this post is just some thoughts on/speculation re: the recent news (the new blog post and the IGN article etc). under a cut for length.

I’m so excited for the official first look at the gameplay!! (ofc) and psyched that it’s happening in early summer as opposed to late summer like August or thereabouts. it feels surreal in a good way that it’s now basically ‘DA:TV Eve’ :D With 15+ minutes of gameplay from the start of the game, we could gain a lot of new information and context such as who the PC is, where the story kicks off and the premise/framing of the story, who the starting companions are, etc.

it surprised me that the name of the game changed, but I like the new title, I think it’s cool and unusual and from dev comments it's not something they decided on a whim or anything. a title change makes sense in the light that Solas isn’t the only focus of the game or the only player on the board – that he’s a key player, but not the heart of it, and the companions are who is being centered. in any event the feel of a title to like say and stuff for me doesn’t affect gameplay or what it’s like interacting with characters etc. I would play this game if it was called Dragon Age: The Quantum Blorbening anyway.

‘The Veilguard’ is the name of our crew of companions, as in a group or faction. (It reminds me of “the Kingsguard”.) Obviously we can see from the name that this group will be involved in protecting and defending the barrier between the Fade and the waking world in some manner. I wonder, will it be a group we form, or a group we join/are recruited into? They must be a fairly recent addition to Thedas. What’s their relation to the Veil Jumpers, if any? Does the existence of the Veilguard imply that the theories that the game will begin with the Veil torn down already aren’t the case? Will the Veilguard always want to protect the Veil during the story, or will there come a point when they re-evaluate that idea? It sounds like they’re always able to take down the new evil threat, but will they always be able (or always want to) to prevent the Veil from being destroyed? also, in-world, who named them The Veilguard?

Maybe our PC’s own ‘title’ (Warden, Hero, Inquisitor, Herald of Andraste, kinda thing) will be Veil Guardian or Guardian of the Veil or something like that..? we obviously won’t be the only veil guard, but while the DA:O PC was ‘the Hero of Ferelden’, in-game they often were referred to in passing simply as Grey Warden or The Warden, despite there being another Warden present (Alistair). When the devs have been talking about The Avengers, I think about that and also get Guardians of the Galaxy kinda vibes. With Varric and Harding’s storyline in DA: The Missing, I wonder if he will be like the Nick Fury (he kind of brought the Avengers together and coordinated them right? Or at least recruited them all, put the team together?), with Harding joining the team itself..? Avengers assemble, form Voltron, etc. with stuff like “you’ll unite this team of unforgettable heroes”, it sounds like the PC (as in previous games) will end up leading the group in some manner, even if they are new to the squad. That reminds me of the HoF. ^^

Somewhere out there in the multiverse, on a different plane, DA4 came out and it was a multiplayer game. it’s good to hear about refocusing on creating a singleplayer game with a focus on characters, choices & decisions, worldbuilding, companionship with characters with their own deep storylines that intersect with the main plot etc, with the customizable hero and the cast of their companions at the center of an SP story. and no online team members, no live service etc.

The world of Thedas itself is still my favorite ‘character’ :D

Warden, Hawke, Inquisitor mention. 🥺

I don’t mind one way or the other about most gameplay specifics. Some of the aspects of combat gameplay (of course, I’m just guessing based on reading some lines in an article atm), like the pausing the action and the ability wheel to give orders, sound like ME: Andromeda gameplay, and Andromeda had good gameplay/combat gameplay that was fun and fluid to play.

One thing I am 😔 about tho is the change of party size from 3 companions to 2. I love Mass Effect and it’s a 3-person squad in that series too (and it works well ofc both in terms of gameplay and dynamics), but I’ll still miss having 3 companions with me in DA :< esp in a game with such a focus on the characters/companions. What can I say, I’m just a blorbo hoarder. I’ll also miss all party members being directly controllable.

I wonder if the 7 companions (seven is a lucky number ^^) will have a class split like 2 warrior/2 rogue/2 mages+1 ‘unique/special’ companion (e.g. Dog, Shale – maybe the flaming head Skellington?) or +1‘extra/secret’ companion or something (e.g. Loghain).

Also, speculatively, being that we’ve never had a qunari woman as a companion before, I hope one is a qunari woman, and since we’ve never had a dwarf woman as a companion before in a ‘main’ game (ily sigrun), I hope one will be a dwarf woman. That also makes me curious about the race and gender split of the 7. Maybe it’s like 2 humans/2 elves/1 qunari/1 dwarf/1 ‘unique or special’ (e.g. Shale)..? Maybe it’s like 3 men/3 women/1 nonbinary person, or the first 6 are a mix of men, women and nonbinary people, and the seventh is something like Dog or a spirit or something?

There were 6 companions in ME1. In DAII, there were 8 in the base game (Seb was DLC), but Bethany/Carver were only around for part of the game. today one of the main things people love most about DAII is its cast of companions. ^^ also, with the way the devs talk about the companions, it's giving "Found Family" trope vibes. that's another thing that people love a lot about DAII. ^^

will it just be the 7 of us, like the crew in DA2? Will it be like in DA:I, where the organization (Inquisition/Veilguard in this case) has main figures/an inner circle, but also commands other people? Or will it be like Mass Effect, where you have a crew which is comprised of companions (in this case 7) who join you on the field as well as a few other developed characters that hang out at ‘home base’? on the number paring down from 9 to 7, I’d rather quality and depth over quantity. In ME2, Kasumi and Zaeed (as DLC) didn’t have proper conversations on the ship. I wonder if “pare down” refers to it being versus the number of companions we had in DA:I, or whether at some point in development of DA:TV there used to be more than 7 companions and some were cut.

each of the 7 companions is from/represents a different faction. For example, while not stated to be a companion in the trailer he was revealed in, it's common speculation that he is, and Davrin is a Grey Warden. Going by the 4 factions Varric and Harding deal with in The Missing, surely 4 of these companion backstory factions in DA:TV are the Grey Wardens, the Antivan Crows, the Veil Jumpers and the Shadow Dragons. And the other 3..? the Lords of Fortune are a new addition to the lore that have also been prominent in recent material. A Grey Warden, an Antivan Crow, and a Veil Jumper walk into a bar.. : ) the composition of The Veilguard is reminding me of Duncan’s words about the Grey Wardens: “Men and women from every race, warriors and mages, barbarians and kings.”

---

some more wild speculation on the 7 factions.

1. Davrin - the Grey Wardens

2. Bellara - ??

3. Harding - Inquisition/Inquisition remnants (I do not think Varric is a companion)

then, based on prominence in previous promo material and The Missing etc -

4. A Lord of Fortune

5. A Veil Jumper (STRIFE PLS!!!)

6. An Antivan Crow

7. A Shadow Dragon

??

or… this prev concept art (bearing in mind it might represent nothing at all except ‘general mood’ & no specific actual characters, or be from a different version of the game before a reboot or before cuts etc, who knows) shows 8 characters. could it be the 7 companions and the Player Character? Skellington Guy (green flaming skull guy) could easily be the (speculative!!) ‘unique/special 7th one’, assuming a 2/2/2 warrior-rogue-mage classbreak down among the other 6 (which is speculation only too ofc). lmk what you think : )

I’m nervous about upsetting or getting the new companions killed already HH.

It’s nice to read how strongly they feel about the new characters and their stories.  

I’m so excited to explore all the regions and varied biomes.

I’m still not clear/sure on whether “you can romance the companions you want” means all 7 companions are bi/pan+, or that there are no non-romanceable companions among the 7 (like no Stens or Varrics), or whether it was more like a general off-hand comment that can’t be read into that much.

I wonder if the Varric-narrated in-game cinematic from 1 year ago plays at the start of the game? Or after we meet Varric?

here is a link to a ramble/speculation about the new logo/icon.

All of Thedas is at risk from a big, scary new threat. As we know, Solas was never the only being interested in the Veil and its removal or destruction. (you can also outline lots of reasons why it should be brought down, like the way the world used to be, elven immortality, the effect on mages/magic etc). it’s also long been theorized that Solas isn’t the main threat/main antagonist in DA4, and maybe more like the Dragon to someone/something else, or a figure like Loghain in DA:O, who you can kill or convince to join you in your fight against the real overarching threat, in that case the Blight. Corypheus broke the Veil in the Red Lyrium future. Demons always want to cross it. the Evanuris are trapped in some way that involves the Veil being in place. Flemythal can never achieve true vengeance while her killers are sleeping or imprisoned somewhere she can’t reach. The Bio25 book says that “The Evil Gods have Thedas in their sights” and that “shadows of the past stir”. It also says that the “Deep Roads teem with evils both new and old”. There are theories about a double Blight. The most recent trailer has someone gushing “Glory to the Risen Gods. They’ve come to deliver this world”. Tevinter Nights hints at fck-knows-what – places and beings, “past the Veil of our world, neither demon nor spirit”, things with chthonic kinda vibes. Etc. a threat being “unleashed” has the implication of someone let something go.. or someone.. let something in... there are also other groups and beings to consider, like the Old Gods, the Forgotten Ones, the Executors.

I thought this phrasing from the IGN article was interesting, though it's not a direct quote from Gary. “Solas, who helped create the Veil, now wants to destroy it.” Helped create? Until now it was more like “Solas created the Veil”. Helped who..? 👁️

The other evil threats/the real threats, these ‘other gods’ (Gary McKay mentions them twice: “it might not just be Solas”, “the Dread Wolf is not the only god” you need be worried about), are surely the upside-down figures in this mural, right? Surely they are the “Evil Gods” (whoever /they/ are) mentioned in the Bio25 book, right? :D

Fin or Bin: Hitman 2

I rejected the privacy policy and, as a result, the game locked me out of all of its live service nonsense. As you can no doubt imagine, I'm heartbroken.

I try not to judge a game based on the business practices of its publisher, however microtransactiony and live-servicey they may be, but this elephant in the room is too large to ignore. Vast swathes of the menus in this entirely single-player game are locked away behind signs saying I cannot play them, because I'm in Offline Mode. That's to be expected of functions like leaderboards, but it won't even let me change my starting position within a level because I'm offline. There is no reason a single-player game should arbitrarily lock parts of itself away because I'm not online. If I install the game to a laptop and then take that laptop to Antarctica, I should be able to play it no differently than I do at home (at least until a leopard seal comes and kills me). Deeply unimpressed and it leaves a big black mark on what could have been a great product.

But lets move on from the crushing reality of modern games development and talk about the game itself!

No one plays these games for the narrative, of course, which is a good thing because it seems to want me to care about the history of a man who quite deliberately is No One. Protagonist Agent 47 is a professional assassin who gets pointed at Target Du Jour and then that target is later found dead. Simple stuff. The mission briefings are actually a lot of fun, very slick editing and cool presentation, with a voice over providing some excuse for the murderings that are about to occur (which I think are actually "we just thought it would be cool to have a race track level and a film set level"). Briefing over, 47 enters the scene, and this is where the game doesn't quite hit home for me.

The Sniper taught me to be efficient. Each level is set up in such a way that there are many different methods to kill the target, and the game actually encourages you to replay missions to find the other ways of achieving your goal. For example, at the race track you can poison the winner's trophy, or sneak into the mechanic's pit and 'accidentally' loosen their wheels so they crash, or add sugar to the fuel so their car blows up; any method that results in a grisly end counts, and all that remains is to exit the scene.

Unfortunately, the game gives me a gun. And while I could engineer a clever setup where the film director gets blown off a building by a wind machine that unfortunately had its safety systems disabled and was then set to a dangerously high speed, I can also just left-click his face and be done with it. There's no mission requirement to 'get away' with it, or make it look accidental, and I think that was a misstep.

I recognise this is absolutely a me problem, and I know a lot of people have fun arranging their dominos just-so. I just feel that narratively-speaking I'm supposed to be a ghost, and the gameplay should enforce that.

Fin or Bin:

Here's a fun thing, the package I bought that included this game didn't actually include the full game- each level is technically a separate DLC, and it gave me all but the last two levels. This game is no longer available for purchase, so I literally cannot finish it. There is fun to be had here, and under the conditions of the blog it's a Fin; it feels like I'm having fun despite the game, but I am having fun.

30 days - 30 ideas

i have so many ideas of little things to include in animal crossing games (new horizons and the future), so i wrote one a day on twitter counting down to new horizons’ release, and i thought i’d compile them all here for easy reading now that the list is complete and new horizons is only hours away. (note that some of these were posted before the direct/other information was released, so they may be a little outdated, but what can you do.) let’s go!

day 30: observatory. (i said little but this is the biggest one.) i want the observatory back. but more: imagine if we could learn about real world stars, planets, and constellations like we do bugs, fish, etc. in the museum. & visiting opposite hemisphere towns would teach more!

day 29: combining villager personalities & essences/natures (pocket camp) to create more varied villagers and dialogue. also species' traits. a peppy, natural bunny (dotty) would be very different from a peppy, cute squirrel (peanut).

day 28: be able to combine certain fish or bugs into one container in your house, so you can have a personal mini aquarium or habitat. also, please let us change the type of container (and give fish more space in theirs so it's not so depressing).

day 27: let us refurbish (almost) all items. i'm willing to give a pass on event/gracie items because they're supposed to be special, but otherwise. i hate having a piece that fits the theme but doesn't match and you can't refurbish. (this includes rugs, flooring, wallpaper.)

day 26: different wrapping papers for presents. the wrapping paper in pocket camp is so cute, much cuter than the yellow sacks we get to buy in new leaf. i'd send so many wrapped presents to my neighbors!

day 25: let us build big pwps/amenities that we and the villagers can interact with. bonus if they're seasonal: an ice skating rink in winter, swimming pool in summer, ferris wheel in the spring... riding a ferris wheel with cherry blossoms blowing? sign me up.

day 24: (another big one) a way to change gender, and a nonbinary gender option. in new leaf, i had a lot of friends stop playing entirely because their avatar no longer matched them after coming out as trans, but they didn't want to delete their whole town, so they felt stuck.

day 23: let villagers catch fish and bugs instead of just perpetually trying with no reward. while it's cute to watch them stalk bugs in the bug off, never seeing them catch any makes me feel sad for them!

day 22: choose held items in dream towns (dream towns better still be a thing). a small detail, but most of my characters carry wands or balloons but can't in dream towns. and when your dream is set on a rainy day, you always default to a red umbrella no matter what.

day 21: sound configuration options. (apparently you can change the volume of kk slider songs playing but i wrote this before that, okay?) not just those, but being able to turn up/down/off hourly music, ambient noises, effects, etc. i'd love to turn up the sound of the ocean!

day 20: SUNFLOWERS. well, new flowers in general, but specifically sunflowers! they're my favorite, and we need tall flowers in the game. plus everyone went wild over the sunflower event in pocket camp.

day 19: more things to do with villagers together. not just going to each other's houses, but inviting to the roost, bug hunting, apple picking, etc. would be SO cute! and that *we* can invite *them*, not just wait for a random ping.

day 18: combine “traditional” events and holidays with wild world events for a fuller calendar. i LOVE the unique wild world events, but taking out toy day, halloween, etc. was also a mistake. the wild world events would fill in those months where major holidays don't happen.

day 17: multiplayer islands to live on with friends. now, nintendo is FAR behind the times with multiplayer, so i don't expect this if ever, but i want it. i want to make a town with my online friends, like a minecraft server. please.

day 16: side jobs. no obligation to do them at a given time or at all, but something extra and fun. working at the roost is a great example, and i'd love to see more: villager home designer, shopkeeper, restaurant chef... these would especially be great later in the game.

day 15: diagonal furniture. please. i like putting things kitty corner and some items, like the basket chair, just don't look right without that.

day 14: let villagers write random posts on the bulletin board again! it was one of my favorite things about wild world.

day 13: more interactive items, for both players and villagers. we've seen villagers reading books and eating ice cream, which is great, but it bothered me that they couldn't play on the jungle gym pwp and stuff!

day 12: let us layer small, tabletop items. PLEASE. clutter looks so much better and realistic when layering is an option, like in the sims.

day 11: remove restrictions on where we can plant palm trees and cedar trees. it never even made sense that cedar trees could only be planted on the top half of the town, but nothing we've seen so far hints at this changing.

day 10: customizable community buildings. one of my favorite parts of happy home designer was designing our own shops, hotel, concert hall, etc. they really made my main street feel unique, especially compared to new leaf's main street where everything's the same (minus unlocks).

day 9: let villagers swim! i want to have cute beach days with my villagers but not if they're stuck on the land.

day 8: ceiling items. please don't take away our ceiling items. we saw a pinata that could potentially be, but that's it (even the hanging plant was converted to a wall item). and, while they were a great addition in HHD, there were very few ceiling items. i'd love a LOT more!

day 7: minigames! at the very least, bring desert island escape back, but i'd love to see much more. a mix of amiibo festival minigames and the one in nintendoland would be great, as well as some new ones. especially if they're multiplayer to play with friends!

day 6: create-a-villager! i don't expect them to be villagers actually in the game, but it could be neat as a little side thing. when hacking new leaf was big, there were a ton of cute and creative fan-made villagers just made with retextures, and i'd love to see more.

day 5: nocturnal villagers and activities. i LOVE nighttime, it's so relaxing, but you also run out of things to do (or, pocket space, if you like nighttime fishing like me). at least residential services will let you sell your fish 24 hours a day, but i'd like a bit more to do.

day 4: something to replace streetpass/the HHA showcase. i loved seeing people's houses, and being able to order from them in new leaf was a nice bonus. i'd love something similar with our friends list, a mix between that and what we had in city folk.

day 3: deeper lore on special NPCs. we have a lot on the able sisters and the nooks, even some on brewster and blathers, but i want to know more about the others! what's pascal's story? we know nothing about him, he just... pops up randomly.

day 2: more weather events/phenomena. red moons, eclipses, blizzards, hail, MOONBOWS... there are so many neat weather things in the world!

day 1 (WE MADE IT!): biome DLC. i've been asking for different terrains/biomes since before happy home designer, where we got to choose those. even though new horizons is set on an island, it's still a standard biome with four equal seasons. i'd LOVE dlc that allows us to make a snowy mountainside home, or a home like the PNW where it mostly rains and snow is uncommon. or a tropical town with sunshine and palm trees abound. bonus if the DLC means we can have more than one town per console. please, i need it.

Day 6 - The Drive Home

Today was the last day of tour. I wake up in the morning feeling guilty because I have a groggy memory of waking up around 8 to go to the bathroom, Paul was waiting to go, but when the person came out I just fronted him (a word I just now remember from elementary school, cut in line, but southern), used the bathroom and went back to bed. Rude. I am wiping the cold from my eye, taking in the undecorated walls of the apartment, and Jeremy comes from down the hall and says ‘Did you get the memo? Louisville cancelled. Tour’s over.” I said ‘fuck’ and processed it. I feel sad for Jeremy and John and Kabir because I know they wanted to play this last show in Kentucky. It’s not that I didn’t, but also for the last three months and for especially the last month I have been feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about this tour, about feeling out-of-control, about being away from loved ones at home, about being available to show up for people in my life, about completing regular routines of hygiene and spirituality and task completion that make me feel boring and comfortable, both. Touring stirs up dredges of the tea leaves that I had let settle into a fine filmy sediment at the bottom of me. I manufactured a jello mold two years ago and poured myself into it: regular 9-5 in the legal field as a means and precursor to law school, then diligent study for 3 years, then a professional career, abandoning the party life, abandoning trespassing in abandoned buildings, abondoning the luxury of resentment and unproductive time, trying to cool and firm into something reliable, serviceable, dependable, available, a resource people could draw from for once, rather than a leech or slug. And when I go on tour I take that jello mold out of the fridge and it holds its shape but also it warms and the longer I’m out the more liquidy it gets and sloshes over the sides and so forth. So I’m ambivalent because I like what I have to offer to this band, I like the physical process of drumming and expressing myself in the context of music and being a member of a band, but also I feel like I’ve kind of chilled enough and it’s time to settle down. And I’m at a way different point in my life than the other guys in the band it seems like, for the most part. So anyways all this to contextualize the fact that the news of tour ending even earlier than early honestly makes me feel relieved, if not happy, and so then I work to temper that boosted mood for the sake of grim decorum befitting a tour taken before its time. 

All our stuff is locked in the venue from last night and we learn we won’t be able to pick it up until 1pm and so we have about 4 hours to kill in the apartment. Phillip puts on a pot of coffee that will turn out to be some of the wateriest on record, but still, a super kind gesture, and then he also puts on The Wire on HBO Go and we just settle in on the couch and watch for awhile. Some of the scenes are familiar, there’s something seductive about this show, and it brings me back to the precise moment of Summer of 2013 right before I moved to Philadelphia right after I got evicted from the squat/music venue I had been living in that winter and spring, I watched all episodes of The Wire on DVD on Matt Martin’s couch at 3 Pomroy and felt deeply depressed. It ranks up there with when I watched all released episodes of The Office in bed in the winter of 2009 after my girlfriend broke up with me, in terms of memorably devestating life phases offset by the amniotic fluid of full-series of TV. So we watch The Wire and I find myself not too inclined to sit and watch and I want to write so I sit at my laptop on the table nearby and write an email to a female (sorry) but I actually do and its purpose is to make her smile and bring some levity and play and purple prose to a moment in her life that, from how she tells it to me, is just so heavy, nightmares and waking horror and a future that feels like it hangs by a thread. so I’m glad to spend time showing up for her in this small way rather than watching The Wire, and also I write yesterday’s blog post, another activity that feels sort of like a pittance but also like: doing-writing is something I have been putting off, in phases and seasons, for my entire adult life, because to me nothing ever matters enough to write about, or if it does my perspective is deficient, or my research inadequate, or my skill incommensurate with the subject matter, or it won’t properly reflect my feelings, or any number of self-sabotaging excuses to not do this thing I so love doing, and love sharing. So for me, writing this blog is a very meaningful and special act of reclamation of a personal mode of expression that constitutes a break in my winter’s depression and what feels like a new phase of happiness, of believing-i-have-a-future, of feeling more authoratative and qualified to know and describe my own experience in a lifetime marred and dampened by dissociation, oblivion, amnesia, and fugue. So it feels like nourishment to get some paragraphs done and to move slow through my days, get them onto the page.

The Wire grows tiresome at some point and Jeremy fires up the PS4 and then the PS3 looking for games but none are multiplayer and so eventually he settles on Skyrim and starts from a new file. Me personally I love watching let’s plays and this is as good as TV. There was a moment last tour when we were in this strange small town in Connecticut called Torrington (the town all touring bands are required to go to, we also joked), in this town Jeremy was describing the sort of surrealness he experienced there and he said he felt like the townspeople in Torrington were like NPCs in a FPS RPG like Skyrim wherein you would go up to people and press A to talk, say ‘What news?” and that I thought was really funny then, I like his sense of humor. Really Kabir and Jeremy and Royal represent this sort of humor that is to me equal parts razor wit, cleverness, timing, accents, absurdity, and broad conceptual placticity, all for the most part very clean too, never or at least rarely blue (you’re gonna inevitably make a D’s nuts joke and that’s just that). And during happy times I am so grateful to be nearby this humor and during less happy times I get self conscious about how great their humor is and how I sometimes feel like I don’t measure up. But that feeling doesn’t weigh for long. Skyrim is fun to watch, it kills some time, we all take turns trying to kill wolves with swords before Jeremy finally does it, there’s a dragon, we loot corpses, discuss Bloodborne and Dark Souls and comparable games. A lot of the main media activity in this group is discussing how a given media relates to another media, Kabir and Jeremy and John know it seems like everything between the three of them when it comes to record labels, band narratives, artist’s hometowns, etc. So we play Skyrim for awhile, and then eventually it’s time to go to the venue and we drive back to The Salty Nut, load in all our gear, do a final sweep, and say our goodbyes and thankyous to Phillip. We return to the Bandido place one last time for one last round of free local Taco Bell which we absolutely scarf and are very vocally grateful to the people for giving it to us for free again, it’s clear they really put effort into being hospitable to touring bands here, at least through Phillip. His band, Thomas Function, was signed on Fat Possum Records, which also had bigger indie acts like Jay Reatard (who Phillip tells a story about him demanding $50,000 in cash for a show fee to feed his coke and heroin habit, Reatard died at age 29 from cocaine toxicity with alcohol also), The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Wavves and Soccer Mommy, but which Kabir postulates has most of its success due to having signed octogenarian southern blues legends like R.L. Burnside and King Ernest and raking in royalties from what Kabir speculates is due to poor management of the estates of these dead leagends who each had more than a dozen children. It’s truly fascinating for me to hear how deep and complex the analysis of music these guys have is. When I feel insecure, which is often, I tend to veneer these sorts of expertises and shibboleths among music-heads as snobby, elitist, exclusionary, petty and asinine. But I think most of that comes from a fear that I lack the insight, cognitive absorbency, and passionate research skills to collate and catalog data about artists in the way these people do, the way my bandmates do. I feel inspired to take time to dig deeper into the musicans I love, to make them real to me, to get a sense of their story, their lived experience, for the sake of corroding the mediation between us somewhat, or at least polishing the media membrane. 

I volunteer to drive for the first half of what will end up being about a 10-hour drive back from Huntsville to Chapel Hill. We go to a Whole Foods in Huntsville upon Kabir’s insistence where I purchase a nootropic snakeoil energy affair in beverage form, Kabir gets hot coffee and a La Colombe Draft can of latte, Jeremy gets a kombucha made from yerba mate (“best of both worlds” he says), John black coffee as per, and Kabir also buys a slice of Tres Leches cake in a clear plastic to-go clamshell: “they can take away my tour, but they can’t take away my tres leches.” Later he’s eating it in the van and he accidentally spills some on himself and he says “shit…spilled some on myself. oh good, it was only one leche” which to me is so funny and perfect humor and just like kind of a paragon of the kind of joke I so treasure from this friend group. Another is when Jeremy and Kabir are recalling a favorite running joke from two tours ago, wherein they were in Philly, home to the famous Schuykill River (pronounced skoo-kill, at least when i lived there, at least around the non-indigenous people i knew), and while there they would affect this blaring Brooklyn accent, deployed heavily on this trip as well for basically any purpose, but back then they would say “UGH MY SKOYKL IS KILLING ME” like Schuykill was lombago or sciatica and also would say “YEAH LET ME GET A KWATA POUND OF SKOYKL ON RYE” like it was a deli meat, and they laughed and laughed. Also they liked doing rhyming jokes like last night there was a chair nearby the combo amp Tired Frontier was going to use for their set and Kabir goes ‘amp on the chair, tone everywhere’ and then I say ‘amp on the ground, makes a bad sound’ and then I tell Jeremy later how Kabir would put me in good spirits whenever I was describing to someone how my LSAT score is very competitive but my checkered past makes the acceptance process a little less than straightforward, and Kabir would see I was getting kinda down and anxious, and he would say ‘You gotta break the law before you make the law,’ and we all laugh and I love that, the function of humor as balm, salve. I want to wield my humor like that.

The drive back is fine, some sprinkles, nothing major, clear traffic for the most part, I feel like I have a good command of the van, keep it around 75 for most of the trip, feel smoth and confident switching lanes, passing, etc. We do another two NYT Wednesday classic crosswords together, Kabir is getting probably 40% of the clues, me maybe 30% Jeremy and John the other 30%, Kabir will just to YEAHHHHHHHH after getting a clue and I start doing that too after Jeremy says “X down, ‘on the table’ 15 letters,” and I say UPFORDISCUSSION after only a couple seconds and it fits and is correct and I feel like a damn genius and we’re all laughing and kind of praising each other half-jokingly for being strong beautiful geniuses who also we know songs. This is a great passtime and the drive flies by and before I know it we’re in Western NC just outside of Asheville and we make a stop to refuel the tank and get dinner. We decide on a Waffle House across the street, not wanting to venture too deep into Asheville for something healthier and better because of the time and money it would likely eat up, Kabir says that FEMA uses the closing of Waffle Houses as a bellweather to indicate the severity of a given natural disaster. We go inside, the waitress says ‘ya’ll aren’t from around here are you?’ in a way that I take to be hostile and I suggest that to the guys and they seem like maybe slightly offput but not very much and we decide not to abort and I later feel foolish because I think I am doing this thing where I become excessively vigilant or sensitive to a perceived slight to a friend who is brown for the putative purpose of interceding on their behalf against racism but what’s actually happening is if someone was racist to them they could just stand up for themselves and make their own call regarding their own comfort or lack thereof and I would do better to act less motivated by white guilt when avoidable. That passes, it’s fine, we eat hash browns and waffles and eggs and grits and toast and cover everything in tobasco and tip well and get back on the road, John takes over for the final stretch. 

I return a call from Marty and catch him up about tour being cancelled and we discuss our fears and hysteria and cancellations and reaction and so forth. Marty remarks that he is a gravedigger during the plague, which is the best possible job to have. It’s not a joke because he actually drives a backhoe working for a cemetary and digs actual graves, super weird and eminently punk/goth and kind of a curiosity but really perfect for the lead singer of one of the South’s premiere punk bands, especially after his being fired from the swish cafe he worked at in Richmond before that. I love Marty and catching up and it feels good to hear his voice. After I get off the phone it sort of becomes campfire spooky story time in the van with everyone proffering their take on the panic, market failure, the likelihood of Capitalism as a superstructure to require perpetual growth even at the peril or death of its working class, the superior response to covid that South Korea and Norway seem to have mounted, a lot of fear of financial insecurity. Eventually this digresses to talk of touring, and the guys discuss all manner of various routes throught the South, Midwest, Northeast, plains states, PNW, Mexico City, Jeremy says ‘I can get us a show in Colombia’ which he can, Argentina or Venezuela through a mutual friend, then Europe so long as the label foots the bill for the plane ticket, then Japan, setting up camp on Honshu would make it easy to hit TOkyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya no problem, except where exactly are people playing shows? there’s gotta be somewhere all these Japanese Noise and Hardcore bands are getting gigs, and then from there of course it’s not hard to get to Australia, John knows a band there, and they go all around the world and this is stressing me out a little bit, only because I wonder about how much they think I would be involved or want to go on such a theoretical tour, and the answer is I don’t 100% know. Part of me wants to say this is my last tour, lean all the way in to law school and leave behind this chapter. Part of me feels like it’s better not to make a hard and fast statement like that because what if the economy collapses and for some reason school is a no-go but being in the band becomes the most plausible source of income or something. I get anxious and psych myself out and quiet down and feel foolish and wish to be home. I fantasize about my future life of stability, but I second guess myself because I just don’t know for sure how my life will be, and want to be careful to work toward the goals I think will be the most fulfilling, self-actualizing, spiritually nourishing, healthy for me; I also want to not forsake the friendships and bonds I’ve forged in these weird intimate moments in the van with the guys. I have the wherewithal to know that nobody is requiring me to make a decision right this second, and that as time passes it’s likely that the best course of action will be revealed one way or another if I can keep from panicking. So I watch videos of the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championships on my phone, eat two candy bars, watch videos of a streamer named Wumbotize play the latest Tetris game, Tetris Effect (2018, PS4, PC), and am pleasantly awed by how crazily far the skill curve of that game has shot up. I have some time ahead of me that is completely free, which is so nice. Before I know it I’m back home in my clean apartment which is tidy like a tetris field at the beginning of a new game and I get into my bed and lay down flat and if my bed is the well than the line of me clears and the well is clean, smooth, primed, for whatever falls tomorrow. 

Weekend Top Ten #463

Top Ten Tweaks I Want to the Series X Experience

I got an Xbox Series X for Christmas. Well, more accurately, I got one on launch day, but for Festive Reasons it remained boxed up till Christmas. Anyway, since then, I’ve been able to play the sexiest of new Xboxes, plugged in to a moderately-fancy 4K TV for the first time too; this is my first proper taste of 4K gaming and certainly the first time I’ve ever played a game at 120fps (it was Star Wars: Squadrons, fact-fans!). So despite the dearth of exclusive content the “next-gen difference” has been very real for me.

I could go on about all the things I like about the console: how fast it is, how quiet, how genuinely aesthetically pleasing I find it when it’s sitting there on the floor, all hard angles and funky green holes (I do genuinely worry about my kids spilling apple juice into its vents however). Playing on the new Xbox is transformative in the sense that things just kinda work; it’s a smooth and painless experience navigating the dash, switching users, booting a game, etc. True, the fact that the dashboard itself is unchanged means it doesn’t jump out at you as being all-singing, all-dancing, but it’s like upgrading a phone or a PC within the same OS ecosystem; what you know, but better. Games look gorgeous in 4K, they run like butter, 120fps gaming is a treat, and HDR is transformative. However, there are a few areas where I feel improvement is needed, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

This post isn’t criticism; for the most part, these are work-in-progress areas of an always-evolving UI and general experience. Like I say, actually playing games on the thing is a joy, and its technical grunt can’t be denied (I’ve not encountered a single performance issue in Cyberpunk 2077, for example, although I have come across some amusing glitches, such as a character doing finger guns throughout an entire shootout, turning a tense combat experience into a scene from Spaced). But as we go forward, taking advantage of the power of the machine (and perhaps moving away from having to support the “old-gen” Xbox One family of consoles), here is a list of tweaks, improvements, and features I’d love to see added to the Series X/S down the road.

Manage Quick Resume: Quick Resume, when it works, is a marvel; jumping instantly to the last moment you were in a game, with virtually no loading. It feels responsive, it feels fast, it feels next gen. When it works. Understanding that there are some games where this isn’t supportable (live service games, for instance), there are too many games where it either doesn’t work right yet, or where it will spontaneously “forget” a Quick Resume. So I’d like it improved and refined. Plus, open too many games in the interim, and your Resume will likewise be “forgotten”. But how many? I dunno. I think it varies. So why can’t we see how many? Give us a Quick Resume button on the dash or in Settings, let’s see how much space is allocated to it, see what games are there, etc. Maybe a warning if one is about to be “pushed out”. Maybe we could pin a game, so it’s always in Quick Resume? Or maybe we could increase or decrease the SSD space allocated to it? Basically, it’s a terrific feature that needs streamlining.

Improved Achievements: back in the 360 era, Achievements were amazing. They really changed how I played games like Crackdown or Gears of War, and there was much friendly rivalry over Gamerscore. Since then, they’ve kinda been forgotten. Finding them now is actually a chore, and the navigation interface is almost non-existent; it’s like Microsoft don’t care. Meanwhile, Sony have overhauled their similar Trophy system, with meta-games and multiple kinds of rewards. Microsoft kinda tried this when the Xbox One launched, with time-limited “Challenges”, but it was a bit of a damp squib. However, they really need to improve Achievements. Give them their own tab on the Guide; make them really easy to view and filter, not just as a social thing, but as a reward all on their own. Use them to track game progress, give us loads of stats about each achievement! Let us pin them to our profile, or have a trophy cabinet of ones we’re most proud of. Make them relevant again, basically.

Improve the App: the Xbox app has had a lot of improvements and refinements recently, but it’s also lost a lot of functionality. There are now at least three Xbox apps anyway – a “normal” one, a Game Pass one, and one that lets you fiddle with Family settings. How about just one that does it all? View your game library, including Game Pass, and let you download and purchase games, as well as play them (I must say, the app is brilliant when it comes to cloud gaming – the touch control layout is really good too). Searching for Games on the Store but not being able to buy them feels a bit weird, and other functionality seems buried in menus. What do I want to do in an Xbox app? In order, probably view achievements, purchase and download games, and see what my friends are up to (oh, and cloud gaming, obvs). It seems weird to me that so much of this is obfuscated or impossible. I do like the ability to download games you don’t own, however (useful for pre-installing a game, especially a disc-based game), and I love the “Rewards” aspect of Game Pass; but it feels the most basic functionality is what’s missing.

Improved Guide Customisation: the Guide has improved a lot during the Xbox One’s lifetime, although I’d argue it’s still not quite the dashboard-in-miniature that you had with the Xbox 360. I like the fact that it’s now customisable, but I’d like it even more if that went further. Yes, some of this is “make it easier/better to view achievements,” but also I’d like to decide which features can be part of the Guide. Jump straight to Netflix, or a particular game? Have my Quick Resume management there? Game Pass? Oh, and make it easier to get into settings; it should be as few button presses as possible. I mean, if they essentially stuff Achievements, Games & Apps, the Store, and Settings in there, I’d be pretty happy.

Better use of Avatars: Avatars are a bit controversial I think; they’ve never been as loved as Nintendo’s Miis, and as time’s gone on their stock as only decreased. But they exist, so why not use them? It’s okay that we can get them as a sort of “live picture” when viewing a friend’s profile, but how about making it into a kind of interactive “room”, showing off Avatar Awards and with our top Achievements framed on the wall? And make more games like Joyride Turbo or A Kingdom for Keflings that make use of Avatars. MS could really do with some kind of party game, Nintendo-style, that incorporates their multiple franchises/characters, and lets you play as your Avatar. But to be honest the thing I think they should do the most is redesign them again. They’re a bit too uncanny valley at the moment; too much details but all smooth and bland, like a CG cartoon character from twenty years ago. Either allow us to make them more gnarled and grotesque like a Sea of Thieves character, or go entirely the other way and make them really stylised, like someone from Ooblets or Untitled Goose Game.

Managing Games from Dashboard: one of the things the PlayStation 5 does that sounds quite cool is the ability to jump to specific points in a game, straight from the dashboard. Whilst I don’t think it would be quite as useful, long-term, as Quick Resume, I do like the idea of “right-clicking” a game and saying “resume last checkpoint” or “go to multiplayer lobby”. At the very least I’d like the option to skip all the launch logos and go straight to the main menu. I’d also like the ability to tinker with aspects of the game right then and there; choose which elements to uninstall, say. This is sort of possible, but although a game like Gears 5 will ask you which bits to install (single-player or multiplayer components, for instance) you don’t appear to be able to uninstall separate sections, at least not from the dash. I’d like to see this implemented system-wide; imagine being able to choose exactly which games – and game modes – to install in Halo: The Master Chief Chronicles, for instance.

Customising the Home Screen: the Xbox isn’t really that customisable, which I think is a bit strange, because I spent a large part of my teens making Windows look really hideous with its vast suite of personalisation options. You can create “Groups” of games and apps, but I’d like it also if you could make your actual Home screen look more you. Instead of (or as well as) recent games, how about pinning one or two biggies? Maybe having folders that expand instead of scrolling down to other lists? Or being able to resize icons? Or how’s about we look up the list a couple of spaces and incorporate our Avatars a bit more, if we so choose?

Simplify Sign-In: I still miss the 360 controller’s little green quadrants; you always knew who you were. Nowadays, because the whole console is tied to a particular account, it can be hard keeping track if there are multiple users signed in, to the point where it’s possible to lose progress or accidentally kick a game from Quick Resume because you weren’t aware that – despite switching user – for some reason the controller was still assigned to someone else (I know it’s possible to sync a controller specifically to one profile but you shouldn’t have to rely on that). Some kind of system-level way of warning or asking who the user “is” – without changing a game’s status – would be nice, as would a permanent on-screen notification visible on the dash. Either that or rejig the controller and bring back the quadrants!

Track Game Usage: the Xbox sort of does this, but like Achievements it feels a bit half-hearted and almost forgotten about. Basically, I like to know the date I started a game, the date I last played it, how long I’ve been at it for… as well as other useless game-specific data such as how many headshots I’ve scored, how many miles I’ve ridden Roach, how many times I’ve chainsawed some dude in two, that kinda thing. They could tie all this in with the “Avatar Home Screen” idea and improved Achievements to allow you to deep-dive how you play on the Xbox!

Share Account Across Family: now most of what I’ve been talking about here as been, essentially, tweaks or redesigns of their UI; features that I’d love to see on the dashboard, either system-level or essentially as new apps. Some of these are more realistic than others, I know; some are probably of interest only to a small proportion of users who share my weird tastes. This last one is more of a re-evaluation of how Xbox views their accounts and their notion of “Family”. Basically, I’d like it if everyone in my family – that is, the four of us who live in this house and use the same Xbox, and who are all joined as an official “Family” according to Microsoft – could share all products and services in perpetuity. This doesn’t seem that unfair; if we were only using disc-based games on a pre-internet console, then there’d be nothing stopping my daughter playing my copy of Forza on another Xbox in another room whilst I’m playing Halo at the same time; or my wife theoretically playing Civ on the PC. Because games are increasingly digital and tied to an account – to say nothing of being playable only through that account’s subscription – it makes it more restrictive. I’d like it if I could install the Game Pass app on a tablet and allow my daughters to play it with their accounts, so I’m essentially sharing the service with them. Similarly, I’d like it if digital purchases could be shared among family members, not just on the “Home” Xbox (in this case my new Series X) but also on the household’s other hardware (my old Xbox One). Could they do this by requiring some kind of online handshake? Or having, I dunno, three consoles designated as a family’s machines? I think all of this may be a bit pie-in-the-sky, but you never know; Microsoft are pushing at the fringes of digital ownership and cloud gaming, so maybe acknowledging that people in a household will want to play all their games everywhere at once might mean that we’ll see some of these features sooner or later.

So there we are; ten things I’d like to see Xbox adopt going forward. As is hopefully evident, none of these are fixing glaring problems, just improving existing features, or adopting new ones that I think would be quite good. But let’s start with that Quick Resume thing, because there really are an awful lot of logos and menus at the beginning of Gears 5.

One final thing: I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve used this gif before. Oh well.

marisathu reblogged your post and added:

umm maybe the first time Joseph had Caesar over?...

Caesar didn’t really know what to expect as he got off the bus at an unfamiliar stop.

He’d known Joseph “Jojo” Joestar, the scrappy, loudmouthed, purple-skinned mutant boy in his grade, for about two months. They’d met when Joseph had punched him in the face for flirting with a cute girl, starting a gritty fight, but the two quickly realized that they both had electricity-based powers, making them immune to each other’s normally invincible attacks. They’d clicked immediately, and quickly became an inseparable- and virtually unstoppable- pair, to the horror of their teachers and classmates who had enough trouble dealing with them individually.

Now, for the first time, Joseph had invited Caesar to hang out at his house after school. Caesar hadn’t had many friends growing up, only the occasional short-lived alliance between delinquents, so to him “hanging out” usually meant loitering in a parking lot somewhere, harassing passerby. He’d never actually been invited to a friend’s house before, so he was a little nervous, yet excitedly curious at the same time.

The brightly colored fall leaves New England was so famous for crunched loudly underneath Caesar’s feet as he followed Joseph. Joseph walked on top of the half-ruined stone wall next to them playfully, never faltering despite all the wobbly stones; Caesar guessed he’d walked on that wall many times before.

“-All the Super Smash Bros. games, and like Mario Kart and Mario Party and Mario Whatever, and Lego Star Wars is really fun too, and I think we have that Crash Bandicoot racing game, and there’s this game called Katamari that’s really weird but it has a multiplayer and-” Joseph rambled on, listing all the multiplayer games they could, potentially, play. Caesar wasn’t really paying attention, and didn’t particularly care which games Joseph had at the moment, but that didn’t stop him from talking anyway.

As they walked, the boys noticed a small figure hunched over in front of the wall up ahead of them. To Caesar’s surprise, Joseph immediately hopped down from the wall and ran towards the stranger. Caesar quickly followed behind him.

“Whatcha doin’?” Joseph asked loudly.

The stranger- who Caesar now saw was a boy with purple skin and a black and gold cap, presumably related to Joseph- stood up and gave Joseph an irritated look. “I was looking at a toad, but you scared it off,” he answered annoyedly.

“Whatever, toads are boring. Anyway, this is my friend Caesar,” Joseph told the boy, gesturing towards Caesar. “Caesar, this is my little brother, Jotaro.”

“Hi,” Caesar said, waving in a friendly manner. Joseph had mentioned Jotaro a few times; From what Caesar could tell, he was shy and nerdy, and Joseph was rather protective of him.

“Hi…” Jotaro said slowly, watching Caesar with a suspicious frown, and both hands in his pockets. He glanced at Joseph questioningly.

“It’s cool, Caesar’s a mutant,” Joseph assured Jotaro.

Jotaro’s eyes widened in surprise. “Really?!” he gasped.

Caesar nodded, grinning. “Check this out.”

With just a thought, Caesar gathered electricity from the cables above them, and formed it into a small orb that hovered above his hand, crackling and flashing and producing a smell of ozone.

“Oh, that’s it?” Jotaro said flatly, his face falling in disappointment.

“Hey, whaddya mean, ‘that’s it’?! People are usually more impressed by that trick, you know!” Caesar exclaimed, feeling insulted.

“I’ve seen stuff like that before,” Jotaro responded with a shrug.

“Let’s go already, I’m starving,” Joseph interrupted, ignoring Caesar’s indignant gasp at Jotaro’s reaction.

“‘Kay,” Jotaro agreed.

Caesar continued to grumble in irritation, but quieted down once they evidently reached the house.

The Joestar house was large, though not unusually so for the neighborhood, with a spacious yard. It was a fairly typical style for the area, and looked to be fairly modern, but at least 20 years old. The lawn was freshly cut, with hydrangea bushes flanking the front steps. Caesar followed Joseph as he pushed open the heavy front door.

“We’re home!” Joseph and Jotaro called out in unison, and took off their shoes, placing them in a plastic tray near the door. As they entered the main house, Joseph suddenly stopped Caesar.

“Dude, aren’t you going to take your shoes off?” he said, looking at Caesar as if he had just done something rude.

“Oh, uh… Right,” Caesar replied awkwardly, feeling slightly confused, but nonetheless took his shoes off and placed them in the tray.

As they passed the living room, Caesar and Joseph (Jotaro had gone on ahead without them) were greeted by a middle-aged woman with bleached blonde hair and a kind smile.

“How was your- Oh! You brought a friend?” she exclaimed in surprise. She spoke with an accent, though Caesar wasn’t sure which.

“This is Caesar,” Joseph explained.

The woman, who Caesar assumed was Joseph’s mom, smiled brightly at Caesar. “It’s nice to meet you, Caesar! Will you be staying for dinner?”

“Uh…” Caesar hadn’t considered this possibility. He wasn’t sure what to say. On one hand, the concept of dinner was very enticing, but the idea of eating dinner with Joseph’s family he’d only just met also sounded somewhat… uncomfortable.

Joseph’s mom seemed to sense Caesar’s uncertainty. “It’s alright, you can decide later. No pressure,” she assured him.

“Forget dinner, I’m hungry now,” Joseph complained. “Let’s go get a snack.”

Caesar followed Joseph into the kitchen, where they were met with yet another member of Joseph’s family: one of the largest people Caesar had ever seen in his entire life, sitting at the kitchen island eating a sandwich.

“Hi Joseph! Who’s your friend?”

“His name’s Caesar,” Joseph answered, introducing Caesar for the third time that day.

The extremely large young man smiled in a way that reminded Caesar of Joseph’s mom. “Nice to meet you, Caesar! I’m Jonathan, Joseph’s older brother,” he said cheerfully, while Joseph began pouring two extremely large bowls of Fruity Pebbles.

“N-nice to meet you,” Caesar stammered, still slightly in awe of Jonathan, who he was certain had to be a pro wrestler in disguise and not a high schooler.

“C’mon, let’s go hang out in my room,” Joseph told Caesar, nodding towards the doorway as he carried the two precariously-filled bowls of cereal. Caesar followed behind him.

“Dude, your brother’s fucking huge,” Caesar exclaimed as soon as they were out of earshot of the kitchen.

Joseph laughed. “Yeah, he hits his head on things all the time! It’s pretty funny. Wonder if I’ll be as big as him when I’m 17,” he added thoughtfully.

“You are pretty tall, but…” Caesar trailed off, finding it hard to imagine Joseph being that giant.

Joseph led Caesar up the stairs and down the hall, and kicked open one of the doors to reveal a mess of a room, with comic books, toys, and laundry scattered everywhere, and walls plastered with band posters. Once inside, Joseph shoved some things unceremoniously off the desk, and put down the bowls of cereal.

“So I had this really great idea the other day,” Joseph began, speaking through a mouthful of Fruity Pebbles.

“What is it?” Caesar asked curiously.

“Hold on, I’ll show you in a minute. Gotta find it first,” Joseph replied. He began searching the room for something, looking under piles of stuff, in boxes, under the bed, and under piles of laundry before finally finding what he was looking for inside one of the desk drawers. He tossed a small plastic bag containing a variety of colorful rubber bands into Caesar’s hands.

“I figured out that I can use electricity to melt silly bands,” Joseph said with a mischievous, giddy smile. “I was thinking, we could fuse ‘em together and make like, fucked up Animorphs silly bands, and then sell them at school,” he explained enthusiastically.

“Woah, that’s pretty cool,” Caesar agreed, examining a misshapen outline of what appeared to be Spider-Man’s torso stuck on top of a t-rex body. “Think we could really make a profit, though? I mean we’d have to buy twice the silly bands, I dunno if people would be willing to pay that much,” he pointed out.

“Oh yeah, I didn’t think about that…” Joseph admitted, frowning in disappointment.

“Here’s a better idea: what if we just offered to fuse other people’s bands, and charged a service fee? Then we wouldn’t lose anything,” Caesar suggested.

Joseph gasped. “Bro, you’re a genius!”

“I know,” Caesar replied smugly. “Now let’s get making some examples!”

“Hell yeah!”

Ace of Space - Lo2k

For this week's mod author interview, we're joined by [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/users/87374]Lo2k[/url], who has been a member of our community since 2006 and is the author of over 50 different mods for No Man's Sky. [b]Thank you for joining us Lo2k. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [/b] Thanks for inviting me for this interview on Nexus Mods. Sure. I'm Laurent Rousseau, aka Lo2k. I'm French and I live close to Paris. I'm repairing multi-function printers for a living and it provides me with quite a lot of challenges. I always wanted to create video games but heh, when I was younger, video games were "not a job" as I was told so often and I was far from the creative guys posting impressive portfolios of 3D animations to be hired. So I did 3D creations on my own, 2D editing, a bit of video editing, and finally, I dove deep into coding and I believe all of this helped me in some way to become a modder. [b]How did you first get into gaming?  [/b] Gaming in general, or modding? For gaming, I can't remember the very first time. My dad was the manager of a Xerox Store, selling the very first Apple computers well before the Apple Stores even existed. So I had a Mac SE for a long time at home and a bunch of games, even if the mac has never been a gaming platform. But at that time, PC gaming was not yet a big thing either, so I played the very first iterations of [url=https://macintoshgarden.org/games/crazy-cars]Crazy Cars[/url], [url=https://macintoshgarden.org/games/dark-castle]Dark Castle[/url] and [url=https://macintoshgarden.org/games/lode-runner]Lode Runner[/url] in black and white. At his store, there was also Amstrad 6128 and 464, so I also played some colourful oldies like the very first Gauntlet. That was another era… Concerning modding, the story will be shorter. It really started in 2002 with the release of Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 4 also known as GP4. As an F1 fan, I played GP3 a lot and saw the modding community growing. When GP4 was released, I had quite a lot of spare time so I started to look at it from the modding side and I learnt to code at the same time. This eventually lead me to create a lot of tools for this game, including a full track editor called GP4 Builder, and they are still in use today in the GP4 community.  I left the GP4 community in 2016 after 12 "years of service" and started to look for new challenges and hobbies. Amongst them were a mobile game project and a new game I just bought and I was loving but that has a lot of tiny things that were annoying me and I would like to fix to enjoy the game even more: No Man's Sky. [center][img width=500,height=281]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1569505480-712287964.jpeg[/img] [img width=500,height=281]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1569505475-260020764.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]From our conversations, you seem to really like No Man's Sky, what is about the game that draws you in? [/b] Well, NMS was sold (mark my words) to be the best retro-sci-fi experience a boy (or girl) could have ever dreamt for. And I had this young boy vibe for colourful sci-fi worlds, travelling into a galaxy full of stars and planets, discovering new ships, new wonders, exploring hundreds of planets, each with a diversity of trees, plants and creatures we had never seen before. That was appealing, to say the least. [b]The game had quite a negative reception when it was first released but Hello Games has managed to turn it around with the NEXT and Beyond updates. Have these changes influenced your opinion of the game? [/b] Well, maybe, but not in the way you might think about, because for me the game has never been a complete deception. I was awaiting a solo game that lets me explore a universe alone. And that is what was released. We can argue on diversity, on bugs, on creature animations and a million other stuff but the core feature was here for me. Since then, each update has brought something to the game. Each one making the game a bit stronger. We got base building, we got vehicles, we got new biomes, we got freighters and then frigates, we got an attempt at multiplayer and with latest Beyond release, we got a full multiplayer experience, we got VR and changes everywhere. I'm very pleased with that and I believe everyone is. But on the other hand, I'm a bit worried about the latest changes from NEXT and Beyond. Multiplayer is not my thing and while I'm glad they brought it to the game for all the fans that dreamt playing this game with/against other players, I just hope Hello Games will continue to give us a way to play this game solo. Sadly this is less and less the case. To give a single example: The anomaly, the tiny and almost claustrophobic shelter of 2 outlaws has become a massive nexus with tons of NPC and land pads. It makes sense from a multiplayer point of view but it is complete nonsense if you play the game solo. In my humble opinion, Space Stations would have been a better choice for a multiplayer HUD. Polo and Nada would still have their tiny station and everyone would enjoy the game either in Solo or MP. Nevermind… Also, the Vulkan switch they opted for just before Beyond release and that is supposed to improve framerate had an unintended side-effect which removed all the shaders from the modding scene and most of the graphical fixes and enhancements mods for NMS were done via shaders. I could cite my [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/686]UltraWide HUD[/url] mod that was bringing an unstretched HUD experience for all non-16/9 monitors NMS players. It's quite sad because not only this feature was never released for the game but now they even broke the mod that could fix it for them. Anyway, I can't blame HG because I have huge respect for all they have accomplished for NMS, from the initial development, flooding, Sony pressure, bad release and devoted commitment for years up to this day. So all in all, yeah, we have great new things in the latest updates and a few little niggly things. And I hope we will continue to see more improvements than niggly things. [b]No Man's Sky features a lot of procedural generation, would you say this makes it difficult to mod?  [/b] It depends on what you want to mod. NMS is, from the different games I looked into for modding, the one that exposes the most settings to modders. Every big or small setting is available to editing, either via a simple text file or via textures and there's not much stuff that is fully written in the stone of the EXE file. So we can't add many features to the game if they were not designed by Hello Games, but we can tweak almost all of the existing features. Even procedural generation is based on settings, like turbulence, noise, scales, roughness... a lot of them are exposed and are used by modders as [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/users/44146502]Redmas[/url] or [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/users/37637030]Rayrod[/url] who both provide complete overhauls of planet generation. NPC, ships and creature generation on the other side makes them difficult to mod at this time. But modders find their way. Redmas rebalanced scales of the different parts of ships and vehicles to bring more variety to them for example. [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/users/2666883]WinderTP[/url] replaced the shuttle class with ships from their favourite Sci-fi movies in [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/1064]Ships of Moar[/url].  Buildings use an L-system I still haven't looked in deep, but which creates tiny changes in the arrangement of each building interior, even if the scale of the changes is not as noticeable as it might be. All in all, procedural generation is tough and Sean Murray did a humongous work on terrain generation. There's still room for improvements to create a larger diversity everywhere else, but it might be their focus for the next or the next, next update. [center][img width=500,height=281]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1569505472-294894533.jpeg[/img] [img width=500,height=281]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1569505477-29879829.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]What tools do you use when working on mods? [/b] Actually, the only tools really needed are an archive extractor like Periander's [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/19]PSArc[/url] to decompress all the game files that are stored in ".pak" files and [url=https://github.com/monkeyman192/MBINCompiler/releases]Monkeyman's MBINCompiler[/url] that could convert the binary ".mbin" files into ".exml" (text) files and the reverse. From here, you can use your favourite text editor and texture editor (with a DXT plugin as textures use the DirectX format). On my side, coming from GP4 where all the files were in the binary form like the ".mbin" of NMS, I also use a hexadecimal editor when I need. It's of great use to compare changes or to quickly update some mods when a very few values have been changed after a new update. [b]Have you ever made any mods for other games (or thought about doing so)? [/b] Not really, I mostly made some tools for Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 4 as I described above. I don't know if you count them as mods as tools aren't really mods but they allow others to create mods with them. I also helped in improving some tracks and textures back then nonetheless. I also looked around Cities Skyline modding community as I love this game too and would have loved to bring some improvements here and there but the framework is completely opaque to me so I play the game within its restrictions and the great mods already published by more talented modders than me like [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1619685021]Move-it[/url] and [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1312767991]Transport Lines Manager[/url]. [b]Do you have any tips and tricks to share with others who might want to start modding No Man's Sky?  [/b] Hmm, not really. The first advice is to come on the [url=https://discord.gg/22ZAU9H]No Man's Sky Modding Discord[/url] where most of the modders are discussing. A newcomer will most likely ever have an answer to his questions. There's also the [url=https://nmsmodding.fandom.com/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky_Modding_Wiki]modding wiki[/url] that provides a good overview of most of the common knowledge about NMS modding. My own advice to someone who would like to start modding NMS would be for him to unpack the files, look at the way files are stored into folders and the file names. Then convert the most expressive ones in mbincompiler and browse the list of settings until you find a value that could bring a change you would like to see in-game. Then recompile the mbin, repack and test your first mod. See your change in-game and check if everything is as you expected. If not repeat until satisfaction. Modding is a trial and error game of his own. A great one though :) [b]What are your favourite mods for No Man's Sky by other authors?  [/b] I browse Nexusmods every day so I see about every mod released, but I personally use very few mods from other authors in my own game (Having 60+ mods on my own already covers a wide range of improvements). The only mods I can't play without are: [list] [*]Riccaforte's [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/324]RemoveIntroLogo[/url] which is one of the very first mods released for the game and that is still working today!  [*][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/mods/623]Clean Space[/url] version to remove the kaleidoscopic speed lines at each pulse drive. [*]I also loved [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/15594199]LawnReality[/url]'s Crescent Worlds but it sadly can't be used anymore as it was a shader-based mod. [/list] [b]Is there anything else you'd like to say to the Nexus Mods Community.  [/b] Well, Nexus Mods has grown a lot and now hosts probably hundreds of communities so I'm not sure what part of NexusMods audience is also interested in NMS. But if they haven't tried the game so far and would like a space sandbox game, where you start at alone and end your journey with several ships, bases, a massive fleet and a better knowledge of an imaginary universe, they might want to try NMS :) [center][url=https://www.gog.com/game/no_mans_sky?pp=a120fe5cad51f0d0942d7c283478628047d6cfce][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1569506614-220646325.jpeg[/img] Get 50% off No Man's Sky at GOG.com until 30/09/19![/url][/center] [line] A big thank you to [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/nomanssky/users/87374]Lo2k[/url] for taking the time to respond to our questions. As always, if there are any mod authors or mod projects you'd like to hear about, don't hesitate to send a message to [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/31179975]Pickysaurus[/url] and [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/64597]BigBizkit[/url]. Published first at Ace of Space - Lo2k

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT CODE

The danger is to companies in the batch, so we started giving version numbers to our software too. And yet a surprising number of founders in the same way that all you have to create a silicon valley in Germany, because you have to make in your head. Unless you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific industry, you may be arguing with a straw man. At other Y Combinator events we allow outside guests, but not identical. You don't, really. Going upstairs his bulk will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code. Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses.

Was Amazon supposed to say no. This essay is about only one of us so far and no word yet for what we are. When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually modify it, but those they ignore as undignified. When a piece of software—in fact, that would be the first to say yes or no, and then I can start my own? But you shouldn't automatically get demoralized either. However high a startup may completely redefine their idea. In pre-industrial times, they were the keepers of the knowledge of vaguer, buglike things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of their lives.

After four years of trying to be a tradition of startups taking VC money you hire a sales force to sell it to the production servers was two weeks. So I don't think it is the Internet gives us more choices. Or rather, what used to be for multiplayer games. Ever notice how much easier it is to redefine the problem to make them easy to learn. Valuation is at best third. I know delivering a prewritten talk your attention is always divided between the audience and the talk—even if they had bad judgement, but modern parents want their children to swear, then make up the difference with attentiveness. Though she'd heard a lot about VCs during the 3 years we've been doing Y Combinator, we planned to invest the way other venture firms do: as proposals came in, we'd evaluate them and decide yes or no within 24 hours, they'd get access to the same forces. When we started Artix, I see a more exaggerated version of the death penalty, one assumes, but how can you say that now?

People would order it because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one—that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge. Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in deals that come to mind begin with F. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should probably choose the other. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were talking to a friend who tells you how much an employee contributed to the wave of hostile takeovers in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, partly because it gives them more control. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this predisposition is not itself intelligence. Why not in business? You can see this most clearly in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or mutual funds. All they're tasting is the peppers. But when Verisign sends me email offering a FREE Guide to Building My E-Commerce Web Site, that's spam. People sometimes think they could improve the startup scene in their town by starting something like Y Combinator, and it was about 300/month. Not only does a society get the best man for the job.

But if you do add that final increment of power, you can afford to let the days rush by. In particular, new things. In the times when books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of each. If investors were perfect judges, the two senses in which one could charge for smells. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of the process. I was very aware, because of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect. Lisp probably expected users to want to be able to answer the question on the application. What is going on.

They're determined by VCs starting from the amount the structure of business doesn't reflect it. What would Sama do? Suppose a Y Combinator company starts talking to VCs. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. And then of course it seems that it should be helpful to anyone who wanted to get lots of attention. I read the papers I found out why. Ideally, no one would invest in a company with a lot of languages are pervaded by this spirit.

After all those years you get used to it. 027040077 quite 0. So I advise fatalism. It's more like saying I'm not going to change something, what would it be? The best of these explorations are sometimes more pleasing than stuff made explicitly to please. Us tax rates, federal power, defense spending, conscription, and nationalism the decades after the war looked more like wartime than prewar peacetime. The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley, where you write programs in multiple layers, the lower-tier VC firms welching on deals. Possibly not. We know who one another are both artificially amplified. I'm not saying spoken language always works best. Ideally you want to, only the desperate ones will take your money.

Notes

Though most founders start out excited about the other hand, they are in a time machine, how little autonomy one would have seemed an outlying data point that could be made. And maybe we should remember this when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a high school, and a little about how closely the remarks attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC while working on your way. Most word problems in school, and b the second type to go away, and FreeBSD 1.

39 says that clothing brands favored by urban youth do not do this all the red counties. To be fair, the first meeting. I talked to a woman who, because despite some progress in the sciences, even to inexperienced founders should avoid. In sufficiently disordered times, even though it's a problem can be done at a 5 million cap.

Could you endure studying literary theory, or one near the door. They would have been about 2, etc. In retrospect, we don't want to create wealth with no business experience to start a startup, you should be designed to express algorithms, and philosophy the imprecise half. Usually people skirt that issue with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while everyone else microscopically poorer, by decreasing the difference between good and bad technological progress, however unnatural it seems unlikely that religion will be a problem so far.

Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you really want, like a later Demo Day or die. It's to make a conscious effort to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day.

Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970.

It was also the highest returns, but I know it didn't to undergraduates on the basis of intelligence.

The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably a cause as it needs to learn.

Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost that none of your new microcomputer causes someone to do right.

There is no external source they can get done before that. If spammers get good grades in them, initially, to pretend that the main reason is that the VCs want it.

Wisdom is just the kind of work is merely a subset of Facebook; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. Org Worrying that Y Combinator.

Hello!! Thank you so much for all the info and theories you post, they are so useful ; v ; I was wondering what you think about people's fears about DA4's nature - some think it may be a MMO due to the way it's been described. We know Bioware was about to make a MMO Dragon Age before changing their minds and making Inquisition a RPG (although some MMO elements can be seen in the game). What do you think about it? D:

Hello! Oh you’re welcome! This answer is under a cut due to length.

There’s some recent posts about this topic you might be interested in here and here, in terms of your question. I hope for a singleplayer RPG. At the moment that’s pretty much what I assume they’re making (a singleplayer RPG with some live service elements), as singleplayer story-driven RP gaming is the core of the franchise and what makes it what it is. I also basically feel like there’s not enough known about the game at the moment to be able to say ‘this is a hint or an indication towards [x] or [y]’. We talk a lot about it, but little is known and official descriptions of the game are sparse. (For me at least, the day when the metaphorical ‘floodgates’ finally open will be (╯✧∇✧)╯exciting.) It can also be hard to parse misinformation and what is vs what isn’t natural worry coloring our interpretations of things.

(SW:TOR anyway is pretty darn good, and I hear ESO’s pretty decent too.)

I’m not sure that BW were going to make DAI an MMO before changing their minds and deciding to make DAI an RPG. Are you maybe thinking of Blackfoot and DAI’s subsequent, but separate, troubled development? As the bulk of the team were finishing up DA2, Mark Darrah assembled a small group to work on a prototype that they called Blackfoot. The two major goals of Blackfoot were to get a feel for the Frostbite engine and to make a free-to-play multiplayer game set in the Dragon Age universe. The second goal ended up never happening, and after a few months the prototype fizzled. Darrah said that it wasn’t making enough progress, ultimately because its team was too small (Frostbite is a hard engine to make progress with if your team’s too small, it takes a certain amount of people just to keep it going). 

It was by the end of 2011, when both Blackfoot and Exalted March were cancelled, that Mark had a substantial team available to start working on the next big game. This is when they resurfaced the Inquisition storybeats idea and began talking about what a Dragon Age 3 might look like on Frostbite. By the end of 2012 they had a plan, which was that DA3 would be an open-world RPG heavily inspired by the likes of Skyrim. So DAI was a singleplayer RPG from its outset. The MMO-like elements to the game are instead a consequence of the game’s long and troubled/strained development; it was the most ambitious game BioWare had ever made at the time, it was their first ever 3D open world game, it was behind schedule early, they were grappling with unfamiliar new technology, the Frostbite engine was very technically challenging and had never been used to make an RPG before, they initially underestimated how much work Frostbite would be, EA insisted they ship on both current and next-gen consoles due to their profit forecasters, the game was delayed, there was no proper preproduction phase, the shadow of DA2 caused some insecurity and uncertainty, leads were stretched thin, the old consoles were limiting, there was a lot of crunch with its associated effects like on mental health and lengths of days worked, there were loads of bugs they had to fix, etc.

“Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did. With tools that don’t exist.”

The engine was however great for making big beautiful environments:

For months they made as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn’t know yet what the designers needed. “For a long time there was a joke on the project that we’d made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures.”

The concept of DAI as an open-world game though was stymying the story team and gameplay design teams:

What were players going to do in these big landscapes? How could BioWare ensure exploring remained fun after many hours? Their teams didn’t have time for system designers to envision, iterate and test a good “core gameplay loop” (quests, encounters, activities etc). Frostbite wouldn’t allow it. Designers couldn’t test new ideas or answer questions because basic features were missing or didn’t exist yet.

&

BioWare had an abstract idea that the player would roam the world solving problems and building up power or influence they could use. But how would that look/work like in-game? This could have used refinement and testing but instead they decided to build some levels and hope they could figure it out as they went.

The MMO-like/MMO-feeling elements in the game, like big fairly empty but pretty maps with a lot of fetch-quest-feeling sidequests and stuff, are there because of these problems and factors. Hope this makes sense! 😊 This information btw comes from the DAI chapter in Jason Schreier’s book, Blood, Sweat and Pixels.