Video Games

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I'm personally doing what I always do and blaming Steam.

"How?" you ask?

Because this is a pattern repeated with numerous developers and it almost always seems to happen when they switch to Steam for their next major release.

In this particular case I strongly suspect that this product was dragged out the door by someone on the publishing side. It was originally scheduled to come out, well, nowish, then they announced "fuck it, its not ready, it'll be out later as a polished product none of this payed beta crap". Then suddenly without fanfare and rather by surprise "Its out!"... and clearly payed beta (hell, payed ALPHA) crap.

And since the common element between this and a half dozen other similar titles that did similar things is fucking Steam I blame them. And I bet you no one else can due to complex non disclosure agreements.

[DSMatticus]

If you want to be pissed at Steam, you've got pretty numerous reasons, like the general shitting all over of consumer rights and such. But Steam is not a publisher. Steam is a retailer. The publisher of SOTS2 is Paradox Interactive, and the developer of SOTS2 is Kerberos Productions.

Now, to explain the industry with you:
1) Publishers fund developers to create projects. There is a constant back and forth of the developers asking for more money and extensions, and the publishers refusing them as often as possible. When the publishers start refusing entirely, either the project disappears or gets released because there is no money left to develop it. If you'll look at the SOTS2 developer "apologies" and "explanations", you'll see that they lost a huge chunk of their staff. What do you think this means? That's right; Paradox stopped handing out money and extensions well before the game was finished, and Kerberos start cutting people as they ran out of money or they started leaving on their own as the shit hit the fan.

2) Retailers do not communicate with developers. They never have. Developers are insulated (at least in terms of the business side of things, Steam offers some in-house technical support concerning platform compatibility and issues) from retailers by publishers.

3) Retailers do not pressure developers. Mostly because they have neither the incentive nor mechanism too; Steam's shelf-space is infinite and their business model super stable. They have no business incentive to give a shit when you release their games. Whenever you decide to release your game, they take a flat percentage fee cut from every sale, and that's about it.

Is your hypothesis that Steam is hurting for money, so they hit up Paradox Interactive, a publisher of indie, niche titles, and said, "hey, we need money. Yeah, MW3 and Skyrim are coming out in like, two weeks, but you have to release SOTS2 now. If you don't release it now, we'll violate all the contracts we've already signed with you."

History lesson: Paradox Interactive pushes out all their developers' games early. It's just never been this bad before.

[name_here]

Whatever other fucks up they made about the Steam release, it turns out they didn't have a game to give us in the first place.

Well, no, because they apparently threw the completed game in the trash. Like, actually. Given that there was a semi-public beta and apparently we only heard about this stuff after release, that actually kind of makes sense.

At least, that's the official story, blaming Paradox does seem entirely plausible. They pulled this "release, then finish" shit before they went on Steam, and now they have someone else to put up their patches and distribute them so they don't even have that obstacle.

Now, it's not unreasonable to say that this behavior is encouraged by the lure of Steam's easy patching making it seem more attractive to stick to the schedule than to get everything done, but Paradox has published titles on Steam before and reputedly they have all been this shitty at first.

Given that Steam is the creation of Valve, who are even worse about deadlines and release dates than Blizzard, I'm going to say that sticking to release dates over actually being finished is not inherent in the system.

[DSMatticus]

Now, it's not unreasonable to say that this behavior is encouraged by the lure of Steam's easy patching making it seem more attractive to stick to the schedule than to get everything done,

Now that's totally true. The age of digital distribution has changed how we develop software in general. But it's not something digital distributors actually provide incentives for, it's just publishers taking advantage of the digital distribution model. Hammering out bugs is expensive and time-consuming, especially as the number of bugs dwindles, and release-then-patch is so much cheaper just because there's an abundance of debug information and reports to use. I suppose Paradox thought that was the state SOTS2 would be in. They were, uhh, wrong. Super massively wrong.

[name_here]

One thing I will say for Kerberos in this: At least they do not have the sheer unbelievable gall to pretend that releasing the game in this state is anything less than a record-setting fuckup on their part, unlike, say, Creative Assembly. Like I said, I've interacted with their CEO on the forums before. He's one of those guys who is usually right but utterly unwilling to admit to being wrong on the rare instances in which he is. Kind of like Frank, except easily offended. So if he's calling it a massive fuckup on his part either he's serious or someone is twisting his arm pretty hard.

For comparison, he apparently belittled the people who complained about Fort Zombie, which was what you get when a bunch of highly-competent RTS people make a first-person shooter and they embark on a journey of discovery in which they find out that they do not, in fact, know the first thing about FPS graphics, patching, optimization, or environment design. As FPSs go, it's kind of like an asthmatic completing a marathon: impressive considering the handicaps it faces, but objectively just not very successful.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

But Steam is not a publisher. Steam is a retailer. The publisher of SOTS2 is Paradox Interactive, and the developer of SOTS2 is Kerberos Productions.

That's just bullshit semantic quibbling. And if you want to play at that, then I'm going to decide to call Steam a "distributor". I mean, since that "digital distributor" is basically what they call themselves.

The important thing to take away from this is that Steam is the one common element in SEVERAL developer-publisher-distributor chains that have gone horribly wrong in recent years.

So MUCH so that these days when you hear that some game franchise or publisher has switched to Steam that you can pretty much guess that, yeah, their big Steam release is going to be a cloud of fucking vaporware.

This is not a good thing for PC Gamers, or the industry itself.

And as for Valve releasing completed products and doing so late if they need to. And making things of some quality (other than fucking Steam), and I REALLY take the time to point out, of often low prices, with potential for user Modding, and with lots of FREE DLC content... well that IS different to what most major publishers switching to Steam do. Since THEY all release early, buggy, second rate quality stuff with less moddability, less user accessibility, and with missing content they try to sell as a handful of paid DLC content that then largely falls through and leaves their game sparse on content.

And to that I have to say isn't it convenient for Valve that so many of their major competitors seem to be using THEIR distribution system so very incompetently.

I mean. Sure you can call it paranoia but it sure LOOKS like Valve/Steam is selling those chumps hard on PAYING valve/steam to be given the honor of destroy their own rival franchises on Steam like that...

[DSMatticus]

That's just bullshit semantic quibbling. And if you want to play at that, then I'm going to decide to call Steam a "distributor". I mean, since that "digital distributor" is basically what they call themselves.

That is what retailer means. We are in agreement. Cool. The fact still stands that retailers and distributors have nothing to do with the development cycle. At all. That is not how the videogame development industry works.

The important thing to take away from this is that Steam is the one common element in SEVERAL developer-publisher-distributor chains that have gone horribly wrong in recent years.

Just how many games do you think are on Steam these days? That's right, almost all of them. You're finding a really shitty false correlation that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Even if these hypothetical vaporware examples exist (and how many aren't?), what you're observing is what digital distribution does. It's not because Steam is pulling strings and forcing developers to push games out early, or begging publishers for games. Because that makes zero fucking sense. This is publishers taking advantage of digital distribution and consumer gullibility and pre-ordering, especially, to push out shit and get people to buy it anyway.

Sure you can call it paranoia but it sure LOOKS like Valve/Steam is selling those chumps hard on PAYING valve/steam to be given the honor of destroy their own rival franchises on Steam like that...

Holy fuck, seriously? You think Steam is intentionally sabotaging itself to make Valve games look good by comparison? Nevermind the fucking fact that there are no Valve games slated for release anytime in the foreseeable future, and Steam in facts generates way more fucking money for them than their game development ever did?

Your hypothesis is that they've got the goose that lays golden eggs... and then they're using them to egg the competitors' storefronts so they look like shit and people will come and buy the bronze eggs they aren't currently producing. You fail at business.

But you also seem to be failing to understand that these snafus have nothing to do with the Steam platform. The steam platform is a wrapper that goes on a game executable and a way of zipping game files into bins. That's about it. There is absolutely no way that the technology behind the Steam platform could have any fucking thing to do with the fact that SOTS2 is a steaming pile of shit and non-features right now.

You hate Steam. Whatev'. But you are being genuinely batshit insane right now.

[Cynic]

Dan Bull on Skyrim.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I spent a while tinkering with character creation in Skyrim, but I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with. The balding ponytail hair seemed perfect for the sort of character I wanted to respond to the intro with.

[Username17]

Personally, I can't stand that kind of faux-photorealism. It looks honestly worse to me than Atari representative squares.

Anyway, to get to a disaster that has nothing at all to do with steam or hideous attempts at photo-realistic 3d: Heroes of Might & Magic VI. The Multiplayer is basically unplayable for several reasons, most obviously because this is 2011 and network hotseat in a 4X game with potentially very long or short turns is not acceptable. But also because there are a wide variety of crippling balance issues and bugs that render multiplayer not merely unacceptably shitty but also deterministic and in many cases crashingly unplayable.

There are apparently a lot of crash bugs that haven't been fixed, but I haven't noticed them. What I have noticed is some graphical bugs that cause you to have to play the game blind for as much as a turn or two when you load a saved game. And by "play the game blind" I mean that you actually can't see your characters or cities or movement paths until it decides to start displaying them to you - which it can take its sweet time in doing. The pathing is fucking horrible. By which i don't mean that it can't show you a reasonable path from where you are to where you are going, but that if this path takes you around objects the computer is incapable of actually following this path if it takes you around an object, causing you to stop and stare at the obstacle like a slackjawed zombie. The game actually requires you to click on intermediate waypoints along the path it displayed for you in order to get your army to fucking walk from point A to point B. That is horse shit.

The campaigns are admirably long, but since the game lacks a random map generator and comes with barely enough instant maps to rub together, I suspect replay will be poor to nonexistant. As things currently stand, a lot of abilities don't work as advertised or at all, chaining you to a relatively short list of things to do. Many of these glitches are quite profound in their reach: like Darkness Elementals are supposed to be 50% resistant to Dark damage but are instead 100% resistant to Dark Damage and half the units in the Necromancer faction do all of their damage as dark damage and you can summon darkness elementals. The AI is really stupid and painfully predictable, which is actually a good thing, since to complete the campaign you have to arrange zero-losses in most battles and melee units have no zones of control (not even "soft" zones of control), meaning that if things actually felt like causing you losses they totally could.

But the real killer is Ubisoft's DRM. It requires you to be continually logged in to their servers to play single player, and if there is a burp in network on your end or theirs it will boot you out of the game without saving your progress. That is not an exaggeration. Turning Autosave off is not an option because the Ubisoft servers could get bored with you and force quit your game at any time.

The very moment that someone hacks the DRM out of that game, there will be much rejoicing. But I don't know if there is even that much interest in doing it right now, because the game was released in a very clearly unfinished state.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Personally, I can't stand that kind of faux-photorealism. It looks honestly worse to me than Atari representative squares.

-Username17

I can take it or leave it. A lot of games now hit the Uncanny Valley for me these days. Although I do wish more of them would put graphical power into something other than realism--one reason Metroid Prime 1 has such a place in my heart. I rather liked the X-ray and Thermal vision on there.

L.A. Noire did spoil me on face animations, though. It's a shame most of time, the actors were told "Look like you're lying" and so the eyes flicker or they do some sort of tell.

[name_here]

That guy looks like he is planning to eat my soul. I think it's the eyes.

[Guyr Adamantine]

Skyrim is just awesome. My orc wizard kicks ass, except when he fights other wizards. Ward spells are fucking annoying.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That guy looks like he is planning to eat my soul. I think it's the eyes.

He's a Breton who couldn't take the stress of the court intrigue back home and wanted to escape to a remote cabin in the north, where he could live out his remaining days as an unsuccessful writer. Then he got picked up by the Imperial army for execution when he tried to cross the border (there's a civil war going on, and going into Skyrim is kind of suspicious). He is sufficiently terrified that he is losing hair. But he resolves that if he finds a chance, he will run for it and master enough magic that he never has to worry about getting crushed by Leviathan again. He probably will start picking up soulstones at some point in his career, so good call.

------------------

I just had a pretty nice Skyrim moment. I introduced my father to the game, he decided he rather liked it, and we've been trading it back and forth. I'm about to give it to him again, but first want to check out this old, half-sunk tower in the river near the start. I bust in through a trapdoor, and the area is spooky, with human skeletons used for decoration and little waterfalls coming through cracks in the stone. I get a strong vibe of potential treasure/danger.

I explore, giving a monologue of description as I do so, promising that as soon as I find a good piece of treasure, I will save, exit, and hand off the game. I come into a large room with a bookshelf on the wall to the left. I leveled up from reading skill books once, so I get really enthusiastic and start picking them up one by one. I hear a weird noise about halfway through, discount it, hear it a second time, grab the rest in a hurry, and spin around. There's an animated skeleton bearing down on me, mere feet away.

I actually yelp in surprise, then blow half my mana on a flurry of evocation. Then I see the necromancer. He throws up a magic shield that absorbs the rest of my magic attacks. So I run, but as soon as I round a corner, I pull out a sword and dagger, then pounce on the mage when he rounds the corner. Success, and I feel pretty nice about it. Took the necromancer robes as a trophy, but I am somewhat concerned that wearing them might make me kill-on-sight for the mage's guild once I find it.

[Guyr Adamantine]

It won't. Necromancy is not illegal, just icky in Skyrim.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Nice. Then it looks like my mana regeneration just improved by 25%.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Is there a way to be a necromancer in Skyrim? I always thought it was lame that there was necromancy in Oblivion, but (to my knowledge) know way to become one yourself.

[Kaelik]

Level 29 Pretty much pure Wizard.

Highest skills in order: Smithing, Enchanting, Destruction, Restoration, Sneak, Heavy Armor. Most of the perks in Destruction/Restoration.

Not too far from loading up on all Dragon Armor, as soon as craft 400 more leather Bracers. Already have 7 Grand Souls tucked away for enchanting everything once I get to full, with all the important perks, IE all 5 of the first one, and the middle line to Extra Effort.

Seems to me that Magika Regen is probably the best enchantment, currently up to 142%, and it sure makes it feel like I never run out. But I will have to see if I can get up to "Destruction spells cost 100% less Magika" and see how the game deals with that.

EDIT: Conjuration has a bunch of animate undead abilities. Both summoning, and raising something you killed. It also has perks that make them stronger. If you want Necromancy. Personally, I think Conjuration is balls terrible in every elder scrolls game. If you do it right, it becomes too damn easy in a really boring and disempowering way.

It's like playing a really tough shooter in co op with respawns, but you are always the guy who stands in back and let's your teammate die. You will always win, but it sure isn't fun.

Actually, I'm really jealous of the Vampire/Spriggan's. They each have the same spell, that is just straight health drain, but it locks on and keeps draining even after you break line of effect. My Magika pool is high enough to take most people's health pools, so I could just start casting, then run the fuck away around corners until they die.

[Maxus]

Impressions of Assassin's Creed Revelations after playing the first section:

1) Ezio's older, but he makes up for it by being even more brutal than in Brotherhood. One of his sword-counters is batting the opponents' weapon aside, putting the point of his sword slightly behind their chin, and lifting them upwards. They slide down the blade after a moment. There's another even worse. I can't quite sort out the sequence of events because I only saw it once, but he apparently stabs them in the face--in fact, through the skull entirely--uses the sword hilt to 180 their head, and then pulls it back out.

2) Grenades look like they'll be interesting. So far I have the materials for a skunk grenade (incapacitates people it hits directly and sends people outside the radius fleeing), phosphorus (big flash), and lamb's blood (makes the target think they've been wounded).

3) Subject 16 already gives me the willies.


Edit: Also, you need to make a Uplay account and put in your passcode to use multiplayer. This has my disapproval.

[Username17]

Edit: Also, you need to make a Uplay account and put in your passcode to use multiplayer. This has my disapproval.

UPlay is caustic DRM. Ubisoft gets zero more dollars from me until they cut that shit out.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Edit: Also, you need to make a Uplay account and put in your passcode to use multiplayer. This has my disapproval.

UPlay is caustic DRM. Ubisoft gets zero more dollars from me until they cut that shit out.

-Username17

I got the impression. But in the least, you don't have to play multiplayer, and you can turn down making the account when they ask you to. Apparently they got bitched out over something similar...

I actually already had an account from one of the previous AC games, so I just had to put in the code on the slip of paper that came with the game to access multiplayer

Further gameplay notes: The hookblade is Bad. Ass. Useful.

[DSMatticus]

But I will have to see if I can get up to "Destruction spells cost 100% less Magika" and see how the game deals with that.

It doesn't.

There are four item slots which will accept "fortify magic school", and they are armor, helmet, ring, and amulet. You can get a maximum of 25% per item without any potions (yes, there are potions that raise your enchanting, with the best one in the game you can get like 28% per item), but it takes pretty much all the relevant perks and really high enchanting. At that point, your cost for those spells will go to zero. Hold a ward for infinite duration, spam thunderbolt without end, do whatever. Take the twin enchant perk, and you can have two free schools of magicka (but no magicka regen). The ring, armor, and helmet all accept magicka regen (and only them), so you can have ~180% magicka regen and ~125% total discounts. The default "master robe of blah" is way better than anything you can enchant: 3% less discount, but nearly 100% more magicka regen. But that's only a robe, and you can put these enchants on anything, like badass dragon armor.

I have found one ingredient so far which has "fortify enchanting." I assume there's a second, or else that was a wasted spot on the ingredient, and that means you can make potions of enchanting. I already know you can enchant items with fortify alchemy. Skyrim has an alchemy-enchanting power loop that given lots of soul gems and lots of two certain ingredients will translate to super ridiculously powerful enchanted items and super ridiculously powerful potions.

Also, where the hell can I find some daedra? They have hearts. I want to carve them out, and use them to make sinister-looking badass things.

[Kaelik]

It sounds like it deals with 100% reduction the way it should, not like it doesn't deal with it at all. You have empirical evidence that Destruction 100% equals free stuff? I'm worried that for some mechanical reason that will not be the case.

Currently running around with unenchanted Legendary Dragon Armor, Gualgor's Amulet, A ring of 60% Magicka Regen, and an Adept Robe of Destruction.

I have all the Grand Souls to enchant my full set of Dragon Armor, but my enchant is only 84, and I have all the perks on the middle tree, just waiting for 100 and Extra Effort to begin enchanting.

I also have a fair number of potions of fortifying enchanting, not sure if they will stack or not, but I noticed that the blacksmith one doesn't get you over 100, so maybe enchanting potions don't either. I know of three ingredients that provide the effects of enchanting fortification:

Hargraven feathers
Spriggan Sap
One more I have but can't remember.

I'm actually really disappointed they won't let you disenchant an amulet of Talos, and then craft a bunch of shit that reduces shout cooldowns, so that you can have a character who just shouts all the time, and does nothing else.

[DSMatticus]

You have empirical evidence that Destruction 100% equals free stuff? I'm worried that for some mechanical reason that will not be the case.

Yeah, I've done it. The discounts hit 100% and magicka costs disappear.

I'm actually really disappointed they won't let you disenchant an amulet of Talos, and then craft a bunch of shit that reduces shout cooldowns, so that you can have a character who just shouts all the time, and does nothing else.

Me too. I look forward to tinkering with that in the creation kit. Also, why can't I make my own staffs?

[Kaelik]

Also, why can't I make my own staffs?

I have no fucking idea, and it's totally weird, I agree. Frankly, I just want to disenchant a bunch of useless flame/inspiration staves, so that I could skill up faster.