It's not the apocalypse that ruins the world forever

We seem to take it for granted that after the apocalypse everything will be bad. Not just a little bad, or bad-but-recovering, but eternally bad. But is that actually a reasonable assumption? Humanity recovered from being killed down to a few thousand people. Earth has been repeated blown up, burned, and suffocated, the latter happening in multiple ways depending on what life was used to breathing at the time. To get sustained terribleness we don't need a one-off event, but instead a Sustained Terribleness Continuation Plan, or STCP, which is impossible to pronounce and redundant. What is the STCP? Us. People are the thing that keeps everything terrible after our initial effort.

Once upon a time a few technicians were given a task that they weren't trained for, using equipment that was poorly-designed, and as a result, Ukraine has a big ol' Zone of Exclusion around Chernobyl. A meltdown led to a steam explosion, which blasted a whole lot of radioactive mess all over the place. The disaster was of such a large scale that the USSR had to stop pretending that it hadn't happened, evacuating the shiny new city of Pripyat and leaving it all to nature. After some initial "all the trees died" problems, nature rebounded, since a lot of radiation is hardly as dangerous as humans.

Combining the story "Roadside Picnic" and the Zone of Exclusion yielded the strange game series STALKER. In it there are all manner of dangers. Some comes from the radiation scattered by the explosion and cleanup operations. Much more comes from the results of an experiment. I won't give it all away, but the general result was another explosion that twisted the laws of physics and created all manner of dangerous mutants. In fact, the bit of radiation and packs of stray dogs are the least of the worries.

People and their experiments are the big problem. To cover up the experiments, they created a fake religion, luring people in with promises of wealth, eternal life, or at least something better than living in an irradiated wasteland. They deliver on none of these, instead brainwashing them to shoot at anyone who tries to figure out what is happening. And then the hero shoots his way in, killing everyone, and possibly destabilizing the area even more, which makes the apocalyptic explosions a daily occurrence. The local apocalypse ruined the world, but we kept it ruined.

If you combine 50's nostalgia with 50's fear of dying in a nuclear war and thrown in an unhealthy dose of a timeless disregard for basic safety or environmental protection, then you get the world of Fallout. There was a nuclear war with China and now everything has been nuked except for Vegas. There are some mutants, mostly of the "radiation makes things bigger" variety, along with some people who turned into ghouls (zombies) from high doses of radiation. Some have human minds, some are feral. It's a bad world.

After so long much of the radiation would have dispersed. Animals and feral ghouls are susceptible to guns. The real dangers, the real problems, came from people. Some became raiders and drug dealers. Others joined the Enclave, which are effectively technologically advanced American Nazis who cannot merely isolate themselves to sustain their 'pure' form of humanity, but must also kill everyone else. That's right, while humanity is right back to the "few thousand people left" stage, these guys decide they need to weed out the undesirables. This becomes a plot point, surprisingly. New Vegas introduced Ceasar's Legion as a technology-hating slave army dedicated to conquering everything, which was also incapable of actually managing an economy or doing much of anything besides fighting. Raiders seem almost reasonable in comparison, since they sometimes recognize that if they kill everyone there won't be any more people to rob.

Worst of all were the vaults that the people designed. They all worked. Some worked to preserve human life, saving thousands of lives. Many more worked to drive them insane in new and creative ways. One was split down the middle to test paranoia. Another was designed to let in radiation, creating hundreds of ghouls. More than a hundred were built and less than two dozen were intended to just save people without subjecting them to extra torture.

I'd mentioned environmental protection and basic safety, so here goes. The background radiation, while an issue, would have fallen dramatically. Only a few locations are still heavily irradiated due to the bombs themselves. Many more are irradiated because of poor storage of nuclear waste. Leaky steel barrels dot the landscape, fallen out of trucks, dumped all over, contaminating the water and soil. In Fallout: New Vegas there is a little exhibit about these that uses absolutely no subtlety to show the exceptional lack of attention to, or regard, for safety.

The cars appear to run on nuclear power, and take barely more than a nudge to explode, often triggering chain reactions. One might even wonder if the bombs ever needed to fall, if a few car crashes might have done the trick. And of course players might find that these little nuclear bombs are handy improvised weapons, so it's not as if we're the sparkling heroes of humanity.

Certainly both of these worlds suffered from human-caused nuclear disasters, but it was their actions leading up to and in response to the disasters that created the long-term problems. Crises are momentary, but human nature and the resulting messes, are nearly-eternal.

The Importance of a Base (home) in Games

The other day, in response to Syl, I wrote about the concept of homes in games, places where you can sleep and retain your sanity and perhaps even comfort.  At the time I thought it was merely a pointless concept that is fun to talk about but has no relevance to the actual game or its design.  As so often happens, I was wrong, as proven by the fact that I disagreed.  Homes, or as I will call them, bases, are important in shaping how we play.

I'll use the term bases rather than homes because the concepts are different.  Homes make us feel warm and fuzzy.  Bases are resting points, hopefully safe, where we can refill, restock, and empty our bags.  Stalker has no homes, but it does have bases and those are very important to how I play.

As I depart from Skadovsk, the rusting ice-breaker in a swamp, I save my game.  As I leave I am transitioning between the safe area and the unsafe.  Within there are no stray bullets, anomalies, or mutants.  Outside, there are.  Having a base creates this transition area, perfect for saving the game.  It's also perfect for quitting the game.  As I return or leave there is a clear change in mental state, from the alert outside to the relaxed and more thoughtful inside.  For me, that makes it a good time to quit.  It is a break in the game.

Contrast that with Civilization which doesn't have as clear breaks.  There is the end of turn pause, but that is merely a button press waiting to happen.  And besides, that pause is time for checking on production, making sure nothing was missed.  It is a pause, at most, and definitely not a break.  This is part of what drives the "one more turn" phenomenon, that despite being turn-based and presumably disjointed, it is actually quite smooth, with one action flowing into the next, with no logical point to start.  There is the start of the turn, right after the AI has gone, but that is an even worse time, when you've just seen all the consequences of decisions and have that information fresh in your mind.  To quit then is to discard all you've seen and all you plan to do, in hopes of remembering it later.

I found this in WoW as well.  When I return to a town there are the mailbox and vendor, inviting me to empty my bags and free myself of the worry of those.  There is the inn, inviting me to log out for a while.  The town is safe and there are usually no quests within the town itself.  Maybe there is a quest giver, but the exclamation point will be there tomorrow.  Unlike Civilization there is not a memory loss from logging out for a while.  However, bag space, despite seemingly to be a stopping point "bags are full, gotta go now", is instead a starting point to another task: empty the bags, knowing where to mail items, what to sell, perhaps what to go to the AH for, or if a bank alt handles the AH, then the bank alt has mail to open and bags to empty and auction to post.  Eventually there is a stopping point, when mail and bags are settled and auctions are up.  It may add another half hour or more, but it is eventually there and will nudge you off to dreams of epics.

Guild Wars 2 is different in its break points.  The anywhere AH sale and ability to deposit crafting materials means that I've not gotten into the habit of using bank alts, so I don't have that pull to jump around to clean up everything.  But this also means that cities do not stop me.  A city is just a waypoint away from more questing, so it's more of an inconvenient loss of silver than a note to stop.  Similarly, the heart system means that I won't return to a town to turn in a dozen quests and have that sense of completion and therefore of stopping.  However, since I am unaware of the existence of rested xp, wouldn't want it anyway, and there is no logout timer in the wild, I have little problem logging out wherever I am.  In that regard it is easier to log out, but there is no nudge toward doing so.  There is even a nudge to stay on: since the marketplace is global, there are always buyers and sellers, so odds are, someone is just about to buy your auction if you wait just a few more seconds and maybe you'll get some of your orders filled so you can craft with that and post it which will sell and in a little bit you'll post more buys and pick up those and why does my clock lie to me and claim that hours have passes when all I was doing was picking up my auctions?

I like having break points.  Call it paternalism if you like, but I think gaming would benefit from design bits such as break points which encourage more moderate play.  They don't at all force it, but they help.

Stalker: Clear Sky

I finally got around to buying and playing this game.  It helped me see what I love about Stalker, by not having them.  It's recognizable as being Stalker, mostly because about half the maps are the same as Shadow of Chernobyl.  The other half are new, but not as good as what they replace.

Lessons learned

1 - I actually like being scared
In SoC and Call of Pripyat (the newest of the three) there are a few underground laboratories that the player runs through.  They aren't friendly places, filled with dangerous mutants and deadly anomalies, closed spaces that make me feel claustrophobic.  One was inhabited by a giant brain in a jar, which was fine, except going too close to it resulted in my psy protection helmet warning me about the critical emissions, which always startled me.  Another featured poltergeists (they levitate stuff and throw it at you and look like balls of electricity and are hard to hit), followed by a giant monster that could shoot earthquakes, followed by a poltergeist that shoots flames.  And then the military attacks.

One of these places scared me so much that the next time I played I was stuck for days: I needed to find a time that I could play that was long long away from when I'd need to sleep.  Horrible, right?  But the lack of these places in CS wasn't much fun.  They were a neat change of pace, from the open-world to the cramped, sending me into a place where I needed to be cautious, but not scared, and where I needed to be fully prepared.  Running out of bullets halfway in with the enemies stubbornly refusing to die was not good.

2 - Have a good story
In SoC you have amnesia and have a serious mystery to figure out, not only of your identity, but of old conspiracies.  In the end you learn something close to everything, or die in various ways, thanks to the multiple possible endings.  In CoP the story isn't as cool, but you do at least get to feel like a bit of a hero, saving people along the way and doing a great service to your country.  In CS you're instead being strung along, possibly being lied to (fans aren't sure), to hunt the hero of the first game, and in the end all you manage to do is fix absolutely nothing and are either dead or brainwashed.  It doesn't have any of the sense of figuring out a mystery and it doesn't have as much of a feel of being the loner against the great conspiracy, since you're basically the tool of a larger group being used to kill some guy based on a nonsensical pseudo-scientific dung pile of a theory (the 'scientist' claims that the guy you're hunting is triggering blasts which are slowly killing you, based on next to no actual evidence).

3 - Work
CS is buggy.  Very buggy.  Fortunately the players who were so enthralled by the awesome game which was SoC put a lot of effort into fixing the many problems in CS and with mods they could fx many problems, but not all.  In particular, the ambitious and neat "faction wars" system, which was meant to allow for allied factions to gain territory, is poorly-scripted and so the NPCs who are supposed to reinforce and therefore capture points often do not show up, leaving the conflicts perpetually unfinished.  This didn't affect my ability to complete the game, but it did harm the feel of it and was an annoyance, to capture an area and then have it fall the moment I step away, when it should not.

4 - Open Worlds and Consistency
All three games use open worlds for the most part, mostly.  SoC and CoP are 90% open-world, where you're free to wander and come and go.  CS is at the start, but after a particular point and with no warning you're thrust into a mostly-linear path for several zones, and unable to turn back.  I hope you wandered into that part of the story with the armor and weapons you wanted.  Hallway-oriented FPS combat has its place, in other games, not in an open world near-sandbox.  I'd complained about the ending to SoC, which was linear, but that was a single zone, not half the game.

This is, however, mostly a matter of consistency.  Hallways shooters exist and that's fine.  I've played them and they were fun.  But that's what I expected from them, not an open world.  Meeting expectations in terms of gameplay is important.  This isn't just about marketing, but about what the game builds up as you play it.  If the first five zones are of one style of gameplay, the sixth should be as well.    The way around this is to build-in variety from the start, so zones 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are different and therefore 6 can be as well, though that runs the risk of just making an incoherent pack of mini-games.

But you might want to buy it anyway
I know I just spent the post pointing out flaws and I think they are all there, but despite those flaws, I do think it is worth a few bucks.  If a Steam sale pops up, get it and it will be worth it.  Full price, maybe not so much, though it's only $10 anyway (keep in mind I'm really cheap).

I found it interesting for seeing what happens if you give the same areas to a developer team and tell them to write a different story.  Same place, new plot.  It's intellectually interesting and maybe you'd find yourself thinking about what you'd do with the areas.  If it were not almost my bed time I might conjure up some comparisons to the Cataclysm of WoW.

P.S. If you do play, I suggest finding an addon that disables or in some way fixes grenades, because for some reason they are homing weapons.

No RPG for Old Men

I watched No Country for Old Men on the way back to school.  It felt like an RPG.  Of course the scenery is that of New Vegas, or rather, both take place in the southeast (though I suppose Texas is its own region, but the land looked similar enough).  The character felt a bit like an RPG character.  He wandered the desert, hunting, and scavenging.  Find a corpse?  Check for a decent weapon.  Of course there is a weight limit to carry.  But that feeling of the lone wanderer, out in the wilderness, with nothing but bandits and insufficient police to keep him company, that felt familiar.

A small bit that really increased the feeling that I was watching Fallout: New Vegas was when he fired, and picks up the casing.  Apparently brass casings in real life are expensive enough to justify that.  Within the game that happens automatically and you might not even notice, though I did because I was in the habit of making my own ammo.  Those casings were as good as loot off a corpse.

I have no doubt that they were not aiming for an RPG feel.  Yet I think the movie and the game genre aim in the same direction, of the lone almost-hero, out there staying alive and maybe slowly, slightly, getting somewhere.  The risks are great, not just from the other people around, but from the land itself.  While I'm sure the man in the truck wanted water mostly because of the bleeding, being in the middle of a hot, dry land didn't help the matter.

Later on the theme developed of the recurring enemy and that nagging question: How does the heartless AI keep finding me?  That's followed up with a healthy dose of greater forces attempting to manipulate the player to their own ends.  Going along with them may be the easiest path, but of course has no guarantee of safety.

That man alone with no allies is a recurring theme in a lot of media, particularly American set in the West, of the lone man roughing it, taking on all odds.  They might be breaking the law or just barely following it, but we set that aside and we root for them.  In America we like to talk about self-made men, a mythical creature.  Yet out there, with no one around, perhaps they can exist, and did.  Just like in real life we yearn for heroes and yet know there are no true, perfect heroes, so we make them in fiction.  We yearn for that self-creation and so we look to the place where maybe it can happen and if it doesn't, we make a fiction where it can happen in the place where it can happen.  And then we make games where that fiction in that place can happen.

I greatly enjoyed the movie.  Though I was sad that he never got that antelope.

A world to live in, a world to sleep in

Syl asked an intresting question: Where would you build your house?

Where indeed?  We can set aside scenery and ask something more important: sleep.  Homes aren't where we live, but also where we sleep.

This is where I think my MMO and single-player experiences diverge.  In single player games I tend to be in worlds I could live in.  Stalker, Fallout, Half Life; these are all worlds where I could live.  I could scavenge and scrape by and have some fun doing it.

I could never sleep in those places.  Like in I Am Legend, I imagine myself trying to huddle in the bathtub while scary things shriek around me.  Normally I'd go shoot them, but it's been a long day and I just want to sleep.

For me, sleeping means huddled under blankets from the cold.  I don't like summer much because of that: too hot.  But winter, winter is wonderful.  I can open a window and be nice and cold, or I would be if not for my pile of blankets and quilts.  So if I need a world to sleep it, it better be cold.  World of Waarcraft had some cold at first: Winterspring and Dun Morogh.  Then came Nothrend and snow, snow everywhere.  Glorious.  Welcome to the endless winter!

Unfortunately, Northrend was also filled with Scourge and was therefore not much a sleeping spot.  Thankfully, Guild Wars 2 has a nice collection of zones with a lot of snow and nary an animated corpse in sight.  Wolves and owls don't worry me.

Beside the necessity of snow, there must be peacefulness at night.  Indeed, there is peacefulness there.  Not like those awful post-apocalyptic zones filled with bloodsuckers and zombies making noise all the time.

What worlds can you sleep in?

Headshot! Or, Why FPS PvP MMOs are a Bad Idea

As I pointed out last week, my new header is a modified wallpaper from Stalker.  Because they're awesome (the game and the wallpaper, but this post is based on the game). It's an FPS, but with RPG elements such as currency, inventory, and quests, as well as taking place in a mostly open world. FPS + RPG = Awesome game.

I also think it could be a blast to play with friends. The game generates AI teams which do, approximately, what players would do: explore, search for artifacts, loot, fight bandits and mutants, and run for their lives when the Daily Everything Dies event is coming. Best daily quest ever. It's a world already designed for groups to exist, so being able to bring in friends seems like the logical next step.

Just as long as we cannot shoot each other.

I'm not suggesting that there should be no friendly fire. It's part of the challenge, when mutant dogs are darting around, to track them without hitting friendlies. But players should not be the enemy.

We've all had it happen, or at least are familiar enough that I can pretend: you're at some small level running around when seemingly out of nowhere you die. Maybe it was a rogue stealthed, a hunter far away, or a warrior whose charge-swing came so fast that you couldn't register what had happened. Whatever the specifics, the same general event happened: a much higher-level player killed you instantly, with no chance to retaliate. It's an annoying side-effect on level-based MMOs with PvP, but little more than that because it is a temporary state: merely leveling up will fix it (though gear imbalances continue the problem, those are for another day).

Imagine if that was instead the standard form of interaction. In Stalker I might take down a team of enemies in a few seconds, at long range. At the least, it would be trivial to take down one and fall back, untouched. Obviously this is fun for me, but is it any fun for other players? We don't like losing, but this is beyond losing, this is essentially random death, which you cannot out-level or out-gear. At best you can become incredibly paranoid or refuse to leave any safe areas. Not much fun.

The RPG solution is to allow you to out-level and out-gear it, so that you react to the bullets in the FPS the same way you'd react to a hunter's auto-shot, by taking damage, but almost certainly not being instantly dead. Now the sniper is trying to pull off a dozen headshots to kill someone. Now he's just wandering into a 3v1 with a minor advantage from getting the first attack, but he's not all that much better off than if he'd just wandered right up to them. All his careful sneaky hunting is a waste of time.

At least for me, part of the appeal of FPS games is the feedback. Shoot, kill. No miss table, no wondering if the enemy will survive because of armor. When a bullet hits you in the head, you die. Or more accurately, they die (from the bullet in their head). The carefully aimed first shot can be the only shot, a reward for being careful and sneaky. This is also why most FPS don't appeal to me, because so often you can put a full clip into someone's chest and they don't die, turning it into a weird punching match. TF2 is the exception because it makes no pretense of reality, embracing the absurdity of it all.

Maybe the S is the problem, and rather than First Person Shooter it should be First Person Speller, where you say words at enemies and if they can't spell them fast enough they die.  Sorry, I guess I should have gone with the less ambiguous First Person Sorcerer, where you throw spells at people's heads.  In this case, a perfectly-plausible "a wizard, that is to say, your character, did it" explanation can explain why a magic bolt to the head isn't deadly.  It may even offer more variation.  Frost magic to the feet slows their movement, to the arms slows their attack, chest slows their breathing so they get tired faster, and to the head slows their casting because of a terrible brain freeze, but without delicious ice cream.  Healing or counter-spells could require similar targeting, so a fireball into the skull of your friend isn't going to do him any good, but into his frozen legs it will get him running again.  This would mean that a dedicated healer/buffer class wouldn't be needed, since rather than making different spells for different targets, instead the spells would have different effects based on what they hit and where.

Okay then, is anyone making a First Person Sorcerer?

My 5-5-5 Plan

What I'm currently playing: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Civilization V, and Poker Night at the Inventory, which has five players and is only here so I could get a third five.

Here and there I read annoyance or anger over the habit of publishers to stick to just a few franchises and slightly tweak them over and over for massive profits. I think that's not at all the problem.

Here I am playing the fifth in two series, after having played the fourth, and in the case of Civilization, the third (I won't count my brief time with Civ II). I like these series. Are they just incremental steps in the series rather than innovative new games breaking new ground? Well, yes. What's wrong with that?

The Civilization series has it's formula: build cities, kill everyone else, rule the world, using a mix of city management and planning as well as military strategy and tactics. Until V it didn't have any major deviations from this formula. Sure, IV added some features and the expansions added more and we got more nuances to the civilizations, but ultimately it was the same general game. V brought the biggest change with the wargame-like combat, for which it ended up receiving criticism. Maybe it wasn't innovation, but it certainly ended up being an argument against change. People knew what Civilization was and that's what they wanted. And there's the whole reason for the franchises, at least on the consumer side: we know what we're getting. I know that some companies consistently make good games and some series are consistently good.

Similarly, as I see it, Skyrim is a much prettier Oblivion with some nice added mechanics, but it is essentially the same game. I don't mind this at all. Oblivion was a fantastic game for me and so far, Skyrim is performing well. The fact that it was not a dramatically different game was what sold me on it: I knew what I was getting and I knew that was a gameplay and type of story that I enjoyed.

I think the true problem is this: first person shooters and sports games. They're stagnant. I believe that they are doomed to be stagnant, at least until something changes dramatically. "Shoot guys in this hallway" has its limits. Crysis pushed this out by often giving an island rather than a hallway, and I commend it for that, but that's a harder model to go with and I don't think it is going to catch on. Open areas are harder on the game, harder on the AI, and frankly, I think many people don't even want that much flexibility. I know I played the Halo demo for a long time because it offered convenient point and click violence, without much need for planning or any thought at all.

I do like the shooting people gameplay, but the typical hallway shooting just doesn't do much for me. It's too scripted, too restricted, and in general, lasts only a few hours. I don't see much sense in paying $50 for an afternoon or two. Maybe I'm just spoiled by too much WoW, which as linear as it has become, is still a wide-open sandbox compared to 99% of FPS. Maybe that's why I enjoyed the Stalker games so much, for their combination of shooting people and sandbox.

I don't like sports games much because unless they go in the silly direction, such as anything featuring Mario or that one NBA game we played back on the N64 (Hang Time?), they just seem stupid. This is of course, my opinion, which is how we know it is correct.

You probably noticed that I'm leaving out that all-important multi-player experience. No one is paying $50 for a few hours of scripted AI. They're paying $50 for months or years of online play with friends and enemies. That's great, but it's not for me. So for me, a single-player player, they aren't worthwhile.

We've now established that franchises are good, except when they make games I don't like. Why would anyone make these bad franchises and why would anyone buy them? Well obviously, they make them because people buy them, like in the classic movie: "if they come, you will build it." So why buy them? If the previous game was playable and fun, why buy the new one if it is only incrementally better? Slightly better for a few hours of single-player isn't worth it, but slightly better over months or years of play, now that is worth it.

But why not make a much better game? Because that's harder! And riskier. Franchises are safe. Customers know what they are getting and companies know what to make. New ideas might not work. Putting major changes into an existing franchise risks its security. Putting them into a new title risks a lot of money, and who will be the customers except the people already buying the incremental upgrade? It's risk with little reward.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to Skyrim and ponder why the Dwemer ruins remind me of a combination of Gnomeregan and Titan ruins, complete with their own degenerate race that breaks through walls to kill everyone, which look like exceptionally ugly elves.

It's like social loafing, but the opposite

What was supposed to be a three-month project is being done in about three weeks. So we're working our asses off. All the other groups think we're crazy. Maybe we are, and were, even before this.

The final bit of the project is a paper. A mere 20 pages, a trivial length for 5 people, and perhaps too short for the scope of the topic. But that's what we have to work with. The main idea is that there is a paper to write, with grades going to 5 people.

Some people would be social loafers. They'd know that 4 other people are there to do it. If I don't edit, they will. If I don't write enough, they will. If I disperse profanity throughout the paper, they'll catch it. To some extent this is true, that I am allowing them to pick up some slack, because that's what teams are for, distributing the load, playing to strengths.

But I cannot just sit back and let them do it all. I know it won't be as good as it could be. So here I am now thinking that the paper is good enough. I'd turn it in for myself. But it isn't a grade for 1 person; it's for 5 people. Any problem is multiplied. Maybe I'd accept an imperfect grade, but I cannot impose that on 4 other people. That's the wrong thing to do.

So I end up inversely socially loafing, doing more because of others, rather than less.

It reminds me a bit of raiding. When I solo I don't mind the deaths because it's entirely my own risk, my own cost, my own failure. But in a raid, if I screw up, I screw up for 9 or 24 other people. Or 39 once upon a time. That's not a good feeling. Early on, when everyone is making mistakes and raids aren't quite so difficult, it's manageable. But eventually it gets to me, it stresses me and angers me, that my mistake is hurting others, and I don't want to be that person.

But what is my benefit from working twice as hard at the raiding and preparation? It's a terrible scenario where the cost of not preparing is massive, hurting me a little and added up over everyone, a lot. But the extra work to fail less? Minor benefit to me, and also to the raid, because then someone else does it wrong and I cannot fix it for them. It's like Tobold would say now and then, with a raid testing the weakest member, rather than the strongest, or the average.

I like tests of strongest or of average. In the former, one weak member may cause no harm at all. In the latter, one weak member may have little overall negative impact. Not none, but little enough that it can be compensated for. But when the weakest member decides the outcome, then it's a race to remove the lowest, and then there is a new lowest, and in theory you remove all the low ones and have a core of high ones and then everything is good, but that's a chaotic process, a disruptive process, a particularly unfun process when everyone is under attack.

So that's that. And I really hate doing citations. I wish I could just paste in the source link. Here, professor, you want my sources, here is the agency budget and newspaper articles investigating it. Alas, I cannot do that.

In unrelated news, I think I'm going to hold off on buying Skyrim, as I've just started playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl again, with the excellent Oblivion Lost mod, and this time I plan to explore a bit more. Last time I had played a bit, hated the UI, and eventually rushed off because I wanted to see Chernobyl after I watched one too many documentaries on it. I'm looking forward to giving the Zone a better look. I'm not looking forward to the next leg of my journey, which is going to the underground X-18 laboratory, which is filled with mutants and dead babies in jars. It's a terrifying place. I might have gone there sooner, but during the day I don't have time and there is no way I am going there at night, not if I plan to sleep. It's a remarkably good game, which you should definitely buy. If you saw my review many months back I'd been less kind to it, but I think the mod, which is free and easy to install, improves it a great deal. Despite already having a reputation as a frightening and unforgiving world, the mod makes it even harsher. Because what we really needed were mind-controlling hostile mutants taking over the few safe areas. I take that back, two. There were two safe areas. Unless the military got aggressive, then only one. Or with the mod, none.

WoW has definitely moved away from world toward better gameplay. Stalker manages to have solid gameplay but without sacrificing the world. And what a world it is.

Students, good luck with finals. Parents, good luck with offspring with finals. Teachers, good luck with students with finals. Everyone else, you better be buying the rest of us some great Christmas gifts.

Realism, Simulation, Immersion, Choice, and Accuracy

Nouns!

Realism! Check out the details on this gun. This game doesn't have to be 20 Gb, but if you want guns that look this good, then it does. You'll want a new video card too. Newer than that one. What do you mean I don't even know what card you have? This is a new, realistic game, of course you can't handle it!

It seems to me that when developers talk about realism they aim for visual realism. They make it look like what it is supposed to be. Presumably looking like it is good enough. But if visuals and sound (I forgot sound) are all it takes, then we'd all have PTSD from all those war movies. And from the similarly visually stunning FPS that they keep churning out.

Visuals do not guarantee immersion.

The problem is simulation. What is being simulated? I'm reminded of the 'simulator' we had for driver's ed back in high school. We'd all sit in our little driver's seats with a decent recreation of a steering wheel, gear shift, turn signal, pedals, and other stuff which I'm sure is important (aren't you glad I don't drive much?). It was realistic. The visuals weren't so great, being projected a bit far away on the big screen at the front of the room.

It was a great simulation in all aspects, except two: immersion and choice. Notice how I said the visuals are projected on the screen? Yea, one screen for all of us. We watched a film from a driver's seat and were meant to react to it, but there was almost no feedback. The car went forward whether I braked or floored it. The car turned left regardless of where the wheel was. It didn't even matter if the car was 'on'.

Sound familiar? How about your average FPS? As much as WoW is 'on rails', it is a gloriously free and open-ended sandbox compared to your average FPS. Assault this objective! Do not try to climb over the fence. Except that one fence that is scripted to be climbable. You must climb that one. Is this like war? Well sure, there are times when taking any other path will get you filled with bullets, shrapnel, poison, or dirt which is moving at a high speed relative to your body despite being, from most perspectives, stationary. But can you imagine a soldier that he cannot flank the enemy by hopping a fence or crawling around the back way, that he will instead attack a dozen enemies head-on? And of course he never, ever has backup or the option to retreat. That last one is realistic if we're talking about Soviet soldiers in WWII, but outside of that one specific example, which admittedly covers a lot of territory and numbers, there are some options.

The problem is that immersion requires not just appearance, but also choice.

This may mean a loss of historical accuracy while also being more historically realistic. Washington could have done things differently. He had the choice. He happened to take the choices that led to me being here in the best greatest country ever put here by God, in contrast with other countries which were obviously put here by Satan. But he could have ended up as a Loyalist. He had the choice and if we were to play the American Revolution FPS, we'd better get the chance to betray all we stand for in return for evil British gold.

On a side note, FPS aren't quite as much fun before semi-automatic weapons. I played one based on the Civil War once. It was a bit annoying. You'd shoot and then take approximately ten minutes to reload and shoot again, making it slightly more interactive than a vanilla paladin, but that's another story.

There are narrative limits. I cannot imagine the size of the budget required to write, script, and test the endless possibilities for Mr. Pre-President. We'd need sci-fi-style cloning just to get enough writers. So fine, let's force him to be a traitor. But does he have to freeze his ass off in Valley Forge? Can he pay Benedict Arnold so he doesn't pull a Benedict Arnold?

This may be why I enjoy Civilization so much. It isn't historically accurate, and come to think of it, it isn't historically realistic either, but it's something historical. It captures the possibilities. It shows how decisions matter. The butterfly effects of choices are often amazing to see. The potential for greatness, and evil, is nearly limitless. Because of this, despite what the mechanics or graphics might lack, it achieves a level of realistic immersion.

This semi-sandbox sort of play is a source of replay value. The 'story' is different each time. Maybe one game I find myself in a peaceful world where science and cultures are the 'wars'. At another time, I may see perpetual war, shifting alliances, and half a continent burned down (I still maintain that I had no territorial ambitions, which is why I destroyed it all).

Even when there is an overall developer-created narrative path, sandbox elements can help. Take Stalker for example. Ultimately you will do the final thing, whether it is killing the C-Consciousness or dying horribly in Shadow of Chernobyl or leaving the Zone in Call of Pripyat. Yea, a bit of a strange ending: you leave. No great discoveries or victories, merely escape. But along the way there are choices. You can side with various factions. Traveling you can try to protect fellow Stalkers or leave them to their deaths. Or assist them in dying. Maybe you skip half the missions and beeline for the ending cutscene, a choice which sounds remarkably stupid to me, but which sounds quite a bit like the leveling-skippers of WoW. I actually played through CoP a few times, finding more that I had missed and seeing what choices I could make differently.

Admittedly these are essentially cosmetic choices. The economy in the game is easy enough that a vendor benefit isn't needed. A few weapons are different, but nothing is unavailable, just a little harder to get. But it is enough. I can play as I would if I were actually there. Or, as I would if I were actually there but not hiding in a corner weeping, because let's face it, there is no way I'd be going into a dark cave, alone except for the scary mutants lurking all around.

And yet, as much as I might praise choice and various approaches to realism, sometimes it's nice to take the straightforward route and shoot Nazis in the face.

Prettier, but not better

My video card took up archaeology again, by which I mean it started displaying artifacts. I decided not to try baking it this time, because I didn't trust it anymore. So I bought a new one. My more-knowledgeable friend convinced me to buy a 1gb card that cost around $120. I had been leaning toward that $40 ones, but he used a very convincing argument, answering "yes" when I asked "if I bought this would you think I am stupid?" So now I have what may or may not be a totally badass video card. I'm leaning toward "sorta cool, but let's not get too excited about it" range. But it's still significantly better than the 256mb 8600 gts I was using before it got baked.

I did the only logical thing: I started up the games I've been playing lately, Civ V and Fallout 3, and jacked up the graphics to maximum. Everything is so damn pretty. It should be bursting into song, it looks so good. I cannot believe how good the water looks, how the light and shadows interact to produce works of art, shifting as I walk, shimmering in the smoke and flames. It is a sight to behold.

I can't honestly say it's all that much more fun. It looks nicer, but the gameplay is unchanged. The annoying bits are still annoying and the fun bits are as fun as they were before.

Only on occasion does the game change substantially, in low-light areas in which a loss of detail can mean a total loss of vision, unless of course I bump up the brightness. Atmospherically I can't say it's all that much better, except possibly in the case of Stalker, in which I'd turned off all grass and turned down the visual distance. Ironically, that may have been the better setting, since now the ground is covered in grass. It doesn't feel quite so much like a dead and twisted landscape, seeming more like a run-down neighborhood on a flat land, with slightly more guns than I'm used to. In other words, it went from post-apocalyptic Ukraine to Texas. Though the Ukrainian accent is easier to understand.

The lack of effect is even more noticeable in WoW, which was never known for it's high-end graphics, and which seems to just gain slightly prettier grass and surprisingly good water effects. But at the risk of repeating myself, this is a good thing for WoW. Hardware accessibility is underrated.

Better mechanics, worse everything else

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. There, I typed out all the damn periods. No more.

Okay, so here's Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. It has a pretty cool story. You're the "Marked One", an amnesiac who just barely survived a big accident on a horrifying truck, and you have only one piece of information: a PDA that says "kill Strelok". Who is that and who am I?

So you do the only sensible thing: wander off completing tasks for the local trader, getting into fights with bandits, mutants, and the Ukrainian military. And for reasons I forget, you decide that the smart thing to do is to try to get to Chernobyl. You know, the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster. Except in this universe it's even worse, with a second disaster causing physics to stop doing what it is supposed to do, creating anomalies in space. Also, a strange device called the Brain Scorcher turns other Stalkers and soldiers into Monolith: aggressive, fanatical, brainwashed soldiers who kill anyone who comes near the plant. And because this chosen course wasn't sufficiently dangerous, you explore various abandoned, or less than entirely abandoned, laboratories which give you (by which I mean me) nightmares.

But along the way the biggest obstacle is the game. Strange bullet mechanics, weapons that wear out and break and cannot be repaired, no matter how much you liked a particular gun, weight limits, and the randomly scattered stashes of valuable artifacts, powerful items created by anomalies, but which are empty until you've found the correct randomly dropped PDA with the location. It's not a pretty game by any means.

In contrast is the third game in the series, a visually stunning and mechanically impressive game, Call of Pripyat. Guns can be upgraded, repaired, and customized to work just as you would want (putting bullets in scary things at various ranges). Stashes exist even if no one has told you the location. The inventory is easier to manage. Artifacts are more fun to acquire, being searched for between emissions (these are a once-a-day Everyone Outside Dies), rather than found purely by chance. On top of all that, there are far fewer loading screens, thanks to most of the outside world taking place in three maps rather than a dozen or so.

But the story...

It can be summed up as this: you're a soldier sent in to look at crashed helicopters and figure out why they crashed. Then you fight some monolith and get airlifted out. That's the main story. Did it sound a little lame? Well yes, it is. There are side-quests, and those add some flavor, but not much depth.

At the time I did not realize this, too busy being scared, or very happy, as I shot mutants and bandits. But after a bit of thought it struck me: Call of Pripyat has a pretty boring main story. Here, I'm going to spoil the big surprise for you, the mystery of the entire game, on why the helicopters crashed. Ready for it? Okay, here it is: the Ukrainian army made maps of the anomalies and the anomalies move after emissions. Wow. Big twist there! No conspiracies, no plots, no secrets to uncover, just "shit moved." Plus some open-ended "something may be going on but we're not going to tell you anything about it" bit concerning mercenaries.

Here's the thing to remember: I had fun playing both games. Sure, the second one had a rather lame story, but it was fun anyway. Does gameplay trump story? Almost certainly, since an unplayable game can never tell its story (which is what SoC was early on, before they fixed most of the really awful bugs). But can gameplay carry a game? Almost certainly, as most PvP can show. And PvE as well, since I doubt most raiders are lore nerds (I mean that affectionately) and most people aren't doing a whole lot of analysis of the quests that they're skimming for quest objectives.

And yet I still wish there were better stories.