We stand on the cusp of history, for between now and the next blog, I will have started two new narrative series! Not just any two either - two series that are both different to the usual style, and very much chosen and masterminded by me, the famous Devin. It will be the first time in... like... 6 years(?!) that I haven't been making a total war NLP - in fact, these two aren't going to be 'LP' at all! Hail the new series format: N!
The two series in question will be a short Frostpunk narrative, and a probably quite long Kenshi narrative. For both I'll be using the format I tried out in my CK2 series, The Promised Crown - that being an entirely prosey presentation. It's just straight up, barely disguised fan fiction, and I enjoyed making that much more than the usual stuff back then. Hopefully doing a whole load of it for two additional series will let me have fun with the writing, and be less fussed with the much more boring gameplay editing and commentary.
Regarding Frostpunk, I'll be writing essentially an expanded version of the main story, which attempts to provide back and fore-story to the game's rough plot, and deals with some of the more enormous plot holes / missing elements, such as, "What the hell is this giant stove doing in a crater in an unspecified location 'north' of Britain?", "Why is everyone not dead walking around outside in -70 degree cold?", and "Why does this Victorian society literally have general artificial intelligence and why don't they use it very much?". Should probably try and mention why the whole frost thing is happening too,
The game is quite short so it likely won't be a long series. I played about 1/3rd of the game last night actually, but things are currently going so extremely well that I might go back and play it again on higher difficulty so there is more going on in the city. Having any foreknowledge of what buildings to make gives you quite the advantage, it turns out. I was hoping to get some children killed in the mines etc. but as it stands half the city is unemployed and resources are maxed out, with robots doing all the work, and it's still only -40. You might think that would still be the basis for a relatively interesting tale, but WHERE ARE MY CRYING MOTHERS?! I dunno, guess I'll play a little more to see if it all goes wrong, and if not I can still try again thanks to the shortness of the game.
Now Kenshi will be a very different affair. The game is a sandbox RPG in a world that is very uninhabitable, with very ugly and boring landscapes, hostile populations, and grindy gameplay. At first, I absolutely hated it. It's a game that many people had told me was perfect for making a narrative, but I couldn't really see why.
The player character is a man-child with no abilities, left to wander the unforgivingly brown world, where even the remorseful-yet-unrepentantly brown settlements aren't safe. There's nothing 'to do', strictly speaking, other than mine resources in the wastes and sell them at a bar. This is extremely slow, but if you speed up the gametime, ten bandits will attack you while you're blinking and that's game over. Figured you could join mercenary companies or established factions, or maybe just start with more than 1 melee defence so you can not die when a starving vagrant with no legs slaps at your shins as you walk past (this sounds like a Yahzee-esque exaggeration, but that really can happen). Well, you CAN, but it's just not the sort of game that would ever let you know that.
On top of horrid performance, crashes, and the UI not scaling to 1080p correctly, I ragequit, but I went online to try and look up what you're actually meant to do. Well the answer was: exploits. The official opening game strategy is to hope that town guards kill some monsters near the gates, then you run out and loot the bodies. That you can get cash, start hiring party members, buying gear etc., and gradually build up a base with training equipment to become an adventurer more able to set foot in the world.
I also saw several people complaining that people 'didn't get' the game, saying that it's more about the roleplay that the game itself. I think that they are right! The game has a lot of content and stuff to do, but it's so difficult to find it, and presented with such below-average quality, you need to have your own personal motivation to play far enough in the game to start enjoying it. And then it's one of those things there being able to do stuff later feels liberating because of how downtrodden it felt to play the early game. In other words: you make your own adventure, and have faith that the start is the worst part.
To mitigate this early game morose issue, I looked into making a wee mod for myself that starts the player in a favourable position. You can already choose to start with a large party of characters to make the game easier, but for the narrative I had in mind to work, I needed to start with just 2, but also with plenty of money and scope to recruit more. I ended up making a start position that is the disowned son of a rich Emperor, with his trusty assistant, living in a safe, heavily guarded city. Both characters have some basic stats, so I didn't have to go down the whole 'training' route before I could adventure (although in practice I still needed to a bit).
I've played like 10 hours of this adventure, and it turns out to be extremely fun. Once you're roleplaying a character, and if you aren't being constantly game-overed, you can get into some scrapes and see highs and lows in good spirits. The cocky hero has met some cool characters, and achieved great things (although many achievements of his are in fact the work of his loyal assistant), yet is still absolutely in peril at all times, with one dangerous scheme after another playing out across the vast, heart-warmingly brown, world. Basically it's gonna be a real good anime! Looking forward to finishing Recs Romanum so I can play more and start writing.
So yeah, gonna be doing new things soon. This week I've been working on the ending for Wings of Eden; hoping to finish it before this wednesday so I can release it next week while I'm away on a cheeky holiday to Stockholm for an extra-long weekend. Pretty unfortunate that both of my two main series are ending at about the same time, since it generates a lot of extra work. This time I'm sure the two things will be different lengths, so by the time I start 3K total war, hopefully I'll be able to put more effort into the first episode and general presentation/format while still keeping up the release schedule.
Well I've been ranting about games this whole time, allow me to continue doing so in...
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WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
Basically, I finished GTA3 and have got most of the way through Mass Effect Andromeda, both covered in the last blog. GTA3 was surprisingly short, at only 8 hours even with time wasted looking for collectables. MEA, conversely, is surprisingly long, and to reiterate what I said last time, is filled with worthy mass effect content that I guess never saw the light of day. I still hate the entire premise and story, but the 'narrative design' (I guess you'd call it) is no different to the previous entries, with nice voice acting and seemingly unlimited supplies of new scenes.
Other than Frostpunk and Kenshi, the only other new thing I played this both was Dead Effect 2 VR. It's a low quality shoot and loot zombie game in a Dead-space-esque setting, which would be unremarkable if not for the VR part. Said VR part makes it very good fun, with the caveat that, like MEA, the beginning few hours are the significantly worse than the rest of it. This time it's not because of presentation quality, or story, (even though those aspects do suck), but a matter of balancing.
Your damage output is tied to your weapon level, while the amount of health enemies have scales with your character level. The level of weapons you can buy is based on your level too. To me, the 'intended' setup is to have weapons one or two levels above your character (damage scales ~exponentially with level, so having a level 10 weapons instead of 9 can double your damage). I believe this is because the game is meant to be played coop and, like many careless coop games, doesn't adjust the difficulty based on the party size. So while you can play it solo, it's just really boring/hard as generic enemies take forever to kill, and you run out of supplies and have to grind easier levels to catch up (I played the demo of another VR game called something like From Other Suns which had the same problem in spades, only worse since you couldn't grind, making it unplayable solo for no good reason).
Once you have lots of money later and can use weapons 3-4 levels above your character level, it gets super fun. The game is paid abandonware, with the main campaign just randomly stopping in the middle of the second act, but just the moment to moment action fighting the zombies in VR with lots of different weapons is cool. EPIC AND COOL GYSZ :P
AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
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I guess that's all for now. Check in with the next blog where I complain about the failed launch of my two exciting new projects! See ya then!
Also I haven't been working on my video game dev project due to doing extra work on the channel/Kings and Generals stuff. Maybe in 2 months time I'll have more developments to report.