Gaming and Randomness

[newnumber6]

So, still playing Gotham City Impostors, but annoyed that they've recently gone the route of "pay more to get different weapons than you can acquire from the game alone". I don't mind selling the cosmetic things like costumes or calling cards or mascots. I don't even really mind selling weapons as long as you can acquire them in-game through completing feats or something. But when you start selling advantages, I want to play less and less. Every time someone uses one of the new weapons or advantages, I think "%!%!ing cheaters," because in my worldview, that's what they're doing.

I also decided to try out the Walking Dead video game. Well... it's more of an 'interactive story' than a game. Sure, there are game-like elements, but really... it's pretty simplistic and the plot is very, very linear (at least, the first chapter).

Game play's okay, I guess, a little like a point and click adventure, but sometimes it's not clear exactly where you're meant to click to do something, and some of the characters are almost comically stupid. (spoilers behind cut) Like, for example, there's a point where two people are menaced by zombies at once, and you have to choose who to save. I want to save the girl with the gun (even suspecting that the game won't let me save both, I try to base my decisions on what I'd actually do - in this case, save the girl with the gun, so she can shoot the zombies off the other guy). She's being menanced by a somewhat disabled crawling zombie grabbing her foot. It should be a natural reaction to run over there, kick the zombie in the head, either knocking it away or killing it outright. But no, there's no option for that, and if you search your cursor on her body or the zombie to look for it for too long, you game over (which is another stupid thing, since letting both die should technically be a possible choice). The actual secret is to click on her purse, where the extra ammo to her empty gun is kept, meaning you run for the purse, let her reload and shoot the zombie. Uh... okay, I guess.

As for stupid characters: At one point, a character's fiddling with a radio, but can't get it to work (btw, this is exacerbated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, this has no relevance to the plot). You can take the radio, flip it over, and find... no batteries. Okay, stressful situation, maybe she didn't think of the obvious. Then she says "I wouldn't even know what to look for", meaning you have to wander the place you're holed up looking for batteries. Then, when you finally do, she takes them, puts them in, and... still doesn't work. So you check it again. Oops, she put the batteries in the wrong way. Seriously?

Likewise, there were plenty of times I thought of better ways to do things, or could almost see a problem coming, but didn't get any opportunity to warn them or try them. I know, expecting too much, but it still feels less like "what would you do in this situation" and more like a choose-your-own adventure with very limited paths.

And you play a convicted murderer, except it's kind of left a little ambiguous about whether you actually did it, and I'm not sure if you can actually CHOOSE that, or they're just being coy, but if YOU play the character, you really should make something like that clear. Sometimes in the dialog options, I don't know whether a given statement is a lie or the truth.

I know it sounds like a lot of complaints, and it's certainly a very imperfect experience, but I kind of liked it just the same. It's fun to make certain tough choices and have it affect how they react to you, or have different dialog options to partly choose your way through the story. And it's surprisingly affecting to have your character having to take care of, and comfort through dialog, a kid he's found who's parents are almost certainly dead (but far away, so you have the option to lying to her).

It's a series of 5 chapters, each sold separately (on some platforms you might be able to subscribe to all of them in advance for a discount, but not on XBL apparently), and only the first has been released so far. Right now I think I might try the second, but unless it really wows me, I don't think I'll go beyond that (well, maybe I'll see if I can... acquire it, through... magic, somewhere down the line). Because $30 for the whole thing feels a bit steep for something that's, at this point, feeling a little like a railroad (I don't get the impression that anything you can do can get you to avoid ending up in the same locations in part one, for example, or fail to save certain characters who are in danger, because the plot just won't let you progress until you complete the task where you get their medicine... and I'll be very surprised if #5 doesn't take place in the same locations no matter what you choose to do in any previous chapter, just maybe with some different people).


Anyway, in other news, I decided to order The Sunless Countries (book 4 of the Virga series), now that it's out in TPB format, and also Catching Fire because, well, I needed to get my order over $25 for free shipping, and that was the one I chose to do that. Also got a new computer chair... well, old one, but new to me, and for free. Had two choices... I think in retrospect I chose the wrong one. Oh well, it's still not bad, just I think the other one would have fit into my space better and been a little more comfortable.

Also today seems to be a weird one for meeting women from my building. Normally the most interaction I have is an occasional hallway nod, but today 3 different women in the laundry room with a hello, one woman who was locked outside and knocked on the laundry room window to ask if i could let her in, and, when I took the elevator up with my new chair, shared it with somebody I'd never met but who apparently lived on my floor on a bike (that is, she got on the elevator on a bike, I assume she doesn't live on my floor on a bike) and had a brief conversation with her (and exchanged apartment numbers, though not names). I'm not reading anything into it, it's just weird it all happening on the same day considering the otherwise relative anonymity of my apartment experience.

What else to talk about? Internet has been infuriatingly spotty these last couple weeks but especially in the last day or two. Somebody's coming in (again!) on Thursday, hope whatever's wrong gets fixed.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did not leave reality the other day.

Comments

[robyrt.livejournal.com]

Maybe you did leave reality, and the new one is only slightly different?

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but if so, the transition was seamless and/or my memory of leaving it was removed. Either way, it feels like i didn't.

[occamsnailfile.livejournal.com]

The Walking Dead game sounds frustrating. I rarely get on well with adventure games, though I still really love the painted-looking VGA backgrounds for the ones that had those.

The selling-weapons thing is a long-running argument in the video game industry. Basically, publishers see downloadable content as a giant cash-cow, and thus far they have not been wrong, but this incentivizes them to slice out bigger and bigger sections of the game as 'for pay extras' and to raise the bar higher and higher for manual unlockers. Asian F2P games turn into unbearable slogs unless you're willing to shell out for a fair bit of service. And that's where you get things like this: If the weapons can be unlocked in-game in some semi-reasonable manner then just selling them is allowing players to short-circuit the time requirement. But since they want to sell weapons, they make the time requirements (or skill, but they almost never do skill as balancing that is just hard) unreasonable. I'm not really a fan of that, as it is just a back-handed way to charge people extra for something they thought they'd already bought. EA shoehorned selling of 'packs' for the multiplayer parts of Mass Effect 3, and set tremendous bars to unlocking the same items through play. ME3 being a primarily single-player RPG of course. DLC in general really needs a lot of work and I think general price-reduction to reach a good value for consumers. In general, for a lot of reasons, I wait a very long time for games to finish releasing DLC and patches and then buy it later, when it's priced down to reasonability. Imposters debuted at $15, which isn't bad, but they sure have a lot of additional bits to raise that tag.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I don't mind DLC in general, although I do agree that usually it's too expensive to be worth it (unless you buy it much later), but at least I can respect it in theory. But in this case it's not even DLC they're charging for - they give the DLC away free, but you have to pay specifically to unlock the weapons introduced in it for your own use.... So... yeah, that sucks. And to me, like you said, it's like they implicitly promised me a certain type of game when I bought it, and are now are going back on that by making it no longer balanced unless I want to spend more. If I knew it was going to be that way, I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. It already pisses me off enough that, no matter how much I paid, the game basically ends when they say it does. The game runs on servers they could discontinue at will. I can't get around that (well, there might be a way on PC), but I'm not going to pay in order to stay competitive. Right now it's still at the level where I'll continue to play, albeit grudgingly, but if it gets much worse, I'll probably drop it. And that isn't necessarily good for them either - the regular userbase is already small enough that I seem to recognize the same few people over and over again (if there were more players, I'd be matched to different ones more often, but in certain game modes I feel like I always run into the same 2-3 players, as though there are only enough players for 1 game of that mode when I'm on). If people feel ripped off and start leaving, or stop recommending it to their friends, they can lose out. I'm sure whether this is a net good or bad depends on a lot of things like the size of the base - at a certain point you reach a critical mass where popularity of the people willing to pay to get advantages (or not care if others do) takes on a life of its own, but, I don't know, in this case.