#Dystopian Arbitrary Endless Possibilities | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

christysports · 4 years ago

Text

Games Like World of WarCraft

Sports may be getting back to TV, yet it doesn't create the impression that life in the U.S. will be completely back to typical any time soon. With less choices springing up for socialization in everyday life, huge multiplayer online pretending games (MMORPG) are turning into a go-to strategy for investing some protected energy interfacing with individuals. In case you're worn out on having no place to go with your homies, simply boot up World of Warcraft, call a few companions, and begin attacking Azeroth.

With regards to MMORPGs, no title can rival World of Warcraft. Initially delivered in 2004, Blizzard has delivered various extension packs and even delivered an exemplary worker that permitted long haul fans to re-visitation of a form of Azeroth unimpacted by years worth of resulting stories. In the event that picking between the Alliance or the Horde doesn't sound excessively engaging, consider investing some energy with one of these 25 games like World of Warcraft.

1. 'DC Universe Online'

Probably the most ideal approaches to easily fall into a huge pretending game is to discover one set in a universe you are now alright with. Fanatics of orcs and dream can go to World of Warcraft, however enthusiasts of caped crusaders and superheroes have DC Universe Online. Regardless of whether you make a personality that is firmly connected with characters like the Joker or Wonder Woman is up to you and players get the opportunity to spread cheer or tumult close by a portion of DC's best characters. The game's extension is really monstrous, taking gamers over the universe with the Green Lanterns to the lower part of the sea with Aquaman.

2. 'Time of Conan'

No, Age of Conan won't let you control a virtual Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet it permits players to contend and attempt to positively influence Hyboria. With various classes, races, and models to look over, players have a ton of control with regards to fashioning a definitive fighter fit for helping Conan shield his recently held onto seat from antiquated abhorrent powers. The game has a charming hack/slice battle framework that permits players to act continuously more than numerous customary pretending games.

Purchase

3. 'Crossout'

In case you're an aficionado of Mad Max however think the genuine individuals are incidental to what in particular makes it so engaging, Crossout is the computer game for you. The allowed to-play game changes out people and beast characters for adaptable beast trucks prepared for outrageous battle in unforgiving conditions. Set in a dystopian world, players join various groups and attempt to discover special things that will assist them with adjusting their vehicles and dominate in the unforgiving climate.

4. 'Fracture'

Like World of Warcraft, Rift sorts players into two groups the Guardians and the Defiant-as they battle for strength and endurance in the voracious universe of Telara. Instead of simply fight one another, players additionally need to stress over the destructive animals that rise up out of the basically voracious cracks across Telara. Follow your class calling to turn into a definitive hero or mage, among different groupings, and collaborate in gatherings to take on strikes in the hazardous prisons to open probably the best things accessible in the huge world.

5. 'Tera'

Delivered in 2012, The Exiled Realm of Arborea (TERA) set the activity battle's part in MMORPGs. Without precedent for a MMO, player aptitudes were friendly and dodgeable, giving gamer's more power over their fantastical ongoing interaction than any time in recent memory. Like World of Warcraft, players make exceptional characters and run off into the world to create things, complete journeys, and takedown online adversaries. With a special karma style that boosts honorable ongoing interaction, the game will really confine certain gamers for a while on the off chance that they knock off an excessive number of players essentially more vulnerable than them.

6. 'Senior Scrolls Online'

In the event that games like Morrowind and Skyrim just started to expose your enthusiasm for the undertakings of Tamriel, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online is the game for you. Rather than making your own character, step up, and fashioning things in a single world, players get the chance to encounter Tamriel as an online climate unexpectedly. A fantastical setting loaded up with heroes and mages continuing on ahead, players join different organizations and set out on missions as they battle to recoup their spirit from the Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Note:Also read here more about World of warcraft.

7. 'Ruler of the Rings Online'

On the off chance that everything about Elder Scrolls Online sounds fun yet you wish it was set inside creator J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical arrangement, Lord of the Rings Online is the ideal game for you. Investigate Middle-earth as either a diminutive person, mythical being, hobbit, or human, players are allowed to make their own cooperations of up to six characters to finish bunch journeys with. Exemplary characters like Aragorn and Gandalf seem to help acquaint characters with the bigger undertakings of the unmistakable settings, however players rapidly assume responsibility for the activity and pick their own way as they set out to finish different missions to help keep the domain protected and stable.

Also read here universe of warcraft cinematic quest guide

8. 'Ocean of Thieves'

A Microsoft select, Sea of Thieves is an undertaking game that permits players to extend their ocean legs and hone their bold aptitudes. With a deck underneath your legs and wind at your sails, players investigate an open-world by means of their privateer transport in Sea of Thieves and complete different missions en route to turning into an unbelievable privateer. The huge world is additionally shared, which means there are incalculable privateers and groups dashing over the open seas hustling to locate the greatest and best goods.

9. 'Last Fantasy XIV'

Last Fantasy XIV might be the fourteenth title in the apparently endless establishment, yet it's really the main MMORPG of the pack. Delivered in 2013, gamers make their own character and become either an understudy of war or enchantment in the realm of Hydaelyn. Notwithstanding which street you pick, gamers eventually become a globe-trotter, join a Free Company organization and begin constructing a notoriety for themselves. With a thick story that addresses the establishment's long history, this game is unquestionably simpler to prescribe to long haul fanatics of Final Fantasy than individuals who are totally new to it, yet any devotees of World of Warcraft searching for a likewise fun encounter ought to consider looking at it.

10. 'Skyforge'

Skyforge is an engaging blend of folklore, sci-fi, and dream all folded into one. Players control a godlike being who, through your activities all through the game, is continually working to turn into a divine being. As opposed to being secured in your group for the entirety of forever, players can pick between any of the 17 alternatives anytime, permitting them to pick up renown in different various habits to at last assist them with opening more rigging and devotees along their long excursion. Collaborate with companions to take on missions or remain as a monotheistic being as you take on the world without anyone else.

11. 'City of Heroes'

Rather than occurring in a pre-set up superhuman universe like DC Universe Online, engineer Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes we should players partake in a spic and span caped universe. Make a superhuman or supervillain as you would prefer, with the ideal forces and extreme codename, and begin performing missions as you either spare or threaten arbitrary residents across Paragon City. Actually, the game is not, at this point accessible from distributer NCSOFT, however in 2019, a publicly released worker of the game sprung up online that has been drawing in players is as yet online today.

12. 'Predetermination 2'

Bungie changed the gaming scene when they delivered the first Halo and they keep on kicking off something new with the uber-effective Destiny 2. Make your own Guardian and specialty his shield and weapons as you would prefer as you set-out to protect Earth's Last City from an assortment of dangerous outsiders. Set in an immense world brimming with different players running-and-gunning their way through missions, Destiny 2 is a profoundly intuitive title with a ton of ability movement and thing customization to keep major parts in charge of their own insight.

13. 'Planetside 2'

In the event that facing a daily reality such that two groups are battling it out for control sounds excessively recognizable and depleting, possibly Planetside 2, a game where there are three groups duking it out for control of the planet Auraxis sounds additionally engaging. The genuine attract to this game is the monstrous size of the player matches. While World of Warcraft may pack endless players onto a solitary worker, Planetside 2's open-world framework, joined with its ability to deal with fights with in excess of 1,000 players, makes it one of the biggest and most riotous multiplayer encounters available.

14. "Star Wars: The Old Republic'

A considerably longer time back, in a system far away, the Jedi and Sith struggled it out in Star Wars: The Old Republic. As great and malicious fight over the universe, players browse eight classes and begin having their effect on the world. It's dependent upon players to pick whether they need to align themselves with Sith or Jedi and screen their activities to ensure they aren't tricked to the contrary side of the power. With many players hurdling around and doing their part to help either the radicals or the domain, The Old Republic is a definitive.

0 notes

spamzineglasgow · 6 years ago

Text

Exits in Video Games: Immanence and Transcendence (Calum Rodger)

In this essay, Calum Rodger explores the poetics of exits and transcendence in video games, via the vectored planes of ‘Victorian-thought-experiments-turned-quirky-novella’ Flatland. Read on for reflections on the secret ecstasies and eeriness that accompany discoveries of glitches, nonsensical infrastructures and metatextual moments in the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Monkey Island and, of course, the virtual sublime of that San Andrean Heaven.

> Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is the weirdest little book. Published in 1884, written by schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, and pseudonymously attributed to ‘A Square’, it describes a strange and awful world of only two dimensions. Its inhabitants – lines, triangles, squares and polygons – are organised according to a totalitarian caste system wherein rank corresponds to the number of one’s sides (nobility are hexagons and above; priests, the highest class, are circles; women, the lowest, are lines). Not that these shapes are conventionally perceived as such by Flatland’s residents: with no way of stepping outside their flat plane of existence, their world appears to them as a series of monotone straight lines in various shades of brightness (colour – the ‘chromatic sedition’ - is brutally suppressed, compromising as it does the ‘intellectual Arts’ of Flatland and, with it, the nobles’ hold on power). ‘Irregularities’ of all kinds - ‘an infant whose angle deviates by half a degree from the correct angularity’, say – are summarily destroyed at birth. Not only must Flatland be an awful place to live; it must also be interminably dull.

> The book is remarkable for the head-spinning extent to which it imagines how a world might be liveable in such dimensionally-limited conditions. It is a necessarily dystopian world: how can one conceive of liberty in a world literally without depth? Flatland is totalitarian by its very form, lacking a structure from which liberty might emerge; there is, in other words, no exit. Only after the narrator’s encounter with a ‘Stranger’ - a ‘Sphere’ from ‘Spaceland’ - does real exit become possible, as the visitor enlightens his incredulous host:

What you call Solid things are really superficial; what you call Space is really nothing but a great Plane. I am in Space, and look down upon the insides of the things of which you only see the outsides. You could leave the Plane yourself, if you could but summon up the necessary volition. A slight upward or downward motion would enable you to see all that I can see.

Unlike conventional dystopias, where the potential of exit is immanent to the system itself (in the irrepressible human parts: love, desire, freewill, etc.), exit from Flatland is transcendent in the genuinely metaphysical sense: a ‘climbing over’ (cf. immanent, ‘remaining within’) one’s dimensional limits, a ‘slight upward or downward motion’ beyond not merely the plausible, but the possible.

> There is an obvious religious subtext to Flatland (it’s telling that Abbott was a reverend and a theologian), with an exit into Spaceland and subsequent transcendence into a God-like omnipresence analogous with enlightenment and epiphany. But this is neither the most timely analogy nor, really, the most revealing. Among Victorian-thought-experiments-turned-quirky-novellas Flatland is surely singular, insofar as it could, conceivably, be accurately ‘translated’ into a 1980s-era home computer game (albeit a very difficult and boring one). And what are the ‘Spacelands’ of contemporary games but extensions of the formal principles of Flatland: virtual worlds constructed according to arbitrary limitations, underpinned by mathematical ‘realities’ to which we mere inhabitants are never granted access? The analogy, then, is between the immanent exits of the games themselves – their deaths, save points, level ends, level ups – which only ever lead to more game, and the transcendent exits lurking imperceptibly somewhere between the game and the code, a ‘slight upward or downward motion’ (which is to say a whole world) away from the limits and objectives set in advance by the game’s structure. It’s an idea which has long interested developers and, more recently, players, with whole subcultures dedicated to finding those exits through which one might ‘look down upon the insides of the things’. But what do transcendent exits look like? Are they even possible? And why – since games are not dystopias we are cursed to inhabit but fictional closed systems in which we participate willingly – do gamers ‘summon up the necessary volition’ to seek transcendent exits at all? While the answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this essay, the transcendent quirks of three classic games can, perhaps, point us in the right direction.

> First: the ambiguous ‘GOAL’ of Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). In Sonic –probably the first video game I ever played – there was one thing that always got me. In the vertigo-inducing bonus stage, your goal was to reach the ‘chaos emerald’ at the centre of a maze. But the maze’s numerous exits, which you endeavoured with rising panic to avoid, were all emblazoned with the word ‘GOAL’. Why, my perplexed seven-year-old self asked, did all the exits say ‘GOAL’ even though they were emphatically bad? What was in the least bit ‘GOAL’-like about these terrifying immanences? My childhood geekery led me to the Westernised version of the game’s back story, which revealed that the villain of the piece, Dr. Robotnik, had designed the mazes as traps. These apparently nefarious exits, then, were but sweet blessed releases from these endless, timeless labyrinths. But that explanation didn’t satisfy me. Leaving aside the fact that the game explicitly rewards you with extra lives for staying in the maze as long as possible, what kind of fool would go chasing the ‘GOAL’ exits, ‘scored’ as with an all-too-simple nudge left on the control pad? What kind of absurd universe was this anyway? Curiously, this was the only aspect of the universe that troubled me. Liberating tiny animals from robot shells with a mutant blue hedgehog I accepted as perfectly logical; the ambiguous ‘GOAL’ just didn’t make sense.

> I later learned that the ‘GOAL’ anomaly was probably due to a mistranslation in the Japanese-designed game, which Western distributors tried (with limited success) to accommodate in their back story. Two things to say about this: one) it makes me like it even more; and two) while this doesn’t involve transcendent exits per se, it frames the ‘flatlanding’ limitations of immanent exits. That’s why it didn’t make sense: it rendered both ‘GOAL’ and chaos emerald (failure and success) as ultimately one and the same. This error in translation – this glitch, you might say – is the accidental ‘Sphere’ that demonstrates such is the case. By extension, there is no essential (‘transcendent’) difference between the GAME OVER screen and the end credits the player is treated to once beating the final boss. Both say ‘now play again – or do something else’. But neither, the ambiguous ‘GOAL’ suggests, offers transcendence. As the theologian wants the real beyond the real, so the transcendent player wants the game beyond the game, the virtual beyond the virtual; like the ‘Sphere’, to ‘leave the Plane’.

> Second: the infamous ‘stump joke’ in The Secret of Monkey Island. While the ambiguous ‘GOAL’ of Sonic is a kind of poetic fortuity, the Monkey Island developers – primarily writer Ron Gilbert, a legend in a certain vintage school of game design that prizes narrative and humour over adrenaline and point-scoring – played with and extended the conventions of gaming to an extent that remains visionary today. Monkey Island has many of the generic hallmarks of postmodern fiction and cinema: intensely metatextual and ironically self-aware, its protagonist breaks the fourth wall more often than Mario and Luigi break crudely-pixellated blocks. But it’s the ways in which the game self-reflexively plays with its own medium – significantly, its exits – that are truly innovative. For one thing, you can’t die, subverting what is perhaps the most common gaming trope of all (this is partly a dig at rival developer Sierra, whose adventure games are infamous for the frequency and ease with which players pop their avatarial clogs). But even more amazing is the ‘stump joke’. Like all PC games of the time, Monkey Island was published on a number of floppy disks (in this case, three) which had to be switched around when moving between game areas (that is, at various immanent exits). The stump joke comes early on in the game, when attempting to interact with a nondescript tree stump in a labyrinthine forest. The player is told to ‘Insert disk 22 and press button to continue’, the first of several requests for high-numbered non-existent disks. Eventually the game resumes as the protagonist says, with characteristic understatement, ‘I guess I can’t go down there. I’ll just have to skip that part of the game.’ Joke is: there is no ‘down there’.

> Simple enough, you might think. But while I figured there was something amiss with the ambiguous ‘GOAL’, the stump joke in Monkey Island – which I first played around the same time as Sonic – was a meta conundrum way beyond my understanding. I was desperate for it to mean something: for the ‘down there’ to exist. And I wasn’t alone. The ‘joke’ was too confusing for many players (many of them grown-ups, I should add), and it was removed from later versions of the game. As ‘A Square’ is obliged to return to Flatland and, in an ending Plato could have predicted, is considered a lunatic and is promptly incarcerated for the social good, so the stump joke was just too transcendent for 1990s gamers’ mores. But games – and gamers – have changed a lot since then. The faux-transcendence of the stump joke has given way to a player-driven pursuit of transcendence, that ‘slight upwards or downward motion’ which breaks the game’s syntax, revealing it – even if momentarily – as something other than it claims to be. The increasing complexity of virtual game worlds, and the concomitant impossibility of testing its every ‘slight upward and downward motion’, has inspired gamers to play the game against its grain until it breaks, finding the glitch that reveals ‘that part of the game’ – the world inside the stump – which we were never supposed to see.

> Hence, third: ‘Hidden Interiors World’, or ‘Heaven’, of 2005 title Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It is difficult to describe, to a non-gamer, the sense of awe I have experienced on entering the world of San Andreas: its vastness; its character; its endless complexity; and, above all, its absolute liberty. But this liberty, I am aware even within my awe, is an illusion. All gamers know this (though the moralising press might disagree), but only the transcendent gamer, ‘summon[ing] up the necessary volition’, can see it for themselves. Such a gamer reaches for ‘Heaven’. As one how-to video on YouTube puts it:‘The Universe of Hidden Interiors or Heaven refers to [a] “universe” […] placed high in the sky, far from the fly height limit. Once inside Heaven, the normal world of San Andreas disappears.’

> In crude materialistic (virtualistic?) terms, ‘Heaven’ is where San Andreas keeps its interior areas, probably to limit loading times when passing (immanently) between them and the main external area. But this prosaic explanation is much too ‘superficial’ to do justice to ‘slight […] upward motion’ and the vision it begets! It’s the sudden collapse of space and distance, the eerie silence, the solitude. It’s the fact you’re in on a secret, have seen something few others have seen (seen it from the insideas well as the outside). It’s also the tranquility, a surprisingly affecting counterpoint to a game-world defined by its constant movement, violence, and energy. That said, I have to concede that its revelation, such as it is, bears little comparison to that of ‘A Square’. The excitement of being somewhere phenomenologically elsewhere is tempered – or perhaps it is exaggerated – by the knowledge that this world is merely an accident of design; its transcendence not a ground, but a figure’s remainder. And that too is its pleasure. ‘Heaven’ is a place where nothing ever happens – but we dream about it anyway.

> Poet and critic Ben Lerner has written of his ‘hatred of poetry’; actually, a frustration at poetry’s inevitable imperfections, borne of an idealistic love for it. He recalls, in his childhood, ‘speaking a word whose meaning I didn’t know but about which I had some inkling’, locating in that ‘provisional’ sense the essence of poetry. Once a word was ‘mastered’, it ‘click[s]’, and is no longer poetry. ‘Remember how easily our games could break down or reform or redescribe reality?’ he asks. Games have their poetry: their transcendent exits, metaphoric apertures nestled deep within the metonymic totality of their worlds. For innocence and experience, for order and liberty, for squares and spheres, they are exits worth chasing.

Text: Calum Rodger

Image: Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA, 1991)

#essay #video games #Calum Rodger #Ben Lerner #Sonic the Hedgehog #SEGA #special stage #poetry #virtual sublime #critical games studies #Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas #Monkey Island #joke #glitch #Edwin Abbott Abbott #Flatland

0 notes

dvepalki · 2 days ago

Text

WIP Sneek peek on a massive art

here the featured tortured blorbos are Glimmer le Dale by @moodymuu , Sleep Schedule Ruined by @kadalcoffee12 and Dystopian Arbitrary Endless Possibilities by @hdra77

#wip #rain world #sneek peek

13 notes · View notes

thesnowciphercomedyhour · 4 years ago

Note

Info dump about anything! Go!

lmao you'll soon regret this in the interest of remaining true to the spirit of infodump, I'll try to type this all off the top of my head without looking anything up. people sometimes wonder if a series should be viewed or played in release order or in canonical chronological order, and I've wondered this too. but having thought long and hard about it, I think release order makes the most sense.

naturally there are some exceptions, like availability, or letting a series make a good first impression, or what have you. but taken as a whole, I think a cohesive work usually makes the most sense and feels the most satisfying if you move through it in the order that the author worked on it.

there are some advantages to this. for one thing, you can feel the craftsmanship and the aesthetic sensibilities grow over time, so there's a logical sense of continuity in the style. for another thing, sometimes the information doled out to flesh out the worldbuilding makes the most sense in the order that it's written, even setting aside timeline hopping. this might make literal sense or thematic sense. or both! to illustrate this point, I'll now blab on to some extent about the thing I know best and most: the Metal Gear Solid games.

everyone talks up a storm about how these games are nonsense and batshit insane, which is not untrue, but I personally think that they make way more sense than people give them credit for! granted, it mostly makes sense when I leave out all the little details, but whatever. incidentally, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure operates a bit like that too, but I don't know that series backwards and forwards, so I'll leave that to someone else. or I'll tackle it another time in a fit of hubris, who knows.

I was originally gonna sum up every major Metal Gear game here, but I just can't help myself from getting into the nitty gritty, and even I'm losing patience with myself lmao. so here's the fast version.

In theory, you could play through the Metal Gear games in canonically chronological order. You'd see Big Boss' start of darkness, his rise to warmongering mercenary fame, his downfall at the hands of his clone Solid Snake, and Solid Snake's attempts to deal with a shadowy conspiracy that Big Boss was also fighting against. And that technically makes sense. But the presentation and storytelling would fluctuate up and down all over the place, and so would the gameplay.

the gameplay evolves more naturally, iterating each time to add in more dimensions to steatlh, improving the gunplay, trying out new ideas with camouflage and stamina gauges, and eventually going so far as to simulate company management in the later Big Boss prequel games.

thematically and plot-wise, the games kinda riff off their last iteration, counting on what the player has already seen and known. the first games are standard action plots, followed by a pseudo-reboot that takes apart the notion of a cool action hero while also delving into the ramifications of being a clone held to certain expectations and possessed of known traits and capabilities. kinda fitting considering that this game is more or less adapting the same plot as the last one, just with higher production value. then the sequel to that goes even bigger picture and ruminates on whether or not it's possible to break out of any pattern, not just genetic ones. it introduces a conspiracy, since that's way harder to fight than a super soldier or a giant robot. and a conspiracy is nothing but patterns and expectations, so it all works out. appropriately, it's also commenting on what it even means to be a proper sequel, expected to be the same yet different. and then everyone got sick of that, so the next game dodges any unanswered questions by going the prequel route, with a much more straightforward james bond style plot filled with romanticism and intrigue. and then the finale game juxtaposes those lofty feelings with a bleak dystopia that follows up the conspiracy setting with a cynical holding pattern that produces potentially endless profit and arbitrary human suffering. and all that's left for the characters to do is to break free of that pattern. and then since the publisher of these games wanted more money, we get some more prequel games that show the beginnings of that distant dystopian future.

And then there's the myth arc that the games build in the background concerning the Patriots, the shadowy illuminati-style presence. in timeline order, there's a fairly straightforward explanation for them, but in release order, there's this fascinating mystery to them. at first they seem ephemeral and abstract, then the next game implies that they once had a concrete form, but simply became shapeless through degrading tradition. and eventually their actual beginnings are revealed and the details surrounding it become even clearer in the next few games

Actually now that I've typed this all out loud, maybe there is some kind of exception to be made. if it had to be one or the other between release order and canon timeline order, it would have to be release order every single time imo. and that works perfectly for gameplay and most story purposes. but maybe most ideally would be something similar to Star Wars' Machete Order. Here, that would look like release order, but then you'd do not just the first prequel game before the finale game, but all the prequel games before the finale game. The gameplay experience would look kinda wonky towards the end, but that's the most narratively sensible way to look at it. though it does rob the surprise in one department, it arguably makes for much better build up and lends some gravity to the payoff.

lmao do whatever you like, I guess. the Yakuza games have a much stranger problem where the early games are janky and amateur as hell and kinda don't hold up super great. but then there's the prequel game that elevates the first game's story and makes that game's payoff so much more dramatic, but the prequel's writing quality is so many leagues above the early games that it might be a tough pill to swallow experiencing things that way. but nowadays I'm thinking that doing Yakuza 0 first is just a kinder, more impressive first impression. and you know how it is, you can only ever get one first impression.

#long post #sorry but you literally asked for it

0 notes