THE DORN OF A NOO AYJE

Hello fellow kids, let's talk about what's happening on everyone's favourite channel in everyone's least favourite genre.

This week was the end of the OFFICIAL Summer 2018 NLP vote, with podium finishes for Crusader Kings 2, Mount and Blade and TW Attila. With this vote I experimented with having a patron vote at the same time as the regular vote to see the views of the mysterious oligarchs behind the channel. Interestingly, these shadowy figures created a set of results that, barring TW Attila coming first, was in line with my own expectation for how the public vote would go (or perhaps more accurately, how it would go if everyone voting had roughly similar tastes to me, as they rightly should).

I ended up with two somewhat conflicting votes, and after a long period of trying to reconcile them I ended up, almost by accident, just picking the top three things from the public vote. The main thing I needed to reconcile was the fact that while Crusader Kings 2 won the public vote, it did badly on the patron vote, and is held in low esteem by his Imperial Majesty Devin. For most of the last week I was thinking that I would just veto it on account of its potential being too poor, but then I decided to punish the audience by actually going ahead and attempting to create something in Crusader Kings 2 so that they might see how foolish they have truly been. That, and so I can have something on the channel that I can point to for years to come and scream: LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! YOU KNOW NOT THE DARKNESS FOR WHICH YOU PINE, INSOLENT MORTAL - whenever someone asks about making a CK2 NLP (e.g. every 0.472 seconds).

In the end Mount and Blade Warband with a Roman mod has emerged as the true winner, in which I will make some kind of 'in the shadow of Nariko's Treasure'-tier series about a slave's quest across the Roman Empire. Yesterday I planned out a loose structure for how I want to the plot to go, but since I don't know exactly what is possible in the mod I can't be very specific (also it's old and broken and who knows what will actually work).

I need to head in and customise the mod to my tastes: make food barely a concern, and make weapon damage super high for speedy action. Then... play the game? No idea when I'll actually find the time to play it, but I suppose that is required to some degree, right? How do you make game videos again? And... oh god... I suppose I need to 'play' CK2 as well? Don't give me that now, I'm far too stressed...

On that note I was thinking the other day how I could one day make Fridays my official game recording day, in order to transfer some of the actual job of capturing footage into the work week, preserving a bit more free gaming time for playing things just for fun. Right now Fridays are when TIC is filmed, and when I work on my video game dev project.

HEY LETS TALK ABOUT THAT FOR A BIT

So I'm making the best game ever, as you might know already, and it's actually approaching some kind of rounded game-ish shape now. I remember DarrenTW told me that from his time at CA the experience was that the products they were releasing were basically non-existent until the month or two before the release, when it would quickly be put together as all the different strands people worked on during development are combined into something useable. Something similar is happening with Godless Tactics, where the battle system is somewhat done and works, most of the world map is there, and the overall structure of the game/plot is now being implemented to leave, hopefully, a game. Balancing will remain a big task once all is in place, but it's a good place to be at the moment.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, reclassifying recording footage as 'work' in my life-schedule. I'm torn because it isn't REALLY work technically in that it's enjoyable in small doses, but on the other hand(s), so are some aspects of REAL jobs and they still get considered work, and of course among my peers on youtube most LPers use their many fewer worktime/business hours to record the actual gameplay (and then don't do any editing huhuhauhauhahauhauh), SO I suppose I could justify it that way.

Since I only actually work (as in edit, write, record VO) like 25 hours a week, it's not like I have no time. Recording TIC and piddling about on the channel (e.g. replying comments) takes things up to about 30, which is my rough guidline for the amount of time to spend while leaving some time/energy in the week for gamedev. But then when I end up having to play like 5 hours of games in the evenings or weekend it just annoys me. It doesn't sound annoying, granted, but it's one of these weird things that most people don't experience: when you are forced to do something fun, whether you are in the mood or not, it taints the whole thing and makes even doing it for fun worse.

Oh my god guys, am I ever going to stop complaining, even for like 1 goddamn month of blogging? Devin's ideal blog: hey guys I didn't do anything this month but the channel just performed like usual somehow, thanks, I did lots of good cardio and I wrote dark souls fanfiction. Remember to like, comment, and subscribe - oh wait, you already have, nice one guys, ha ha ha ha h ah ahah ah ah ah a!

I suppose the good news is I'm going to not be playing TW for the next couple of series, which will be nice. One TW series at a time is enough for me, certainly. I've enjoying filming Xenonauts for my current abridged commentary series. Generally I think that the abridged format will be where I experiment with more things and try to keep it all fresh and interesting, and eventually I'd even like to transition it into making comfy abridged commentaries of any old game, like something that wouldn't seem to fit the formula at all like Far Cry. Somehow I have a hunch that something strangely enjoyable (and with much wider appeal than my normal videos) could be made.

Getting back to that vote, a lot of people commented or wrote me saying that I should either only include the things that I personally want to do on the votes, or that I should have a system where I pick one thing for myself, then the public picks another. The latter system is sort of what I've done over the last couple of years, e.g. I picked Barbarian Masters, Fields of Mars and Nariko's Treasure, the public picked Sinews of War, The Second Messiah and Honourable Gentlemen, and various abridged series. But yeah, I think that's a decent compromise.

As far making it only things I want to do (e.g. STALKER vs Skyrim vote now!), it's a case of trying to be sensible about things. Ultimately this isn't a hobbyist channel, and what the audience (the market) wants is important to the channel continuing at all. Sure going my own way may eventually lead to me just having a different audience, but the indeterminate transition period would be nasty and demoralising I bet (#Brexit). Keeping that in mind, the views of the audience and of the patrons (whom I literally can't afford to lose), need to get at least equal weighting with my own inspiration, je pense.

Something else that happened this month: Barbarian Masters ended! I was happy to see that the ending was well received, and see lots of people thanking me for the series as a whole, it was all very nice. An unexpected thing was that only 1 commenter noted the intended interpretation of the ending (spoilers here): that the death of Yoshishige and ultimately Tsugutsura was instigated by Nagayori in the background.

There were like 3 or 4 clues that he had deliberately murdered Yoshishige, which accidentally caused the battles that plot-fistedly killed Tsugutsura - he supports Tsugutsura's plan, he visits the geisha just before a geisha apparently kills Yoshishige on someone's request, he says something like "it wasn't meant to go like this" when Tsugutsura is injured, and he expresses he doesn't care about Yoshishige's death (so perhaps wasn't averse to killing him). In the comments some people were confused as to what had truly happened, or thought that Nariko's motivation to kill Yoshishige for revenge was all there was.

I guess what I'm saying here that I thought it would be more obvious that Nagayori was masterminding things, but then again I can't really see the plot presented in a clean, cold fashion and see only what the audience knows, since I know everything already. Who knows what other things I've been dropping into dialogues for background characterisation are just being wasted? For example... did anyone watching Honourable Gentlemen connect the fact that Dorian starts drinking around the same time we learn that he is spying on John for the government? Since they were previously said to be friends, maybe that means he didn't really want to betray him?! The intrigue!

I think these titbits are just momentary things that I throw in for my own amusement that are pretty much invisible to the audience. It's like Dark Souls: its impossible to know what characters are talking about because it's SO unexplained, but if you look all the information up you can see that clues towards that information existed, just never a complete confirmation or what have you.

Speaking of Dark Souls, it must be time for: WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH!

This month I played: Xenonauts, Bus Simulator 18, Hyrule Warriors and Dark Souls. I will now give a few thoughts on each, in the name of high quality blogging content.

XENONAUTS is low budget xcom, based more on the old xcom games I that am too fresh and youthful to have known. Like a certain game later in this list, it suffers right off the bat from giving the player no direction or indication of what to do. The game just begins, with the assumption you've at least read enough about the game to ascertain its genre and the premise: you will be attacked by aliens. From that you can begin to try and use the tools it gives you to prepare, but you'll hit strange roadblocks: if you try to hire troops, nothing happens; there is no indication to show whether research projects are progressing; you can't see any of the alien activity unless it is close to your base; when a fight starts, its hard to tell what counts as being 'in cover'; everything about the seemingly deliberately bad reaction fire system. I'm going to stop now.

(Aside: the game is still well reviewed, and this reminds of of another turn based tactics game, Battle Brothers, which I played for a bit and just got frustrated with how many basic game-design rules it broke. The experience could be fairly-objectively improved so cheaply and easily, and yet people still liked it? TBT has low standards for how enjoyable a game needs to be, clearly, which is great news for my own project!)

The point is, all these problems turn out to make sense if you read a lot about how the mechanics work. From the perspective of the game dev, how things work makes sense. I'm taking this as a cautionary tale or sorts, for things they thought worked fine (or worked in line with some early 90s PC games), are just inexplicable to someone like me expecting modern design quality. NO RESEARCH PROGRESS BAR? LITERALLY WHO MADE THIS TRASHFIRE? Basically the answer is that the game needs a tutorial, and way, way better UI to be user friendly. Once you know how to play it, it works and its fun enough, but I believe that if you didn't look up how to play it somewhere, you'd be really hard pressed to get anywhere. Which reminds me of...

DARK SOULS (not remastered edition) is a hack-and-slash adventure in the 'soulslike' genre, named after this very game due to how influential it was. I will now argue that Dark Souls is trash (and that I continue play after like 40 hours despite this). I've already hinted at the main problem: core mechanics/rules of the game are not explained in the game, and must be discovered by accident (aka the hard, repetitive, ultimately quite boring way).

For example: everything about the humanity-system, esp.the knowledge that humanity is pseudo-finite and where/when you are meant to be human in order to make the game 100 times easier. You can became human at any time, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Every time you do it, that's one fewer time you'll be able to do it throughout the rest of the game, little do you know. And little do you know that if you are human before the difficulty spike that is the Bell Gargoyle boss, there is no spike at all and the game progresses smoothly. Otherwise you are just stuck at the start of the game with no option but to very, very slowly grind to improve your character so that you can win the hard way.

The other major issue is just knowing what you are meant to do. The developers stated somewhere or other that they were deliberately shunning newer design philosophy in order to prioritise "what we think is good" (paraphrasing). They were probably fans of NES games then, because it shares a lot of the problems that were designed-out of gaming from that era: trial and error gameplay loop with lots of repeated sections to extend the game; hidden 'x must be done before y' gating systems that just kill you until you give up or just happen to do x before y; and, of course, balancing designed mostly to steal your money at arcade machines.

The point I want to make is that is that Dark Souls, in a complete void, is nearly-unplayable. I played for about 4 hours before I gave up, knowing not where to go, whether I was expected to grind for souls to level up, whether I needed special weapons to kill certain enemies... just everything that normally would be indicated in some way. THEN I just looked in the guides. Oh right, you're meant to do undead burg first. Oh right there is a door that leads to the intended path here, so you do that rather than the near-impossible thing that's not lead to a dead end yet. Oh you just need to be human and swtiches from nearly impossible to trivially easy here, here and here.

Once you know where you're meant to go, what level ups you're 'meant' to get, and just straight up what the objectives in the game at any given time are, the game is actually pretty good. The combat is basic but fun, and becomes less hard with skill (and much less hard with 'knowing what enemies you're not 'meant' to fight until you've done xyz and got the xyz things'). Exploring the cool world is fun, killing stuff is fun, and if you have a guide to give you a clear picture of what you're meant to achieve at a given point, working towards achieving that is fun. No more of the classic gaming question: is this hard, or is it meant to be impossible to stop me from trying it? Is this the game's way of telling me where to go, or is the hard enemy 'intended' to be beaten with an exploit or AI glitch? (spoiler: yes, so much meta-game design in this thing).

I can't be bothered to rant anymore. Just adopt a few usability upgrades please, game, you're hiding a good thing beneath layers of difficulty-memery and parts that are dreadfully-boring-unless-you-have-a-guide-that-tell-you-how-to-get-to-the-fun-bit.

BUS SIMULATOR 18 is a bus simulator released in 2018. If you don't hit any pedestrians, you'll be fine. It kindly cuts out the most boring bits of bus driving for you (e.g. driving from depot to first stop) but the actual driving is still pretty boring. Taxi missions in GTA V are very similar, but better. I got it for free and made some TIC with it, so I'm happy enough with that!

FUN FACT TIME: at first I was playing the early access version, and your customers often talk about a TV show called Winter of Passion. In the release version they still talk about it, but for some reason all the subtitles have been changed to call it Blizzard of Love, with the VO still saying the old title to add the confusion. What was the rationale behind this last-minute change? Who thought it mattered? Who thought it was worth making the game actually worse by introducing VO-subtitles clashes just to specifically have some in-game TV show have that particular name? There is, undoubtedly, a fascinating tale there.

HYRULE WARRIORS is a hack-and-slash 'warriors' game that is basically Dark Souls with a nicer setting, much bigger movesets and everything runs 10x faster (and it's mostly easier #exceptwhenitisn't#darksoulsoffasterdarksoulsgames). The interesting thing about this game is that the game the developers made afterwards, Fire Emblem Warriors, is functionally similar and uses the exact same engine and overall game design, but they cut a whole load of things from that design to narrow it down to the basic core. In other words, you can do a lot more in HW and there is more variety in just about every aspect of the game. It includes many battle mechanics inspired by Zelda games, whereas FEW doesn't really take fire emblem mechanics and make them big features in a similar way. Why weren't people more outraged by this?

I can't really be bothered to explain, but yeah, this is good. Thanks to Kings and Generals for giving me the giftcard I used to buy it! Oh I will add that I've been playing it coop, and the game is just half as difficult in coop (your offensive power is effectively doubled), it doesn't balance for it at all. So that's nice!

I really need to get on with my pitiful life, so thank for reading this if you did, and I'll see you next month for more ranting, and perhaps insights on the beginning of the new projects on the channel!