#god AND i need to play more skyrim to grinde that character up high enough to actually go to akavir

[morihaus]

oh you know what. i should take a shower that might cure my bout of malaise

[moodcrab]

Elder Scrolls VI Wish List Part III, Smithing & Equipment

Godd Howard stated around the release of Skyrim an *actual* bloody decade ago that he focused on what to remove from a game rather than add, taking a "less is more" attitude to provide a more streamlined experience. But he was wrong, less isn't more. It's literally less. Anyone who has had to spam iron daggers for real life days just to upgrade your sword a little better knows this. With all due respect to a great game, Skyrim wasn't streamlined, it was kind of... simplified.

As far as smithing goes, here are a few things I'd like to see more of, not less:

1. Weapon degradation needs to return! People hate it but it makes sense that your gear would get damaged and it actually gives you a reason to keep smithing and working on your skills so you don't have to unimmersively spam daggers. How well you can improve your gear (fine, superior, legendary and so on) will depend on your smithing skill, but that ranking will go down the more you use the gear. Completely neglect your gear and it will degrade in rank (dented/blunted, rusty, useless). If you don't want to become a smith you can pay a professional blacksmith to do it for you, dependant on their skill and your mercantile (which is also back).

2. The gear you improve should actually look improved, and the gear you neglect should actually look neglected; it may just be an iron sword, but if I took the time to make it *superior* then I want it looking superior to some bandit's iron sword! If I'm claiming an ancient sword from an equally ancient undead bady, I want to be able to take it back to my shop and restore it, maybe come back to later when my skills improve.

3. How come you can forge beautiful jewelry in Skyrim from the start of the game? Wouldn't it be cool if there was a separate perk branch with perks like "Stonecutter" and "Silversmith"?

"Stonecutter rank one: Can upgrade the quality of gems based on smithing level, rank two: Increased chance of finding gems when mining" and so on.

I mean why not? It'll at least give you something to do while going for 100, and it'll help your mercantile skill too, which is also totally back.

4. Woodworking. Bows and other wooden items should have a separate perk tree, work bench and traders to metal based items. How am I hammering a wooden bow at a forge, then improving it by sharpening it with a stone? I don't mind walking from the fletcher, where I made quills, to the blacksmith where I'm going to make the arrow heads.

5.

a) You wear clothes under armour. Like, it's weird that they make you *not* wear clothes under armour.

b) You can make clothes. Same principle as with jewelry and woodworking, only this time it's cloth. Perks into leatherwork would help out in other areas, like smithing.

6. Considering all the previous points we should probably rename "smithing" to "craftsmanship", with smithing being an optional branch to explore.

7. As mentioned before, dealing with a craftsman with a low skill will yield different results to one with a high skill, but also the truly high skilled pros won't let you, some random off the street, use his equipment. You need the proper skill, and it'll cost you (a fee depending on your mercantile skill, which won't not be there).

8. If you master a craft you should be able to unlock unique looking weapons, clothes, jewelry and armour sets not found anywhere else in game. It's a reward for the effort. These high level enemies may have ebony armour, but it doesn't look nearly as nice as *my* ebony armour! Because I made it and I'm a master! This reward not only sets your character apart from the crowd in the later game when he or she is no doubt reaching demi god status, but opens up role playing as an artisan or merchant type.

To sum up, every aspect of your equipment is now either craftable at their own realistic crafting station, at their own realistic businesses, giving you enough activities to improve your skill without grinding. Your equipment can be improved upon for practical, aesthetic or financial reasons, which incidentally would really help your mercantile skill, which is so back that I'm doing the next wishlist on it.

[st33d]

Sandman

I’ve tried a lot of sandbox games over the past year. Mostly driven by acquiring a PC and leaving my Mac to its scheduled obsolescence. Playing games on a Mac is like playing Doom on a calculator. You celebrate that it works, it actually works, but it usually fails to be more than a proof of concept. When I switched back to a PC I discovered an entirely new realm of stubborn design. At least it wasn’t getting slower with each update and it deigned to play all manner of toys. Being quite turgid for roleplaying games I set about catching up with every RPG the Mac had denied me and checked out some more for good measure.

A common feature I discovered in many of these games is what I call the Back Breaker. You lift the game up high, then crash it down over your knee, broken. You are now free to explore the game how you choose - all of its secrets are laid bare. A lot of people get very upset at the inclusion of Back Breakers in what they hope will be a game with an ever ascending skill requirement. The notion that the audience is primarily there to explore is an insult - where, they ask, is the game? Personally I like this feature, I like that the end game is to become a god. This is why a lot of you will disagree with my assessments.

Skyrim

The sticking point for many people with this one is the combat. It’s dour grey-brown landscape invites a comparison to Dark Souls (I’ll get to that one in a bit) so people like Matt Lees will remark that Skyrim is an inferior counterpart. If you’re looking for tight combat in Skyrim, then like a 1st edition iPhone 5, you’re holding it wrong.

It insists you take it seriously over an unskippable introduction to the most tired hook that any roleplaying game can throw - the prison break. After shaking your screen as hard as it can with an assault by a dragon you are thrown into a scant and confusing interface in a land of ugly robotic people who are super fussy about what time they’re willing to sell things. On my 1st playthrough it got dark, so dark I couldn’t loot the mages I was killing for their expensive robes. I quit and rerolled a khajiit, purely because the wiki told me they had nightvision. It wasn’t until much later I discovered that there were many means of creating light, some of them causing fantastic AI behaviour (I nicknamed the spell Magelight; aggro-ball). Some short way into the terrible main quest line I thought, “sod this”, and went in search of the mage college to learn how to blow things up like some of the monsters were doing. This haphazard adventure was some of the best gameplay I’d ever encountered. A scared lowly girl-cat, picking her way through a hostile landscape in hope of learning real magic. Typical that when I finally arrived at the college I encountered the first blatant design wall in the shape of an unclimbable pillar that the college sat on. I barely had the mana to cast the spell that would prove me worthy to train there. A few hours later I was the archmage of the college. It would take many more hours before I mastered glitch-riding: taking the cereal box collision space of my horse and rubbing it against the prettiest parts of the scenery until it yielded to let me ride vertical. Out of the many hours of play the only real low point was getting turned into a vampire, I had to look up a wiki on how to cure it and reload many times because the quest to stop vampirism is broken.

There are many Back Breakers in Skyrim - I chose twin dremora lords that I chain-summoned to lock up the AI. But truly it is Skyrim’s pretty mountains and their unresolvable collision meshes that are the best. Only after hours of play does one develop an art for sniffing out details that defy edge-case-programming. Skyrim is a perfect mess. I know why they keep re-releasing it, they got lucky. One need only play the Dragonborn DLC to see Skyrim at its worst. It is a hard game to recommend, for it is not really a game, it is a thing both ugly and beautiful.

% out of 10

The Witcher 3

“Stick with it”, they say. Few games deserve such an epithet as this one. The controls are fiddly. One’s inventory is so dense with options that I didn’t realise that my potions refilled themselves until I’d nearly finished the game. After which my character sported full-body-priapism as I quaffed every decoction available. The turning point from hating this game to loving it was a side quest where a character caught Geralt off guard when being subject to the witcher’s advice - the townsfolk declared him a freak not because he was like Geralt, but because they were intolerant of homosexuals. I then got drawn further into the man’s drama. Every single story this game presents is trying to be Not So Simple. It’s a manifesto that leaks into the game’s bestiary that tells you not only what a monster likes for dinner, but your best tactics for killing it. But then, it’s Not So Simple as killing a monster, there is always another layer to each story.

It took at least three score hours of gameplay before I started skipping some of the many cutscenes. One of them was the infamous sex-on-a-stuffed-unicorn. It was a fault of the main storyline being so lackluster. I never really cared for Ciri, I found her even more fiddly to control than her tutor. But the extra layers that surround it: the Bloody Baron, stupidly shagging Keira Metz, the numerous detective scenes - they all carry this game. It is a shame it takes a few hours for it to reveal itself.

I must commend the map design for being sensible enough to be broken into several parts. You first explore a tutorial village before moving into war torn Velen and its haunting soundtrack. Here you work until you can gain passage to the north, the islands, and your home. Many sandboxes simply give you one map to conquer and contort it to stop you wandering into the final challenge. It’s refreshing to move on to a clean map, full of new challenges and surprises.

I couldn’t be arsed to play Gwent.

Trophy out of Archgriffin

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This game has three stages: Delight, Depression, and Exploration.

Delight

Oh wow, there’s so many things to do. And so many things interact with one another. The sense of discovery comes not only from reaching new locations, but also finding new ways for elements to interact. Of course wood burns. Of course burning creates an updraft. Of course metal conducts electricity. Even after many hours of play there are still new things to find. So strange that the game is as dense as it is... empty.

Depression

Ugh, I don’t have a horse and I’m in yet another blank area. Ugh, I lack just enough stamina to climb this mountain, I’ll have to start all over again. Ugh, I can’t stay in this area because I take damage and the food I eat to stop it only lasts ten minutes. Ugh, I complained about all of this online and everyone keeps saying, “I don’t have a problem, the game works fine for me, Git Gud.” As often as I meet people who have played this game in excess of 100 hours, I also meet people who have played it for less than 10. If you are unlucky, if you don’t make the right connections, if you don’t stumble upon the right thing, this game is truly depressing. Made more so by the amount of people who cannot fathom why anyone would have trouble with the game. And yet there are many that do. It is not really that they need to be better at games, it is merely because they have not found the Back Breakers. Or worse, they do not appreciate them.

Exploration

After needless hours of collecting (grinding) you find yourself in possession of armour. You upgrade the armour again and again and suddenly the cloud of depression is lifted (if it was ever there). You are free to explore any edge of the island, you simply need to wear the right threads. At this stage of the game you have found many secrets but still keep finding more. Korok seeds, the OCD baiting puzzles, become a delight to find. It’s hard to remember the game ever being frustrating, but it remains in the back of my mind. Zelda BotW has a hump, a hump that some people will feel very aggrieved to surmount. Do not be surprised when you hear of someone bouncing off this game - it really is torture for people with precious little play time or patience.

Perhaps I should say something about the shrine dungeons or the 4 beast dungeons. They exist. There, I said it.

96 out of 120

Path of Exile

I tried this many years ago on my Mac using some sort of Windows executable wrapper. It did not work. I tried again when I got my new PC, I was underwhelmed. I tried yet again two weeks ago - holy shit this is the best action RPG I’ve ever played. The fact that it’s also free is sort of a weird blessing. You can only buy cosmetics and extra slots, so it even has a total lack of pay-to-win going for it. At least they get to keep expanding and updating it, which is probably why my recent play through was so smooth.

Diablo 2 is one of my all time favourites. It’s a concise loop of murder, loot, sell. But not without flaws. It has cruft, tedium, and imbalance in spades.

Path of Exile shuffles the formula and bets the whole thing on loot. Skills are loot. Money is loot (you pay with scrolls and item modifying tools, no gold). Equipment is loot. Yet playing it like Diablo is quite a silly thing to do - you get almost nothing from items you try to sell to vendors, so you no longer make trips back and forth with junk items. Leveling up is spent on a massive passive skill tree shared by all the classes, so the game sees no need to forestall leveling because it’s not the gatekeeper of mechanics. The items are. This occurs by way of gems that you socket into items, a bit like Diablo 2 and 3, but instead of boring damage bonuses you get entirely new mechanics. If you play with several characters in the same league they can share these items as well (providing they are strong enough to wield them). A mere ten levels into the game I had a full on rave of undead surrounding my witch character like she was the hottest new DJ at a halloween party.

I refrained from playing on hardcore because the game is online only and my internet sucks, but the game does boast a challenge that is mandatory hardcore. A multi-part dungeon that rewards you with a new section for your skill tree. Complete it without dying and you get to specialise. This is further complicated by deadly treasure rooms you must salvage keys from in order to unlock the many chests at the end. This was quite an exciting challenge with real stakes and real swearing when I let my greed get the better of me.

So what of its flaws? It takes a few goes to shake off the Diablo conditioning, so it’s not until you hit act 2 and try again from scratch that you figure out a strategy for building a character. The passive skill tree has a handy search feature and after I typed “minion” into it I was determined to carve a path through the best parts. If you don’t plan your route, you miss out on your mana rocketing back to full, your health restoring, or in my case: zombie disco. It’s online only and if you insist on playing over the weekend it can be a very choppy experience. The chat is a sewage pipe, a stream of edgelord douchebaggery. Go into the options and turn it off. I’ve yet to meet anyone that wants to form a party and every time I look at it I’m certain I don’t want to. There’s little to say of the story, it’s not bad though. I appreciate that it doesn’t try to get in the way like Diablo 3′s did. Perhaps if they had taken their loot thesis a step further they could have buried it in the game’s items. Then all this hoarding would have expanded into something like an archaeology dig. A missed opportunity.

O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O out of Shiny Armour

Shadow of Mordor

It’s quite cool and exciting to begin with. We’re in Mordor with lots of grim orcs and cool cutscenes, and... is that a bush? Oh okay, it just popped into existence. Nevermind. Well at least sneaking around is fun... my finger hurts a lot though because they want me to hold down the trigger button for ages. Yeah, ganking orcs is cool, it’s real fun shooting them in the head... oh, I have to do these crappy sword fights where I only press two buttons throughout the whole thing.

This game is like someone who seems fascinating and pretty from afar, but soon as you talk to them at length you begin to realise that they’re quite boring. They just say the same thing over and over. It’s a sausage party that gets slowly more off putting as I play. The developers don’t even seem to know that women exist outside of being trophies or reasons to be angry about stuff. The main draw in this game is apparently the battles with the orc leaders, which I found to be the most boring part of the game. I hated the sword combat and it kept dragging me back to it. After doing every arrow and dagger challenge I could find on the map I left the game and never played it again.

Gollum out of Mordor

Dark Souls

in my game Ending I structured the second level so that the player would step forward and get a slap to the face in the shape of an unfair death. This was my opening salvo, death is your education. So after persisting with Dark Souls I’m somewhat nonplussed. I get it. By repeatedly killing the player they form a mental map of the area. By repeatedly killing the player they encourage experimentation.

Except that this doesn’t always work. There has to be some investment on the behalf of the player or this magic completely fails. If the player feels like they can walk away, they will. And they do. It’s why I believe Dark Souls is such a hit with game reviewers, they are beholden to persist, and in doing so the game makes a believer of them.

I on the other hand couldn’t care less. A tedious march through the same janky fights to get to the same boss I still don’t understand is nothing more than that. I tried a variety of combat techniques, from trying to interrupt attacks, to blocking, to evading, all of it very unsatisfying. What little progress I made illuminated the premise, to internalise the map and hone my skills, but I was not impressed. I enjoyed not one second of it, I only endured. I experimented and I explored, but never was I delighted.

The very worst thing that Dark Souls has given us is complacency towards killing the player. I have heard designers remark that it didn’t matter that the player died in that spot in their game because Dark Souls kills the player all the time. It makes me want to shake them. Dark Souls does not kill you all the time, it kills you for a specific reason. See, I get it, I get Dark Souls, I just don’t enjoy the combat.

Soul out of Estus

Divinity Original Sin 2

I had the worst time with Divinity Original Sin. My two characters insisted on bickering and ruining every conversation - no matter how many times I reloaded a scene they would find a way to trash it. I eventually found myself locked out of every quest in the game and unable to fight my way past monsters higher than my level. I was playing the game to forget about a failed relationship where my ex would find excuses to start arguments. It was about as bad an experience playing a game I could ever hope for.

To say the sequel is an improvement is true. To a point. Somehow I’ve done it again and gotten trapped in an area with no quests to advance and monsters too powerful to fight past. I’ve muddled my way past some really irritating quests with obtuse requirements that I’m told can be solved in many ways. Except that when you fail to chase a particular lead it’s really frustrating to have to try a dozen different tactics to shake out a solution. It feels like I’ve picked up my PC and I’m rattling it over my head until the game agrees to let me move on. People keep telling me I can solve situations in dozens of ways, but all of them seem very specific and very intent on being a dick about it.

The combat is as amazing as it is chaotic. Environmental effects are at the fore, making it feel very D&D-like as you slow people down with oil and then ignite the oil and so on. The story I felt was okay, but the tone is all over the place, making it impossible to give a shit. Some nice touches with elves gaining visions from eating flesh and anyone can choose perks for talking to animals - but I found it more infuriating than cute after searching an entire island to solve a riddle, only to have a rat explain to me that I had to talk to some NPC again in order to shake, shake, shake out the solution. For every ounce of fun I got two ounces of frustration and misery.

1 out of 2

Dungeon World

Out of all the table top roleplaying games I’ve tried, this one was the most robust for casual play. Especially seeing as roleplayers are the most unreliable people on the planet. The resolution system it employs forces a plot twist every time you use it, so it’s impossible to plan anything. It’s not for everyone, you end up with a very gonzo story without the fiddly depth that other roleplaying games manage. On the other hand it’s a dream to be the Games Master and watch a story unfold instead of meticulously planning it and seeing a conclusion land that tears apart your ideas instead of adding to them. I wrote a full guide of how I run this game over here. The campaign is effectively a sandbox, I let people explore and fill in the map as we go - which is why I mention it. I’d like a computer game that approached it this way, not like Dwarf Fortress where a randomly generated overworld is dumped on you. Instead I’d like a piecemeal discovery of the world, one that reacts to the tensions you’ve created. Perhaps I’ll have to do it myself.

Story out of Players

[vee-blackwell]

i got a bout of depression that hit tonight from not being distracted enough to avoid getting in my own head and i think i had too many bad thoughts about who i am VS family acceptance

my queer things, my interest things, my (lack of) set goals.

it hurt a lot to try and explain transgender things to my gramma while watching I Am Jazz, when talking about nonbinary people using “they/them” pronouns, she essentially said that if you dont use he/him or she/her then you have no gender “so you’re just nothing” which was just too close to home (literally) for me to hear as someone who doesnt feel anywhere close to any definition of gender, and am definitely not enough % to feel comfortable going on the male side of the binary.

that’s the hard part of that. it seems like it would be easier to tell her i’m bisexual or something (another term that doesnt really match me, but explaining asexuality or the differences between pansexual and bisexual self-identities is another thing thats hard to do with an 86 year old woman). but then what if it changes how she asks me about anyone i hang out with or makes weird assumptions about my relationships?

but at the same time, in watching this show with her, where she’s trying her best to be open-minded and learn about transgender people via watching I Am Jazz, she starts asking me to explain things in the show. not in a negative way, again, shes trying to understand which is more than i could hope for other 80+ year old grandparents. but then she asks me how i know so much about transgender people and issues they face when its things she doesnt expect people i know in real life, close to me, to have dealt with yet. and i have to play the “Educated Ally” instead of the “Depressed, Closeted Transperson” and hope she doesnt go from asking about my friends that are out to wondering about me. because it just makes me fearful of being in another time period of living in an abusive and unsupportive / negligent household where i never feel safe and im constantly arguing with my family. and i dont need that, or even to feel like im risking getting to that point again

i at least want to feel like i wouldnt be kicked out of the house and become homeless, or stop getting money from my family if i came out at all... but how many other transpeople had the same thoughts and were totally wrong? my mom who watched some of the show with us today almost immediately misgendered one of the transgirls on the show, talking about how **she (i dont want to misgender even by quoting my mom) clearly didnt have hormone blockers as long as Jazz because **her voice had changed. and it’s like, alright, she uses a feminine name, looks like any other normal high school girl, and has been working to try and get her voice to pass better, and it’s still so easy for ignorant people like my mom to pick up on that one thing they feel doesn’t fit right and just misgender someone immediately. and it’s worrisome. because i know how easy it is for “the average adult” around my mom’s age to miss the point entirely on how someone works to transition and making their own personal choices

...

im just queer and tired and fearful. my mind screaming at me “do SOMEthing” every time i wake up is like the echo of a broken record player that’s playing somewhere i can barely hear it. so i do something. i get a food. i grab a game. i grab my phone for games. i grab a video, or a game tutorial, or ANOTHER computer game, or i go on social media sites. and i do all these empty “SOMEthings” to mute the bad thoughts like the ones above. the ones that both overwhelm me into submission and also make me numb to any emotions.

i get bored of the phone game, the magickarp jump cooldown timers are all that’s left.

i get bored of harvest moon, after realizing that i was 1 floor away from the bottom of the mines last time i get frustrated. do i go back for it again and make the long boring trek, or do i go back to grinding cooking recipes so i can finally make that god damn tempura meal? each day passes as quickly or as stagnantly as i please thanks to my emulator. freeze time and do my daily farm chores, use the inventory item dupe glitch to keep stocked every gift item i need to give everyone, show everyone on the local islands my pets for bonus friendship points, unfreeze time so that the one fisherman character will finally show up to talk to and i give him his daily gift and show him my dog, i go fishing with frozen or unfrozen time as i choose. the day is done. time for the next one.

i get bored of the computer games that both tantalize me into playing them because i love them and want the mental stimulation, yet the other screens beckon to me stronger, and i sit on the 3 blue hellsites, toggling between them in mixed intervals.

i get bored of neopets, because it is after midnight and its the 3rd day in the row i forgot to do my dailies. god DAMMIT i’m never going to get trudy’s shitty 30 day bonus spin for those 100k neopoints if i keep this up. i go onto the help boards, and bump up the lottery board. copy and paste my old post, add the moneybag emoticon and congrats the winners. short list gives the UNs. long list gets generalized. the regular group of lottery players and bumpers congratulate and recognize each other, making the odd chat message about their lives. this is as far as i chat on the neoboards now because i have no social energy otherwise to talk to other neopets friends about how life is still depressing, and trying to speak around the child filters and character limits.

i go to my mom’s room, its hard to predict if she’ll be home at 5 pm or 8 pm or 11 pm or gone to her shitty boyfriend’s house. it had been GTA V. then crash bandicoot warped (ps3 port). and now skyrim with the DLC. i play it as i spend my life, there are markers telling me where i should go for quests to progress, yet i wander aimless around the world finding something more interesting to explore until i finally remember what i meant to do. my mom comes home, and i ask if she wants me to get out so she can sleep. she says its fine, and leaves the lamp on shining on her bed. it becomes after midnight, my gramma scolds me for staying in there when my mom is sleeping. while i agree, my hyperfocus is hard to break, and it still takes me more time than it should to simply save and quit in the middle of my doing nothing of importance in the game that i play for the middle of my doing nothing of important in my life.

i eat wherever i spend my activity. TV tray by my bed at all times now, my propel bottle sways like a top heavy asshole everytime its moved. the tissue box takes up space for food, but everytime i move it on my bed its either in the way or not close enough to use when i need it. my nose is still almost ready to bleed from the dry summer air. im still dehydrated because i lack the ability to remember to drink the juice, milk, or propel bottles within arms reach.

it’s 3 am, or probably later. i ask joey if it’s time to sleep. i take my melatonin, we both brush our teeth and say goodnight. am i lying to him again this night, and apologizing and saying i’ll do it for real? this could happen twice before the guilt takes over and i either cave and do it for real, or stay awake focused on my daily nothingness distractions.

on the days its 5 am or later, my mom wakes for work. we talk about the cat. we always talk about the cat. sometimes she says her work is shit and that shes in pain. things that are obvious. she leaves for work and says goodnight to me in the hopes i go to sleep soon.

i sleep. around 11 am to 1 pm is around the time i get woken for my medications. anxiety, depression, birth control pill (1 daily for 3 weeks at a time). i have to eat and drink with it, so its something simple. on bad days i fall back asleep for over an hour. like a sloth, i drag the tray of food to me, resting the plate or bowl on my bed to eat as i stay laying down. sitting up means i feel more obligated to stay awake after this. i finish the food, drink, and my pills, and shove the tray back against my closet, and lie back down in bed forcing myself to sleep.

it becomes anywhere from 3 pm to 5 pm, on bad days its 6 and later. i lay in bed after waking up maybe two or three other times from sweating, or tossing and turning with bad dreams or being awake enough that i could get up, but unmotivated or too depressed to get up and have to be awake for that much more time. i crawl to the computer first, turning off my nightly music and going online on steam. just so whoever cares knows im awake. i go adjust the thermostat as both i need as well as what wont freeze my gramma to death (or at least to complaining for hours). i say that i dont know what i want for food. she offers a suggestion, and i say sure. i return to my room until food is brought to me, and i grab juice or milk to have with my meal. it probably gets cold if it was meant to be eaten hot.

i get a food. i grab a game. i grab my phone for games. i grab a video, or a game tutorial, or ANOTHER computer game, or i go on social media sites. and i do all these empty “SOMEthings” to mute the bad thoughts like the ones above. the ones that both overwhelm me into submission and also make me numb to any emotions. the pattern repeats.

...

this has been Vee Life Simulator. sorry. no refunds.