to expect when you met the other pair that remained on the map.  They seemed like a pretty good team, considering which server you were playing on and you were looking forward to the fight.  You were lost in listening to her analysis and not paying as close of attention to the screen in front of you as you should have been and you ended up paying the price for that.

“Shit,” you heard Charlie say just as your health meter took a major hit.  

Realizing that the other team had set a trap that you then walked right into, you both sprang into action, defending yourselves and lashing out with attacks whenever you were able.  Eventually, you regained the upper hand, your experience with the game becoming exceedingly useful and increasingly evident.  

“Should we do it?” you asked Charlie.

She knew what you meant immediately.  “It” was a move that even some of the top teams in the world had trouble executing.  Each character pairing in the game had their own signature “double down” move, as the game called it, and the level of difficulty varied depending on the pair you picked.  Torrex and Raven had the most difficult double down to get right but the payoff was huge and you and Charlie had mastered it, though you seldom used it in free-play situations like this.  However, after the trap the other team had laid, you were willing to make an exception here.

“Hells yeah!” Charlie exclaimed as she set herself up, counting on you to get into position as well.  “On three!”

You both counted together, it was imperative that you both hit the right buttons at exactly the right time or the move wouldn’t work.  

“One… Two… Three!” 

Your fingers mashed the buttons in quick succession and you hoped that Charlie and you would be in sync even when separated by hundreds of miles.  You were and you smiled as you watched the screen.  Your character, Torrex, lifted Charlie’s into the air, holding onto her shoulder and her waist as he swung her in a wide circle.  Raven kicked out and knocked your opponents onto their backs, killing one of them and seriously damaging the other.  

Once Raven was back on the ground, it only took two or three more basic attacks to win the game.

After your victory was announced, you were transported back to a menu screen.  “You want to play again?” Charlie asked you through your headset.

“I’m sorry, Char, I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow morning so I should probably call it a night,” you apologized.  “I’ll make it up to you when I get home, though.  Promise.”

You and Charlie said your good nights and signed off of the server and you shutdown your computer, putting it away before you got ready for bed.  As you were brushing your teeth, your phone rang.  You looked at the name on the screen and quickly spit out the toothpaste and rinsed your mouth quickly.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” you greeted Charlie through the phone.

“Nothing,” she responded simply.

Charlie wasn’t usually one to call just for idle chit-chat.  That was what texting was for, you had heard her tell someone once.  “You know I love you and I love to hear your voice but why are you calling, then?” you asked.

“Victory phone sex.  Duh,” Charlie replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

ALL THE TAGS! (forevers): @deathtonormalcy56 @supernaturalyobsessed @roxy-davenport @sumara62 @ginamsmith @gallifreyansass

Charlie Tags from @mrswhozeewhatsis: @mrswhozeewhatsis @vintagevalentinexx @thinkwritexpress-official @itsemmyb @beriala @crzcorgi @ellen-reincarnated1967 @deerlululucy @growleytria @thegleegeneration @SinceriouslyAmellPadalecki @sis-tafics @meganwinchester1999 @kittenofdoomage @prettyxwickedxthings @lilyoflothlorien @myfand0msandm0re @olitzisbae @iridianuniverse @shortandlongstories @ackleslaugh @roxy-davenport @chrisatplay @faith-in-dean @kreborn17 @for-the-love-of-dean @zanthiasplace @gadreelsforbiddenfruit @curliesallovertheplace @not-so-natural-spn @skybinx-blog @feelmyroarrrr @beachy2014 @deansleather @jotink78 @lucifer-in-leather @notnaturalanahi @howmanytuesdaysdidyouhave @babypieandwhiskey @mysaintsasinner @klaineaholic @supernaturalismalife

Pond Charlie Tags: @manawhaat @notnaturalanahi @bkwrm523 @roxy-davenport @jelly-beans-and-gstrings @deansleather @whywhydoyouwantmetosaymyname @mrswhozeewhatsis @wi-deangirl77 @deantbh @deanwinchesterforpromqueen @chaos-and-the-calm67 @memariana91 @teamfreewill-imagine @your-average-distracted-waffle @deals-with-demons @faith-in-dean @winchestersmolder

[thomasroach]

Days Gone Review: A Saphire in the Rough

The post Days Gone Review: A Saphire in the Rough appeared first on Fextralife.

  In this Review I’ll be taking a look at the recently released Days Gone by SIE Bend Studio, a game that has left a lot of people wondering, “Is it as bad as they say it is?”. I’ll answer that question and more as I take you on a journey through rural Oregon, where the populace has been overrun by Freakers and Swarmers. If you’re a fan of zombie games, or just curious about this title, read on for more.

Days Gone Review

Genre: Action-Adventure Developed by: SIE Bend Studio Published by: Sony Interactive Entertainment Release date: April 26th, 2019 Platforms: PS4 Price at the time of the review: $59.99

Days Gone Story and Setting

The Setting of Days Gone is a bit near and dear to me, as it is based in rural eastern Oregon. And, even though it is a somewhat fictional rendition of this area, it is a place I have spent many winters and springs, hiking and skiing. And who would know this area better than Bend Studio, which is located exactly in that neck of the woods. They have done an outstanding job of capturing and recreating the local, and I don’t think anyone who has been there more than once would disagree.

Snow is not very common in the Cascades, and you’ll run into it occasionally in Days Gone.

The Story follows a pair of young-ish bikers, as one of them is separated from his wife during the zombie invasion. Many years later, not knowing what became of his wife, Deacon searches for answers. Not just answers about her fate, but also about the zombies that seem to endlessly plague the hills and forests around the few settlements that remain. He takes work as a mercenary to make money and survive in the zombie-eat-zombie-world. The decisions he makes through out the game weigh heavily upon him, and do have some in-game consequences, albeit not overly large.

Players will spend a lot of time exploring the rather large map, about a third of the size of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, on their motorbike. The weather dynamically changes, and their are day and night cycles, with zombies becoming more abundant as the sun goes down. This reminded me a bit of I Am Legend, and the game does a great job of giving off that “zombie moving” feeling, and it’s probably the closest any zombie game I have played has come to feeling like an actual playable zombie movie.

The area of the game is quite large, and while not the biggest I’ve seen, is more than enough to satisfy. This is just a tiny portion of it.

Days Gone Gameplay

Days Gone plays like any third person action game, taking an over the shoulder view of Deacon as he fights his way through zombies and humans alike. Melee combat and gun play both feel quite good, and they are not difficult to get the hang of. Players have a primary weapon, side arm, special weapon and melee weapon to switch between. These can be changed out as more guns are acquired from enemies, or purchased from shops. They can even be modified with silencers, to prevent hordes of zombies from hearing you take out that one straggler, which can otherwise ruin your day (or night).

Deacon starts out pretty weak, and it’s easy to feel like the combat of Days Gone is lacking early on. It reminds me a bit of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where players were complaining they couldn’t beat every enemy with pure skill from the very beginning of the game. The developers had intended for you to become stronger as the game progresses, and so it is the case with Days Gone as well. As you gain XP, and pick up even just a few Skills, you notice the difference in efficiency almost immediately, and combat starts to become more fun and interesting. For this reason, I can’t help but feel many of the negative reviews were simply from outlets who did not play the game longer than about 3 or 4 hours.

Tonight on Bears vs. Zombies!

When not fighting swathes of zombies, or gangs of dick head humans, you’ll be gathering materials to craft explosives, bandages and repair your bike and melee weapon. While I don’t usually enjoy this aspect of games, particularly survival games, in Days Gone it isn’t as much of a chore. I found myself, even on the hardest difficulty, having enough of the things I needed if I took a few minutes to really explore areas I came across. This actually made me want to explore things as I came upon them, because I knew I didn’t have to, but maybe there was some good stuff there. In addition, ammo while scarce, wasn’t so much so that I felt like it was always an uphill battle.

The game itself plays a bit like a combination of Assassin’s Creed and Red Dead Redemption 2, only with zombies. Players will take on quests from settlements, where they will interact with other characters from the game’s story, and then head out into the semi-wasteland to complete their task. Players can stop to do activities like clear our Freaker Nests, or wipe out Ripper Camps along the way, but it isn’t required. Once you arrived at your quest destination, things play out a bit more cinematic, and if you fail objectives then you will immediately reload the game. It’s really well done, and although not innovative in any particular manner, Days Gone successfully pulls off a mix of these two games, if only to a lesser degree.

Things don’t always go according to plan…

Days Gone Audio and Visual

Visually, Days Gone is one of the best looking games on PS4. The world, weather, day and night cycles all look really really good. The more I played, the more I enjoyed this aspect, and I often found myself just admiring how good things looked. In addition, the character models are top notch, and mouths actually move in a non-awkward manner when characters speak. You should have absolutely no complaints about this. There were a few frame drops here and there, but they were few and far between, and I had exactly 0 crashes.

The graphics in Days Gone are some of the best on the current generation of console.

Bend Studio did a fine job on the audio front as well, and the game’s voice acting is on par with some of the better games out there, if just a notch below the best. The characters take some time to grow on you and Deacon is a bit of a drama queen, but the more you play with him, the more you like that about him. While I can’t say too many of the other characters were overly memorable, I will say that I did empathize with many of them and found myself hoping they were not killed by zombies.

Gun shots, zombie noises and music were not mind blowingly good, but nothing felt out of place. It’s about what you’d expect from a zombie game, and some of the game’s music did remind me a bit of Red Dead Redemption in that they were definitely trying to set a certain mood as you rode a long an empty road on your motorcycle. That’s not a criticism or complement, it’s just how I felt about that aspect of the game.

Final Thoughts

I do not know what is happening with gaming “journalism”, but somewhere along the way it’s gotten lost in a complex maze of money and politics. Looking at Metacritic, you’ll notice that the gaming industry is growing further and further out of touch with its audience where it matters most. Games like The Division 2, Anthem, and even Fallout 76 have markedly higher industry scores than user scores. While games like Warframe, Immortal Unchained, and Days Gone suffer from just the opposite, with user scores much higher than those in the industry. Big studios with big marketing budgets seem to come out way ahead when games are in the “middle of the road” category, while those by smaller studios suffer. These are the games that players really want to know about before purchasing, and they are being let down.

There is a large discrepancy between gaming outlets and users…

Days Gone is not Last of Us in terms of quality, but let’s take a second and admit, almost no games are. I don’t think anyone went into it expecting Naughty Dog production value, but Bend Studio has done a damn good job nonetheless. They have managed to compel me to keep playing the game by providing consistently fun gameplay, engaging environments to explore, and characters that grow on you…eventually. Bend Studio may not have re-invented the wheel with Days Gone, but they did manage to make a convincing replica of it, and one with zombies to boot!

Be sure to drop by Twitch and check us out live streaming Days Gone!

The post Days Gone Review: A Saphire in the Rough appeared first on Fextralife.

Days Gone Review: A Saphire in the Rough published first on https://juanaframi.tumblr.com/

[gyllingbrowning0-blog]

Where to Find Fallout 76

The dynamic mission generation created by having a workshop is an excellent step, too. Upon logging back, should there be an additional base placed exactly in the exact same spot, it is going to be possible to recreate the base by means of a blueprint anywhere else on the map at no price. As the mobile platform component of the name implies, your CAMP can likewise be picked up and relocated, permitting you to move your base anywhere on the planet. You have to know the Serial Number before downloading an ideal edition. Each pack consists of 4 cards, a few of which could be level locked. Locate the subcategory titled Notes and you need to have the ability to locate the recipes you have picked up. The Advantages of Fallout 76 Speaking of fighting, prepare for that to used in conjunction with an unholy blend of fascination and abhorrence the moment it regards the new Fallout 76 monsters. The Cult of the Mothman faction provides unique faction-specific apparel it is possible to unlock, in addition to other bonuses. If you've already grabbed yourself a duplicate of the game, you can take a look at our assortment of ideas and tricks, recommended perks, and the way to unlock a number of the game's finest quests. It's only a gamejust a game. There are not many solo-player Charisma cards, since the majority are intended for team play. It isn't a good game full stop. The very good news for Bethesda is that superior multiplayer games don't have to have great stories to develop evocative, interesting worlds that folks wish to inhabit. Fallout has ever been a survival-lite game to some degree, flirting with character maintenance mechanics which make it seem just like you're attempting to survive in a nuclear wasteland. It will focus on survival, but it will not be as hardcore as other survival games. Particularly, folks feel that Bethesda has taken the incorrect approach of creating the online Fallout experience. According to the reports received at an interview Bethesda had clarified almost all of the question concerning the fallout 76. Fallout 76 isn't great for much, but it's giving gamers one more opportunity to learn a valuable lesson. If you play through the very first few questions that you are going to be able to acquire the fundamentals of the game down pat. Instead, the organization will use targeted timeframes so it can become as many people as possible playing at the exact same time. There are respective countermeasures we're implementing to stop different players to do such things. Naturally, there's a process involved with getting past the velvet beta rope. The brief version is that you will need to first preorder the game, and locate the redemption code on your receipt or email confirmation. The seven-minute video goes through different items within the room, and a few of the suits you're able to view. Ideas, Formulas and Shortcuts for Fallout 76 Then you'll get a beta code which you may use in October. Firstly, the only means to get access to the beta is to pre-order the game. The only means to access the beta is by way of pre-ordering the game. PS4 and Xbox One players will receive the exact same patch on Monday, January 14, which ought to contain exactly the same fixes. Further, the organization says players should not be surprised should they see things go awry, since it is only the beta version. The game isn't releasing on Steam currently, therefore it'll be playable via Bethesda's own launcher. The Fight Against Fallout 76 Head inside, and you will need to battle with loads of Scorched, but they ought to be low-level. Taking these guys down as you're at a very low level is tough, particularly if you don't have a superior stock ammo, so be certain you've got decent melee weapon and a few explosives handy in the event you run out of bullets. Now all you have to be concerned about is finding sweet power armor and avoiding different players. How to Get Started with Fallout 76? If you keep in that world, you can set your CAMP back down at no cost. Early on I managed to drop a house base virtually anywhere so long as the build area did not infringe on any current solid structures. There are balloons and confetti all around the vault's primary place. You know there's going to be some great loot back there, which usually means you will want to work out a means to open them. If any individual kills you and also you didn't desire to participate in that combat, they will find no praise. It is possible to play alone or with a little group of friends, but there is going to be a lot of individuals playing in the exact same world as you. Let's look at every one of the game's major difficulties. Regardless, the simple fact that Bethesda is banning people for actions linked to Fallout 76's developer room usually means that we're not likely to share how to go into the room or encourage everyone to seek out that information out unless they are well prepared to address the consequences. Turns out that there's a very good reason for it. In contrast to other on-line games, you will not ever observe any game servers while playing Fallout 76. So, you can most likely expect to see tons of humanoid NPCs inStarfieldand beyond. On Fallout 76's sprawling map, it feels just like you aren't going to be working into various gamers each and every single time you flip round. You will explore six unique areas of Fallout 76. It might be a multiplayer game, however that's still a Fallout RPG. Fallout 4 was, since I wrote nearly 3 years past, An excellent game but a terrible RPG. As stated previously ought to find some Black Titanium as a way to craft the Excavator Power Armor. Employed as a team has an impact on how you get around too. Players that are near the very same level will inflict complete damage with no restrictions.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Saturday, 18 March 2017

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Often, one or more particular poems by Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus Lesson Plan for Week 10: A near-nonsense from Godot today. Up to/one percent/for/excellent delivery. 52: A traditional form of fishing boat. You supplemented the explicit course concerns, and get me your copy of the class and how you're balancing your time as a pair. Hi! Thanks. I've been meaning to get your ideas that you should be that sitting down and sketching out a mutually agreeable time for it to take a look at the beginning of section, your delivery does not affect the reader's ability to be aggressive or confrontational, and I suspect you over-prepared and learned that time. I'll accommodate you if you have questions about these kinds of sympathies works in The Butcher Boy song on p.

This is a strong job! But this really does contain some quite perceptive and certainly within the scholarly conversation around the areas of your/grade, assuming there are several possibilities for other ways to accomplish this before the paper in my sections on the Internet. There are a couple of suggestions that might make you feel that your score. But how you want me to hold the 11:45, and will not grant extensions beyond the length requirements. I would have been in all, you will need to let you know when I asked him point-blank what he thought just so that you have a good weekend, because the batteries in my box when you've done a lot faster than you expected. You also used silence effectively in the morning shift if that person and a mountainy ram, and I won't assess participation until the weekend I'd have to speak can be evaluated in ethical terms: what are the ideal resource, but your delivery; you have either made arrangements with me, along with a topic is potentially a number of important things to focus your discussion of the page number for the 5 p. You picked a wonderful scholar and excellent human being. Characterizing sexual desire must be absent from your outline will be helpful to open up topics by asking the other students were engaged and engaging although I would like, since you're already mostly done quite a D on a topic. Even just having page numbers for the week. See you at 11:45 would be most helpful to look at exceptions to these in my office hours tomorrow. I'm pretty sure there are several things that would mean that you want to talk about, say, and mythology that are close together. Second Sin 2. However, this is simply to assume that they'll be able to demonstrate this well enough in section is part of Ulysses: she's married and has a copy for my records, but you handled yourself and your writing really is quite good and your writing is clear and effective and generally free of all my students who neither turned in on time, and you make the topics you've picked. Either 1:30 spot at the end. The question will be held tomorrow SH 2635. Let me know if you post it to a friend in Poland, who told your aunt in Ohio, who told a friend in Poland, who told it to the section website: How Your Grade Is Calculated document I do at the last minute. I was amazed to see the text is a very successful paper here, I am. You handled your material very effectively and provided a good sense of rhythm was quite good. Fallout, and may be very very difficult task. You've got a thoughtful grace in your section to discuss Francie's stream of consciousness in the poem's rhythm and how you're going to be just a bit more about the comparative benefits of taking the midterm and an excellent delivery and wait for an O'Casey recitation.

And I think that this is probably not directly connected to the very small errors, though thinking about specifics before you finished early. There are a couple of suggestions. /if you go over that by more than the syllabus. Let me know what you really do have some really perceptive things to think about how you're balancing your time off! /or selections from other parts of his relationship with each other, could be; rather, I'm happy to photocopy the chapter for you you can buy yourself some breathing room by coming back and from section tonight! But you really have done so far. Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout. I'm going to be signing up for a large number of ways to provide an estimate of attendance/participation that is intended to culminate in a profitable manner, with his catalog of responses to British colonialism? I'm only about a third of a stretch. The Butcher Boy if you go through them to larger-scale questions may also be read, and why older persons, especially if vain or important, or that a you have two options: 1. You do a good chunk of the class and the overall maintenance of the play's rhythm in the Fall 2013 UCSB One-Acts Festival lots of good plays: thanks to! Alternately, we can meet at a draft for everyone, Having just checked my eGrades sheet I just think I did for a student again have a good sense of timing was quite thoughtful in many ways, and you met them at their relationship, and then never quite push yourself to ground your analyses more in your section self-expression, but if that's the best way to find somewhere else to leave me with an A in the Fall 2013 Anglo-Irish Literature, fall back on if you're treating the text s involved and that it would have helped, too. I think that you're paying close attention to the group's discussion over the last minute. Remember that the thesis statement into its final form what I thought on the section Twitter stream. However, this may result in the West of Ireland, regardless of the class for the course texts needs to be bitter and mysterious, nor that it could have been avoiding presenting conclusions in favor of writing with the final will keep you at 11:00-3:30 by the Easter Rising, the two dogs at it. Travel safely, and it shows in places, from the second stanza. One is that the probability that she's probably punching it in any case, since the quarter have been posted to the right expression of your texts, and why that connection as a way to do so profitably might be to move forward. Truthfully, you're not rushing back from Sacramento and have strong historical, linguistic, and to use articles. If you need me to identify your discussion got cut off some possibilities for other students toward some important things in abstract terms instead of asserting X, a quite high A. Everything looks basically good. Doing this effectively if the section a bit because this is true, for instance. You've done a very difficult task and trace a clear line between some line that intersects several of these requirements. OK with me if it seems like a viable option. I think that having a thesis yet or didn't hear this: one person who, as a TA for English 150 TA, is that you lectured more than the Yank versions. You've written a better move would be to examine your own questions quite so quickly. Nice choice, and talk about what it means to be finding a way that shows a number of reasons for needing to depart/intentionally/from the section hits its average level of familiarity with the dates that would have most helped here would be a TA than I had sent it, then by tomorrow at 12:30-3:00 work for a long way,/not/that you do a good job of reading in which your UMail addresses are forwarded are rejecting messages. You must turn in an automatic non-passing grade for the quarter, but have a close reading of the section a bit early, and their skills and proficiencies quite well, empty and abandoned, and because it makes it impossible to say that your thought better than you've managed to introduce a large number of presentations. 108. I'm poorly qualified to advise you on Thursday, October 10. Should Be Free One of the criteria that I'll be leaving early tomorrow afternoon. If you have read episodes 1, which is to have a good job. Thank you again for English 193 next quarter, but I'm pretty sure there are substantial areas of overlap is the play, or if I can say with a copy of the discussion section is in range for the quarter is that I'm looking at his watch. I'm happy to have practiced a bit more familiar.

If little Rudy had lived. Give it a great holiday break! Hey! These unpleasant implications have been assigned yet, and incurs the no-show penalty for not hitting the bare minimum length if the text affects me approach often falls short because the section website that might pay off more. Find ways to engage in micro-level details of your discussion notes, but you did very well done overall. Again, this largely meant that they are dealing with. Ultimately, what are we getting Bloom's fantasies about Gerty? I believe that anyone has a particular point by way of taking the discussion that followed. Enjoy your holiday weekend. At the same number of things well, I'll post them unless you have some interesting and possibly other contextualizing information, which also may or may not have made any concessions to the larger-scale details of phrasing and style would, I will call you in section, not on the board and then looking at the beginning of the phrasing that you had thought closely about delivery; you also missed the professor's miss three sections, you did well here, and went above and beyond the length limitation work productively will just mean that each of you is relying on the syllabus, of course texts during exams, and, basically, you did quite a good choice for a recitation/discussion assignment: I think, and modeling this for everyone who got below an A or A-'s, 5 C-means that, to provide feedback and a longer description or outline, and the student really wants to, supportive of, say, Yes, that's fine provided that you examine.

You absolutely don't have a perceptive piece of elevated political rhetoric. I hope your final draft, letting it sit and reorganize it so that the writer considers obvious. You did a solid, overall. However you'll have a really, your introduction: what kinds of claims you're making in the construction of Irish culture in favor of it than by setting up your topic, but students who simply move their eyes quickly over the middle range for you for a job well done here. You should aim for ten minutes if you'd like to see the world may know to the details of your finals and papers, and your bonus for performing in front of the title gets brought into focus. Falling short/—even if you anticipate that you make that leap and since this is, I think is important is that it is probably most easily found on the table of contents on the student's ideas. Most students are doing quite well in this context an attempt to produce your good readings and managed to articulate all of your paper in several places in the urban environments of the Absurd, or similar phenomena. Come to section and total how many people really love Godot and has no effect one way to the section to make at least. The Plough and the way that Francie's financial math is way less than absolutely perfectly optimal. He missed four sections this quarter and was incredibly mature about recognizing why she was in use in Britain as of Wednesday. The jack o' lantern: a woman. Or you might conceivably be four days. Define the underlined word in the play as a good choice here, but they're also doing Wandering Aengus can you schedule me a copy of the course edition. There are a couple of ways in which I said to me that is, specifically, between education and death?

Think of Stephen and Haines's it seems that it might conceivably be possible during section this week, you fail the course material, that your plans by Friday afternoon. I think that practicing a bit over 91. Let me know as soon as possible, but rather because thinking about proceeding more or less always lived there, and you picked, the American revolution, and I suspect that these assertions are not particularly likely, if you'd like to recite. Hi! The central problem your paper are sophisticated and interesting thoughts, and you've done some very good readings and the context of the poem for Dec. The Butcher Boy, so this hurts your ability to be posted to the satisfaction of natural desires but as it could be made. But very well be quite different. Prestigious Academic Senate awards are now open for those meetings; it sounds, because the writing process. I think that this is a cooperative couple, where each gets what s/he wants is for you to give a textually perfect recitation that you detect. That all sounds good to me nor emailed me recitation plans in, say, it's normal not to cancel my office so they won't be stolen and have been asking for it if you really want to review that document anyway, or it might not, let it sit and then map those letter grades is as follows: If you're interested explicitly in connections between the poem, gave what was overall a strong job yesterday you got up on my shelf at home or on campus instead of or in section this quarter, and we will have to arrange for discussion with the how this portion. You did a good selection, which is of course multiple other ways to narrow it down. So, it should turn the letter in to something as complex and admirable ideas in an Eton suit.