Just A Ball On Satan's Ping-Pong Table

[Silver Sorrow]

Blah diddy-blah diddy-blahblah. Futzing around with this 'n' that.

Mass Effect: Nothing much to say, really. Just grinding away.

System Shock remake: stalled completely. Don't think I'll go back to it.

System Shock 2: the most interesting thing is how weird the respawns can be. I got to the Rickenbacker and no less than four rumblers were fighting the security turrets near the bridge. Wacky.

I'm really interested to see what the game throws at me in the final shoot-the-stars! room of the Many's body. I've heard people being swarmed by spiders or midwives. For me, it's usually rumblers. I don't think sane people concocted this game.

Unreal II: I was still curious if Aida's snake tattoo stops at her waist, so I reinstalled. But really: I just wanted to see if it's as irritating as I remember it. So far...not really.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I don't remember a thing about how far into the game I'd gotten, but apparently I had 29 hard saves? Why don't I remember any of this??

Fallout 4: with all the uproar over the next-gen update (Simp-Nerd Rage: "They broke all my mods! Now I can't mince about the Commonwealth in my stiletto heels as my ginormous titties bounce all over the place! WAAAAAAAAH!"), I thought I'd see how far I got into the vanilla game before I quit in disgust. It's playable thus far, but I just know that the settlement building will be godawful without mod help. So for now, I'm just be-boppin' along, diggin' how goddamn horrible the NPCs look. And the player? BARF.

I did manage to make a good-looking male character, so there's that. Far less effort when you're going for manly instead of pretty. Unless you want a pretty man, in which case I don't want to hear about it.

Speaking of which, does anyone truly understand how liberating it is to go through Mass Effect as a default maleshep? It's a lot more fun when you're not distracted by the notion that your femshep's nose is perhaps a centimeter too low on her face. Plus, you get to hook up with Tali later on. If you're into willowy Smurfs with glowing eyes and severe immuno-deficiency problems. (As opposed to tentacle-head Smurfs.) (Or space racists.)

It may be just the bleary dullness of wit that comes at 4:30am, but I don't really consider Ashley to be a racist. She's really no more a racist than the other species, who have the same attitude towards others: our people first, then yours...and until then, we're watching you, scum. (Aha! Dark Elves in spaaaaaaaaace!)

(Hell's bells, get some sleep, idiot.)

Anyway, Fallout 4's big ol' update broke mods, as I said. F4SE, to be more precise. But those guys have been working hard to restore functionality to the mods that use it...and then there was a patch to the upgrade released yesterday, further breaking the--

I'm just fascinated to see 1) how long it takes to fix things, and 2) how outraged people can be about a number of issues connected to the whole thing. It's strangely fun to watch. My favorite people are the goblins rolling back their game versions through arcane means: switch to Offline mode, spill the blood of the innocents, say the magic words ("wocka wonka hooboo!") and poof! You're a pathetic moron!

Anyway. Also lined up for my lackadaisical consumption are The Sinking City, God of War, VTMB, The Force Unleashed, Jedi Fallen Order, and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Also, I wonder how the hell I'm gonna get out of the Bonehoard without becoming zombie chow. I think my Thief muscles are a tad rusty.

EDIT:

Yeah...rumblers.

You cannot view this attachment.

(Had to up the brightness by 200% and fiddle with contrast and saturation because it was so dark...but who gives a shit, right?)

[Starfox]

but I've come to realize that it's just a matter of them not being consistently challenged in the Real World.

Pretty much. When you're confronted to proper challenges IRL, you don't want your games to be more challenging but more relaxing because your whole life is already in hardcore mode, and if you die, you don't get to reload, you just... die.

Only games I played in the recent past that were hardcore (not that you have a choice, there's only one difficulty) were the three Dark Souls and Lies of P. And that's possibly my max when it comes to challenges. Not that I didn't enjoy them (stunningly enough, even to me, I did, even to the point I got into NG+) but that's not something I would do every day of every week of every year.

$170 for two weeks' worth

That's a lot. But I just returned from grocery shopping myself with a bill of roughly $120... for a week. Prices have literally exploded here since the thing in Ukraine started. Curiously one year after it started, most of the grocery stores began renovations. Isn't that convenient? Makes you wonder if the price hike was even necessary to begin with or just artificially planned. I mean some of those shops hadn't made any renovations in more than 10 years and suddenly after just one year of inflated prices they redo the whole shop, just like that.

[Starfox]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I don't remember a thing about how far into the game I'd gotten, but apparently I had 29 hard saves? Why don't I remember any of this??

Either the memory is really starting to go or your brain was really uninterested. But if it's any comfort I don't remember anything about my hard saves either.... whatever the game. I just know I generally do one when I'm about to do something really stupid or unheatlhy

but I just know that the settlement building will be godawful without mod help

Which is why I always choose "only update when I launch the game" then start the game using the F4SE loader. For some reason it confuses Steam and the game never gets updated. Which is fine by me. I don't need an update where the only real purpose is to make the Creation Club more accessible to all, especially those of us who don't want it.

[Silver Sorrow]

There's always the danger that I'll mess up my installation somehow. I can't trust myself to not do something stupid. So to that end...

GOG had a sale on FO4 GOTY edition...and it hasn't been updated to the current NG fiasco. So what I did was plunk down a couple of bucks for the GOG version and moved all of my mods (all those mods!) over to the new folder. Reinstall Wrye Bash and Loot -- I'm not a fan of Mod Organizer 2, for some reason...probably because I'm an idiot -- and...ta-daaaaaa! Continue playing with all my mods. Granted, I don't have access to all the goofy CC content mods, but...so what?

[It's not so much that I *need* to play FO4 again, it's just that I had a lot of time and effort invested in getting it where I wanted it, and every so often I'll return for a bit of dystopian despair...which is preferable to what's going on in the Real World.]

The only real obstacle I've faced is...well, it's kind of weird: I updated a couple of mods earlier today and I just stumbled across a radstag and a radstag doe outside Abernathy farm. The stag went aggro and I sent it to join Bambi's mom. The doe, however...when I killed it, *I* died instantly. Reload. Try again, same thing. Every single time. Haven't figured it out yet, but killing it with the console solved the immediate problem, but now I gotta sift through a bunch of mods in search of the answer.

To begin with, its ID in the console is (00195d3e)[EP]...which means that it's not added by a mod, but is a vanilla actor most likely affected somehow by a mod. I think. So now I need to crack open xEdit or something and start searching for form IDs...man, I hate this crap. Some ding-dong makes a couple of wild edits and now I have to find them and kill them. The edits, I mean. It's not like I have a list of people that...never mind, I've revealed too much already.

Speaking of the struggles of living in a dystopian society, I would totally embrace the concept of Soylent Green as long as it's cheap. And it would be...at first. Then some random corporation would step in...

[Silver Sorrow]

Okay, now it's *really* weird. I killed the doe via console and went about my day. Then I was jumped by a couple of feral dogs and died immediately upon killing one of them.

As if I didn't hate my life before...

Loading all of my mods in xEdit and searching for the formID of the doe turned up no weird edits (it's a placed leveled creature, btw). Now with the dogs being a problem, I think I might have to go through this the old fashioned (read: tedious) way: disabling newer mods one by one until I find the problem and make the hurting stop.

EDIT:

Crap. Crap crap crap CRAP. It's *my* mod. It's never given me any trouble before, so it's conflicting with something I've installed. Maybe the Game Configuration Menu mod. I tried disabling that, but I still dropped dead. So maybe it's screwed up my current saves and now I need to start a new game to make sure. Good thing I'm just an hour into this character or I'd say a lot more mean things. Hurtful things. Things I couldn't--

--I need to eat something before my blood sugar hits negative values.

EDIT AGAIN:

Yup. It was Game Configuration Menu conflicting with my mod. So GCM had to go. I only installed it because it had a bunch of features that could've allowed me to get rid of a couple of smaller mods, but whatever. The problem was that it had baked itself into my saves so I had to start a new game to make absolutely sure it was that mod causing problems (or is it: my mod caused a problem with *it*? naaaaah. it's everyone else's fault but mine). I'd conclude with some sort of insight into human nature as gleaned from the ordeal, but I got nothin' but a fatalistic shrug and a mumbled "oh, well."

[Starfox]

So let me get this straight. You have a mod (your own) that gets in conflict with some other mod and for some reason the result is that you drop dead each time you kill some random animal? That's the weirdest issue I've ever heard of and in more than 20 years of Bethesda I've heard an awful lot and experienced my fair share.

GOG had a sale on FO4 GOTY edition...and it hasn't been updated to the current NG fiasco.

Except for Skyrim and Fallout 4 I've moved all my Bethesda games to GOG because of their updating crap. Fallout New Vegas got updated a while back for absolutely no reason (valid one) I could see. Yeah, let's update a 10+ year old game... just because we can, and because that will invalidate mods. I think that Fallout 4 will follow suit. Skyrim, well after the last update the only thing I lost was my customized gamepad profile because the new one (that is there to simplify the access to the CC) is incompatible and if you ever try to use a custom gamepad map, it will crash the game as soon as you connect a gamepad.

It was so great when Steam allowed you to NOT update a game. But no, they had to make that mandatory.

[Doc_Brown]

So I gave in and replayed Void Bastards.  Still a lot of fun, though by the end I was happy to move on to something else (played 2.5 to 3 hours a day over the course of three days).  My biggest complaints against it are its tone (there's nothing wrong with the comedic bent, it's just that I prefer System Shock 2's survival horror vibe), and the fact that it doesn't build up to any sort of grand finale.  You rather anticlimactically acquire the final component you need, and then the game just ends.  I would have preferred a final boss fight of some kind, or at least have to run a gauntlet on a unique ship, something larger than those that came before.

Interestingly, the studio is working on a follow-up (as opposed to a direct sequel) called Wild Bastards.  While the idea's intriguing--mixing Void Bastards' rogue-like experience with something akin to Lucas Arts' Outlaws--the focus on combat is probably going to make it a 'no' for me.  One of the things I like about Void Bastards is being able to do as much or as little as you like on a ship before leaving, as opposed to being forced to kill every enemy in the level before you can move on.  They just dropped a demo, though, so you can see for yourself.

Update: Tried the demo so I need to modify my comments a bit. 

• I was spot on with the Outlaws comparison.  "Where are you, Marshall?" was a common enemy bark there, while in Wild Bastards you'll hear, "Outlaw, where are you?"
  
• I was mistaken on a couple of points.  First, while it is more combat focused, you can still sneak around to get the drop on enemies, all stealthy like. 
• Second correction--you can actually leave a level without killing everyone, you just can't advance past it like in Void Bastards. 
  
• Related to the above, the levels are persistent.  If there's, say, two enemies and you kill one before retreating, if you return there will be only one enemy remaining.  Which means you could theoretically go heal up first, or have a different character tag in.
• Lastly, there are supposedly 41 enemy types (25 human, 11 animal, 5 security) which goes way past what Void Bastards offered.
  

So the jury's still out, it just has more of a chance than I thought...

[Silver Sorrow]

So let me get this straight. You have a mod (your own) that gets in conflict with some other mod and for some reason the result is that you drop dead each time you kill some random animal? That's the weirdest issue I've ever heard of and in more than 20 years of Bethesda I've heard an awful lot and experienced my fair share.

What can I say? It's me, after all.

The other mod -- Game Configuration Menu -- has all of these settings changes, some of which that apparently didn't like the changes I had made in my own mod. Plus, the mod page has five pages of bug reports, so that should've been the first red flag. But other than that, it looks like it would be a good mod for anyone else but me.

I was kind of curious to see if Fallout 3 would run under either GOG or Steam after all these years and OS changes...short answer? NO. But FNV will, for reasons that I can never hope to grasp with my poor dumb cracker mind. Anyway, there is a solution, and that's the Tale of Two Wastelands mod. You can play FO3 and FNV with that mod, you just have to set it up, etc. The Best Of Times is the official setup guide.

Essentially: install FO3 and FNV, mod organizer 2, a shitload of fix and utility mods, and there you have it. Now you can play both games. Theoretically...I haven't tried it just yet, as I've been busy the last couple of days. But hope springs eternal in the human boobies. The mod runs via FNV (NVSE, actually) instead of FO3, as FNV has proven to be more stable.

(I recall FO3 crashing left and right like a complete bastard...ah, memories.)

I'm also running those through GOG, since I don't want Steam springing a surprise on me just when I get it just right.

There's also supposed to be a FO3 remaster coming out at some point, but as someone pointed out, it'll probably just be a texture upgrade. Although I don't see how Bethesda can break it any more than it is, I know they're willing to try.

In my weary downtime, I've been listlessly trying out the NG version of FO4, which isn't too bad. Some of the F4SE mods haven't been updated yet, due to how difficult it's turning out to be for these guys to figure out what the hell Bethesda's done to the code. Sure, I miss Transfer Settlements and Bullet Count Reloaded (respectively: being able to import and export settlement blueprints, and being able to perform tactical reloads on such weapons as a pump shotgun without having to go through the full reload animation), but I can live without them for the moment. I think. I miss the elaborate fountain I made in Starlight drive-in, but I'll survive. Somehow.

On the upside, going from an interior to an exterior in Boston is much faster now.

So...yay. I guess it was worth it?

I don't think any of the "content" thrown at the player is worth the ordeal, either. You do get roughly nine million quest popups, though. THAT'S always a lot of goddamn fun.

Oh, but there's one small problem with the NG...infinitesimal, really. Seems that if you have a mod that messes with NPCs in any way, the game will start stuttering and lagging and all that happy horseshit.

Way to go, Bethesda!

With that said...

Doc, it sounds like you're having WAY more fun with games than I am lately. All I seem to do is spend hours getting everything just so, play it for a few minutes to make sure it doesn't crash on load, and then wander off to do something else because I'm sick of it.

One more thing before I take my four-hour midday "nap": if I have to join one more goddamn discord channel just to download a mod, I'm going to destroy the universe.

[Silver Sorrow]

Well...I tried the NG version of Fallout 4, and I reiterate a question: is it worth it?

No, not really.

Sure, Boston loaded faster from interiors, but that's just about the only real benefit I could squeeze out of the thing. I was pretty much on a test run and ended up destroying a valuable savegame due to a bit of mod-testing, so I just decided to hang it up entirely and go back to the pre-NG version.

My mod setup actually worked back then -- no brown-face bugs, Transfer Settlements didn't crash, I didn't have to suffer through the entire reload of all eight shot-shells when I wanted to just reload one, and yes, Boston takes a long time to load, but so what? I don't got nowhere better to be (to mangle the language).

Don't get me wrong: this is not an all-consuming obsession. I don't really care all that much about the thing, I just need something to tinker with as I trudge through these endless weary days of waking misery.

Huh. I kind of like that.

I guess it beats trying to get Fallout 3 running on Windows 10, though. Yikes.

(Actual solution: the Tale of Two Wastelands mod. Problem is, since it runs through FNV, any FO3 mods you need will have to be converted. Seems a lot to go through just for a couple of games that were frustratingly clunky and weirdly unstable. All those BSODs...ah, memories.)

[Starfox]

Meanwhile, I had the extreme displeasure to watch the reveal trailer, then the gameplay trailer of the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard which was formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf but apparently the guys at EA/Bioware (I let you guess which part of that entity) had a problem with that. I don't see which as "Dreadwolf" was completely in line with Dragon Age lore, The Veilguard (whatever that is) is not.

But that may be a result of having fired all the writers who did know everything about the universe and the lore of Dragon Age. The new guys saw "Dreadwolf" and asked "What's that?" and then someone at EA went: "Unimportant. Just get rid of it and find something cooler".

Tip for you writers newbies: any title including a "THE" in the middle is not cool, it's just stupidly sad. Even writers used to very long titles have always known that:

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps" (Blade Runner)
"We can remember it for you, wholesale" (Total Recall)

Is anyone seeing a "THE" anywhere? No! That's because Philip K. Dick knew what he was doing... I'm joking but barely (he had a bunch of other titles with "the").

So "Dragon Age: The Veilguard" is not saying "this game is cool". It's just conveying the idea that this game will suck so much that they didn't even manage to get the title right.

And wait because right up to now, I only talked about the title.

What the reveal trailer convey is absolutely anything except a Dragon Age vibe. There's no Dragon Age in there, period. And no, it's not because you manage to squeeze Varric and Harding in the trailer (and my God, what did they do to her face?) then sprinkle a bit of veil and an eluvian that you get Dragon Age, no matter how much you shake the result. This trailer is a compilation of Marvel and DC Comics all rolled into one package but certainly not Dragon Age.

The gameplay trailer is even worse! What you get from this one is an attempt at turning Dragon Age into Mass Effect.

First, if we believe the "combat pause" interface -- and yep, apparently tactical pause and positioning your companions is gone, because who needs that? -- no more party of 4, you're limited to three (including the PC, which really feels like that other Bioware game series with a title hard to remember... I believe it starts with "Mass").

The number of spells/abilities immediately available was downsized from 8 in Inquisition (which was already "meh") to 3 (maybe 6, the trailer was not really explicit about an eventual "shift" key), as for the attack animations, they are purely, there again, of Marvel/DC proportions. Not that I have anything against Marvel or DC but they don't deal in Dragon Age and what I saw in those two trailers is just that: NOT Dragon Age. If I wanted to play Batman then I'd just do that: play Batman (there are enough games pertaining to this IP floating around).

No need to mention that the reception was abysmal (as it should be) and the complete debacle was barely prevented by 39K likes after 24 hours against 230k+ dislikes on Youtube for the first trailer. It was a bit better for the gameplay trailer but still far to be great. It's that bad. I mean, the game is not even released, nobody even played it and still Bioware is taking such a huge amount of flak that they should resemble to a gruyere by now.

And nothing was really said about the story itself because "we want to prevent spoilers". I shudder to think what they've done with it...

I think at that point, we can confirm what we already knew for a long time but didn't want to admit: the Old Bioware is dead. Just a name in EA panoply of great studios they successfully choked to death, a name that really doesn't mean anything anymore. If I had any sparkle of hope for the future Mass Effect, it would be definitely gone. fortunately, such a sparkle didn't exist in the first place so I won't be disappointed... IF Bioware, as a studio, manage to survive the release of "Veilguard".

Right now, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is making replaying Dragon Age 2 seem like an exceptionally good idea.

Oh and by the way I already exposed in another post that a lot of the old Bioware guard founded a new studio, Archetype Entertainment, and are currently working on a game called "Exodus". I saw the reveal trailer for Exodus and when you compare that to the reveal trailer for Veilguard (yep I'm not even going to pretend there's any Dragon Age there)... I don't think there's even a point for a full comparison. Talented people with decades of experience on one side, new generation of fanboys on the other...

Do I sound too harsh? I do, don't I? Well, get used to it because I don't think the future of "Veilguard" will impress me that much more.

Oh, and I want to grab this occasion to temper my enthusiasm about Exodus too. Due to the nature of Exodus story (what we can gain from the trailer anyway), there is one huge potential mistake that can be made here. I just hope that the amount of experience present at Archetype will prevent them to fall in the trap.

[Silver Sorrow]

"The Veilguard", if you look at the Big Picture, is a metaphor concerning the protection of the Collective Maidenhead from the horrible nasty things that evil white men do to--

--ehhhh...never mind. I'll just say that maybe "Dreadwolf" was far too manly for the likes of DEI-infested Bioware.

We're going to have to suffer through Varric getting in touch with his feelings, Harding's rise from a minor, semi-interesting character into A Force To Be Reckoned With (Behold! The Power of Dwarf Pussy!), more willowy fey fellows and Strong Diverse Female Characters than you can shake a Pride flag at, and...

...again, ehhhhhhhh. So here we sit, just watching AAA gaming collapsing in real time. Anyone want to play a game featuring a black samurai? A Star Wars game with a butt-ugly female lead? No? Then you must be a racist!

Anyway.

Exodus piqued my interest, so I hope it won't be the same situation as Zach Snyder's Rebel Moon debacle. ("I'm doing Star Wars, but better! Hey...why are you laughing at me? Why are they laughing? Did I say something funny? STOP LAUGHING AT ME!")

Then again, even if Exodus turns out to be a 2D side-scrolling platformer, if couldn't be any worse than Andromeda's piss-poor execution.

Outside of games, Star Wars has been murdered by Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, and Lesbian Headlamp, former personal assistant to Harvey Weinstein. It just gets better and better out there, folks. So I'll just blip right over that for the moment.

Which brings me to the most important topic of all: what have *I* been doing lately? Well, I'm glad I asked. But first, a personal anecdote that goes nowhere and only serves as yet another example of why I'm not entirely fond of the human race:

The Setting: Sometime in 1984...lunch time. The table assigned to the fourth graders in the school cafeteria.

The school was located in a rural area which I have since dubbed "The Edge Of Nowhere." (The actual *middle* of nowhere is roughly a few miles to the west of that.) This meant that every other yahoo I ran into was an ass-backwards hick...and was I any better than them? Honestly, no. I was not. I didn't think I was, either, which probably saved me from quite a few ass-kickings.

Anyway, one of the girls in my class, upon hearing me say something to my cousin, looked at me funny. "She your kin?" she asked.

Now, I had yet to develop any sort of sarcastic body armor at this point, which most likely saved me from an even greater number of ass-kickings. So I just kind of looked at her and asked, "what?" (I didn't really understand what she was asking at first, because I'd never heard it phrased quite like that; civilized people, I had thought, asked about kinship in more formal terms: "are you related?", for example.)

She repeated herself and I finally caught on. "Oh, uh...yeah?" I said. There was a lot to unpack there, really...but most of all, my cousin and I had the same last name, and it wasn't exactly a mundane name like Smith or Andrews. One half of my confusion concerned her patois, and the other half was awe at how stupid she was.

Now I understand my dad's willingness to join the Air Force and get the fuck outta there, because...Jesus Christ. And it seemed like they got dumber and dumber with each passing year. (Some of them, I mean...not all. Just almost all.)

So there you have it: a pointless story that goes exactly nowhere. Much like my life, yes, but at least I got out of there before I was 12.

So, uh...where was I? Oh, right: games.

I never finished Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. I didn't remember why until I loaded it up. It all came back to me: a walking simulator with dumbass combat tacked onto it. The game itself is supposed to be a revolutionary something-or-other in the something-something depiction of paranoid schizophrenia and mental illness and so on and so on and blah blah blah, but the thing I was feeling was a sense of overwhelming dread and stark depression at the thought of having to trudge through this thing for the next few hours.

So I found a full playthrough on YT. A little over four hours, yes, but it saved me a ton of frustration. I highly recommend going that route.

Then I looked at Days Gone, which is yet another post-apocalyptic romp, this time on a motorcycle. The game strongly suggested that I play with a controller...which is doable. I have a PS-style controller, but I've never liked using it for anything besides side-scrollers. I'm far more comfortable with mouse-and-keyboard; I have trouble with dealing with adjusting the camera and such, and this was just more of the same. I'll come back to it later, someday.

I thought about revisiting The Talos Principle (which I had also never finished), but I recalled that I'm terrible at puzzle games and would probably just spend most of my time peering at YT walkthroughs in hopes of finding that ever-elusive CLUE that I have never been able to catch.

I've been more or less puttering about with Fallout 4 (yes, still), trying to get a stable mod setup before I lose interest entirely...and I'm using the pre-NG version because, hey, fuck Bethesda. So I guess I'll post a few screenshots here. Why not?

Firstly...one thing that's bugged me since FO4's release has been this sign:

You cannot view this attachment.

"Our books don't move! GUARANTEED!"

Then there's the whole settlement-building thing. You need mods for this. Vanilla building is absolute crap.

You cannot view this attachment.

This area is under heavy construction currently, but getting that fountain working right is probably the only thing I've ever been proud of in my entire miserable little shit-splat of a life.


Speaking of construction, I kind of regret not using tinted glass for my building facade.

You cannot view this attachment.

Good thing I'm not a vampire.


If someone asked me what mods they would need to recreate my character, I wouldn't know where to begin. "Get a pen and some paper kid, because you'll wanna take a few notes."

You cannot view this attachment.

Still, I'm pretty happy with her. Took me...what, a few years? No big deal.


Got a couple of feral ghoul mods...including one that adds in such things as:

You cannot view this attachment.

Yes! Feral babies! Or, as I call 'em: Squishes. (As in: "Stomp any Squishes lately?")

I just wish there was a gameplay mechanic to make that happen...stomp-squish! YAAAAY!

I may have completely lost it somewhere along the way, is what I'm trying to convey in my own weird little way.

Dammit, I'm rhyming again. Mayday. Abort. Abandon ship.

[Silver Sorrow]

A brief blip: Fallout London been released. If you're on GOG, then you're good: just install and play...because GOG hasn't updated the game version to the next-gen nonsense. If you're on Steam, however...you're screwed. You need to downgrade your game -- there are guides available, never fear -- but really: if you value your sanity you'll just get the GOG version and turn off the automatic updates.

The only downside...

...and this has become far more than a brief blip at this point, I know...

...is that the Creation Kit is DRM-ified; if you need to use it, you need Steam. I've been needing to make various changes to various plugins lately, so I've been using xEdit. And I've learned a few things, which makes me nauseous: a day without learning anything is absolute bliss, I say.

And another thing...more of a rant, really: people who use mods calling themselves "modders". You're not a "modder" if you merely use mods. You're a "user." DUMBASS.

Okay, time to get that blood sugar back to normal levels...

[Lord Mantrid]

I've come to the conclusion that I am either going to play it in six months when everything is at least semi-patched up, or I'll just never play it. I already have Magnum Opus running on Wabbajack and that took way too long for my tiny walnut brain to comprehend. The last thing I need is to get a computer science degree to downgrade my Steam copy and install a mod that I don't REALLY need to play. I haven't had the best luck with British mod-makers.

I also just flat out refuse to install GOG Galaxy. I don't know what they're bribing people with to start making everyone use it, but the fact that all my free Prime games require it this year when I have been getting Steam codes from years is enough to hate it. Steam is the devil but I already have it just let me use it.

I am lazy. Make it easy or I won't do it. I'll just go touch grass instead.

[Starfox]

And another thing...more of a rant, really: people who use mods calling themselves "modders".

Really? That's news to me but I'm not surprised in the slightest considering the vast and steadily increasing number of challenged idiots roaming the internet and our daily lives). They tend to be confused by even the simplest things.

As for Fallout London (how are we supposed to nickname it anyway? F-UK? Well, that would be something ) I think I'll give it a pass. I bought the GOG version of F4 a few weeks ago but I'm not about to go through the whole install process and configuration yet... For now I'm still running my old F4 Steam copy with blocked updates.

Plus I don't know. I always had some trouble with this mod. Going to Europe with Fallout is like writing a new book with no guidelines (the official European lore for Fallout is pretty thin). Plus we know that if the mod is met with success, Bethesda will either appropriate it or go to Europe themselves and do their own thing which (as everything they do is deemed "canon") will invalidate the lore from the mod.

It reminds me of another mod for F4 called Fourville. It's a nice story mod which took place in a vault on the coastline (North East of the map), a vault which was labelled "4". What do you know, in the TV show a vault was created as the control vault and was also labelled "4". Of all the numbers available they had to choose the one from an existing mod? That's kind of crappy. What is even more crappy is that the control vault did exist in the original drafts for the first Fallout (though it was never used) and it was labeled back then very logically Vault Zero.

That's Bethesda to you... Let's do our own thing, ignore the previous lore and create a new one while crapping on modders who dare not being part of the Creation Club!

[Silver Sorrow]

I believe "F-UK" would be the perfect acronym for it, but apparently some people are offended by such a thing. Oh, well. "FOLON" (adjacent to the colon) is fine, I guess.

I haven't had much luck with British mod-makers myself, really.

Anyway!

I thought that I'd hang back a bit, see if they cleared up any glaring bugs and the like before giving it a try...then I decided to try it out anyway. And then I immediately uninstalled it after an hour or so of screwing around. You may suspect that I'm going to tell you why...

The problem is, I really don't know. Not exactly. Call it Fallout Fatigue, for want of a clever turn of phrase. It's not like my issues with getting invested in Starfield (more on that in a moment), not exactly; I think it's just the idea of going through the agony of endless fetch quests and fending off relentless attempts to graft another goddamn follower on my ass...but this time with an impenetrable cockney accent.

I'm sure it's great. And maybe I'll try it out again someday. But not right now.

Now, I had no troubles installing or running it; I installed on a fresh GOG version, so no downgrade black magic was necessary. But I'm just...Fallouted out, I suppose.

And then there's Starfield. I've tried to get involved. I've tried to form an inkling of interest. But it just isn't there. I've nothing left. I've no fucks left to give, to put it another way. I've been trying to figure out why, exactly (even though I'm about as self-absorbed as they come, I'm not exactly keen on uncovering the motives behind my behavior)--

Pause a moment as I plug a fresh battery into my mouse. YET AGAIN.

-- but I think it's because Starfield lacks focus. There's a thousand planets and you can do all this incredible shit that...seems so very limited and stupid in that special Bethesda way. Scrape 'n' grind for resources. And credits. Engage in the local economy. Meet glassy-eyed information kiosks. Fart around the hinterlands. Have companions thrust upon my sensibilities (tell me: how am I supposed to be a disturbed loner when they won't leave me alone!?!). Explore a whole lot of nothing. Fiddle about with equipment. Sew pants. Cook food. Replace my mediocre weapon mod with a slightly more effective weapon mod. Manage my inventory. Talk to more kiosks. Curse Todd Howard's name.

Now...let's scale all of that back, shall we? Let's just take Fallout 4 and put it in space...but with better graphics and more zap-zap-pew-pew. Focus on a handful of planets instead of a thousand. Craft each planet to be unique with its own challenges, giving the player an actual sense of accomplishment. Space Preston floats up and tells you that a colony needs our help? Fine by me, whatever. But my point is that Bethesda's ambitions have exceeded their grasp. (Or something like that.) Epic space game? No. It's too scattershot.

The most horrible thought is that they're going to do the same with TES 6: not just one province...it's gonna be ALL of 'em! And both moons. And every single plane of Oblivion. (Mankar Whatsisname claimed that Tamriel was Lorkan's little corner of Oblivion, but whatever...never trust a word of what General Zod says.)

So I guess that's all to say that I've pretty much stalled on modern games. I'm looking forward to Exodus, and that's about it. Dragon Age: Diversity Edition is gonna flop hard, the next Mass Effect will be a damn Pride parade, and every other big-ticket game is being developed by the mentally ill. (And Bethesda, who seem to be afflicted with some form of bizarre developer-based dementia.) It's all just gone to hell.

AZ talks about this a bit:

Of particular interest: 8:38 ("As somebody who personally identifies with busty Asian ladies...")

The only hope is indie games...and older games. Which explains, I suppose, why I've been playing a lot of Doom 2.

You cannot view this attachment.

I think someone's mixed up their iconography here...