I snatched up the three newer expansion packs for CK2 at a Steam sale, very apropos of the last post. Seeing as most everything was 75% off I even paid up for some custom culture portraits which change the appearance of the affected culture’s characters from the default vaguely northwestern European to something more local. Are they any good? Well, they’re different.
The celts just look tired. Just… so…. very…. very…. tired.
Norsemen on the other hand come out as blood drained vampires.
Today my Steam account is one year old. And twenty days. I suck at anniversaries.
On September 9th 2013 I bought Far Cry 3 on Steam for 14,99 euros. Probably at a discount. It would have had to be because I had already completed the game. Don’t ask how. I had encountered a problem, though. Ziggy’s mod for FC3 refused to work properly with my copy and explicitly stated that it wouldn’t do so with non-authorized copies. I really liked Far Cry 3 and the thought of playing it stripped of magical super powers was genuinely thrilling. So I paid up and took the medicine. It was a bitter pill to swallow: Not only did I have to down Valve’s client, I had to take Ubisoft’s Uplay client too as part of the treatment. If you’ve never come across Uplay count yourself lucky. It’s the essence of DRM bullshitware masquerading as a social network. It figuratively made me throw up in my mouth. If I was being cured of my piratical tendencies, the cure felt decidedly worse than the disease.
I’m only about halfway through the Frozen Synapse singleplayer campaign despite having played it on my android tablet for every single commute since the end of the summer holiday. That thing is loooong. There is however an end in sight and with few decent tablet gaming alternatives, I’ve started looking at the multiplayer options. Which is when I made the alarming discovery that rarely have I played a game in which the transfer of knowledge from singleplayer to multiplayer is so slight. In single player the AI seems at best random and it’s unpredictability (and vast numerical superiority) is your true opponent. In multiplayer you enter a world of endless secondguessing, like trying to play ten games of rock paper scissors at once. So far I’ve only won using strict camping tactics.
I know how to make a leather cap in Minecraft and I’m not going to tell you.
Because you probably either stumbled upon the crafting recipe yourself or you just looked it up on the internet. Also you probably advanced to gold hats years ago, anyway, having tossed out whatever leather gear you didn’t need for Dungeon Night fetish wear. I bet creepers are really submissive what with all that self destructive behaviour. Aaaanyway…
I happened upon the ‘recipe’ (i.e. correct 3 by 3 pattern of empty space and leather) by trial and error. When I started playing Minecraft I got engrossed by just trying things out. I knew about punching trees. And had probably seen people make crafting tables. Also the annoying putdown ‘mining like a baby’ pops into my head from time to time, so I obviously read this piece on RPS. From there on I just had a go at it. When I got stuck I horsed around some more. When I got really stuck I started needlessly enlarging my mansion. When I got really, really stuck, I quit and played Spelunky for a while to get back to real life and real priorities. You know, stuff like ‘winning’ and ‘beating the game’.
I’m not sure when it became a dogme-like rule. But it’s there now. Sort of. No internet. No wikis. No outside-of-the-game hints (I do take some guidance from the in-game achievement map though). If I’m living in a cave with no electricity it stands to reason that I’m not just hopping online to learn how to make shoes, gates, or bread. Man, I wish I had bread. Rotten monster meat is nice and all but it gets a bit samey samey after a while.
After a game that has you questioning choice, agency and free will and openly mocks video game conventions like linear storytelling, achievements and – ha! – winning, what’s next? Do you go back to acting out the role of captain Blazkowicz (who chose young guy over old guy using the old utilitarian moral choice crutch of ‘lifetime still to be had’) and make him jump though hoops to save the day?
Minecraft and the like have trained a generation to believe that punching, hitting and generally destroying things is the best way to harvest resources. Not so.
What is it about…. What are you’re trying to do here that you think other – you know, like, the DayZs of the world and what not… What is it about having this kind of… The angle you’re taking, the thing that separates it away from those competitors, I guess.
I don’t know much about games journalism or the kind of industry auto eroticism event that is E3. So the premise of this post may be very naive. The quote above is my painstaking transciption of a question – if you can call it that – by Danny O’Dwyer of Gamespot to a Sony rep about the zombie-survival MMO H1Z1 being showcased at E3. I know from experiences that coming up with intelligent sounding questions on the spot can be exceedingly hard but just to be clear, the question was part of a sitdown interview, not a shouted drive-by question on the showroom floor.
My point isn’t that O’Dwyer should have prepared himself better – though he clearly should have, it’s not like it’s not an obvious question to ask – but that he seems to be tying knots on his tongue trying not to sound critical. Here’s the same question, put simply:
Zombie-survival MMO games are a dime a dozen these days. Why do we need another?
My wording, however, implies the possibility that Sony’s game is not only unoriginal but possibly superfluous in a too-crowded me-too-market. Which would be critical in a journalism sense (not in a ‘your-game-is-shite’ sense).
Which leaves me with the – as I said, possibly very naive – conclusion that these kind of events truly are love fests between industry and game press that brook no critical attitude towards the wares on display.
