Author Archives: Azuriel
Game Dialog Choice
I’m still slowly working my way through Pillars of Eternity, but this is starting to irk me greatly:
Fine.
Pillars is not, of course, the first game to tie your in-game dialog responses to statistics or skills. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas come immediately to my mind, for example. But on reflection, I don’t really like it in those games either. I find Pillars a bit worse in this regard though, due both to how much more difficult it is to actually raise your abilities, and how this game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to, you know, stuff like this:
and this:
Answer: [Wisdom 18 Required]
Ironically, Plansescape Torment also required certain attributes to be above an arbitrary threshold to unlock dialog options, so perhaps it is not the best of examples.
Or maybe it is. After all, the attribute breakpoints were invisible.
And I guess that is what annoys me the most: I do not understand the point of showing me dialog options I can never select. I don’t care that the other options would have only increased my quest payout by 100 copper, or saved me from one additional encounter, or given me an extra potion.
As a designer, what are you trying to communicate to me? The fact that I made poor decisions on the character select screen hours before actually playing your game? Are you trying to signal that certain skills will be important in the future? If so, are you giving me any tools or resources to achieve those thresholds later? I mean, clearly I can do nothing about these forbidden choices in the middle of the conversion, or even after I reload the game really. Or am I supposed to simply keep this in mind for some hypothetical second playthrough?
Truth be told, I was a bit miffed back in the day once I realized that most of the best dialog options in Planescape Torment were locked behind Wisdom 18+. But the game never rubbed my face in it, or otherwise treated dialog so… gamey.
Speaking of which: why are we all tying dialog to abstract attributes in the first place? For roleplaying purposes? To cause players to handicap themselves with useless Feats/Skills/Talents so players can’t be good at fighting and not fighting? Just give me my dialog choices and let me work things out from there. Or don’t and just not tell me about it.
This middle way is the worst of all worlds.
Anime Reviews: Steins;Gate, Toradora!
Steins;Gate
Episodes: 1-24
Genre: Sci-Fi, Near Future, Drama
Steins;Gate is a gripping, emotional drama that also reminds me of why I hate time travel as a narrative mechanic so much. The anime follows the eccentric teenage “mad scientist” Rintaro Okabe and his two friends/Lab Members as they spend their days fighting the “Organization” and otherwise goofing around with gadgets. After going to a conference on Time Travel, Okabe encounters a woman stabbed and lying in a pool of blood. Shaken, he texts his friend about the incident while the Phone Microwave gadget was running… and his text arrives 5 days in the past, changing the future.
What is brilliant about this anime is exactly what I dislike about the conceptual narrative. The first half of the anime explores the nature and limitations of the “D-Mail” system – the ability to send a phone text to someone in the past – and each successful D-Mail permanently changes the world and resets everyone’s memories to match it… other than Okabe, who remembers everything. Later on, the anime darkens considerably once Okabe realizes the butterfly effects of all these changes and the seemingly inevitable future it portends. And that is the rub. Each time the world is changed, everything that happened previously ceases to be. Okabe (and you) remember that other world, but it’s irrelevant in a practical sense, erasing huge swaths of continuity and character development.
Make no mistake, Steins;Gate is a superb, shocking, draining anime and by far the best version of Time Travel I have encountered in fiction. I still hate Time Travel as a narrative mechanic though, and my attachment to the characters of Steins;Gate and their sacrifices (which are erased) only deepens my antipathy for it.
But if you have no issue with Time Travel? You should see this anime yesterday.
Toradora!
Episodes: 1-25
Genre: High school romantic comedy
In a nutshell, Toradora is a high school romantic comedy with enough dramatic elements and interesting characters to set it apart from what otherwise amounts to another entry in the busiest anime genre of all time. The show follows Ryuji, a high schooler who looks like a delinquent but is actually fairly sensitive and domestic, and his new neighbor Taiga, the short “palm-top tiger” with an even shorter temper. Once the two of them realize that they have crushes on the other’s best friend, they set differences aside while trying to set the other up with their crush. As you might expect, misadventures and misunderstandings abound.
Overall, I really enjoyed Toradora to the tune of crushing all 25 episodes across two days. As mentioned, there is enough drama and emotional scenes to set the anime apart from its peers, if the quirky characters did not do so already. And most importantly? There is actually catharsis by the end; this is no harem comedy in which nothing is resolved by the final credits.
Review: Metal Gear Solid 5
Game: Metal Gear Solid 5: the Phantom Pain
Recommended price: $35
Metacritic Score: 96
Completion Time: 50+ hours
Buy If You Like: Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima, 3rd-person Far Cry
A serious game for serious people.
Metal Gear Solid 5 is one of the most engaging games I have ever played. The completion time up there is a general estimate, but I personally clocked in 75 hours before I reached the end. The core gameplay loop is incredibly tight, the visuals (with a GTX 970) are impossibly fantastic, and never before I have felt like such a badass, one-man infiltration army.
At the same time, I can empathize with those who feel this Kojima swan-song is the weakest entry in the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Or simply an incomplete game.
As you will undoubtedly see in the weeks and months to come, a lot of people were incredibly disappointed with… let’s just say Chapter 2. The “first Chapter” comprises what felt like was the entire game – it is almost an entirely self-contained 40+ hour narrative, with a capstone boss battle and rolling end credits. When I saw “Chapter 2” flash on the screen afterwards, I was legitimately surprised. “What?! There’s more? Wow!”
What becomes immediately clear across the half-dozen or so story missions though, is that Chapter 2 is more Epilogue than anything. Or, if I’m being honest, a desperate last-ditch attempt by Kojima to throw in plot material he wasn’t able to work into the main narrative before the release deadline. Which is really a goddamn shame, because Chapter 2 has some of the most emotional missions in the entire game.
The boss battles were a little weak, but no different than the other games IMO.
I am mentioning all of this at the beginning because it’s important to ask yourself what kind of gamer you are. If you are a diehard MGS/Kojima fan who bought into the trailer hype, you’ve memorized the lore, and are looking forward to having this 5th (and presumably last) game wrap everything up in a manner consistent with the other games… you will be disappointed.
The spectacle is there. The ridiculous plot points are there. The zany scope is there. What’s missing is at least one critical story mission (which was included as a video in the Collector’s Edition, but can also be viewed on Youtube) and some filler missions to coherently link together what exists in Chapter 2. This isn’t like the end of MGS 2 where you’re wondering what the hell just happened, or the 2nd disc of Xenogears when the team apparently ran out of money. The Chapter 2 missions feel like they were created first, and awaiting a context in which to place them later, but it never arrived.
Indeed, they are missions that in all likelihood should have been cut out altogether, until and unless they could be finished as DLC.
What’s in the booooox?
On the other hand, if you are a gamer capable of enjoying a game for what it is, or otherwise have few expectations coming in, MGS 5 is going to blow your mind.
As I mentioned before, the core gameplay loop is incredibly tight. You might be tasked with rescuing a prisoner for example, but are otherwise left to your own devices (literally) as for how to accomplish that. Binoculars will tag enemies and allow you to track their movements through walls, so scouting is encouraged. Mother Base is always in need for more and better-skilled recruits, so tranquilizing and extracting enemies soldiers is encouraged. If you manage to get in close-quarters with the enemy, you can interrogate him into telling you where prisoners and resources are located, so getting real close to enemies is encouraged. It is a hell of a lot easier to do all of those things when the entire base isn’t trying to kill you, so stealth is encouraged.
Note how all of this is “encouraged” as opposed to being required. You can absolutely run and gun your way to S-rank level completion if that’s how you want to play. Or, you know, if someone raises the alarm when you’re 80% done with the mission every goddamn time and you can’t be asked to reset it yet again.
There have been some complaints for how much of the story was relegated to cassette tapes. As someone who attempted to complete MGS 4 before the release of this game, all I can say is: thank Christ. Having the plot mechanics tied to cassette tapes instead of the Codec system allows the player to A) listen to them at their leisure, including while on Side Missions, and B) opens up the ability to hear historical information, including conversations in which Big Boss was not present. Removing the Codec system might have contributed to the looser overall narrative of the game, but honestly I’d take that over the awkward, rambling Codecs of titles past.
Perfect grenade opportunity: ruined.
Since I played this on the PC, I just want to take a moment to talk about my experience playing exclusively with the mouse & keyboard. For the most part, it worked well. The two specific issues you will encounter is with sneaking and throwing grenades. The default crouch speed is fast enough that guards can hear you with 5-10 meters, unless you hold down Ctrl, which is agonizingly slow; with a controller analog stick, you would be able to hit a sweet spot between the two speeds while remaining undetectable. That said, you can unlock a Sneaking Suit fairly early on that will allow you to move around a maximum Crouch speed with no issue. With grenades, there is an overhand and underhand throw option, supposedly determined by tapping the left-mouse button versus holding it down. After having enough perfect grenading opportunities foiled by this finicky detection system, I resorted to overhand throws always.
There are some additional mouse & keyboard unfriendliness in the many menus – mouse scroll doesn’t work, you need to press 1 & 3 to navigate menus, etc – but it’s not disruptive enough to forgo mouse aiming IMO.
In the final analysis, a day or two removed from the end of the game, I still feel like Metal Gear Solid 5 is an incredible experience. There are people out there with completely legitimate grievances with the game, both mechanically and narratively, and I empathize with them. At the same time, I feel less that MGS 5 “doesn’t fit in” with the rest of the series and more that the rest of the series would have been better off being more like MGS 5. You know, minus the rushed, unfinished nature of Chapter 2.
Impression: Metal Gear Solid 5
As it turns out, Metal Gear Solid 5: the Phantom Fulton is a lot of fun. Like, a lot lot.
The proper tone is set from the very beginning:
I’ve been playing 12 hours and I still don’t know who’s ass that is.
Like, it’s funny, right? But even crazier is when you think about A) who would come up with this, B) who would allow this to occur, and C) am I actually seeing this? I guess it’s tame in comparison to that one Raiden section in MGS2, but still! This is the sort of esoteric goofiness that is so endearing of Japanese videogames, and the Metal Gear Solid series specifically.
Also, holy shit, 60 FPS on super-max settings. My recently-acquired 970 is smoking this game so hard, it can apparently bump the resolution higher than my monitor can support, and then downscale it to 1080p to cram in more shinies.
Here is a picture of me kidnapping a puppy:
Seems to have recovered from the tranq dart I shot at her face.
Analyzing my own experience playing this game has also been amusing. The MGS series has always had this weird dichotomy in which it gave you 30 weapons to play around with, but made you feel bad for using anything other than the tranq gun in every scenario. Now in MGS 5, they give you the same plethora of guns and frequently tell you to go nuts. Grenade launcher by the 5th mission? Go for it.
In spite of getting the OK for GTA-levels of mayhem though, I’m playing this game like Tenchu.
But if I kill them, I can’t break their spirit and brainwash them to join my army…
It’s pretty clever design, I must say. Because while it is certainly worlds easier just sniping everyone from a million miles away, pretty much the entire reward structure of the game encourages sneaking and getting up close and personal. Since you are rebuilding Mother Base, you want to keep the place as fully stocked with brainwashed troops as possible. So instead of killing them, you can knock them out with tranq guns to the face and Fulton them out. But if you managed to sneak up on someone, you can interrogate them into putting resources and other goodies on your map, including diamonds which represent enough currency to make up ~10% of a research upgrade. Once you get the info, you are free to kill them or knock them out at your discretion.
I really do enjoy this sort of design tension, as it is all carrot and no stick. In a hurry? Blow them up. Want to actually play a stealth game? Go ahead and have all the rewards.
Best score I’ve gotten thus far.
In any case, no doubt you will be hearing more about this game in the following week(s).
Blaugust Clean-up
Thank god that’s over. Nothing quite like getting into the spirit of blogging by burning yourself out with thirty-one daily posts.
I’m halfway kidding.
It was a fun experiment, but I’m doubtful that I’ll participate next year. While there is still some possibility of long-tail shenanigans, my mid-month analysis seems correct:
The numbers, minus the numbers.
In other words, in terms of pageviews and visitors, daily posting still resulted in 10% less views than the peak in May. Which, incidentally, was a month that saw eleven (11) posts. Perhaps that is not quite as fair a comparison given how August is certainly 16% higher than both June and July. Then again, I posted 11 and 13 times in those months, respectively. Talk about diminishing returns.
The thing that is up rather markedly are comments:
Probably the better blogging indicator.
As I mused two weeks ago, I am not entirely sure whether the uptick in comments is due to the shotgun effect – more posts makes it more likely you post something people want to talk about – or from the nature of the Blaugust event itself, or a complete coincidence, or what. The thing I do know is that pageviews are one thing, but comments can actually challenge your arguments, change your worldview, and even comfort you with camaraderie. All things I definitely appreciate.
Not worth posting daily for that though, Christ.
Anyway, I have a birthday and Metal Gear Solid 5 to enjoy this week. So, see you… maybe Thursday. Or whenever the hell I feel like it.
*sigh* Feels good to say that again.
The Best of In An Age, Vol. 1
[Blaugust Day 31]
If you are looking for the best, most philosophical, endearing, poignant, expertly written posts for In An Age, then look no further.
That’s right, they appear here, at the top of InAnAge.com, two or three times each week depending on when I feel like dropping epiphanous bombs. Subscribe or add to your RSS reader of your choice, and you’ll be notified every time the light shines forth from my bushel. Which, again, is all the goddamn time. Worst… bushel… ever.
If you’re not up for reading nearly 800 posts though, here are the Top 5, in no particular order:
Wirehead
This post is actually somewhat topical given how it was originally written about my feeling of “offness” whilst playing Guild Wars 2. The term “wirehead” has came to represent any game I play obsessively but ends up making me feel empty when I turn it off. Favorite line from the post: “Playing Guild Wars 2 feels like going to Disneyland ahead of the apocalypse.”
Entitlement
Despite the years, I still consider “entitlement” to a be a trigger word for me and a Godwin’s Law for videogame arguments generally. The best summation of my feeling on the word ended up coming from a more recent follow-up post: “When you use the word “entitlement” as a pejorative, all you are doing is asserting that someone has unreasonable expectations about something, without actually bothering to offer an argument or explanation as to why it is unreasonable.”
The Problem With F2P and Microtransactions
If there was one other concept I wish the whole of the internet knew and understood, it is that of Consumer Surplus. While the F2P and microtransaction ship has long since sailed, the idea of Consumer Surplus is still useful in moderating the insanely anti-consumer sentiments that crop up in gaming discussions with disturbing regularity. This particular post isn’t the best one on the topic, but it’s the first, and it explains what Consumer Surplus is. For the others, just click on the Consumer Surplus tag.
My Issues with the Bioshock Infinite Plot
Oh man, Bioshock Infinite. It’s been over two years since I wrote that post, but I still stand by every argument made and presented. Simply put: if you liked Infinite’s plot, you’re wrong. Case closed.
Established Fact
Speaking of arguments, I’m still rather fond of this one. At the time, the internet was discussing why WoW was losing subscribers in Cataclysm despite the (established) fact that the actual cause was the increase in dungeon difficulty. Incidentally, I consider that post and a few others from that time period as the beginnings of my (one-sided) rivalry with SynCaine.
________________
There you have it, the Top 5 posts from In An Age. While the newest amongst them is April 2013, my original list had at least 25 entries mostly pulled from the Philosophy category. In fact, that’s the place I recommend going to if you enjoy my writing at all and yet somehow have failed to keep current with my steady stream of genius. Priorities, people; work on them.
Runners-Up:
- A Flight Too Far
- Revisiting Single-Player MMOs
- Design > Toxicity
- No Country for Old Blizzard
- The F-Word
Enjoy Continue enjoying.
B2P MMO Goes F2P
We kinda knew from an earlier leak already, but it’s now official: Guild Wars 2 is going F2P.
The F2P restrictions can be compared here, or just read this bullet list from Reddit:
- Does not receive daily login bonus
- Start with less storage than paid account : 2 character slots, 3 bag slots
- No map wide chat interaction, can use local chat
- Cannot post on ArenaNet forums
- Can only start new whisper conversations once every 30 seconds
- Can trade and buy common items on TP
- Can’t mail items or gold to other players, can still send text-only mail to friends
- Must be level 60 before entering WvW, other unspecified zone/level restrictions
- They must play to level 10 before leaving the starter zones, to level 30 before using LFG
- They can play PvP immediately but must get to rank 20 before using custom and unranked arenas
- Cannot trade gold for gems
- Cannot access guild vaults
The more I think about it, the more bizarre this announcement gets. First, has there ever been a B2P MMO that went to F2P? I know GW2 is highly dependent on its cash shop for additional revenue already, but this still feels like a weird strategy. Especially in terms of those “restrictions,” which are incredibly lenient when compared to similar offerings. I guess the WvW restriction might prevent easier zerg leveling/karma farming, but the scaling was so bad back when I played that you practically had to be 60+ to do anything of particular note anyway.
The second bizarre thing about this announcement is the timing. Remember two months ago when ArenaNet bundled the base game into the expansion box price and the internet lost its shit? Surely they knew they were going to announce a F2P conversion two months later… right? Maybe they wanted to wait until PAX for the press coverage, but that was still a lot of negative coverage right in the summer months that could have been avoided multiple ways. Perhaps them knowing F2P was coming contributed to their laissez faire attitude at that particular information rollout.
I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a slight itch to maybe perhaps download GW2 again, especially after I stopped playing WoW. My game experience ended on a particularly sour note last time around, but it might of been because I wasn’t completely sold on the Elementalist playstyle. Plus, you know, since I bought the retail box years ago, I could start it up and be back playing with little issue.
On the other hand, ArenaNet’s commitment to “Living Stories” and one-time events means that I’m not even sure what, if anything, would actually be different a second time around. Lion’s Arch was destroyed and rebuilt, I think? Maybe they added a few more entries to the Explicit Schedule of Villainy? Who knows. For now, I’m much more likely to get into FF14 than GW2 again.
Best of luck to ArenaNet just the same.
Lessons Learned: Home Theater Edition
[Blaugust Day 29]
If I had to pinpoint the exact moment when my home theater plans started falling apart, it was when I decided not to get a home theater. I still don’t want one, for the record, but I’m currently in that sort of purgatory where doing something and not doing something are both equally bad. Since I cannot go back in time, I will have to settle for dispensing vicarious wisdom.
Originally, I bought a 32″ TV and a PS3 for my console needs. That was fine at the time, as I was living with a roommate and thus had the TV in my bedroom. Then, of course, I decided I needed to get some kind of soundbar because TV speakers are universally terrible. This setup worked for about a year and a half, until I ended up getting a new apartment by myself. At that point, a 32″ TV just starts looking comically small from 9 feet away. So… new TV.
Enter the dilemma.
Price-wise, the 42″ TVs I was looking at were the same price as projectors. I decided to go with the projector because A) why not?, and B) poor long-term planning. I’m not saying that I regret the purchase per se, but it definitely set me down a path that I had not fully anticipated.
So I had the projector and the soundbar. I was not all that happy with the soundbar though, because its volume settings were such that Volume 4 was a bit too quiet to hear, and Volume 5 was too loud. Now that I had a projector, surely it would be as good a time as any to pick up a set of 5.1 surround sound speakers, yeah? No, past self. The answer is no. Unfortunately, I was not quantumly entangled at that point and ended up buying this particular set of speakers for a sum that was probably around $100.
It was not until this point that I realized I had made a mistake like six moves ago.
See, home theaters are like building a computer – you can’t just randomly buy the shit you need (motherboard, CPU, etc) and expect the disparate parts to just come together somehow. For example, let’s take a look at the back of my projector and speakers for a second:
Uh oh.
There are a lot of things wrong with this picture. A lot of embarrassing, quite-obvious-in-retrospect things. Things like “how the hell are these two things supposed to connect?” The answer is two audio-out cables from the projector. So I have HDMI quality picture and sound coming from the PS3 to the projector, which then downgrades the picture to 720p and reduces the sound to 2-channels, aka stereo. That… sucks. What’s worse is that I’m not even sure these speakers were better than the soundbar, because most times its either too quiet or shaking the walls, and while I have reduced the amount of neighbors I have with my recent move, I remain in an apartment.
A “solution” to this problem is precisely the thing that you’re supposed to buy with any 5.1 speaker setup: a receiver. Which, despite a rather exhaustive amount of research, is a device I have a hard time believing needs to exist as a discreet product. Near as I can tell, a receiver is a $200+ ugly box that takes the already-5.1 sound from your main device and “translates” it into 5.1 sound for your speakers. Why the device needs a receiver to exist, or why speakers can’t just play the sound, I have no idea.
So this is the dilemma I now face. It’s dumb to have 5.1 speakers playing stereo. Spending $200 on a receiver though, is also pretty dumb since I don’t necessarily care about true surround sound. And even if I do get a receiver, it’s also kinda dumb to spend that money to pump surround sound through my cheap speakers. That’s like wearing $200 dress shoes with sweatpants. But my current setup is not particularly good by itself; it works, it’s passable, and it also contributes to my lack of desire to play console games. I’m tempted to just buy a better quality soundbar and call it a day, but that leaves me with a set of useless speakers. There’s also the problem that I’m using a projector, which means the soundbar either needs quasi-receiver-like powers so I can run my PS3 signal through it, or I suppose it can run on the two stereo cables. Would the optical speaker jack in the back of the PS3 work too? I have no idea.
On the one hand, I have to be mindful of the Sunk Cost Fallacy here. If a soundbar would solve my problems, the speakers will just need to go back into a box in the closet. A receiver would also solve my problems though, and presumably be more modular/useful in the future home theater experiments. And, just throwing this out there, buying a regular (40+”) TV and soundbar would solve even more problems still. The projector is cool and all, but it’s one of those things I’m starting to realize that you can’t (or shouldn’t, at least) just half-ass.
Well, there you go. Learn from my mistakes.
In An Age 
UI is the Window to a Game’s Soul
Sep 9
Posted by Azuriel
There is a lot to say about Metal Gear Solid 5 – or at least there would be if it were not consuming all my desire to do anything else – but today I wanted to talk about what it perhaps does best. Which is this:
No one expects 3pm infiltrations.
Just look at that. Look at that and realize exactly how much you don’t see.
For comparison purposes, here is MGS4:
Like an eye full of sand.
The narrative just writes itself, doesn’t it?
The elegance of the entire setup continues to blow my mind every time I play MGS5. Much as with MGS3 before it, removing the mini-map forces the player to redirect their attention to their surroundings. But in another design coup, MGS5 will give you the same functionality as an omniscient radar… provided you tag enemies with your binoculars. Just having that exist as a mechanic pushes players into wanting to scout bases ahead of time, without necessarily requiring them to do so. Which, of course, further immerses players into the game space as they try to determine where guards are likely to be, which approach has less coverage, where the escape routes are, and so on.
But more than that, the UI really speaks to what a given game is about. Is there tactical stealth in both examples above? Sure. But latter screenshot speaks of a game in which you need to manage health, psyche, stress levels, utility items with battery power, a back pocket filled with 8 different weapons (not pictured), and finally a mini-map in which you need to rectify advanced information about enemies with what you can actually see around you. Actually being stealthy is important, but it is only one of many concerns.
Now contrast that with the former. What is important there, based on the UI?
The definition of good UI is that which both accentuates player gameplay and does not detract from it. In many ways, I feel that the UI in Metal Gear Solid 5 takes it a step further in that it generates gameplay in a way that so many other similar games have tried and failed. And while MGS5 is not the first to use such a brilliant mechanic, this is the first game I have played in which everything just feels so right.
Posted in Commentary
1 Comment
Tags: Game Design, Metal Gear Solid 4, Metal Gear Solid 5, Minimalist, UI