#we spent like four hours watching them be NPCs and waiting for their movements to line up perfectly for cute pics

[hogwartslegacypics]

Sebastian carrying MC (@choccy-milky’s Clora) bridal style

[ciathyzareposts]

Camelot: What Makes Us Unique

This particular Camelot character has probably never existed before or since.

             Back in 2004, I was meeting a friend at a bar in Boston. I opened the door to look in for him, saw that he wasn’t there, and backed out, elbowing in the stomach the man behind me. I turned around and saw that it was the governor of Massachusetts. Since then, I’ve liked to think that I’m the only person to have ever elbowed Mitt Romney in the stomach while he was walking into a bar. I’m sure plenty of people have elbowed him in the stomach on other occasions.

This is the kind of story I like, because it’s an assemblage of circumstances that has probably never occurred to anyone else. I look for those in life. I may not be the world record holder in any sport or hobby, but there’s a decent chance that by the end of my life, I will have published more blog articles on CRPGs than anyone else alive. If that turns out not to be true, I’ll only need one other modest qualifier (“than any other Mainer”) to make it true. I guarantee that I’m the only person in the world to have my particular combination of jobs (if you include CRPG blogging as one of them). I don’t hold the record for the number of airline miles flown between 2010 and 2018, but I’ve got to be within the top 10%, and when you’re in the top 10%, you only need one or two additional circumstances to make yourself unique. It’s possible that I’m the record-holder out of Bangor, Maine, for instance.

My enthusiasm for unique experiences filters into CRPGs and probably explains why I like open-world sandbox games so much. I don’t like the idea that I’ve reached the end of a game in the exact same position and circumstances as everyone else who has ever played the game. When you can’t even name your character, this is particularly infuriating. Look at my recent review of Deadly Towers, for instance. How do you really know it was me playing that game? I could have taken those screen shots from anyone. At least Dragon Warrior displayed the first four letters of “Chester.”

These issues got me thinking about the peculiar trade-off that exists between player and character. Think of a game like Pac-Man. When a champion like Billy Mitchell achieves a perfect score, we don’t say, “Wow, you created a great character there. You put a lot into him.” The very statement is absurd; every player’s Pac-Man is the same as everyone else’s. Instead, all praise goes to the hands and eyes of the player himself. In contrast, when we watch the ways that various players have won the Mulmaster Beholder Corps battle in Curse of the Azure Bonds, we look for clues in the characters–their levels, their spells, their weapons, their movements. We’re aware that there’s a player behind it all, of course–perhaps a very intelligent and strategic one. But his success is slightly diffused by the imposition of the characters. We are aware that his strategy only “works” because of the allowances of the game. Perhaps most important, we are aware that we could have done the same thing, whereas no studying of his technique is likely to make most of us like Billy Mitchell.

It is for these reasons that I don’t think it’s really possible to be “good at” a game like Skyrim. Experienced, sure. Patient, definitely. But “good”–what does that even mean? Early in its existence, some players proudly posted images on Reddit of their characters clad in leather armor and wielding pick-axes (possibly the worst weapon in the game) killing dragons. I thought it was silly. Either the game has enough flexibility to allow you to do such a thing or it doesn’t. It says nothing about your skill as a player that you were able to do it except that you were willing to use the game’s resources to grind, or enchant that pick-axe, or improve that armor, or carry and drink a hundred potions, or whatever you did to make it possible.

I just bought Irene the Myst 25th anniversary collection for Christmas. That is a “good at” game. A player that possesses the strength of puzzle-solving to blaze his way to the end without any spoilers is an impressive player. But his end-game screenshot is the same as everyone else and the “character” of the game is essentially invisible, a no-one, a ghost.               

In many modern games, “uniqueness” extends quite literally to the character’s appearance.

            In case it’s not clear, I’m not particularly interested in being “good at” CRPGs. I don’t play them for competitive reasons. I play them to enjoy the strategy, tactics, world-building, plots, and sense of character development. I like a challenge, but only a modest one–a temporary bump in a game that, because of its very nature (particularly because of reloading), you’re almost certain to eventually overcome.

Many people prize the opposite. I suppose even I do, in different circumstances. The value of most competitive games is that everyone’s playing the same game under the same circumstances, with no real imposition of “character” between the player and the performance. A king in chess isn’t a “character”; he’s just a piece. You don’t give him a name, and he doesn’t acquire new abilities as he defeats pawns and levels up. When he moves to take a rook, there are no probabilities associated with the encounter. When he wins, all glory goes to the player who moves him.

When my king reaches the end of a game, on the other hand, I want him to be my king–a unique character that no other player has won with. I want my endgame screenshots to look different from everyone else’s. And in those screenshots you should be able to tell something about how I played the game. Was I careful or daring? Did I rely on brains or brawn? Did I favor equipment or skills? What role-playing choices did I make along the way?

To me, some of the worst RPGs are closer to chess. Your “character” is just a gambit that you’ve moving across the screen, offering you no sense of connection or identity. These are essentially arcade games with a few nods to RPG mechanics. We’ve seen a million of them: Caverns of Freitag, Gateway to Apshai, Sword of Kadash, Sword of Fargoal. Even worse is when the game offers RPG-style inventory and leveling, but at fixed intervals along a linear plot, so that “character development” is just an illusion and everyone does reach the end the same as everyone else.

The best RPGs, however, offer plenty of opportunities to make your character your own:            

Name

Selection of race, sex, alignment, and class

Attributes

Skills and talents

Inventories, especially those with multiple slots

NPC interaction, dialogue, and role-playing choices

Choice of what order in which to do quests and side-quests

Ability to grind, or not (only meaningful without artificially low level caps)

Customization of character appearance

Statistics, achievements, and trophies

                The multiplication of these various factors means that many modern RPGs feature characters as unique as the humans who create them, finally achieving some of the sense of ownership and identification that tabletop RPGs allowed from the outset.           

Every player may have had to do exactly what I did to win Ultima IV, but at least my name and the number of turns are unique.

          Camelot is an early game, and thus not as advanced in the originality of its characters. But of the single-player PLATO games, it comes the furthest. When I play it, I do not feel as if I am feeding so many characters into a meat grinder, as I did with The Dungeon, The Game of Dungeons, and Orthanc. Its allowances for stealth, magic, and multiple fighting styles, paired with the strategic nature by which you must explore dungeon exploration, create as close to a unique experience as anything we’re going to get for many years. If nothing else, the combination of items in the 13 inventory slots likely creates characters for each player that no one else has ever played.

I’ve put about 12 hours into the game since the last Camelot entry and I’ve gotten a lot more powerful–enough to take on dungeon Level 5 with relative ease–but it’s still slightly frustrating how long its’ taking to finish the game, much more so because I keep dying and resetting my score back to -99,999. But I recognize that it was designed for different players in different circumstances.

There was an interesting moment the other night where creator Josh Tabin happened to be logged into the system at a moment that I got stuck. I had teleported into a section of Level 4 that offered only one exit: a downward chute. Unfortunately, I had taken a Potion of Levitation upon beginning the expedition (you always want to use Scrolls of Protection, Potions of Cepacol, and Potions of Levitation at the outset of each expedition if you have them). It turns out that Levitation stops you from using chutes, even deliberately. The condition doesn’t wear off until you return to town. There were no other exits from the area, and I was out of Scrolls of Recall. The only solution I could come up with is to wait until the turn of every hour, when the dungeon levels respawn, and kill everything in the half-dozen rooms I had access to, hoping to get a Scroll of Recall at some point. But since Josh was there, I informed him of my trouble and he opened a secret door for me, then spent some time patching the game so that even if you’re under the effect of levitation, you can manually choose to take a chute.

Other things about the game since I last wrote:            

As I previously mentioned, the game occasionally gives you a specific monster to kill before it will let you level up. It’s very erratic. I had a period from roughly Level 10 to 20 where I got a quest every level. Then I didn’t get any at all between Levels 20 and 29.

A “Palantir” tells you at what level you can find the object of your quest. If you’re already on that level, it tells you the specific coordinates. Of course, if the hour turns while you’re still seeking the quest creature, everything resets. 

As you move downward, enemies get harder but rewards get better. Some of the magic item rewards are awesome. I’ve had a couple of Wands of Fire that completely clear out rooms in one turn. The problem is how frequently they require recharging and the expense thereof. The game’s economy is still excellent. I make a lot of tough choices between leveling up, recharging, and purchasing new items.

It turns out that items don’t have a fixed number of charges but rather a small probability of running out within any given use. High intelligence seems to lower this chance.

Some of the best items that you can find increase your attributes. Manuals and tomes increase them permanently by one point while various potions increase them temporarily for several points. I have maxed out my strength, intelligence, and constitution with these items, and I must be close on the other two.

         A Manual of Bodily Health raises my constitution.

         Scrolls of Taming, Orbs of Entrapment, and Wands of Charming all work on different creatures. I’ve learned that when I lose a companion (or one leaves), I want to head down to the lowest dungeon level on which I can survive to start hunting for another. About six hours into this session, I was able to charm a succubus, and it’s remained with me ever since–an extremely powerful ally.

I probably mentioned this earlier, but there are special rooms on each level that the creator calls “stud rooms.” They feature enemies 2-3 levels harder than the normal ones on the same level, but with rewards 2-3 times greater. Any new expedition needs to begin with clearly the stud rooms that you know you can clear.  

          In one of the “stud rooms.” Seven green dragons are a little much for me. The Scroll of Identification gives grim odds.

         There’s a magic item called a “Tardis” that resets the dungeon in between the normal hourly resets. It allows you to quickly hit the stud rooms multiple times in a row until it runs out of magic. It’s incredibly useful but back in the day when there were multiple players hitting the dungeon at the same time, it must have been very annoying for some of them.

              The two players on the leaderboard who have won the game both have Level 60 characters, so I assume that’s the game’s level cap. Thus, I’m halfway there. I probably won’t have much more to say about Camelot until I win, so hopefully I can get it done this week while I also wrap up Challenge of the Five Realms. I’ll say this for Camelot: it’s the first PLATO game that I’ve enjoyed lingering with, rather than blasting through it just to document its historical value.

Time so far: 40 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/camelot-what-makes-us-unique/

[gamerszone2019-blog]

No Man's Sky Beyond Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/no-mans-sky-beyond-review/

No Man's Sky Beyond Review

In 2019, No Man’s Sky

is the water fight of games. When your water balloons are stacked high and your water gun is full it’s an absolute blast. But inevitably, you run out of liquid ammunition and have to pause for several minutes, soaking wet and shivering, while you operate a hose and refill your stores for the next round of fun. While the recent Beyond represents another significant step in the right direction for No Man’s Sky that improves itself in almost every area, the uninteresting harvesting and survival mechanics that underlie it all remain incredibly grindy and frequently mind-numbingly tedious. It often feels like it’s been made by two teams with opposing views on game design, who are each tugging at either side of it until eventually agreeing to meet in the middle or tear it in half.At its best, No Man’s Sky plays like an increasingly elaborate interstellar Animal Crossing. You travel the stars and visit strange, procedurally generated planets in a never-ending quest for loot and money to spend on upgrades for your survival suit and weapon, ships to pilot, rovers to drive, and bases to build. Every time you think you’ll log off for the night, another notification pops up that reminds you about that one last thing you really wanted to do, and before you can say “I need an intervention,” it’s 5 AM and you’re redecorating your fifth base on some remote world or taming a bizarre creature that looks like the lovechild of Big Bird and an octopus.

Here’s how you tame and ride creatures in No Man’s Sky Beyond

It’s easy to appreciate the improvements and additions included in the Beyond update because they’re apparent as soon as you boot it up. Improved graphics highlight things like detail on your ships and a revamped tutorial and mission guidance system makes it much more clear what you should be working toward at any given time. Unlocking new technologies has been reimagined as skill trees that are easy to understand. And these are just a few of the highlights on the massive laundry list of things in the Beyond update that make No Man’s Sky vastly more interesting than it’s ever been.

With Beyond, No Man’s Sky is vastly more interesting than it’s ever been.

“

But the same things that make playing No Man’s Sky a wonderful, habit-forming odyssey that would make Tom Nook proud often work against you — like when you find yourself repeatedly grinding the same materials and crafting the same parts over and over again in an ongoing effort to fuel the numerous engines of interstellar life. You’ll spend tedious hours mining rocks to craft metal plates that you need to make starship engine fuel just so you can take off in your ship and see the still-impressive, completely seamless transition from ground to outer space and back again. And even though No Man’s Sky’s carrying limitations have been even further loosened with the Beyond update your inventory still fills up almost constantly, ensuring that the grind will never be defeated. With few ways to automate resource gathering, exploring the cosmos often takes a back seat to waiting for your mining laser to melt a tree into resources for minutes at a time.

And, considering how central exploration is to No Man’s Sky’s appeal, it’s staggering just how many mechanics still seem dead set on preventing you from doing just that. Why are your sprint and jetpack capabilities meters so limited, and why does using them draw from your life support meter? Why does every language have to be learned one word at a time, meaning that even after dozens of hours of playing you still can’t really understand any of the alien races you encounter? Why, for the love of God, does every planet in the universe have violent weather events every couple of minutes that require you to shut yourself indoors or hide in a cave and wait out to survive? Time and time again, No Man Sky begs you to explore it but then (quite literally) forces you walk, not run.

Hello Games’ Sean Murray walks us through Beyond’s many improvements in the video below.

It’s odd that No Man’s Sky still has so many irritating elements, because it’s also very clearly aware that they exist and tries to smooth over the issues rather than simply fixing them. For example, combat remains as dull and repetitive as ever, so the appearance of hostile lifeforms and robotic sentinel space police has been reduced instead of trying to make fighting them more entertaining. Space dogfights also remain monotonous and overly simplistic in Beyond, and while controls seem to have improved and encounters don’t drag on as long, fighting off pirates is never more than an annoying interruption to your travels.

Beyond brings NMS dangerously close to what we all thought it was when it was first revealed.

“

And yet, there’s something truly special about No Man’s Sky after the Beyond update that brings it dangerously close to being what we all thought it was when it was first revealed years ago. Getting lost among the stars, seeing strange and unique creatures, and claiming a piece of the nigh-limitless galaxy for yourself by building a home are all rewarding and all but completely unique to No Man’s Sky. It’s hard not to fall in love with it in the brief pockets of time where it isn’t forcing you to beat your head against a wall for an hour while you search for a deposit of copper but the stupid Dr. Seuss planet you’re on has is uranium.

In the course of my travels, I found myself stranded on a massive water planet filled with aggressive jellyfish, stared in awe at some bizarre life forms that were made up of levitating crystals, and explored the murky caves on an atmosphere-free moon. Of course, regardless of how they look every planet still has an identical loop of gathering materials, hiding from inevitable and frustrating storms of heat or ice or toxins, and maybe building a base or riding an animal or two along the way. But still there’s an undeniable rush of excitement in discovering and exploring a planet for the first time that doesn’t go away even after hours of play.

Beyond also alters and consolidates No Man’s Sky’s three main storylines into a more cohesive set of quests that intertwine, and they are much more accessible for it. One of the best-kept secrets of No Man’s Sky is that the story is actually fairly complex, with twists and turns that even go so far as to explain the reason behind the universe’s existence. But frankly, the vehicle by which the story is told – an endless chain of fetch quests and vague conversations with generic NPCs – makes the whole thing not at all worth the effort. Your time is better spent doing the things that are entertaining to you, finding your way to the end of the main quest lines only if you manage to find joy in doing so. (Or, y’know, YouTube exists.)

No Man’s Sky Beyond Screenshots

Multiplayer features have been drastically improved with Beyond, though it still falls far short of today’s standards in many ways – especially where organization is concerned. The Anomaly space station is now a social hub that allows you to encounter other players organically rather than by invite or chance (though doing so is still quite rare), and together you can undertake short group missions via The Nexus or even visit one another’s bases by stepping through a massive teleporter. The number of players in a single instance has been bumped up from four to eight on consoles and up to 32 on PC, but actually organizing activities together can be a bit of a nightmare. For starters, you’re given very few tools to find one another in the expansive galaxy, and unless everyone is communicating and staying together it’s easy to get lost or left behind with no easy way to rejoin your friends. If you find yourself without the required materials to launch or pilot your ship when everybody else takes off, for example, you’ll either get left behind by your friends or will hold up the group while you go shoot a laser at some plants for a few minutes. Sharing resources with one another is still, sadly and inexplicably, not an option.

Sharing resources with one another is still, sadly and inexplicably, not an option.

“

Most of the major and strange multiplayer glitches from last year’s NEXT update (in hindsight, a very funny name now that it’s the previous one) have been ironed out, though you’ll probably still encounter the odd bug now and again. I had incidents where my partner couldn’t see the enemies attacking me, or animation issues making it unclear when one of us was firing our mining laser. Playing with others makes the grind of No Man’s Sky much more bearable, but oftentimes because having someone to share in your pain can be really cathartic.

VR makes its debut in No Man’s Sky with the Beyond update (on PlayStation VR and PC, at least), and wandering around an undiscovered planet and hearing unknown critters walk up behind you is an exciting and sometimes unnerving experience. Using hand tracking with Move wands or Oculus/Vive/Index/etc controllers to aim your weapons and tools feels natural, even if you’re still just engaging in the usual monotony of harvesting. Using VR in space flight, on the other hand, is an overwhelmingly positive experience which benefits from your character being stationary and blurriness not mattering quite as much in the darkness of the void. And while it doesn’t fix the monotony of dogfighting, it absolutely makes it more immersive because you can look up through your ship’s canopy.

Watch 10 minutes of No Man’s Sky in VR below.

Movement options offer a static mode with teleportation and click-turning that can be a bit hard to learn but is easy on those of us with weaker stomachs, or a smooth-movement mode that acts the same way the non-VR mode does. However, on the PlayStation VR it was so low-res and blurry that it might make you lose your lunch like it did mine… twice. Still, seeing the galaxy of No Man’s Sky from a true first-person perspective can be a breathtaking experience, even if technical limitations mean there’s still a long way to go before it makes us feel like we’re really there.

Source : IGN