I am still in the early stages of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I was using my bow a lot, and ran out of olive wood to make arrows. Having somehow overlooked the small trees from which you can collect wood, I turned to YouTube to find out how to best farm wood. Some advice wasn't useful for me yet, apparently you get a ship later in the game and can gather wood by crashing other ships. But I learned of two other methods to get wood (or drachmae, or other materials): You can buy them in the in-game store. Or you can use software like CheatEngine to increase materials in your inventory to any amount you want. That both are possible seems extremely weird to me.

I am not morally opposed to cheating in single-player games. CheatEngine is installed on my PC, and there have been some games in which I used it simply to avoid some unfun grind, or to modify the difficulty level of a game more to my liking. Pay2Win for me basically is the same as cheating, just more expensive. And yes, there have been games in which I paid for the same reasons that in other games I used CheatEngine, to avoid grind. I don't like grinding for credits in World of Tanks, so I buy some of them, for example.

But with cheating by software or cheating by paying being pretty much the same, the games that allow you to cheat by paying have a strong interest to prevent you from cheating via software. You can't use CheatEngine on World of Tanks to give yourself infinite credits, because that information is stored server side. Even in an offline game it would probably be possible to encrypt data about resources in a way that would make cheating at least much harder, if not impossible. But Assassin's Creed Odyssey makes no such effort. How much wood you have is a simple 4-byte data point, which is easily found and edited.

Now, there is a valid discussion to be had whether it would be better to gather wood in-game, or whether to cheat to get it. But who is going to argue that buying that wood for real money is somehow morally superior than using CheatEngine to get it? Why would anybody want to pay 20 Euros to Ubisoft to get 24,000 drachmae, when he can get any amount of drachmae he wants with free software and 2 minutes of effort? It seems like a very weird method to financially exploit the part of the gamer population that isn't even minimally skilled in other types of software.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:39 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

• My experiment in international shipping was a success. I received my parcel 18 days after I had ordered something from the USA, from a company that wasn't shipping to Europe. Using an intermediary service to receive my parcel in the USA and forward it to Europe worked. Okay, the shipping costs inside the US, to Europe, additional fee to the forwarding company, and taxes, added up to another $60 for a $60 collection of goods, doubling the cost compared to what I would have paid in a shop. But as I don't travel much this year, this certainly was the better option.

• Although I haven't lived in my native country for nearly quarter a century, I always vote in general elections there. For me a vote is an expression of two things: One is my preference of political party A over political party B. The other is my belief that whatever party wins the election, it will be all right, because that is democracy. Somehow the democracy part has gotten lost in all the coverage I see about the US presidential elections 2020. Both sides claim that if the other side wins, apocalypse looms. It is easy to see where this attitude can lead, and that future isn't pretty: "Vote for us, or we will grab power by other means" is *not* democracy.

• Wasteland 3 has come out today. Wasteland 2 came out in 2015. I bought the director's cut of Wasteland 2 in a Steam sale earlier this year, but haven't been interested enough to actually play it. Why am I interested in Wasteland 3?

- posted by Tobold @ 2:05 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

From time to time it can be fun to use an element in a story that doesn't belong to the genre, time, and culture the story plays in. For example in my current D&D campaign of Dungeon of the Mad Mage I took up a suggestion from the DotMM Companion to describe the mad mage, Halaster, as the presenter of a game show. So for the characters, Halaster is the mad mage of the title, as a game show makes no sense to the people living in a world of heroic fantasy. But to the players, Halaster is a bit more believable than somebody whose only explanation for his behavior is "he is mad". The anachronism is a deliberate break of the 4th wall, leading to a better story.

I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a story that is fundamentally based around anachronisms. A science-fiction story in which the characters are mostly tribal warriors with bow and spear. And while I could get into that setting at the start, I really didn't find the story at the end very believable. Because it isn't just the player who is able to identify the science-fiction elements. Somehow we are meant to believe that the main character, who grew up in a world without technology except for a smart-phone like object she found as a kid, is suddenly able to understand complicated technology well enough to do things like copying files or understanding how an AI works. The hand-waved explanation that this is due to "genetics" isn't convincing to me.

Anyway, I don't regret having bought the game, as I have played it for 60 hours, and at least the first three quarters of that were fun enough. I do feel that to some extent I "played it wrong" by not concentrating on story and side quests from the start. I thought that, like in Breath of the Wild, there would be enough game in the open world mechanics to enjoy much of the game while ignoring the story; I was wrong. I constantly bumped against the limitations of the game, the limited climbing system, the limited weapon choice. If I had played the game "as intended", those limitations would have been a bit less obvious. As a hunting / shooting game, Horizon Zero Dawn was fun enough, but I didn't really enjoy the parcours gameplay or the science-fiction story, and so I don't think I'll play the recently announced sequel.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:04 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments

I consider Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild the current gold standard in open world games. How does a game become the gold standard? By having features you constantly miss when you play a similar game. Like, whenever I stand on top of a mountain in an open world game, I now want to paraglide down, like in Breath of the Wild. So when in Horizon Zero Dawn that isn't possible, it feels a bit disappointing. Well, at least sometimes there are zip lines you can slide down.

What I am missing a lot more in Horizon Zero Dawn is free climbing. Horizon Zero Dawn only has fake climbing. You can climb a ledge only if it is painted yellow. So quite often I look at a ledge and wish I had a pot of yellow paint, which doesn't exist in the game. The game only allows me to climb at the places that the devs want me to climb, following a designated parcours. In other places I can sometimes get up a mountain by jumping, but the results are somewhat unreliable, and sometimes lead to falling death.

So I am on this mission to liberate a kidnapped family in Horizon Zero Dawn, and with that farm nested against the mountains I think approaching it from the top would be the best idea. There are no yellow ledges to climb, but I manage to get up by a lot of jumping a bit further off. I approach the ledge to be able to fire down at the farm, and find myself teleported to the starting point of the mission. The devs don't allow the approach that I have chosen. Those are the moments where for me the game falls short of the gold standard for truly open world games.

I have had a lot of fun in the first 50 hours of playing Horizon Zero Dawn, and am now falling rapidly out of love with the game. If I had just followed the main story and some side quests, I would have finished the game by now. By exploring the open world features and economy of the game before tackling the story, I basically broke the game. It turns out that the kill monsters, loot them, gear up and get stronger cycle in Horizon Zero Dawn is flawed. In a game like Diablo or Borderlands, you will always find new weapons and gear. In Horizon Zero Dawn you can only find common, uncommon, and rare monster parts and exchange those at merchants for a limited selection of weapons and armor. At some point you simply have all the weapons and armor the merchants have for sale, and you can only sell the monster loot for "shards", the game currency.

So, overall, playing through Horizon Zero Dawn once is fun, but compared to Breath of the Wild the game is lacking openness, longevity, and replayability. Well, let's hope for Genshin Impact, the upcoming Breath of the Wild ripoff game that will release on September 28th.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:17 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

If we think back to an earlier age of video gaming, games having an end was normal. Not just for arcade games, which for obvious commercial reasons can't give you more than X minutes of play time for your quarter. But also for more complicated strategy games like Civilization: You play on a map with a civilization until you win, lose, or lose interest, and then you start on another map with another civilization. Of course, such games still exist. But increasingly, as part of the "games as a service" idea, there are games that never end. There are people out there who have been playing the same character in World of Warcraft for 15 years. Now games like WoW still offer you the possibility to start over with a new character, or even on a new server. But some of the games I have played don't have that possibility. The only way to start over in World of Tanks, for example, is to open a new account.

I recently mentioned that my wife started playing Assassin's Creed Rebellion. So I occasionally helped her and showed her things that weren't well explained by the game itself. And I noticed that playing those lower levels of Assassin's Creed Rebellion was a lot more fun than my version of the game. Because I had been playing for months already, I had reached the level cap, reached the end of the story, and had two thirds of my heroes already at the highest possible 5-start rank. There wasn't much to strive for left in the game, and it had gotten a bit boring. So I decided to reroll. Which is absolutely not foreseen in that game. While the game is played on iOS or Android, the save game is hosted on Facebook. I might have been able to delete that save game on Facebook, but of course then I would have lost the ability to go back to my high-level save game if I ever wanted to. So in the end I had to create another Facebook account with another e-mail in order to be able to start a new game of Assassin's Creed Rebellion.

The advantage of the reroll game of ACR is that, having already been at the top level, I am in less of a hurry to get there again. So I am less tempted by offers to spend money to advance faster, and happily play with the more common heroes the game gives me for free.

Of course another option would be to stop playing this, and start playing another game. However finding a mobile game that I like is very hard. There are now literally a million games on the app store. If you start a search on games that use the same fundamental mechanic as Assassin's Creed Rebellion, which is to say a game about collecting heroes and battling with them, there are thousands and thousands of those around. Unfortunately, most of them have extremely boring battle mechanics, with the best option usually being setting battles to "auto" mode. A game like Assassin's Creed Rebellion, where you really have to think which heroes to take with you on a mission, and which one of the three heroes to use for each room, and which of the various options (sneaking, running past, assassination, combat) is the best for each enemy, are rare and hard to find. I'd be open to suggestions!

- posted by Tobold @ 11:09 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

Horizon Zero Dawn, like many other games, has both an open world exploration part, and a story part. Now in games like that I tend to take the story slowly, and concentrate on the open world part first. So while I am not very far advanced in the Horizon Zero Dawn story, I have already reached a major goal that isn't story-related: All of my inventory slots are maximized, for resources, gear, and ammo. I prefer to play the game this way around, because now I won't have so much trouble with inventory management when I play through the story. I can shoot arrows for longer before running out and having to craft new ones, and so on.

Story-wise this means that while technically I was in pursuit of killers, I took many days "off" that chase, and spent it grinding for currency and materials for crafting. Because, surprise, I know that the people I am chasing aren't going anywhere. Whether it is a computer game or a pen & paper role-playing game, story is nearly always scripted. If you are after a cult doing evil sacrifices and storm their temple, there will be a sacrifice going on right that time. You never arrive too early or too late, unless the DM or the person scripting the story wanted that to happen. As a consequence we have learned to ignore the flow of time in these games.

The problem is obviously that a game designer who gave players a lot of freedom can't know what the players are going to do with that. In Horizon Zero Dawn, "the Proving" will happen when you turn up and say you are ready for it. If there was actual time and you could actually miss the event, much of the story afterwards wouldn't make much sense anymore. Like your wedding, you can't possibly miss it (don't try that). And because you can't miss it, you don't feel any time pressure.

I think it would be interesting to play in an open world game in which time actually passes, and you can miss things. But that would necessitate two things: A story which isn't all about you, and a game which can handle different consequences, as a function of whether you did or did not turn up for events. Both of which are problematic. A game in which you *aren't* the hero would be less appealing. And game stories today are mostly linear, with maybe a few branches. The AI necessary to create something like an "open story world" doesn't exist. In a way, that was one of the unkept promises of MMORPGs, that the other players would provide the living world and open story. Didn't work out that way.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments

 I am 15 hours into Horizon Zero Dawn on the PC. Before I started the game, I was still considering whether to use mouse and keyboard, or a controller. So I read up on it, and mouse and keyboard was recommended, due to the greater ease of aiming. And that has been working quite well for me at the start of the game. Most of the time the keys you can press are helpfully displayed on the screen. And while I must have missed the part of the tutorial where it told you that you can roll with LeftCTRL, that information was easy to find in the settings, under Control Mapping. But then I got a new weapon, a sharpshot bow, which came with a tutorial mission to hit three watchers in they eye, and I had great difficulty with that quest. My arrows were flying wide all the time, even from rather short distances. What was wrong? It turned out I hadn't fully understood the controls of shooting a bow.

Normally in the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn, you hold the right mouse button to get into aim mode, and then you click the left mouse button to fire an arrow. If you have a fast bow, you can loose multiple arrows by clicking the left mouse button in fast succession, which works great if your target is relatively close to you. What I hadn't noticed was that you can also hold the left mouse button for a while, and then the arrow releases when you release the mouse button. There is a badly visible circle of light around your aim circle which gets smaller when you hold the left mouse button. And to be very accurate, like for example with the sharpshot bow, that is exactly what you need to do. Hold both mouse buttons while aiming for the eye, then let go of the left mouse button to shoot the watcher.

That took me a while to figure out, and to the best of my knowledge isn't explained anywhere. I managed to find the function when I got yet another weapon, a sling, and couldn't aim it further away than a few feet of me. Turns out you also have to hold the left mouse button to "pull back" and be able to shoot further away. Once I had that figured out, I realized what my problem had been with the sharpshot bow.

Two more things about Horizon Zero Dawn: I like the game and would recommend it. And if you start playing, take Silent Strike and Lure Call as your first two skills as soon as you level up the first time. Those help immensely if you like to take down enemies like a silent hunter instead of just rushing in and mashing buttons.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:34 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 My wife plays computer games, must mostly the ones that do not require you to react quickly: Point-and-click adventure games, mobile puzzle games, and the like. She says that in a PC or console game like Assassin's Creed, she never manages to push the button at exactly the right time, and then ends up missing the attack or the jump or whatever was required. So when a few months ago I started playing Assassin's Creed Rebellion, I didn't show her the game. I was drawn to the mobile Assassin's Creed game by having played several of the series' games on PC, and thought as she hadn't played those, she wouldn't be interested. Today my wife by chance looked at my screen while I was playing, and contrary to what I had thought was very interested in the game. She doesn't know the characters or the series, but she likes the cute graphics of the mobile version. And, as it turns out, she also like the gameplay.

The gameplay in Assassin's Creed Rebellion is turn-based. You can still make tactical decisions, like whether you want to sneak past a guard, assassinate him, or attack him head-on, but you never need to press the button at exactly the right time. You just have a percentage chance for things like assassinations or jumps, and combat is also just a numbers game. Which means that you have a lot of the tactics of an Assassin's Creed game, without needing to bother getting the execution right.

Sometimes I wish there were more games that would get the real time to turn-based conversion treatment. I'm still playing World of Tanks, I'm still not very good at it, but my trouble clearly is with the execution, not with the tactics. That is why I prefer tactical games like XCOM to shooters or platformers. Many games seem to be designed for the typical reaction times of teenagers, and I just can't keep up with that.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:16 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

The internet, as the name suggests, is international. Except for some authoritarian governments blocking access, you are mostly free to visit websites all over the world. Although I live in Belgium, I can go to the website of a US company. However, once we make the transition from the virtual space to the real world, things become a bit more complicated. If I want to order something from that US company, I might find that they aren't shipping internationally.

Today I started an experiment to overcome this problem. I opened an account at ColisExpat. They provided me with a US shipping address, which is basically a PO box at one of their warehouses. So now I can order a parcel from a US company shipped to that US PO box. When it arrives, I'll get an e-mail, and can then pay them for the international shipping of that parcel to Belgium. If I have several parcels, I can get them repacked into a single one to reduce shipping cost.

I assume there are other companies that do the same thing, but ColisExpat was the one I found when I was searching for shipping options for a particular US company. Of course international shipping is expensive and slow (or extremely expensive and not quite as slow), and adding the fees for one more company isn't helping. I used to fly to the USA for professional reasons or the occasional holiday at least once a year, and do some shopping there, but that isn't an option anymore. Let's see whether this service gets me the things I want to buy from the USA to Belgium.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments