The Outer Worlds

 So, I got the game The Outer Worlds, made by Obsidian. Obsidian is basically the guys from Black Isle, who made Fallout 1&2, Planescape: Torment, and some other RPG's. Obsidian also made Fallout: New Vegas, the better sibling to Fallout 3.

The game is a First Person Shooter Role-Playing Game, or FePeSeRPeeGee. You travel between different planets in a solar system, and you interact frequently with other characters through a dialogue system very much in line with that of Fallout: New Vegas.

We'll start with what I like about the game.

The combat system is absolutely brilliant. Controls are precise, you can tackle enemies in any number of ways, there are lots of different kinds of weapons that operate completely differently. The combat system is so good that I could see it used in a regular FPS or a looter-shooter like Borderlands. In addition to your own weapons and abilities, each companion has a special attack that they can use with a cooldown that can hit like a ton of bricks.

Customizing your character is unsurprisingly well done, seeing as that's one thing that the guys at Obsidian have always been good at. Apart from choosing stats, you also choose skills to improve, IE pretty standard for this type of game. In this case, though, it's very seamlessly integrated into the gameplay. The skills you choose will impact in many ways how you'll tackle the world overall. Will you lie 'til your trousers conflagrate, or will you be threatening violence on everyone you meet? Or, for that matter, will you just pull out your gun and repaint the walls.

Yes, that last part is pretty much always an actual option that's written into the game.

Instead of one huge sandbox, the game takes place on a number of planets and stations in a solar system, where each location has its own little sandbox.

All in all, it's built to allow as much freedom to figure things out your way as it can.

As mentioned, you get a bunch of companions, and they all have really well-written personalities. They are three dimensional, have motivations you might not have guessed, and actually act as part of your conversations with NPC's.

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Now, all this sounds like a glowing recommendation, doesn't it? Well, that's because it is. Apart from the ending.

What the game does is not so much reach a crescendo as reach the point where the story takes off and it's time to make shit happen.

That's where it ends. It really bummed me out, to be honest. It really felt like the story was nowhere close to done. For those who have played Fallout 4, it's as if you made it into the institute, spoke to Father, then the game just ended, resolving absolutely nothing.

Oh, but maybe there'll be a sequel? Yeah, I'm sure it's likely there will be a sequel to a completely new intellectual property made by a company that's infamous for not finishing games on time.

Dammit!

Balance

This one...it's a tricky one. Took some thinking, but I hope you'll see the point.

Hollywood sucks at Opponent Balance.

Not familiar with the term? Not surprising, I made it up about 20 minutes before writing this. In essence, it's how you balance the power of two opponents in a story to make it interesting. A lot of movies, comics, and games are really terrible at this, but I'm going to focus on the movie industry for the moment. I might sprinkle some smaller examples of the others in for flavour, though.

One thing I must bring up right at the start is american wrestling. They constantly have to deal with these issues, and have to find ways of making them work in a setting that tolerates a whole lot less bullshit than comics or movies. So I will be using them as sort of a measuring stick. Wrestling also has a term called "getting your heat back", which basically is a combination of getting revenge and regaining what your character has lost by losing.

I think I'll have to simply start listing illustrative examples for this to work, so let's get this thing started:

Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

He's a good example. He is incredibly strong. Stronger, in fact, than even the Hulk. In fact, he is stronger than any one member of the Avengers. No single one of them has any hope of even hurting him alone.

What he represents is an opponent that is on a level entirely above that of the heroes. We don't expect any hero to beat him by themselves. He is the kind of villain who is used to galvanize the heroes into one group working together to beat him.

Ronan the Accuser doesn't get his own headline, because he's pretty much identical in this regard. Both are defeated when the heroes work together, the one thing we are rooting for them to do.

It's a simple archetype, and usually it is not fucked up.

That lizard bloke from Amazing Spider Man

He is a fairly good example. He is created in the same kind of way that Spidey was; a normal human altered by SCIENCE! to become something else.

So how well is he balanced against Spider Man? Fairly well through most of the movie; he can lay a beating on Spider Man, but Spider Man can counter very well when he's actually using all his abilities.

I'll lump him in with Dr. Ozzy Osbourne, or whatever his name is, where Spider Man has to fight much harder than the villain in order to stop the villain from killing innocent people as well as Spidey himself. I think that's a good way of maintaining a balance; you don't have to have the characters measure strength against strength, you can add other elements that cannot easily be quantifiable, sort of leaving the issue of Opponent Balance in the air.

Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy

He is a fantastic example of what not to do. Make no mistake, I love his character. I think Bautista just owns every single scene he is in, and the movies would be greatly diminished without him.

But in terms of Opponent Balance, he is literally useless. His great vendetta is against Ronan the Accuser, the aforementioned good example of a villain that is on a level above the heroes; one that no single hero can hope to defeat. And yet that's Drax's feud; against an enemy he can't even scratch. Heck, the worm they fight at the start of the second movie he doesn't even manage to injure at all.

In wrestling terms, imagine if a tiny little featherweight would try to fight, well...Batista with brute strength. It would be laughable. So how do you work with that? Will you have that character change strategy and use other methods against the villain? Or will they simply keep going and become pure comical relief?

Because, remember; we're not actually shown how powerful a fighter Drax the Destroyer is. We're told it. We don't really get any point of reference for how powerful he is, other than that he is less powerful than Ronan the Accuser.

In fact, he has a fight with Ronan, and loses completely. And what do the screenwriters have him do? Change nothing. Keep going the way he always did.

Drax did, however, get his heat back; in the end, he had an equal part in killing Ronan with the other guardians. He lost his first fight clean, he didn't evolve in strength, but got his heat back anyway.

Speaking generally for a moment, you always have to have in mind what the implications of losing a fight are, and what it says about your character. Let's say you have decided to book a match where your top face(good guy) goes up against your top heel(bad guy), and you want your face to lose. How will he lose? That will impact the face's character, and will be a deciding factor in how you'll have to move forward.

Let's say you book it so that the heel simply wrestles better, wins clean because he hits harder, moves faster, and has more heart. Then what? How will your face move on from that? Is he even in the championship picture anymore? You might want to simply book another match where the face wins clean instead. But then what? Why did he lose so decisively in the first match?

In Rocky III, Rocky loses like hell against Mr. T. It shows that he's lost the Eye of the Tiger, that intangible factor. He's no longer hungry for it. Then the point where he's finally ready to make his return to the ring is when it's clear that he's regained the Eye of the Tiger. That's a proper journey of a hero.

These are questions some screenwriters tend to ignore. And for some reason it's usually involving superheroes. That's why it upsets me when heroes are defeated clean by enemies on roughly the same level of strength.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase: I hate the dynamic between Venom and Spider Man in Spider Man 3. Venom is simply better; he's faster, stronger, has better webbing, he is simply superior. But he's not a character on an entirely different level. He's a dude, sized like a dude, who can be injured like a dude. When Spidey loses to him, that makes Spidey worse.

And Venom has him at his mercy not one, but two times, refraining from killing him in favour of just doing fuck all for a little while, waiting for him to get a cinderblock to the head and the arrival of Harry Osborne respectively. This is actually something that happens in wrestling as well, and usually it's the result of someone missing their cue to run in. All of a sudden the action in the ring can stop, and someone is supposed to run in and interfere, but doesn't show up on time, so they have to fill that time with something.

Anyway, Peter never gets his heat back on Venom. He's saved by Harry, which does nothing to make him look any stronger, and after that he uses some trickery to defeat Venom. He ends the movie with the fact established that he simply isn't good enough to beat Venom.

Dammit, here's the last example:

Wolverine from X-tremely fantastically shit movie

He's a terrible example.

He fights with Sabretooth, and gets his arse handed to him on a pewter platter.

Then he gets magical metal skeleton.

Then he beats Sabretooth.

Sabretooth is clearly fucking better to begin with at fighting! Wolvie gets an upgrade that he has done nothing to deserve and that he hasn't worked for at all. It's like if Apollo Creed walked up to Rocky, gave him a magic ring, and then Rocky could go an beat the living daylights out of Mr. T.

And Logan at no point gets his heat back, because you can't show you're better than someone if you're given a free fucking upgrade after losing the first fight!

Ian McCollum!

Neat and proper

I'll keep this one short and sweet, since it's basically a small thought-bubble that popped up.

In Minecraft, I decided to construct a small castle, or keep. I started out by leveling an appropriate area, then moved on to construct the floor section.

That's where I stopped. I looked at the ground and realized that it was almost entirely made up of soil. Soil is not a good foundation for a castle, so I had to replace the first layer. Through not insubstantial amounts of work I stripped away the soil and replaced it with cobblestone, the most basic form of mined stone in Minecraft.

But nobody will ever see it; I don't go around showing my creations to people. Heck, if I didn't brag about it in my blog, nobody would have ever even known about it. So what's the point?

It's my own flavour of roleplaying. Sure, I can roleplay in the traditional sense with other people, but when it's just me it doesn't quite work the same. See, my roleplaying takes place in my head. When I play games like Minecraft, there are conversations taking place, plans being made, and actions taken which only take place in my head. It could be that there's an imaginary companion that one has with which one discusses plans about expansions, buildings, or mines.

So my character looks at the soil, and realizes that it doesn't make sense to build a castle that way. So my character changes his plans. So my character explains to his illusory companion that the plans have changed. Not all those things can be represented in the game engine, but they all take place.

Every Man's Sky

Alright, a whole lot of people have been talking during the last year or two about how No Man's Sky has actually turned into a great game now, as opposed to what it was at launch.

And I'll be damned if it hasn't actually done that.

Hell, it might've turned into my favourite game at the moment.

Let's back it up a little, though. In 2016, a company called Hello Games released a sci-fi survival game called No Man's Sky to great fanfare. That is, they provided the fanfare all by themselves, because the game was...nothing. It was basically interplanetary Minecraft with all the charm and flexibility carved out with a screwdriver and set on fire. Quality, however, wasn't the big problem.

Lies were. As mentioned, the developers hyped the game to the sky(No Man's Sky, presumably). Most famously, head of Hello Games, Sean Murray, did a long interview prior to release where he lied about some features that proved not to be in the game, and misled the public about others.

In spite of this, I bought the game, knowing its limitations. Fact of the matter is that I've got a soft spot for those types of games. So I played it for a good while. And it...sort of trickled down the drain. I like the game less and less as time went on, and there came a point where the game seemed completely and utterly devoid of quality. So I stopped playing.

Maybe I ought to note that I played the game in between sessions of ECT. No, I don't agree that getting electricity sent straight into your brain multiple times can have any impact whatsoever on one's enjoyment of a video game. So shut up!

Time went on, and now and then I heard murmurs about how the developers were intent on improving the game. I didn't put much stock in those rumours, to be frank. They couldn't release a good game from the start, what made people think Hello Games would be able to piece one together afterwards?

I think my attitude there was unfair. Most of the time, if developers release a shit game they just hunker down, pretend it's good, and maybe sue some people to push the blame over to them. Hello Games, meanwhile, decided to man up and make the game something that matched what the players expected.

Part of it, I can admit plainly now, was that I disliked them because they lied and released a crap game. And when I dislike someone for what they've done, my automatic instinct is to keep holding that against them. Unless they actually make amends, which is what Hello Games did.

In the end, I kept hearing so much talk about how great the game was now and how the developers had really pulled the game out of the gutter. So I decided to try it again.

This time, it was not the same game anymore. There were NPCs to interact with, interaction with other players, storylines, it just goes on and on. What impressed me the most, though, was that now the game had direction. You were taught things in quests, you developed your character with help from the game itself, it just flowed. It's still huge and completely free to explore, but now they've added the pieces that were missing.

Also, you can get a mech suit.

Jurassic Morons

You know, I've been meaning to write this little feature for a while now. The one stumbling block, however, was how to actually express in text just how magnificently idiotic the, so far, two Jurassic World movies are.

I mean, I could just rage on about them for page after page, but I don't think that would actually convey just how much I want to kick the writers of those movies in the genitals.

So, here's my plan: we'll pretend that the park is being visited by J. R. Sensibleguy. The reason for his visiting the park is the fact that the main reason why everything went to fuck in the previous movies is because either there was no sensible person involved, or nobody listened to the one sensible person.

In fact, the whole series can just be renamed to "Why the flying fuck didn't anybody listen to Ian Malcolm?!", but that's beside the point.

Mr. Sensibleguy is hired by the InGen board to look into the park, the management, the plans for the future etc, and see if any of it is fucking stupid. His main interlocutor in the park is the manager. Let's name her...F. G. Coquesoaker. This first episode is about how the manager handles the situation with the Indominus Rex. Enter stage right.

Coquesoaker: Let's face it; nobody is excited by dinosaurs anymore.

Sensibleguy: *looks out the window* What the hell are you talking about, the park is literally packed with as many people as can possible fit, and everyone is having the time of their lives.

Coquesoaker: Hrm...but we need to innovate, invent new attractions for the visitors!

Sensibleguy: Okay, fair enough. What's on the board?

Coquesoaker: Allow me to present to you...the Indominus Rex!

Sensibleguy: Oh, okay. What's the deal with that one, then?

Coquesoaker: Well, it's huge and has lots of pointy teeth!

Sensibleguy: So does the T-Rex, what's so special about this new one?

Coquesoaker: Well...I mean, it's bigger, and has more teeth!

Sensibleguy: Right. Well, what else is special about it?

Coquesoaker: We don't know.

Sensibleguy: I...what? You don't know?

Coquesoaker: Nope.

Sensibleguy: But...how smart is it?

Coquesoaker: Don't know.

Sensibleguy: How strong is it?

Coquesoaker: Dunno.

Sensibleguy: How high can it jump?

Coquesoaker: Look, it sounds like I'm not getting through to you just how absolutely nothing we know about this thing.

Sensibleguy: These are important questions from a safety standpoint, how on earth can you safely keep the thing locked up, let alone use it as a park attraction if you don't know first thing about it?

Coquesoaker: Oh, we can't have that as an attraction. Way too dangerous!

Sensibleguy: So why the shit is it still alive?

Coquesoaker: Meh, it costs alot to develop, so we kinda cross our arms and pout over that one. Oh, holy shit!

Sensibleguy: *sigh* What's the matter now?

Coquesoaker: It's escaped! Look, there are claw marks on that wall.

Sensibleguy: Ooookay...but how did it get past the huge moat surrounding the paddock?

Coquesoaker: Don't have one of those.

Sensibleguy: *deeper sigh* Look, are those claw marks supposed to have come from that thing scaling the wall? Are you telling me it leaped, then clawed its way up like a cat that just barely missed a jump? And look at that monitor; the tracker says it's right there in the paddock!

Coquesoaker: The tracker is wrong. The I-Rex has clearly escaped.

Sensibleguy: Hey, before we do something (more) stupid, let's just check the cameras and look through the window at the paddock. Hell, it's tiny! And there is only one hiding spot; that clump of trees over there!

Coquesoaker: No, I don't need to look at anything, and it most definitely isn't hiding in that clump of trees just large enough to conceal an Indominus Rex! I will send in two people, completely lacking any equipment that would be able to so much as menace a house cat. Open the gate!

Sensibleguy: Tell me, you don't happen to have two gates, so that the animal will not escaped when you are letting those two people out or in?

Coquesoaker: Of course not.

Sensibleguy: Yes, I thought as much. It was an act of pure optimism to have posed the question in the first place. But...if you don't think the I-Rex is in there, then why the hell do you want to send two guys in to look?

Coquesoaker: Because it might still be in there!

Sensibleguy: In which case you definitely don't want to send them in there, because they'll make nothing more than a tasty snack for the dinosaur.

Coquesoaker: Oh fuck, it was in there! Close the gate.

Sensibleguy: Let me guess, the gate is slow as shit so the dino has plenty of time to run for it?

Coquesoaker: Yes, why?

Sensibleguy: Oh, no, nothing. I'm just beginning to see a pattern, that's all.

Coquesoaker: So, now the guard is dino-food, and the I-Rex is free as a bird.

Sensibleguy: What a shocker, who could've predicted it...

Coquesoaker: I know, right?!

Sensibleguy: Tell me just one thing: Do you have any way whatsoever of stopping that thing?

Coquesoaker: Oh yes; we'll send a bunch of guys armed with shock sticks and stuff like that, which obviously can't even hurt an animal that size, let alone incapacitate it.

Sensibleguy: I thought so. Oh well, first we'll have to do a full emergency evacuation of the whole island.

Coquesoaker: Nah, that'd cost money. Much better to waste a bunch of human lives. We'll just let that animal rampage for a bit, then it'll probably get tired and return to its paddock by itself.

Sensibleguy: *starts walking towards the door, then stops and takes out sunglasses* Here's what we're gonna do; we'll play it like Michael Crichton.

Coquesoaker: Why, what did he do?

Sensibleguy: *puts on sunglasses* Bombed the whole island to oblivion. [Exit stage left]

Voix aquetinge!

Voice acting is a tricky thing. Let’s see how tricky.

It’s one of those really tricky things to pull off in any video game. It’s got relatively small margins of error; sound too dramatic and you sound like a parody of 18th century theatre, don’t sound dramatic enough and you sound like you don’t give a shit. And it can really fuck up a game if you get it wrong.

Two Worlds is a game that had absolutely atrocious voice acting, and my attempt at playing it ceased after about the a third of a sentence. The iffy graphics and slightly sub-par controls didn’t bother me half as much as the silly speech.

The whole Resident Evil-series, I think, is just the biggest pile of dung you’ll ever find in the industry in this regard. The acting constantly sounds like it’s spoken by people who’ve heard about the concept of speech but haven’t actually spoken a word out loud in their entire lives.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, meanwhile, got a lot of flak for its bad voice acting, but I don’t think it was entirely fair. Sure, the lines were often ridiculous and said in very questionable ways, but most of that I’d scratch up to bad directing rather than poor performances by the actors. The hilarious interactions between characters where lines were randomized weren’t the fault of the actors either, as that was due to terrible game design. The voice acting in Oblivion is something I’d describe as “Not good, but not awful enough to kick me out of the experience”.

Something that often causes problems for games is when the developers decide to bring in famous movie actors, thinking they must automatically be great voice actors. At least that is the most generous assumption. More likely they do it to capitalize on their star power for marketing purposes. This is a bad idea. Patrick Stewart in Oblivion, Sean Bean in Oblivion, Peter Dinklage in Destiny, Matthew Perry in Fallout: New Vegas. All of them completely phoned it in. That doesn’t make them bad actors; voice acting in a game is completely different from acting in a movie or TV-series. In the  case of Destiny, the devs even realized that Peter Dinklage made a shit performance, and replaced him with Nolan North, IE the guy who does the voice for every male main character in all of gaming.

But let’s not focus entirely on the negative examples. There are many games and entire franchises with stellar voice acting. One that I’ve followed for many years is Warcraft, where the guy basically in charge of storytelling, Chris Metzen, also is a fantastic voice actor. Dead Space has really credible voice acting for a very dramatic horror-action game.

Then there’s Simon Templeman. He is the greatest voice actor in all of human history. He also constantly sounds like he wants to piss in your cornflakes. He’s simply got the best evil voice in the industry. Funnily, then, that in the Legacy of Kain-series, he plays the perpetual anti-hero trying to save the world in his own way. Or an evil bastard trying to rule the world. Or just a guy with a personal vendetta against the Hylden lord. It’s not clear. Other than that series, he’s probably most well-known for doing the voice for Teyrn Loghain in Dragon Age: Origins and Admiral Han’gerrel vas Neema in Mass Effect 2 and 3. His voice is simply amazingly punchable, which makes it all the more satisfying when you actually get to punch his character in Mass Effect 3.

So, to sum up, I think the conclusion here is that we should all want to punch Simon Templeton, but not actually do it.

Toodles.

I could make you care!

Care.

Game developers want to make you care.

They want you to feel a connection with the world and the characters in it, so that you’ll feel that you are part of the world they have created.

They suck at this.

Whether it is because of laziness or just gross incompetence can be debated, but what is evident is that developers tend to display an impressive lack of knowledge of what makes us care. As is my way, I shall be tearing down a game that perfectly exemplifies this. My victim tonight? Fallout 4!

Mind you, I regard Fallout 4 as one of the best games in the world. This is not a (conscious) attempt at trashing the game, it’s just a case of it having the most egregious example of this nonsense I could think of.

They use a baby. It’s that cheap. At the start, you tickle the baby, your spouse dies when the baby is kidnapped, and you spend most of the game looking for the baby. But there is no reason whatsoever to care. I understand what Bethesda are trying to do here; they can’t be bothered to get into what makes people tick, so they intend to hitch a ride on the human instinct to protect infants. It doesn’t work, and here’s why.

Firstly, the so called “baby” looks like a creepy loaf of play-dough. What you have to realize about the automatic human affection for infants is that it actually requires an infant, and that abomination certainly isn’t it. There’s always the issue of the uncanny valley when depicting humans in media, and infants aren’t easier in this regard, they are more difficult! We regard them as more adorable and lovely, but that only makes it worse when they’re all wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that movies and games that want to scare you always tend to contain demonic or zombified children. Letting us see that useless piece of clay won’t endear us to it in any way.

Secondly, they let the next step rely completely on the first one. In it, your spouse, a person you’ve interacted with for all of 58 seconds, is shot and your play-dough “baby” is stolen. It’s inevitable; since nr. 1 fails, nr. 2 goes down the drain, as it well might. We walk through the game with the character constantly whining about how he/she is searching for their child. But you don’t actually do much to find him. Fallout 4 is just a terrible environment for this particular type of story. “Woe is me, my son is lost, I need to find him! But first, I’m off to find some paint for the inside wall of Diamond city.”. In open-world games, the developers tend to tailor the game to that setting; you might run around gathering allies for a war or trying to find clues to ancient mysteries. These stories allow for you to go around doing various tasks, meeting people, uncovering secrets. But it doesn’t allow for hurriedly searching for your infant son!

But number 3 is the one that shows up to completely kneecap the whole thing. It’s when you get to the Institute and find out that your son was actually abducted some 60 years ago, and is now an aging man. Add to that the fact that said aging man is dying from cancer and wants you to succeed him as the head of the organization that kidnapped him from the beginning. There’s a lot to unpack here. You’re suddenly face to face with someone who is your son but is a complete stranger who has no actual connection to the infant you were looking for. How is a human being supposed to feel an emotional bond with this old man you’ve never met before? Fact of the matter is, the Shaun you were looking for, the infant who was kidnapped and needed to be saved, hasn’t existed for many years. Instead you’re faced with the leader of the faction that has clear as day been presented as the bad guys thus far in the game.

Bethesda are just so comically bad at this. First they try to pluck your heart strings with the cheap trick of using a “baby”, then they drop that in favour of ordering you to care about an old man in charge of the evil faction! You’ve been trying to find and rescue him from his kidnappers, all the while he was sitting pretty in the Institute, grateful to his kidnappers for having “rescued” him, as he puts it. Okay, so the main character was robbed of experiencing their only child’s whole lifetime, but the Institute were nice to his son, so there’s no need for the main character to be upset.

“Ah”, you comment, forgetting that I’ve told you to shut up numerous times, “I see you’re upset, doesn’t that mean you care?”

I’m not upset at the Institute, or Shaun for that matter. I’m pissed at Bethesda for creating a story that is absolute bullshit, especially in this type of game. It’s like it’s carefully tailored to make us give no shit whatsoever about the main story. Heck, the Institute, their methods, and their goals are nuanced and interesting. The dynamics between the different factions and what they want to achieve is complex and doesn’t just make it a clear-cut “good or bad” plot.

Oh, you think it works as a sort of depressing revelation? Come on, this is Fallout; the series where there’s a vault entirely populated by clones of a guy named Gary, all capable only of attacking you and screaming “GAAAAAARRRRYYYY!”. This isn’t some Greek tragedy, it’s too silly for that. There’s a time and place for such a story. Fallout ain’t it.

In the end, there just isn’t a single reason to give half a fuck about the Shaun-angle. It’s pointless. The game could not only make do without it, the game would actually be a lot better without it.

Don’t try to fuck up my favourite game, Bethesda.