I don’t post often on here but since my good buddy @egg-on-a-legg mentioned these guys when talking about their own fo characters, here’s my main player characters for the bethesda games! Steve is my lone wanderer, Siv is my courier six, and cooper is my sole survivor! if you have any questions just pop them in my ask box!

Doom Eternal Pc Download Installer

Doom Eternal Pc Download Installer - Opinion My

With no appearances from both The Elder Scrolls six or Starfield at Bethesda's E3 presser this calendar year, that left DOOM Eternal as the headliner of the present. That might all be about to alter, even so, as in celebration of the approaching movie sport DOOM Everlasting, releasing twenty second November, Bethesda and Rebel Distillers have declared a partnership that will see Europe's very first Doom Eternal Pc Download spirit created specifically for a video clip match - DOOM Bone Vodka. DOOM Eternal picks up after the activities of DOOM (2016). As the DOOM Slayer, you return to find Earth has endured a demonic invasion. Raze Hell and discover the Slayer's origins and his enduring mission to rip and tear…until it is completed.

The E3 and QuakeCon demo for DOOM Everlasting states its intentions pretty early on: as a skyscraper-sized gun fires into the sky, a computerised voice intones drastically that the ‘BFG ten,000' is lively. At E3 2019, Bethesda formally Doom Eternal Pc Download For Free declared that Doom Everlasting will launch on November 22, 2019 for PS4 , Xbox One , Nintendo Swap , Google Stadia and Laptop.

Doom Eternal's E3 2018 trailer had every little thing we love about the series, dialled up to eleven. Get a glimpse of its apocalyptic vision of Earth, with a suitably thumping soundtrack and some jacked-up demons staring down the barrel of a shotgun. Doom Eternal is shaping up to be the very same rapidly-paced, action Doom Eternal Pc Download packed expertise as its 2016 predecessor, based on our hands on time, even though we did not get through the pre-introduced model of this recreation with no a handful of hiccups.

The main DOOM mechanics are right here, most importantly the various techniques that reward aggressive gameplay. Although you will discover pickups for wellness, armour, and ammo dotted close to the map, the most trustworthy way to best them up is simply by charging up to a demon and doing your worst. Doom is more challenging to judge since I was enjoying on the Stadia controller. Google's gamepad has an gain in excess of standard inputs, in that it connects immediately to the network—in our scenario, wired into Ethernet—instead of passing through a middleman.

And you know what? The two games were totally playable. I performed a solitary Scorpion vs . Sub-Zero match in Mortal Kombat 11 and arrived absent the victor, and in Doom Eternal I fought my way through two regions before managing out of hands-on time. Doom Eternal's battle manner Doom Eternal Pc Download will have 6 distinctive maps at start, every designed to enable the Doomslayer and demons to partake in a hellish game of cat and mouse. These arenas include portals, monkey bars and soar pads to make perform as dynamic as feasible - and exciting certainly.

Doom Eternal Pc Review - Mechanic

Doom (for Laptop) Doom is back again and true to the unique. But if DOOM‘s multiplayer was a disappointment, this is some thing I would rank as a disaster. Probably the one feature I believed would be incredible no matter of the good quality of the other two thirds of the package was SnapMap, a map creation and sharing resource that is primarily its own minor software doom eternal program tacked on to DOOM to test how it performs. At very first glance it's outstanding, a basic way to create singleplayer, co-op and multiplayer maps by stitching pre-made rooms collectively and decorating them with your content of choice and the share it cross-system for everybody to enjoy. It appears wonderful, and it easily could have been.

Contacted by the UAC Chairman Samuel Hayden , one of the handful of survivors of the incident, the protagonist is directed through the foundation to prevent its complete collapse. With the advice and Hayden's AI, VEGA , he learns from the diagnostic report that casualties and damages are catastrophic with the exception of Pierce and Hayden, all staff doom eternal have both become demons or died horribly. Soon after stabilizing the Foundry ahead of a meltdown takes place, Doomguy learns that Pierce programs to use the UAC's Argent Energy Tower to tear a long term portal into Hell.

Doom 4 has a little bit of old Doom mixed with the more recent aspects. There is no reload system in the recreation (other than for the super-shotgun). That is, if you have two hundred bullets from you equipment gun, you can empty all of it by trying to keep the button pressed. No reload needed, or something! Which is a fairly cool issue in my impression. There are upgrades to be discovered in the sport, just like the older game titles Doom Eternal. Every amount has a secret to be unlocked which provides you a weapon upgrade. These upgrades can be utilised to upgrade various weapon modules that can be located throughout the maps (do preserve an eye out for these). And there are two Doomguy small designs in each stage which you have to find. And just a trace, they would not be existing in the apparent places.

After fairly a number of many years of pretty critical ‘realistic' shooters, DOOM is a breath of refreshing air that the genre really required. It really is unashamedly entertaining gore soaked visuals each impress and harken back again to the good previous times of the 90s and it all will come with each other completely to make some thing really pretty special and I would really like to see a sequel or Quake reboot from the exact same staff - I'd get either in a heartbeat.

Clocking in at around 16 several hours, Doom's one-player campaign is prolonged, and could be even a lot more if you make a decision to uncover every secret it holds. Our only grouse is its value. With most video games falling in the selection of Rs. three doom eternal,499 on the PS4 and Xbox One particular, the inquiring price of Rs. 3,999 for Doom is on the higher facet. The Personal computer variation fares a little much better at Rs. two,999 but is still double of what you'd pay out for other new Computer online games.

On the debacle with Fallout 76

 I feel like the debacle with Fallout 76 has become a testing grounds for a lot of the dominating theories and myths about video games and video game consumers in general, as well as more specifically about Bethesda studios and Bethesda gamers. I apologize for the LONG post ahead, but there’s a lot to unpack here and I want to make sure everyone’s on the same page before I try and make any big points. For those not in the know, I will attempt to summarize: - Bethesda released Fallout 76, a multiplayer installment in the Fallout franchise, with a set release date of November 14, 2018.  - The game was announced with the marketing that it would be playable and enjoyable as singleplayer, that every person you ran into would be a real person, that it was a new Fallout experience, that its graphics would improve upon Fallout 4′s graphics by 16 times, and notably, one collector’s edition which cost $200 was marketed as coming with a wearable helmet and a canvas bag.

The beta was shaky and riddled with bugs, and upon release, the game itself was still pretty much broken -- far moreso than other Bethesda titles, and this coming from a company where the running joke since Oblivion has been that the bugs are so prevalent that they are a feature, not a flaw. An enormous patch was released shortly after launch, which was larger in size than the game itself, and which not only didn’t fix almost any of the bugs, but created hundreds *more* bugs, as if they didn’t playtest the patch at all.  For players like me who can go a surprisingly long time in a Bethesda game without seeing any bugs at all, I will note that these bugs include: - T-posing enemies which either spontaneously assume their correct animations only when you get close, or never do, or which teleport suddenly into you to try and display their attack animations - Horrendous enemy A.I. where a lot of them will just stand in one place looping an animation - Enemies spawning out of thin air directly in front of you due to slow loading - A bug where enemies spontaneously heal the exact amount of damage you deal to them, making them invincible - Falling through the ground out of nowhere - Clipping through and getting caught in the world - Frequent server crashes, often due to in-game happenings (the game eventually gives you access to nuclear bombs, but the same bombs can crash the server if you drop them) - Frequent disconnects - Frequent game crashes (with no ‘save game’ function) - Body horror bugs like the Wendigo Bug which have been present since Fallout 4 and haven’t been fixed by Bethesda yet, even though modders were able to fix them weeks after Fallout 4 came out. Three years ago.  Moreover, the game directly ported over most of its visual assets from Fallout 4. Most of the landscape elements come from Fallout 4, almost all of the weapons come from Fallout 4, almost all of the outfits and armors come from Fallout 4, most of the monsters come from Fallout 4, the physics and gunplay is directly ported over (minus the ability to pause the game to open your inventory, of course, and minus the time-slowing aspect of V.A.T.S, which makes V.A.T.S almost completely useless), the character creation is ported over, the loot is ported over, the base-building system and all of its assets (walls, floors, anything you’d use to build a base) are ported over. Basically, other than trees and certain monsters unique to West Virginia, you’ll have a hard time spotting content which isn’t directly ported over from Fallout 4, often without palette swaps. Is the promise of better graphics fulfilled?  Well, the lighting is significantly improved, and even very pretty and atmospheric -- though occasionally light will shine through solid far-away objects, like mountains. Modders had done this almost immediately with Fallout 4, too, though, so it’s not really a huge achievement. And the landscape is much more colourful than in any other Fallout game, which is admittedly a nice change of pace, even though it makes no goddamn sense why the trees would survive while everything else dies around them. But other than those two elements... yeah, it just looks like Fallout 4, but usually doesn’t render as well due to being on a multiplayer server and due to the graphical glitches. How about the promise that every person you run into is a real person? Well, that was true all right, but how anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me. It’s one of those things that sounds really cool and innovative until you think about it for literally any length of time at all. Why would that be a good thing? Unless you have quite a lot of friends who you’ve somehow got onto the same server (which, by the way, I don’t think has much functionality in Fallout 76), you’re not going to be very interested in those people, and you have no reason to be. They’re just big lumps of immersion-breaking, as I seriously doubt many people are going onto the game to vocally roleplay their way through the game experience.  Moreover, this means no NPCs besides monsters and robots. No quests from anyone but robots and holotapes. Now, I like holotapes. I’m one of those unbearable players who listens to every holotape and reads every computer terminal. My favourite part of Fallout games is usually finding out the big stories behind Vaults or unusual locations. But when you are doing this quest for someone you will never meet, and have complete certainty of this fact, the reason to do quests in the first place starts to ebb away. You just get holotapes or robots telling you to go to a place, kill something there, rinse, repeat. That’s the entire game. Nothing is achieved; everyone who recorded those holotapes is dead, or a monster now. You’re not doing anyone any favours. There’s no one to help, there’s no one to hate, there’s just you (and whatever people you’re playing with, who, again, aren’t really part of the story as multiplayer gamers don’t typically roleplay). The main quest of the game revolves around trying to find the previous Overseer of the vault. There’s zero suspense, interest or urgency, because as a player, you know with complete certainty going in that if you find her, she’ll be dead or a monster. When you remove the NPCs, you remove all our reasons to care about quests. You also remove all interactions in the game besides “kill thing, loot thing, make stuff with loot”. And killing monsters with such laughable AI and glitches, AI designed for Fallout 4 where V.A.T.S could pause the game and dropped into a game where it doesn’t, isn’t nearly enjoyable enough to make that game loop anything but ghastly. How ANYONE thought this was a good idea is beyond me, and I’m pretty sure at this point that they didn’t do it because they thought it was a good idea, they did it because having NPCs function like they would in a singleplayer game, while in a multiplayer server, is an incredibly daunting task. When literally no one asked for the game to be multiplayer in the first place, but hey. Is the game fun to play alone? Not from literally anyone I know who has, no, and this is due to the above factors. Is the game, as the marketing said, more fun to play with your friends? Well, yes, but the same could be said of cleaning out a moldy garage alone versus with friends. Being with friends makes anything more enjoyable. The game does not cease to have all its serious underlying problems when you play with friends, you just have someone to commiserate with and witness this bullshit with you. Is this a new Fallout experience? Not really. It’s Fallout 4 with a prettier landscape, story constrained to holotapes and therefore constrained to the past (and not the present the player is actually playing in!), and it’s arguably not even a Fallout experience at all. It wears a Fallout skin but the core roleplaying, choice, and narrative features of the game are gone, and all that’s left is a world that’s much bigger, but where all the new space is pretty much empty anyhow.  Oh, and the canvas bags for the collector’s edition were cheap vinyl when people got them, Bethesda just went “yeah canvas was too expensive lol, u can have five dollars’ worth of the game’s microtransaction money for free tho if you want, just file a complaint”. The amount of the microtransaction digital money wouldn’t even buy a virtual canvas bag, mind. Then someone threatened a lawsuit, and it looks like people are going to get their actual canvas bags. But they still need to file a complaint, and WHOOPS! They accidentally doxxed everyone who filed a complaint, to some other people who filed a complaint! The absolute cherry on top. (Yes, it really was an accident, it’s even stupider than it sounds.) So what can we take away from all this? Well, I wouldn’t take away much hope for Fallout 76 as a game, for one. It’s a dumpster fire, and they keep pouring gasoline onto it. But the game has scored abysmally low basically everywhere. People have noticed, and they’re not pleased. The game’s price has dropped 30%, and that’s in the first couple weeks after launching, which is completely unheard of for a AAA game. Returns are going wild. Youtube is FULL of videos taking Fallout 76 to town. So clearly, gamers won’t lap up whatever you give them just because it’s a sequel to something they love. The sunk cost fallacy hasn’t run that deep, and people are suddenly extremely skeptical of whatever Bethesda releases next -- which at this rate, is going to be either The Elder Scrolls: Blades, or their new sci-fi game, followed by The Elder Scrolls VII (title as yet unannounced).  I would also suggest that studios may finally have been given a good indication that clumsily slapping multiplayer on something that had success as single-player isn’t the greatest idea. This is a lesson that probably should have been learned years ago, but better late than never.  I would also hope that game studios, Bethesda especially, develop a touch more respect for their fanbase and realize that player bases can be lost. Bethesda has relied upon their fanbase to mod away their bugs, laziness, and incomplete content hampered by release dates for many years now, but faced with a multiplayer game with no mod support, they are put in a position where they have to realize how heavily they’ve been leaning on those mods. But there’s another part of the story that isn’t being covered so much -- one which challenges the assumptions which has led Bethesda and the players to such a disaster in the first place. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in the makings for a long time now, but was released something like a year late in comparison to its originally announced release date. The new Kingdom Hearts has been repeatedly delayed. I’d expect the fans would have reacted with nothing but outrage! But they ... haven’t, for the most part. There’s been some frustration and groaning, especially with people who have pre-ordered the games, but for the most part, the fans have been pretty understanding. It turns out they’d rather have a game come out finished than come out on time.  That seems simple, and even obvious, but for close to twenty years, it has been the prevailing logic that for a game to sell well, it has to come out at a pre-defined and specific date, and if it isn’t done, that’s just how the process of making games work, and we’ll fix it in bug patches, or wait for mods to fix it. This is such an assumed phenomenon that it shows up repeatedly in Extra Credits, a show which talks in great detail about the production of video games, and I’d be hard-pressed to name a game that I own or play which doesn’t have unfinished content, even if it’s fairly bug-free. But here we are, Red Dead 2 is out, and it’s a roaring success, despite considerable delays. The conventional wisdom is simply wrong. And it gets even better. This is the trailer for The Outer Worlds, a game made by Obsidian. I urge you to watch it. First of all, the game looks good. The graphics are good, the human characters are expressive and dynamic while still looking realistic. The backgrounds are great. The humour is great. The world-building, what we see of it, looks very promising. And oh my god, the shade they throw at Bethesda is gorgeous. Not only does Obsidian highlight themselves as the creators of Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas -- that is, the two most-loved Fallout games -- they play with the concept of a cryogenically frozen player character (possibly lampshading the use of the same concept in Fallout 4), and they point out that player choice isn’t just about a binary “who do you shoot” moment -- another moment from Fallout 4, and one of the few real choices you get to make in that game -- and implies that variety of choice, including non-combat choice, is going to be a Thing in this game. Look at the comments section for that video. You will see hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of comments praising the trailer, talking about the shade it casts on Bethesda, making New Vegas meme jokes, praising the music, lauding the humour, wondering about the characters it shows us. You know what I didn’t see? Even one single, solitary comment complaining that there’s no definite release date shown anywhere in that trailer. Seriously, watch it again. It doesn’t say exactly when it’s coming out. Just 2019. No month. No date. Just sometime next year. You know... when it’s done. What you might not have known was that The Outer Worlds was originally estimated to come out this year. You didn’t know that because they didn’t release the trailer until just recently -- when they were far enough in production to produce such a great trailer, for one, but also once they were far enough to be certain they would be finished with production within a year.  No one cares when it’s coming. They care that it looks like a good game with so much original effort put into it. That’s what matters. And maybe if the game studios can realize this, we’ll finally see an end to the exploitative bullshit that happens -- exploitative of not just the gamers, but of the thousands of overworked employees it takes to make a AAA video game -- in the service of an absolute deadline above the game itself. God, now that’s a thought. So don’t be discouraged by the failure of Fallout 76. There’s way better on the horizon. The myths that studios need a firm deadline to put out a good game, the myths that players in some way demand a firm deadline, the myth that players will sit there and take any level of bullshit, they’re all being thoroughly, publicly debunked. Feels good, man. Feels good.

Video Games are a God Damned Mess: Bad Business Practices, Unsustainability, and the Fidelity Plateau

(shoutouts to the anon rando in my inbox for telling me about the read more button you were kind of rude about it but i don’t use this website so i legit didn’t know)

The video game industry has always been a bit wild and wooly compared to its older contemporaries. The emergence of a new medium is always rife with upheaval as paradigms shift and people discover that the old rules don't necessarily apply all of the time. That said, the past three months have been filled with what I can really only describe as catastrophes for many disparate publishers and development studios.

 You may recall I talked a bit about this during my game of the year list and Fallout 76 analysis, but to recap: with Telltale shutting its doors and shafting its workers, the writing was on the wall for the same thing to happen again as the intrinsically unsustainable boom and bust cycle began the less glamorous stage. It turns out I was correct in my predictions but congratulating myself for seeing this coming is not unlike congratulating myself for accurately predicting that tomorrow will be Tuesday. Or. Whatever day it will be when I post this. fuck i dated the lp thread ruined LOOK the point is that this was really obviously going to happen and that nobody felt the need to prepare for it or try to stop it before 10% of Activision-Blizzard's workforce got canned is a major failure of the industry at large.

So let's talk a bit about what's happened since then. There's been a lot, so forgive me if I miss your favorite corporate implosion. First, at Blizzcon, Diablo Immortal was revealed to what actually might have been the most actively hostile reception of a game in history. This has less to do with the more financial aspects of the ongoing Videocon Crisis and more just kind of served as an ill omen and an example of Blizzard's worrying descent into... wherever it is they're going. If gross incompetence was a place, they would be descending into it. On paper, a Diablo mobile game is a money-printing proposition. When all is said and done Immortal will still probably make them gobs of cash. In practice, however, they fucked the landing so hard they probably lost potential sales. The kind of folks who go to Blizzcon and get omegahype for a new diablo game are not the kind of folks who play mobile games. Mobile games have a Stigma among the hardcore crowd, and also the Ethical Business Practices in Video Games crowd (which as of this writing appears to be me, Jim Sterling, and the Warframe devteam). For a lot of braindead gamerbros, mobile games are synonymous with things like Candy Crush and Peggle, which are perfectly fine games honestly but they're For Girls or some shit so mobile games are bad and for casuals. More pertinently, mobile games are also a ferocious jungle of microtransactions, pay2win mechanics, and generally shoddy design. Command and Conquer and Dungeon Keeper, beloved franchises that have been ripe for revisiting for years now, both found mobile games and they were both utterly terrible. These games make a great deal of their money by exploiting "whales", or in actual human being language, vulnerable people with disposable income and difficulties with impulse control or addictive personalities. Or kids who know their mom's creditcard number. Kids play video games. Now that we are no longer kids (theoretically, anyway) it can be easy to forget that. I'm not the pearl-clutching type, but I think that stigmatizing a genre of games that proudly touts an exploitative-of-children business model is probably okay.

So there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Diablo Immortal right out of the gate, and quite frankly whoever thought that just pushing that out there with literally no other Diablo related news items (like any whispers of the long coveted hd remaster of diablo the second) was either transferred in from another company the day before or had some kind of unspeakable grudge against the scheduled presenters, to whom my heart goes out to. There is also some undeniable precedent that Blizzard-Activision will, in all likelihood, monetize the everloving daylights out of it. Both Hearthstone and Overwatch have more or less become nicely polished vehicles with which to deliver lootboxes to players for a nominal fee. If this hadn't been followed by a seemingly unceasing calvacade of disasters, the whole debacle would have been really funny to point and laugh at. It's still pretty funny to point and laugh at, but it also has some less amusing implications. Blizzard in particular has been up to a lot of no good lately. Let's talk a little bit about their recent one-two punch.

First up, we have the complete and sudden abandonment of competitive support for Heroes of the Storm. Heroes of the Storm was essentially Blizzard's seething regret and resentment for letting Valve snatch up the whole Defense of the Ancients thing put into code and unleashed upon an unwitting populace. It had actually been gaining some renewed interest over the past year or so due to the developers putting in some elbow grease and making the game both more accessible and just. More better. HotS has also had a modest but respectable eSports scene since the game's launch, with a variety of professional players, shoutcasters, tournament organizers and emergency bugfixers employed. Many of them were anxious about their jobs for months in advance with no word from the higher ups about who would still be employed by 2019. Sometimes, companies have to make difficult decisions and let people go to keep operating. Even my communist ass reluctantly accepts this as a reality of the system we live in. However, there is a protocol about this kind of thing. Giving notice. Giving, you know, severance pay. Stuff like that. And of course this presupposes that this sort of cut to the workforce is actually necessary in the first place. Given that AB subsequently reported record profits for the year of 2018, I have some doubts. Completely dropping support for a game out of the blue is a scummy thing to do to your playerbase. When it is also directly impacting the livelihood of hundreds of people in your employ, it goes beyond scummy and turns right into Unacceptable.

But "unacceptable" is Bobby Kotick's favorite word in the English language so while shoving hundred dollar bills from his latest corporate bonus up his butt he and his friends in the boardroom decided that the HotS esports people might get lonely, so they had better go and fire another 10% of the workforce too. Just because. Like literally just because. His company is doing fine - better than fine! They are at record levels of better than fine. But the shareholders demand more and more exponential growth, so to cut costs that really didn't need cutting, away goes 10%. Will game quality suffer because of this? Undoubtedly. More work being piled on fewer people who are also living in mortal fear of losing their jobs Just Because is not a recipe for success. People are mad about this, much like people were/are mad about Fallout 76 - players of games, industry wonks, and iconic voice actresses alike are no longer tolerating this kind of thing in Two Thousand and Nineteen, Common Era. Nor should they!

Elsewhere in the Game-o-sphere, similar developments are brewing. ArenaNet, the folks wot do Guildwars, went through another round of mass layoffs. EA's stocks have plummeted and Battlefield V "failed to meet expectations" because it only sold A Ton and not A Fuckin Shit Ton, and Anthem is not really lighting the world on fire. After Mass Effect Andromeda's... curious debut, Bioware has probably been feeling the heat and a lot of people are concerned that it too will suffer the ultimate fate of all studios acquired by Electronic Arts: joining Visceral Games in a broken heap at the bottom of the garbage chute. Bring back Dead Space you motherfuckers. Bethesda continues to, improbably, suffer through PR disaster after PR disaster with Fallout 76, a game that seemingly cannot stop fucking up. Ubisoft has received some positive attention for vowing to NOT lay off hundreds of employees for no discernible reason, which leads me to believe that our standards for praiseworthy behavior have dropped alarmingly low. Even 2K Games in all of its monolithic glory seems to be feeling a bit of a Stock Price Squeeze. Honestly by the time I get this done and posted it's entirely possible that somebody else will fuck something up. I'm still kind of waiting on the fallout from Randy Pitchford's porn thumbdrive, but I'm also a little bit pleased that Actual Money Crimes are getting more traction in the news cycle.

So, returning to the main point: the industry is in a bad situation of its own making. It's a scene that's almost always been defined by trend-chasing. For a while, that meant that we would just have to suffer through an endless glut of EXTREME SPORTS GAMES SPONSORED BY A DUDE or a barrage of samey console shooters desperately trying to be Halo every once in a while. Unfortunately, the trend-chasing now extends not only to the games themselves, but to the methods by which they are monetized. Ever since DLC became a mainstream thing, the brightest minds of the boardrooms have been working tirelessly to deduce which method of fleecing players will scientifically speaking get them the most money. Inevitably, when some enterprising little weasel develops a new and improved monetization scheme, the rest of the little weasels will immediately latch on to that scheme and that's how you end up with Battlefront 2's ridiculous lootbox grind and Shadow of War's ludicrous inclusion of randomized lootboxes in a singleplayer action-adventure game. While I'm certain that the platonic ideal of the lootbox has existed in some form or another for decades now, I think that we can squarely lay the blame for the Great Lootbox Plague of the Twenty-Tens at the feet of Valve.

Valve has been known for questionable business practices for a while now (albeit in a more lowkey way than We Fired 800 People So Bobby Kotick Could Buy a New Yacht), largely getting away with it because Steam has been more or less unchallenged as the premier digital distribution service for video games. This might be changing soon, as Epic Games is going straight for the jugular with a number of aggressive moves with its own fledgling platform, but historically, Valve has faced very few consequences for just kind of being petulantly antagonistic towards its userbase because said userbase is easily mollified by steam sales and Gaben memes. When people think lootboxes in 2019, they probably think of games like Overwatch or Battlefront 2 or basically any contemporary multiplayer game. I certainly do, but a bit of fact finding allowed me to remember that Valve has been doing this shit since Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2's byzantine cosmetics market can't be overlooked either. All three of these games are or were at one point genre leaders and made Valve so much money they basically decided that they didn't really need to make games anymore. A reasonable conclusion to draw, given the fact all three of these games are inextricably linked to their history as very popular mods. Valve just outsources a great deal of its labor to dedicated, naive fans and gives them a pittance of the huge mounds of dollars they make from their hard work. It's a good racket, but it has set an alarmingly poor example to the rest of the gaming world.

Games as a service, in concept, is fine for games that lend themselves well to the idea. MMOs have been using a variation of the model for decades now and that genre is actually like, Perplexingly Healthy. Free to play games like League of Legends and Warframe have also had success with a service model. The problem comes from the AAA Game industry's pathological insistence on shoving square pegs into things that don't even have holes to begin with. Shadow of War, or Assassin's Creed, or any other major singleplayer offering, has no business whatsoever being a Live Service. They are finite experiences by design and that's completely fucking fine and normal. Appending microtransactions and lootboxes to them is a transparent attempt to just suck up a little bit more money from players in the most unsustainable way possible. Here is a small hint if some WB Games bigwig stumbles upon this: first of all, I'm building a guillotine, so you better watch your ass. Second, how dare you fucking make Shelob a sexy lady. Third, (this is the one that is probably most relevant): People are willing to pay as they go for cosmetics and timesavers for games that they like and want to support. I've dumped a lot of money into League over the years because there was a period of time where I was playing it nonstop and having a wonderful time for quite literally no cost to myself, so I felt like buying the cute Panda Annie Skin was a good compromise. Regrettably I would later learn that there are aspects of Riot Games I'm not super okay with giving money to but at the time they seemed agreeable and my friends who work there gotta get payed somehow. This whole dynamic of wanting to support a video game goes out the damn window when you are already charging a $60 entry fee, plus whatever highway robbery pricing you put on the inevitable DLC. In this case, the onus is squarely upon the publisher to provide an experience and content one would reasonably expect of the pricetag. Putting in microtransactions for cosmetics is galling. Putting in microtransactions for actual game progression, like in Battlefront 2 or Shadow of War, is outright insulting.

Many will leap to the defense of these publishers and developers, saying that these measures are necessary to make these ludicrously expensive and lavish AAA games that all look suspiciously like one another. For the time being, let's accept this as a true statement. If this is, in fact, the state of affairs in the industry, then the industry needs to change to a more sustainable business model. When playing Destiny 2, during a big space cutscene, the cute pilot lady ferrying me to The Large Molerat Man's Murderboat had beautifully rendered skin where you could see the pores and the little wispy cheek hairs that swayed to the momentum of the space plane's movements. It was very nice but then the next year or so I heard nothing but people pointing out "hey this game has no content you dipshits" or "the devteam is actually scamming people with the experience system to wring more playtime out of them". The cheek hairs affair succeeded in making me want the pilot to buy me dinner and regail me with stories of her space adventures as I batted my lashes at her in romantic admiration, but also: stop it. You do not need to do this. This is strictly unnecessary. The graphics arms race of yesteryear is over. Nobody cares anymore. Fidelity is plateauing harder and harder, to the point where games running properly on console without having to settle for 30FPS is becoming very difficult. There is an Earth B somewhere out there where Bloodborne was not a sony exclusive and got a PC release with 60FPS support and loading times for humans and on Earth B I am still playing that game for the forseeable future because it is the best game ever. We are far past the paradigm where we are making Tremendous Graphical Leaps with each successive generation. Right now, as of this writing, games look jawdroppingly good. Just ludicrously pretty and grandiose. Continuing to push the graphical envelope for Every Damn Annual Release is a waste of resources: monetary resources, labor resources, system resources. As of March, 2019, what people really want is stability and functionality. Something that runs nice and smooth at 60FPS and doesn't turn its characters randomly into nightmare inverse-Rayman beasts. I think the huge success of the Nintendo Switch, a console with relatively modest hardware but superb functionality, portability, and a surprisingly full featured library of both massive first party titles, like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey (which honestly look better than a lot of games on more robust hardware because of wonderful art direction) and smaller indie games, is testament to this line of thinking.

Maybe that's too bold of a statement. Maybe there's this huge swath of the gaming public that is just clamoring for more cheek hairs. If there are I think they're fucking out of their minds but who am I to judge. As long as games like that werewolf game The Order exist, where the universal reaction is "this is so pretty!!! ...wait there's nothing in here." I think that there is a serious responsibility to push back against that because evidently it's bankrupting the game industry and forcing them to violate international gambling laws to stay afloat. Except it's fucking not, actually. Many publishers are claiming record profits, upward trends, and are in a spot to have the raw nerve to say "well this game that sold 7 million copies didn't sell 8 million copies so it failed to meet expectations". They are doing ludicrously well for themselves in terms of generating revenue from sales. Where these highly successful corporations are running into problems is satisfying the almighty Shareholders. Shareholders are sort of like. Imagine if you got a job where you had to keep a large committee of actual babies happy, except the babies don't know shit about fuck about anything and demand that you routinely break all reasonable laws of sustainability and keep bringing in exponentially higher profits or they will take their ball and go home. There is still, evidently, money enough to give newly hired executives million dollar signing bonuses, but when it comes to just making a game that doesn't fall back on exploiting people with gambling addictions, we're suddenly dealing with an outfit of noble, longsuffering churchmice just trying to make ends meet. People are rapidly getting fed up with this blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty. Sales from Hearthstone card packs alone could fund a robust HotS esports scene for eternity if properly apportioned. This money is not properly apportioned. It is thrown into a gigantic incinerator so Kotick can get high on the fumes.

You might be wondering what this girls' deal is with Blizzard. Surely there are more egregious offenders? Firstly, Blizzard is very relevant at the moment because they are one of the highest profile publishers to recently Do A Business Oopsie. Secondly, I live in Irvine, California. Blizzard HQ is a ten minute drive from where I live. It's a local company to me, and it's legitimately kind of hard to see it continue to go down this path because I've had friends and neighbors who have worked there and enthusiastically described the experience right up until the very moment they get canned for no reason. My alma mater, UC Irvine, is one of the leading schools in the nation on adopting eSports into their collegiate athlete program. I understand, to a lot of people, Electronic Sports (please support them) are a big joke silly thing, but to me and my family who work in the UC system, they're actually like a huge and pertinent part of professional life. I'm literally being consulted by my mom's co-workers for advice and insight on how to minimize the abusive and toxic behavior that has become synonymous with streaming and professional gaming because campus now has a huge eSports center with rows on rows of gaming computers for students to use. Games Are Big. They are a powerful cultural and economic force in the lives of millions of people and denying that because of "haha nerds" is the same shortsighted, utterly-lacking-in-self-awareness wanking that resulted in the stupendously destructive "its just the internet, it doesnt matter lol" attitude that has caused the world so much grief. That said Bart Simpson becoming an esports legend sponsored by Riot Games is still pretty lame don't @ me.

What it comes down to is this: the games industry has grown into a hugely influential and powerful institution that affects the lives of more and more people every day. However, the appropriate growth in regulation, oversight, and worker protection has not occurred and has honestly shrunk. People love to talk up Satoru Iwata because when the Wii U was floundering he took a massive pay cut and refused to lay off any staff, reasoning that "it will be very difficult for our teams to create software that will impress the world when they are constantly worrying about losing their jobs." It's a little incredible that The Baseline Reasonable Thing To Do has elicited such effusive praise, but that's the world we live in and Iwata-san was pretty alright so I'm okay with it. Both his conduct and reasoning are both solidly above reproach in this case: it is really hard to be creative when the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head! That’s 500% true! This goes for game developers, community managers, eSports staff, support staff, literally every part of the process that matters, even the totally unrelated clerks and communications people who are still completely necessary for creating games. The only people who don't suffer are the dipshits on top who don't actually contribute to the creation of games in any way. They're still fine. Better than fine, really. That's why people are mad. That's why people SHOULD be mad. Don't stand for this anymore.

Fallout 76: What We Know and What We Might Expect to See

Disclaimer: Not about gameplay mechanics (multi vs. singleplayer) but more focused on the lore and world building aspects of what the game could entail

Vault 76 is only mentioned three times in the other iterations of the Fallout series: twice in Fallout 3 (once in the core game and once in the Mothership Zeta dlc) and once in the prologue to Fallout 4. The mention in Fallout 4 is definitely a blink and miss it moment; it occurs in the prologue, where people are generally focusing on the other things going on rather than the news report that’s going on in the background while you’re puttering around the living room. In Mothership Zeta, we hear mention of Vault 76 in a captive recording done by the Zetans. And in the core Fallout 3, we find information on the vault in a Vault-Tec terminal located inside the Citadel. So let’s take a look at what each of these mentions tell us about Vault 76.

Fallout 4: The newscaster’s dialogue can all be found here (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Newscaster). He says that Vault 76 was debuted the previous year in alignment with America’s tercentenary; that is, America’s 300 year anniversary of being a nation. Beyond that, we’re not given much hard info on the Vault. We can assume that it must have been received well due to the continuation of the Vault program and the expansion the newscaster mentions, of more than 100 vaults.

Fallout 3, Mothership Zeta: Honestly, the least helpful mention of Vault 76. In MZ, you can find captive recordings of people (and a cow/brahmin) that the Zetans had abducted. One recording is of Giles Wolstencroft (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Giles_Wolstencroft), an assistant CEO of Vault-Tec. He had been inspecting the construction of Vault 76 when he was abducted. We don’t know if he was alone, as he doesn’t mention anyone being abducted along with him. It will be interesting to see if we get any mention of this guy in Fallout 76 (even if it’s just a small note on a terminal, I’ll be happy tbh).

Fallout 3, Core: As mentioned above, we find the most information about Vault 76 on a Vault-Tec terminal located in the Citadel, which was labelled as a Records Database source. All the information I list can be found here (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Citadel_terminal_entries), about halfway down the page. We can’t see anything about project goals, apparently whoever is logged into the terminal doesn’t have access to that section. However, we are told a few things. The main, most interesting thing is that Vault 76 was meant to function exactly as Vault-Tec advertised: this vault was a control vault. This means no wacky experiments, no weird administrative choices. It was meant to function as a clean, as-advertised vault. It’s listed as a DC area vault yet we don’t see it in Fallout 3 itself (this would support the theory that Vault 76 is located somewhere in the Virginias, ,which would place it close enough to DC to be included in that list). It lists the duration as 240 months (20 years) and it’s total occupancy as 500. This number is quite a bit higher than the other vaults listed in the same terminal but I find that nearly to be expected. As a controlled variable, Vault-Tec would want to make sure there was enough of a population so that any surprises wouldn’t probably affect the whole of the vault. The controlled variable in an experiment is just as important as the variables that were getting treated with the experiment itself: If Vault-Tec didn’t have a baseline to compare to (Vault 76, no experiments done, “normal” development) how were they to know that the reaction of the test subjects (for example, Vault 92 and how the people reacted to the sound experiments) was genuine and not just a “normal” behavior?  

And that’s it. That’s all we really know for sure. The Vault-Tec terminal mentions other things, like running a computer control system called Brainpower 4 (which makes me think of Robobrains, but we’re never really told what Brainpower itself is). This is the lore facts that we currently have for 76 and assuming Bethesda doesn’t mess up its own lore, we can list these as “facts”.

Except we do know of another control vault. Vault 8 (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_8). According to Chris Avellone, who worked on Fallout 2 and New Vegas, released the Fallout Bible, in which he included some behind the scenes information (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Bible_0#Vault_system). While not explicitly stated in Fallout 2, there was meant to be an opportunity to allow you to learn that Vault 8 was intended to be a control vault and open once the all-clear was given. And apparently that all clear would come...after 10 years, not 20. The resulting Vault City did not seem to be ravaged by nuclear waste nor suffer from anything that you could explicitly blame on the close timeline to the bombs dropping.

Suspicions!

Time Frame: the year on the Pipboy is 2102, 25 years after the bombs dropped and 5 years after the doors to Vault 76 were meant to be opened. Not much to say here, really, but will come up later.

Pipboy and Vault Suit: The Pipboy shown in the trailer appears more like the Pipboys from Fallout 1 and 2, aka a  Pipboy 2000.Which actually kind of makes sense. It seems like Vault 76 was one of the earlier vaults to be finished and it’s easy to assume that Vault-Tec went ahead and had the vault stocked with what materials they had at that point. They couldn’t have known when the bombs would fall so they needed the vault to be supplied, just in case. If Vault 76 was stocked before the newer versions of Pipboys were finished, Vault-Tec may not have seen a reason to go back and exchange them for the updated version. The suit also looks more in line with the older vault suits, like in Fallout 3 rather than Fallout 4. This would also stand with the earlier stock being styled differently.

The Party?: Reclamation Day:. Reclamation,definition: the act of claiming something back. It seems fairly straightforward that Reclamation Day would mean the day that the Vault opened and the dwellers were thrown into the Wastes, to reclaim America. But if the year is 2102, the original opening date was 5 years earlier, so perhaps they’re celebrating their (successful?) adventure into the Wastes. Regardless, I feel we can all agree that Reclamation Day is at least referencing their reclaiming of America. The video shown in the teaser is of a man encouraging the dwellers to rebuild, that that will be their duty post-war. Vault 76 was also built and released as the tricentenary celebration of America, it would stand to reason that such a...patriotic inspired vault would be encouraged to be the ones to rebuild America.

Climate/Weather: If the bombs only fell 25 years before the start of the game, you would expect to see the landscape completely irradiated and unlivable. That would depend in part on where the Vault is really located (DC area/Virginias or somewhere else entirely?) and where the nearest bombs fell. Of course, it could be a case similar to Zion Canyon in New Vegas. A super big storm blew/washed out majority of the radiation, leaving Zion Canyon to stay nearly pristine and natural. Could this have happened in the area surrounding Vault 76, perhaps only leaving pockets of extreme irradiation around a mostly livable area? Sure, it’s possible. Likely?....who knows, honestly. The closest thing we can really look at to gain any insight is the Chernobyl incident and how that area has reacted to radiation damage. It’s been roughly 30 years since the incident and for the most part, the area is still unlivable. Yet, this was a small scale accident (though not small scale in terms of loss, of course, it was devastating) and cannot quite compare with total nuclear annihilation. Except, like I mentioned earlier...Vault 8 opened its doors only 10 years after the bombs dropped and seems...fairly livable. They did take their G.E.C.K. from the vault itself to the surface so perhaps that had some influence on the livability of the surrounding ecosystem.

Creatures: I’ll admit, a good bit of this is simply speculation. Being 2102, one creature we may not see at all in Fallout 76...is the super mutant. We only know of three origins of super mutants: the labs within the Institute in the Commonwealth, Vault 87, and the Mariposa Military Base under the Master. The expedition that resulted in the Master’s mutations and his decision to make an army resembling his new form took place in 2102 - just like this teaser trailer-  in California. So we can assume that the Master’s army won't be seen in Fallout 76 simply due to the timeline and distance (assuming Vault 76 is in the Virginias). Likewise, the Institute didn’t restart their FEV experimentation until 2178. The only possible place super mutants could come from during this time frame is Vault 87. Super mutants were leaving the vault in order to find more people to turn into mutants. If Vault 76 is located in the Virginias or the DC area, its possible that the super mutants managed to make their way into that territory, though we can’t be sure that they would travel such a great length. Deathclaws did exist before the Great War and doomsday, but they were then refined by the Master with the FEV. We can’t be sure of their origins, so I wouldn’t be able to say for sure whether or not we could see them. For most of all other creatures (rad-stags, radroachs, etc.) the radiation wouldn’t have instigated mutations that quickly. Radiation doesn’t manifest as mutations in just a decade or two. Evidenced again by Chernobyl, 30 years later and the animals there suffer from lack of fertility, cataracts, and tumors but no known visible mutations as extreme as two heads or extreme size increase. We will probably still see irradiated creatures but probably not those mutated to the point that we’ve seen in all the other games.

Ghouls: Short and simple. Ghoulification can happen in an instant or over many years. Moira Brown in Fallout 3 will ghoulify if you blow up Megaton, which would be instantaneous. Other cases speak about watching their hair fall out, their skin peel off, a growing hunger, and many other side effects. You could go feral right away or stay “sane” and keep your mind. I highly expect that we’ll see ghouls, as their presence would hold up to canon as well as the fact that they’re one of the main figures of the Fallout franchise.

And that’s that! I didn’t do this to figure out if it was a multiplayer survival game or just the Standard Fallout fps rpg. I just wanted to look at the possibilities of what we could see lore wise and world wise. Any ideas? Did I get something wrong? Please feel to reblog, reply, or message me directly!

Even-though it seemed to be the ideal next-generation MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online had a bumpy launch year. Failing to convince both MMORPG as well as Elder Scrolls fans, the title was criticized to be too much of a lone-wolf game, with a lore and world smaller in scale compared to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. What made it worse, was its monthly subscription, which many of the curious people didn’t dared  take the plunge, but now three years later, with a subscription-free model via The Elder Scrolls Online: One Tamriel Unlimited update, the game is has been reborn, and expanded with Bethesda’s first additional “chapter” called Morrowind.

Similar to DLC packs, The Elder Scrolls Online (or TESO) will expand throughout the years with content drops called chapters, and the first one which is Morrowind is priced at $39.99 including the base game (or Vanilla content), adding over thirty hours of story based missions, a new character class and a new raid to name a few. Bethesda hopes that the Vvardenfell Island will be a sufficient call to arm for former TESO players to return to Tamriel, but also attract the nostalgic Elder Scrolls fans of what remains one of the most popular RPGs of the past two decade, and gave its name to this chapter: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind brings us then to the on the island continent of Vvardenfell, and for some of us Elder Scrolls hardcore fans, it is a kind of gigantic slap in the face, with a journey back in time to rediscover the immense city of Vivec or even Balmora and Seyda Neen, which I last seen back when the early 2000s (when HD games weren’t even a thing). It is great to see Bethesda has cared almost to exceed the expectation of the most loyal fan, bringing back everything that has made the charm of Vvardenfell into these modern days: from the singular architecture of the capital to its special flora and fauna (whether they are cute or bound to kill you), but it’s still a new adventure, as the story of The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind is set in the lore 700 years before the event of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

During that period of the Elder Scrolls’ great history, the city of Vivec is still under construction and therefore only resembles a glimpse of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind’s location. Yet, this inconsistency leaves at least in part the opportunity to travel in couple of known terrain that the series’ veterans will appreciate. It is interesting to note that developers still thought of these veterans, by allowing you to create a brand new character that can start its adventure directly in Vvardenfell, without the basic main game tutorial, in exchange for an introduction to the new region. But this island is not all fun, and sadly now populated by an incredibly high number of low-level Guardians at launch, as everybody seems to want to discover at the same time the new zone and our new character class. Too bad that even with a new chapter, The Elder Scrolls Online still feels impersonal and most players have a lone wolf mentality, so I hope that this sensation will last only a few weeks.

If there’s one sensation that should last, it is the impression of taking part of an RPG one discovers at its own pace rather than a MMORPG in the strict sense of the term, a kind of singleplayer adventure led by many players (almost how I felt throughout my journey with Destiny). Of course, guilds, group management and dungeons can be found in the menu of the game, but we feel that more care has been given to the narrative and different scenarios or stories. Thus, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind’s quests propose a real progression, where the main quest is no longer the only one to have a real effect of your choices, which bears sometimes heavy consequences and a succession of objectives that can lead the player on eight or ten missions throughout a region. In this sense, it brings it closer to the roots of The Elder Scrolls, which is dear to many players including myself.

This developers choice risks sadly disappointing fans of traditional MMORPG, those who cherish the interactions between  players and the impression of belonging to something that is bigger than they are, as they once again embody the nature of a savior as a character. From the first missions handed to you by Vivec, the demi-god of the city, one feels that our hero is the last hope of Vvardenfell in the The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, something that will delight RPG fans used to this, but that is something too different from the core concept of an MMORPG. To be honest, this way of playing is not new to The Elder Scrolls Online and at the time of the release of the original game, I’ve already pointed out that problem.

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The Elder Scrolls Online is already recognized for the quality of its missions which regularly avoids the fetch-and-deliver typical tasks known in so many MMORPGs. In The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, the developers took even more care to this aspect, and from the very first moment on Vvardenfell, we learn everything that is at stakes on the island. There’s quests that ask of us to infiltrate traffickers and destroy the next harvest of skooma, or choosing between selling a slave or allowing him to regain his freedom, filled with many conversation and scripts that are well written. I regret, however, that the mechanics of these dialogues have not evolved and that the main story is a bit too often obvious.

On the technical front, while by the 2014 launch the core game not considered a graphical feat, The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind is just decent. Rather than a real graphical redesign, the game retains above all a quality artistic direction with an interesting coherence. The whole is very well supported and Bethesda’s mega-servers have improved significantly over the past three years. I do need to emphasize the fact that there are – as always – a lot of bugs and small connection problem, which sometimes involve random disconnecting in the middle of completing a quest. I’m also really disappointed by the lack of improvement of the user interface, which on PC seems to rely on the work of modders alone, but fortunately, Bethesda did an excellent job of fine-tuning the inventory management and map system.

Some players will be disappointed to see that this first chapter is not as rich in content as they would want. Indeed, Bethesda only introduce one new class of character, known as the Warden. This fifth class, however, seems capable of fulfilling many roles, from the DPS to a healer and even become a tank. It has a triple tree of skills: “Green Balance” is focused on care, “Winter Embrace” is for the tank side of the character and “Animal Companions” is more related to the damage set. In a very short time, some optimization specialists will probably have devised schemes to perfect the Warden, but at the moment I was mostly impressed by the visual impact of the Green Balance skill tree, and It seems more particularly indicated as a group player, potentially becoming the most effective support player.

If you are more of a PVP player, The Elder Scrolls Online’s vast battles are back, and if new players may feel somewhat overwhelmed by the size of Cyrodill (the main area) or by the multitude of ways to approach this type of content, the Morrowind chapter adds new options to its formula. Thought to be faster in terms of gameplay, arena battles pit three teams of four players in smaller enclosed spaces in order to have smaller scale clashes.

Capture de Flag and Team Deatchmatch are the starting offer for this PvP in three specific arenas (Daedra Ruins, Red Mountain and Dunmer Ruins). Players can join the queue via a simple menu within the TESO interface, and will win medals according to their actions, in order to win various rewards. Fluid and intense, these new faster type of confrontation proves to be great after a few games, even if one feels that the overall balance between classes could still need some adjustments to counteract the dominance of some builds.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind was reviewed using an Xbox One downloadable code of the game provided by Bethesda. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 and PC in both retail and online store releases. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

  Since the release of The Elder Scrolls Online, Bethesda has not stopped enhancing its MMORPG and listening to fans. In this sense, The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind perfectly fulfilled the objective set by the studio: an invitation to a journey through time to (re)discover the island of Vvardenfell, which may disappoint the MMORPG purists, but that will delight RPG explorers. Even-though it seemed to be the ideal next-generation MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online had a bumpy launch year.