So hey, there's a bunch of unused Mass Effect 2 music lurking over on Bandcamp from one of the composers. Track 1 is fantastic if you liked the Suicide Mission material.
Monday, 26 March 2012
Friday, 16 March 2012
No Fighting in the War Room: Mass Effect 3
End game spoilers galore for Mass Effect 3 here. If you haven't completed it yet, move right along.
Seriously, go. Get out of here.
Okay.
I completed ME3 a couple of days ago, fully aware of the furore over the ending as I made my way closer to it, thinking "can't be as bad as everyone is making out, surely".
Only to complete the game, sit back and think yep....a game that did almost everything right apart from the ending (and to be clear, I mean from the moment you go to retake the Earth). While most of the point I'd probably make have already been made, I want to make a few comments about the actual design of the finale (which is terrible). First the recap, which itself highlights some pretty bizarre scripting.
Destination: Citadel
The Citadel turns out to be a crucial part of your large space weapon that can kill the reapers. Shepard and company need to get on board. Rather than hide it in the middle of nowhere, the ancient and terrifyingly intelligent Reapers decide to place it directly over the homeworld that the deadliest Reaper killing son of a bitch in the galaxy is heading right for, with an army consisting of every tooled up species in the galaxy. Worse, the transport beam - used to place humans onto the Citadel for harvesting - is not only left switched on in the middle of Shepard's full scale assault to reach the Citadel, it is guarded by one solitary Reaper who doesn't stick around for the ten seconds afterwards to make sure that the biggest single threat to their existence - that would be you, Shepard - is actually done and dusted.
Apparently this same Reaper is Harbinger, who actually has some experience with Shepard refusing to die unless turned into a smoking pile of ash. Yet not only does Harbie not raze the ground with a few more blasts just to be sure, he sails off leaving their last line of defence to some husks and the brave Marauder Shields, who gave his life so that you may end up not seeing the horrible ending.
So of course Marauder is shot to pieces and Shepard reaches the beam.
What follows is an ending that replaced the original conclusion to the trilogy, and unfortunately doesn't improve upon it. You know when you played ME2 and kept hearing about dark energy, and even played through a mission that involved stars aging prematurely?
The original ending had the Reapers being the last ditch attempt to prevent advanced races from tearing the universe apart or harvest them and keep things ticking over until the next cycle.
This is a good explanation, it harks back to earlier games, it gives you one hell of a tough choice to make.
Then the writer left and they ditched it, and replaced it with....I don't even.
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them."
Now place this alongside their actions in the first two games - you know, when they're controlling the Geth. Now it reads like this:
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them with the aid of their own creations because our irony capacitors need calibrations."
If you're going to make man Vs machine the lynchpin for your Reaper invasion of everything, it would probably help if it made a lick of sense. The dark energy route has an elegance and a "yeah, okay, that works" about it. The "We heard you like..." motivation is the first of many fumbles at the conclusion of a trilogy years in the making.
Worse, the Reapers are controlled by Space Casper, the horribly annoying child littered throughout the game that you're supposed to give two hoots about. I'd pay $15 for a DLC that allowed me to stick a nailgun dart between his eyes. Game devs: there's a reason the "make children killable in Fallout" mods are extremely popular. Kids in games are always annoying. Magical space children that randomly end up being controllers of the Reapers - controlled from on board the Citadel at that - is a recipe for disaster.
Speaking of which: there are non essential characters in ME2 who I can have up to ten lines of conversation with for no other reason than "just because". Yet you place this batshit insane AI in front of me, at the culmination of the story, and Shepard just accepts everything he is told without hesitation and isn't given an option to question any of it. I can't ask where it came from, who made it, why I might want to do my own thing instead of jump through Casper hoops...nothing.
Not only does this not fit with the character, it doesn't mesh with the supposed design philosophy of the series. Shepard is about to make a decision that will reshape the galaxy or end everything, and he isn't going to take five minutes out of his busy workaday schedule to drag some answers out of Casper?
Really?
Three Way Failure
So yeah, claims of "It won't be anything like ending A, B or C" aside, that's exactly what you get.
Except...the design of your defining moment is awful. The developers try to influence your choice, not so gently nudging you down the path of what they feel would be the best ending - they have "control the reapers and let them live" as Blue (Paragon), and "kill the reapers" as Red (Renegade) and "magical galaxy wide biology alteration" in the middle as glowing white ("pick me! pick me!") At this stage in the game, the player should not feel the additional burden of a developer breathing down their neck and saying "You want this one...don't you?"
The end result of whatever decision you make - all the mass relays destroyed, presumably billions killed in the explosions, the Turians, Salarians and Quarians trapped in the Solar System (and at least two of those species can't eat human food, so enjoy your slow horrible death) and a Universe plunged into the dark ages isn't mentioned, isn't explored, isn't given a second thought.
If that had been presented as one of the options, you'd have probably just picked a "Let the Reapers squish us all, thanks" ending and walked into one of the darkest finales ever. Which would have been amazing.
So of course, the game doesn't actually have a "Reapers win" ending, nor does it have a more traditional "Shepard wins, but at some cost" ending.
All you have is SPACE MAGIC, now in three colourful flavours. Turning everybody into synthetic / organic hybrids by....I don't know how....is as bad as "A Wizard did it", and has no place being dropped into the last ten minutes of a series based in fairly standard sci-fi lore trappings.
Of course, there's no explanation how this is done. And in an amazing slice of asset reuse, the developers give everybody an identikit ending based on three space magic choices that has absolutely nothing to do with any choice you've made so far (this is all so lazy, the movie files are actually listed by colour in the game files). Even Fallout 3 managed a couple of different slides depending on the choices you made throughout the game. And New Vegas is a great example of how to do it (go check the End Game Wiki page).
This places all the eggs in a very lacklustre FMV basket and leaves it at that.
An interesting result of the identikit ending (accounting for pretty colour variations, of course) is that I'm seeing lots of people lose interest in a second playthrough because the endings are so similar (hey look, this one is green instead of blue!) that they couldn't be bothered. I'm guessing Bioware are noticing something is going horribly wrong in their stat tracking, hence threads such as this (I've read that a number of Bioware writers didn't like the ending given to them, but one guy had an override button and dismissed their concerns. If true....whoops.)
Now, there is a counterpoint to the "these endings are terrible", and either misread the complaints as "crybabies demand a happy ending" or something in a bit more detail. To address some of his points:
1) It's Confusing: No, they're not being "preserved" despite what Space Casper says (and you taking that view seems to suggest you believe what this AI - who controls the Reapers - is saying at face value. The AI is hardly going to say "Kelly Chambers in a jar, lol" is it?)
They're being turned into mush in the most horrendous way possible then turned into some sort of mass intelligence fishpaste that then goes off to fishpaste everybody else. For the first two games, they even used synthetics created by the organics to shoot the organics with laser guns and rockets. Are all of the victims of the Reaper controlled Geth slaughter throughout the galaxy "preserved" too? Because you might want to look into that.
If the Reapers are so smart - and they apparently are, given their commander has a space magic button that can change biology across the galaxy - why don't the Reapers avoid all the hassle and simply turn up every 50,000 years to kill all synthetics?
2) Lore Errors and Plot Holes: Sorry, but if you openly admit you don't know what happens when a Relay explodes (despite that being the thing that ends the Arrival DLC, places Shepard on Earth at the start of ME3 and is actually detailed in the Codex) you probably don't have any business snarkily comparing some of the many, many batshit crazy plot holes listed above to Star Wars nerds obsessing over the length of a Star Destroyer. Speaking of which: leave your explanation as to how Joker is flying through a relay when you make your choice and how the squadmates on Earth with you are also on board at the door, thanks.
3) Player choice is completely discarded: Glad you mentioned this, because it's more of an issue with the underlying game mechanics that the third game is supposedly built on, rather than anything to do with the plot. Shall we race towards the home stretch?
Building your fleet has never been so pointless
All throughout Mass Effect 3, you're told to recruit allies, build a force capable of stopping the Reapers. You negotiate with morons to grab some assets for the Earth battle, you talk down species from a two way holocaust to have their fleets aid you as you reclaim the solar system, you fiddle with gene cures to get this guy to help that guy and did you save the Rachni because they'll come to your assistance in your darkest hour...
....except none of this actually happens when you finally have your fleet and go to "take back Earth".
I assumed Bioware had expanded the mechanics of the suicide mission in ME2 - that is, your choices both in the build up to the finale and the choices inside of that finale would shape the course of your last stand.
Everything points to battle readiness and the strength of your fleet. The first thing you see when you load the game is the battle map, locked at 50%. The first thing you see after a mission is the War Room, and your increasing supplies of decision making allies. Everything you do pops up a little "your military might has increased" with a little picture of a Krogan on it or whatever.
You upgrade the Normandy, because you guess that based on previous experience when the space battle begins you'll probably lose people unless you upgraded.
LOL NOPE.
Any visions you had of telling certain fleets to attack certain Reapers, protect various support lines or planets or holding points while the Alliance punched a hole through to Earth, any hope you had of calling in Turian air support while faced with 6 brutes and an instakill Reaper, any notion of seeing certain sections increase / reduce in difficulty while duking it out on Earth are all gone.
Because none of this happens. Instead, Bioware take all of your assets and fishpaste them, Reaper style, into a number and a text blurb on a "build the crucible" diagram and that's it.
This is a massive, massive disappointment after seeing what they did with the suicide mission. More of a let down than letting the council die in the first game only to see it populated with what look like the exact same aliens on the Citadel in ME3. More of a let down than choosing to not save the Rachni, only to run into an "artificial queen" (dear god) dumped into the game anyway. More of a let down than having made all those choices in earlier games to get to the stage where you could save both the Geth and the Quarian, only to watch the Geth potentially die as a result of hamfisted "either / or" choices on the Citadel (why do regular synthetics die alongside the Reapers anyway? For all intents and purposes, the synthetics are the evolutionary equivalent of a tomato next to the Reapers so why would the space magic beam wipe them out too?)
As a final nail in the coffin, the only impact the battle fleet / war readiness has on anything is a few (slight) modifications to the FMV, and should you desire to see Shepard Commander wake up at the end you need to play multiplayer to increase the score. And of course bolting "Shepard survives" onto the "bad" renegade ending ensures that all synthetic life dying for him to live is the trade off, even though he should be dead too because his entire body only works because of Reaper tech.
Plot holes? Holy shit, yes. Finishing the game and seeing the "Continue the legend with downloadable content" popup is the final icing on the cake.
The majority of this game was fantastic. The cast had some great lines, the injokes were actually funny and using music and locations from the first game made the whole thing very nostalgic.
Even the increasingly tiresome "survive fifty waves of enemies" in the London sequences and the "here's six brutes, a Reaper and two banshees because we're starting to flag a bit now" didn't faze me in the long run.
But for a game based on choices supposedly making a difference, only for those differences to end up at the bottom of an exploded set of space relays based on three space magic options given by a last minute introduction that you can't even debate with or question, there's only one thing to say.
Seriously, go. Get out of here.
Okay.
I completed ME3 a couple of days ago, fully aware of the furore over the ending as I made my way closer to it, thinking "can't be as bad as everyone is making out, surely".
Only to complete the game, sit back and think yep....a game that did almost everything right apart from the ending (and to be clear, I mean from the moment you go to retake the Earth). While most of the point I'd probably make have already been made, I want to make a few comments about the actual design of the finale (which is terrible). First the recap, which itself highlights some pretty bizarre scripting.
Destination: Citadel
The Citadel turns out to be a crucial part of your large space weapon that can kill the reapers. Shepard and company need to get on board. Rather than hide it in the middle of nowhere, the ancient and terrifyingly intelligent Reapers decide to place it directly over the homeworld that the deadliest Reaper killing son of a bitch in the galaxy is heading right for, with an army consisting of every tooled up species in the galaxy. Worse, the transport beam - used to place humans onto the Citadel for harvesting - is not only left switched on in the middle of Shepard's full scale assault to reach the Citadel, it is guarded by one solitary Reaper who doesn't stick around for the ten seconds afterwards to make sure that the biggest single threat to their existence - that would be you, Shepard - is actually done and dusted.
Apparently this same Reaper is Harbinger, who actually has some experience with Shepard refusing to die unless turned into a smoking pile of ash. Yet not only does Harbie not raze the ground with a few more blasts just to be sure, he sails off leaving their last line of defence to some husks and the brave Marauder Shields, who gave his life so that you may end up not seeing the horrible ending.
So of course Marauder is shot to pieces and Shepard reaches the beam.
What follows is an ending that replaced the original conclusion to the trilogy, and unfortunately doesn't improve upon it. You know when you played ME2 and kept hearing about dark energy, and even played through a mission that involved stars aging prematurely?
The original ending had the Reapers being the last ditch attempt to prevent advanced races from tearing the universe apart or harvest them and keep things ticking over until the next cycle.
This is a good explanation, it harks back to earlier games, it gives you one hell of a tough choice to make.
Then the writer left and they ditched it, and replaced it with....I don't even.
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them."
Now place this alongside their actions in the first two games - you know, when they're controlling the Geth. Now it reads like this:
"We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them with the aid of their own creations because our irony capacitors need calibrations."
If you're going to make man Vs machine the lynchpin for your Reaper invasion of everything, it would probably help if it made a lick of sense. The dark energy route has an elegance and a "yeah, okay, that works" about it. The "We heard you like..." motivation is the first of many fumbles at the conclusion of a trilogy years in the making.
Worse, the Reapers are controlled by Space Casper, the horribly annoying child littered throughout the game that you're supposed to give two hoots about. I'd pay $15 for a DLC that allowed me to stick a nailgun dart between his eyes. Game devs: there's a reason the "make children killable in Fallout" mods are extremely popular. Kids in games are always annoying. Magical space children that randomly end up being controllers of the Reapers - controlled from on board the Citadel at that - is a recipe for disaster.
Speaking of which: there are non essential characters in ME2 who I can have up to ten lines of conversation with for no other reason than "just because". Yet you place this batshit insane AI in front of me, at the culmination of the story, and Shepard just accepts everything he is told without hesitation and isn't given an option to question any of it. I can't ask where it came from, who made it, why I might want to do my own thing instead of jump through Casper hoops...nothing.
Not only does this not fit with the character, it doesn't mesh with the supposed design philosophy of the series. Shepard is about to make a decision that will reshape the galaxy or end everything, and he isn't going to take five minutes out of his busy workaday schedule to drag some answers out of Casper?
Really?
Three Way Failure
Except...the design of your defining moment is awful. The developers try to influence your choice, not so gently nudging you down the path of what they feel would be the best ending - they have "control the reapers and let them live" as Blue (Paragon), and "kill the reapers" as Red (Renegade) and "magical galaxy wide biology alteration" in the middle as glowing white ("pick me! pick me!") At this stage in the game, the player should not feel the additional burden of a developer breathing down their neck and saying "You want this one...don't you?"
The end result of whatever decision you make - all the mass relays destroyed, presumably billions killed in the explosions, the Turians, Salarians and Quarians trapped in the Solar System (and at least two of those species can't eat human food, so enjoy your slow horrible death) and a Universe plunged into the dark ages isn't mentioned, isn't explored, isn't given a second thought.
If that had been presented as one of the options, you'd have probably just picked a "Let the Reapers squish us all, thanks" ending and walked into one of the darkest finales ever. Which would have been amazing.
So of course, the game doesn't actually have a "Reapers win" ending, nor does it have a more traditional "Shepard wins, but at some cost" ending.
All you have is SPACE MAGIC, now in three colourful flavours. Turning everybody into synthetic / organic hybrids by....I don't know how....is as bad as "A Wizard did it", and has no place being dropped into the last ten minutes of a series based in fairly standard sci-fi lore trappings.
Of course, there's no explanation how this is done. And in an amazing slice of asset reuse, the developers give everybody an identikit ending based on three space magic choices that has absolutely nothing to do with any choice you've made so far (this is all so lazy, the movie files are actually listed by colour in the game files). Even Fallout 3 managed a couple of different slides depending on the choices you made throughout the game. And New Vegas is a great example of how to do it (go check the End Game Wiki page).
This places all the eggs in a very lacklustre FMV basket and leaves it at that.
An interesting result of the identikit ending (accounting for pretty colour variations, of course) is that I'm seeing lots of people lose interest in a second playthrough because the endings are so similar (hey look, this one is green instead of blue!) that they couldn't be bothered. I'm guessing Bioware are noticing something is going horribly wrong in their stat tracking, hence threads such as this (I've read that a number of Bioware writers didn't like the ending given to them, but one guy had an override button and dismissed their concerns. If true....whoops.)
Now, there is a counterpoint to the "these endings are terrible", and either misread the complaints as "crybabies demand a happy ending" or something in a bit more detail. To address some of his points:
1) It's Confusing: No, they're not being "preserved" despite what Space Casper says (and you taking that view seems to suggest you believe what this AI - who controls the Reapers - is saying at face value. The AI is hardly going to say "Kelly Chambers in a jar, lol" is it?)
They're being turned into mush in the most horrendous way possible then turned into some sort of mass intelligence fishpaste that then goes off to fishpaste everybody else. For the first two games, they even used synthetics created by the organics to shoot the organics with laser guns and rockets. Are all of the victims of the Reaper controlled Geth slaughter throughout the galaxy "preserved" too? Because you might want to look into that.
If the Reapers are so smart - and they apparently are, given their commander has a space magic button that can change biology across the galaxy - why don't the Reapers avoid all the hassle and simply turn up every 50,000 years to kill all synthetics?
2) Lore Errors and Plot Holes: Sorry, but if you openly admit you don't know what happens when a Relay explodes (despite that being the thing that ends the Arrival DLC, places Shepard on Earth at the start of ME3 and is actually detailed in the Codex) you probably don't have any business snarkily comparing some of the many, many batshit crazy plot holes listed above to Star Wars nerds obsessing over the length of a Star Destroyer. Speaking of which: leave your explanation as to how Joker is flying through a relay when you make your choice and how the squadmates on Earth with you are also on board at the door, thanks.
3) Player choice is completely discarded: Glad you mentioned this, because it's more of an issue with the underlying game mechanics that the third game is supposedly built on, rather than anything to do with the plot. Shall we race towards the home stretch?
Building your fleet has never been so pointless
All throughout Mass Effect 3, you're told to recruit allies, build a force capable of stopping the Reapers. You negotiate with morons to grab some assets for the Earth battle, you talk down species from a two way holocaust to have their fleets aid you as you reclaim the solar system, you fiddle with gene cures to get this guy to help that guy and did you save the Rachni because they'll come to your assistance in your darkest hour...
....except none of this actually happens when you finally have your fleet and go to "take back Earth".
I assumed Bioware had expanded the mechanics of the suicide mission in ME2 - that is, your choices both in the build up to the finale and the choices inside of that finale would shape the course of your last stand.
Everything points to battle readiness and the strength of your fleet. The first thing you see when you load the game is the battle map, locked at 50%. The first thing you see after a mission is the War Room, and your increasing supplies of decision making allies. Everything you do pops up a little "your military might has increased" with a little picture of a Krogan on it or whatever.
You upgrade the Normandy, because you guess that based on previous experience when the space battle begins you'll probably lose people unless you upgraded.
LOL NOPE.
Any visions you had of telling certain fleets to attack certain Reapers, protect various support lines or planets or holding points while the Alliance punched a hole through to Earth, any hope you had of calling in Turian air support while faced with 6 brutes and an instakill Reaper, any notion of seeing certain sections increase / reduce in difficulty while duking it out on Earth are all gone.
Because none of this happens. Instead, Bioware take all of your assets and fishpaste them, Reaper style, into a number and a text blurb on a "build the crucible" diagram and that's it.
This is a massive, massive disappointment after seeing what they did with the suicide mission. More of a let down than letting the council die in the first game only to see it populated with what look like the exact same aliens on the Citadel in ME3. More of a let down than choosing to not save the Rachni, only to run into an "artificial queen" (dear god) dumped into the game anyway. More of a let down than having made all those choices in earlier games to get to the stage where you could save both the Geth and the Quarian, only to watch the Geth potentially die as a result of hamfisted "either / or" choices on the Citadel (why do regular synthetics die alongside the Reapers anyway? For all intents and purposes, the synthetics are the evolutionary equivalent of a tomato next to the Reapers so why would the space magic beam wipe them out too?)
As a final nail in the coffin, the only impact the battle fleet / war readiness has on anything is a few (slight) modifications to the FMV, and should you desire to see Shepard Commander wake up at the end you need to play multiplayer to increase the score. And of course bolting "Shepard survives" onto the "bad" renegade ending ensures that all synthetic life dying for him to live is the trade off, even though he should be dead too because his entire body only works because of Reaper tech.
Plot holes? Holy shit, yes. Finishing the game and seeing the "Continue the legend with downloadable content" popup is the final icing on the cake.
The majority of this game was fantastic. The cast had some great lines, the injokes were actually funny and using music and locations from the first game made the whole thing very nostalgic.
Even the increasingly tiresome "survive fifty waves of enemies" in the London sequences and the "here's six brutes, a Reaper and two banshees because we're starting to flag a bit now" didn't faze me in the long run.
But for a game based on choices supposedly making a difference, only for those differences to end up at the bottom of an exploded set of space relays based on three space magic options given by a last minute introduction that you can't even debate with or question, there's only one thing to say.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
I have modded New Vegas right up the wazoo: Part 2
Yep, the continuing adventures of "How many mods I can add to a game before it explodes and takes half the street with it". This time around, I've mostly focused on adding extra clothing, armour, quests, building interiors and a stack of extra people. There doesn't appear to be any real impact on the game as yet, and there are only two things I simply cannot get working (only head retextures so no big deal really).
In no particular order, here's a bunch more mods I'm running. I'll cover some of the others mentioned above (like additional people and buildings) next time, as I haven't actually come across all of the content I've added yet.
Not gonna lie - this might be my favourite armour in the entire game, modded or not. You do a little quest to grab it (there's two versions, actually - the other comes with a rebreather but it's surrounded by about a million high level enemies so I don't have that one yet). It's the kind of thing I expected to be in the game from the start, but the closest I could find was the hideous ghoul brotherhood robes.
And nobody is going to wear that.
Combine with some form of eyewear and the "face hidden" mode from pimp my scarf and you're going to look pretty badass.
2) Nevada RV house.
I really like this one, because it gives you a base of operations East of the Mojave Outpost, somewhat South of Nipton.
You get a shack with a ton of storage, an RV you can sleep in, a chemistry table to rid yourself of addictions and a dog.
Word of warning - you're not far from a place where Viper gang members spawn, and I was not entirely impressed when my dog exploded due to a sudden raid. Alas poor Yappy, I knew him not at all.
3) Portable Campsite. Another one for the "how was this not in the game" pile. You buy the bed and the campfire from random shops:
Then you throw them on the ground and activate both items. You can now sleep anywhere and cook some food whenever you feel like it.
Nice, simple and immersive mod. Sometimes the bed gets stuck in the ground or hovers ten feet in the air just like real life.
4) The Books for Bullets Program. Trading in books in Fallout 3 was great fun (no really, it was) and it blew my mind the first time I saw a ton of pre-war books in Vegas, thinking "I'm gonna make a fortune out of these" before realising they didn't carry the same worth that their DC cousins did. No matter, I'm sure you'll get to do something cool with all these books lying about the place. Right?
Wrong. You didn't do a damn thing with books, and I was somewhat let down by this. I also thought the whole crafting bullets skill was a nonsense due to never being able to find the parts I needed.
WOULDN'T IT BE AWESOME IF SOMEONE WHO CAN CODE THINGS HAD A SIMILAR IDEA AND FIXED MY PROBLEM.
Step right up, person who made this mod. It adds a "books for bullets" machine to a police station, and gives you the crafting components you need depending on what type of pre-war book you feed it (yes, the mod changes pre-war books into things like Fiction, Spiritual, History etc).
The machine:
The books:
My face: :D
Fantastic mod.
This is genius - a smart way to give your character a home (of sorts) in Goodsprings at the start of the game in a way that doesn't break the story with an unrealistic "Five minutes into the game and now you live in a mansion" mod. You know the alleyway at the side of the saloon and the store? Yep, you're going to set up there.
It's pretty simple, and you get some XP for each part of the alley that you sort out.
I was worried that me dicking around out in the open might attract a passing Deathclaw and cause a massacre but it hasn't gone horribly wrong so far.
6) Black Leather Armoured Duster.
No two ways about it: this coat looks badass.
Nice hat, too.
7) Oven cooking.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could cook with ovens? Well, now you can.
Depending on your Luck stat, you may find lots of working ovens or you might have to fix them before using. And then it might be out of fuel, so you finally have a use for flamer fuel (admit it, you never bothered to pick it up because you never bothered with flamethrowers). Great mod.
This one adds 21 bobbleheads to the wasteland, and you can configure the mod to give you skill bonuses or just money for every one you find.
9) Buildable Bots.
Science. Everybody loves science, especially when it involves insane death robots. And you'd love to build your very own insane death robot, wouldn't you?
Of course you would.
Well, GET READY FOR THE SHACK ATTACK, BY WHICH I MEAN THE WOODEN SHACK BELOW.
Inside, you'll find one of the most interesting and fun mods around. Behold the metal things!
Finally, there's a reason to collect all those bits of junk and scrap lying about the place. Fire up the machine at the end of the room and you can pick your weapon of choice:
This is what I ended up with:
They'll follow you around like a regular companion, and you can repair your robot if they get too messed up. My robot died horribly, so I ransacked him for parts. Easy come, easy go.
The ambient music in this mod could easily have wandered into town on the back of an official game soundtrack. It really is that good.
Bizarrely, the video only gives tiny snippets of music which seems a little pointless but don't let that put you off. Well worth the download.
I think that's everything for now. Next time I'll go over the rest of the 73 or so mods I've stuffed into my copy of New Vegas...
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
New Vegas improvements go missing in the wasteland
I've been meaning to write a thing about Skyrim for a while now - or, to be more accurate, a thing about Skyrim via the barren lands of New Vegas. This review of Skyrim prompted me to write the below ramble. I think I've covered most of the things I wanted to whine about, but I may throw in the odd update.
It seems to me there's a lot of things Bethesda simply ignored en route to Skyrim via the glorious path that was New Vegas. Of course, NV was put together by Obsidian and where Obsidian listened to the things players practically begged for, Bethesda seemed to throw up their hands, proclaim "didn't read lol" and just built Skyrim on the much older Fallout 3 model.
Why they did this, I have no idea. Things that Skyrim was crying out for yet are somehow strangely absent:
1) Hardcore mode. How the Hell this goes AWOL from New Vegas to Skyrim I have no idea, but given all the hunting, skinning and eating you can do it seems absolutely insane that Bethesda left this out. You can mod it into the game, but really - this was a hugely popular feature of NV (I wouldn't play without it), and should have been in the game. It's not like Skyrim would be negatively impacted in any way by its inclusion, so....where is it?
2) Actual impact stemming from faction choices. One of the greatest things about NV was all the faction interplay, sizing up the options, working out which side was the best shot at a future for Nevada and siding with one, becoming mortal enemies to the other, playing sides off against themselves or going rogue and doing your own thing. At one point I reached a tipping point and had so many options open to me, so many choices, so many possible directions the game could go in that I had to physically stop playing for a day or two while I weighed up the direction the wasteland would take. Games: serious business.
I loved that dressing as NCR and wandering near a slave camp was a guaranteed shootout. I couldn't get enough of mods that added in faction ID cards that you could forge to wander on into the enemy base. I tasted the sweet sweet bitter candy of pushing one side too far and having to steer clear of dangerous roads at night, instead hiding away in whatever friendly NPC location I could find. It made everything a little more tactical and, you know, interesting.
Here? I can side with the Imperial Legion, throw on some Imperial Legion Armour, walk right into Windhelm while rocking that armour to the max and jump up and down on the dining table of Ulfric Stormcloak. Nobody stops me, challenges me, queries why the legendary Dragonborn - who has decided the Empire is awesome, thanks - is no more than ten perilous feet away from the saviour of the Stormcloaks.
If this was New Vegas, within minutes of walking into the camp Cesar would be wearing me like a skinsuit and bits of my companions would be nailed to multiple crosses along the Nevada highways. Or I'd have those NCR goons warning me I had a few days to change my ways before dedicated murder teams would be shooting bullets into my skull. Or Mr House would not take kindly to me poking around the Lucky 38 and I'd be dealing with his stupid robots.
In Skyrim, I'm tap dancing my way through the homes of my enemies for the sake of being allowed to do every single mission that I can, and I feel like this is quite the step back from the advances made in New Vegas.
3) Companions. In Fallout 3, they were pretty uninspired for the most part, didn't have many interesting things to say and were quickly relegated to walking gun turrets / crap carriers. Don't even get me started on that game ending, but anyway...
New Vegas blew me away where companions were concerned. Every single one of them was a fleshed out character, they all had a great set of (involved and lengthy) personal quests that could directly impact perks that could bring you, future relations, the ending they received (yes, they all had multiple and varied endings depending on your actions and faction choice) and their general comments were endlessly entertaining. I mean, don't even get me started on Cass.
There's one mission in New Vegas later in the game involving Cass, except at the time I didn't make that connection and as a result I rather stupidly walked into a trap consisting of about 9 tooled up douchebags, whose sole purpose was turning her into liquified goop.
I was given the choice of simply handing her over for a reward, or signing my own death warrant as they went on and killed both our asses. By this point, I was so connected to the game world that for the first time ever in a game I was not only positively furious that they intended to splat a pretend persons brains across the floor, I was 100% balls out determined that this would not take place. What followed next can only be described as an orgy of death, explosions, shotgun shells and my character no doubt giggling to himself while smearing the blood of his vanquished foes on his face and chopping off their limbs with his fire axe.
Lydia is fun to launch off a cliff with Fus Ro Dah a couple of hundred times.
Like I said, the difference is mindblowing. Not only are the companion quests and character depth missing in action, the Skyrim characters also appear to be stupider than characters in a game released back in 2010.
In my humble opinion, the pathfinding in Skyrim isn't as good as NV. I can run all over the place in NV, turn around and be 99% sure Cass or whoever will be right behind me. In Skyrim, they'll often simply stop following me even when on a flat surface, or just....vanish. Somewhere. Or chase a wolf into a river then over the edge of a waterfall. In fact, I kind of suspect the reason you can kill your companion with weapons and magic but not by blasting them off a mountain with Fus Ro Dah (try it!) is because the only reason that shout exists is to overcome the issue of pathfinding and companions endlessly getting stuck in stupid places.
Seriously, why can't I kill Lydia by blasting her from the top of a mountain? Makes no sense otherwise.
Finally, the problem of doorways - specifically, companions becoming a lump of granite in a doorway and refusing to move. You'll notice in New Vegas that you can run into your companion and they'll just shift out of the way. In Skyrim, you're just running into a brick wall and hoping it eventually gets the message.
I haven't played Fallout 3 for a long time. Do companions do the "You shall not pass" thing there too? Either way, Skyrim companions were definitely brought into the world with a -INT score.
4) The interface. Oh God, the interface. Everything that needs to be said can be found here, but for my money the best vanilla UI in a Bethesda game is - you've guessed it - New Vegas. There are still problems, but most things are easily accessible, trading is straightforward (and you can see what ammo is needed for your weapons with no fuss) and the companion wheel....wait, let's back this up right now.
The companion wheel introduced by Obsidian remains the number one way to have your companion do stuff. It's fast, simple, reasonably sophisticated and lets you toggle tactics on the fly without too much dickery. Crucially, it also separates talking and doing. I don't need to have a chat with Veronica if I just want to take stuff or have her hang back while I shoot some dude in the face from afar. Similarly, should I want to listen to her various awesome hipsterisms, I can click the dialogue option and start waffling.
So of course we get to Skyrim and the companion wheel is replaced by slow moving text options. Whether I want Lydia to trade objects or alter her fighting technique, I have to wade through dialogue options, sometimes scrolling and often cursing. Look at this:
I cannot flip enough rageburgers at silly, silly decisions like that one. I loves me some Skyrim. I loves me some Lydia despite her vaguely Antichrist-like vibes. I especially loves me some blasting Lydia off the highest waterfall I can find.
But while charting the journey and development of these titles from Fallout 3 to Skyrim, I have to ask myself the question:
Did Bethesda even notice the improvements in New Vegas? And if so, why weren't they incorporated into Skyrim?
Sunday, 5 February 2012
I have modded New Vegas right up the wazoo
Playing NV on PC instead of the console is quite an eye opener - might as well be a different game, given how much extra content you can jam in there at no added cost. This is the best of what I'm rolling with so far, with no horrible crashes or explosions in sight. I'll be looking to throw in some gameworld expansions, but I at least want to play through the official DLC before I inevitably murder the coding with deathbricks.
1) Black Wolf Backpacks. How this game didn't come ready rolled with backpacks I'll never know, but this mod adds a collection of nifty carryspace onto your frame. You can double up the large backpacks with the small bumbag thing too. (Note: giving your companion a backpack increases their carry capacity forever, but this is hardly something you're going to complain about).
2) Another "what were they thinking" fixer, the Sunny Smiles companion mod does what you'd expect it to.
If you want to leave Sunny somewhere, you can tell her that location x is "your new home" and she'll wait there until you come back. You can also choose to leave the dog behind if annoying Fallout dogs aren't your thing (and nobody will ever replace Dogmeat anyway, not even his puppies).
3) New Vegas Bounties. This is a fun one, giving you twenty something "go forth and shoot that asshole" type missions to play around with. You go see some guy in a shack who tells you about the target and a general idea of where to go next, then off you go to slaughter what appears to be Robin Williams from his spot in Night at the Museum. The humanity.
4) Nordic Gear. I missed the old "find this awesome armour loot" missions from FO3 (did NV even have any of these? Can't remember) so this one fills the spot nicely. The loot is found in various locations across the map, with some of the best bits hidden in a certain location which I've yet to find.
I bought this for Cass.
5) FO3 has a better radio than NV. Mr New Vegas is nowhere near as interesting as Three Dog, and I now have a pathological aversion to Johnny motherfucking Guitar like you wouldn't believe. This mod here is a port from FO3, complete with scripted radio presenter and a whole bunch of public service announcement warnings from, uh, people.
6) 100 outfits. If you're bored with everybody dressing the same, then this is a good mod to have. It seems adding this causes characters to change their own clothing, but I haven't seen this happen yet. When installed, some of the shops will start trying to flog you different kinds of outfits, all of which come with modifiers to things like perception, agility etc. I kinda like this one:
Remember how much you liked the roving trader outfit but hated having to remove it due to it not having any damage resistance at all?
Yeah, this will fix that little problem.
7) Pimp my scarf. This one lets you pick up a snazzy face wrap / scarf and, uh, wrap your face with it. They come in "face hidden" and "face not hidden" varieties.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Sunday, 1 January 2012
Steam Sale Carnage...
Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout New Vegas, Mount & Blade Warband and Fire & Sword, Shogun 2, Unreal And Quake packs, Hacker Evolution Duality, Defcon, Left 4 Dead 2 and the Hitman pack. I also got Swords and Soldiers as a freebie from the coal crafting thing.
Thank goodness it's over for another year...
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