Blagust Day 10: Savage Lands – Early Access Impressions

From afar, Savage Lands looks gorgeous.

I have to admit that I was initially attracted to it, as opposed to most other survival sandbox games, for this somewhat shallow reason. It looks kind of like Skyrim. Could it recreate the immersive feeling of Skyrim, in a survival setting?

I wasn’t keen on finding out at the full price, while it was still in Early Access, avoiding such games as a matter of habit, but Steam cleverly read that a lot of people had this game on their wishlist and slashed prices by 60%. At $8, being able to try it out as it undergoes various updates over time and supporting its developers seemed like a steal.

Up close, however, it gets somewhat more disappointing. The seams of the textures become obvious, the resolution is not that great, many of the bushes appear to have no substance whatsoever, being almost flat textures, and so on.

The animations are awkward as hell, when you look at your own shadow.

Each mouse click that swings an axe or hammer basically looks like this: Picture yourself taking a crouched haka stance… now freeze every part of your body, and swing one arm. Just that one arm. Up and down.

Ugh.  It’s stiffer than a mannequin could achieve, and breaks practically all the rules of Animation 101.

The sky’s still pretty, though.

The above anecdote about its visuals pretty much encapsulates the rest of the game as well, with the caveat that everything is still in Early Access, so the extent of the changes from now to launch is still unknown.

On the face of it, Savage Lands has something going for it here. Survival in a Skyrim-esque setting, with the promise of local singleplayer, friendly PvE multiplayer and free-for-all/hostile PvP multiplayer servers.

Hey, look, they managed to cater to all three subgroups of survival-liking players, how awesome is that already?

What it has does function, if in a basic manner.

You start out crash-landed (via boat) on the shores of the Sundered Isle.

There is a basic quest tutorial about stuff that you can collect and build.

Helpful items are spawned/placed fairly nearby so that you don’t immediately starve to death or otherwise die before figuring out what’s going on.

There are three meters that need to be looked after and maintained – fairly standard tropes in a survival game – Cold, Health, Hunger.

Hunger, thankfully, doesn’t plunge as fast as certain other games *cough Don’t Starve cough* so there is time to putter around without a supreme sense of urgency. Which is good, because it takes a while to source out food.

There doesn’t seem to be any farming in the game as yet, so one is constantly foraging – either via the random hacking down of flora in the hopes that some berries or tree nuts pop out (disappointingly, there don’t seem to be any visual indicators as to plant-based food sources as yet either, so it’s been mostly Grand Theft Lumberjack) or via hunting animals.

The hunting of deer is one of the better done ‘gameplay’ moments in Savage Lands so far.

Deer spook and run easily when you get close. So you have to “walk slowly” aka press the Ctrl key and “pretend to crouch and sneak through grasses” (no animations for those yet) and sneak up on the deer, if you hope to clobber them with a melee weapon.

It takes at least three hits to down the deer, so some patient stalking is in order.

Fortunately, after a few repeated backstab rogue impersonations, you generally earn enough hide/sinew to make a bow.

Hurrah for ranged attacks. After crafting some flint arrows, the next hurdle is get the hang of actually using it. Right mouse button draws back the bow, left mouse button fires. The arrow arcs, and doesn’t quite go where your crosshairs are, so you have to compensate by aiming a little higher and/or shooting a few tracer arrows.

The whole process ends up a pretty satisfactory simulation of deer hunting without making it impossibly annoying and time-consuming, and feels extremely rewarding because you almost always welcome the deer meat and you’re perpetually bottlenecked on animal leather products like hide, sinew and strong sinew.

Wolves are a little weird, aka the AI might still need to be worked on a little.

Normally, the only way I realize a wolf is around is when I hear the growl and look down to see one of them nipping at my heels. It’s like they just appear around my ankles.

They take around 5 axe hits to slay, and the first few hits usually end up as an exchange of blows (with one caveat) and after they’re wounded, they seem to like running away for a short distance or running in wide circles…

Ok, this fella is a plague wolf and takes about 10 hits. Similar AI though.

…though ironically, they almost always come back, so it’s just a matter of letting them run themselves around a mulberry bush and taking another swing when they approach.

Skeletons move slowly and otherwise seem to aggro like wolves initially. Then they’ll just inexorably close on you, and keep coming.

Fortunately, the general caveat of -any- fighting in Savage Lands presently is that all you have to do is melee kite the buggers, and they’ll take a swing and miss, at which point you run up and whack them once or twice and then back off once again before they can take a second swing… which also misses, rinse and repeat. Really, just back away and most of the damage is minimized.

Nothing has seemed terribly challenging as yet, but then I haven’t fought bears or -the- dragon, which is just as well, while I’m merely getting my feet wet.

This fellow… the pride of the loadscreen, he is.

Health, by the by, is maintained by not getting hurt, using bandages when the bleeding effect is on you (I bled to death once when I didn’t have any on me), and bandaging up or eating food for a little health recovery.

Knew I was a goner. it was just a matter of trying to get as close to base camp as possible before bleeding out, to make corpse retrieval easier. (It’s cute that we call it CR out of habit, when “item” retrieval is more appropriate these days.)

Lesson learned. Bring bandages.

If you die, you turn up at your spawn point, having left your possessions at the corpse, which you can go and retrieve.

They kindly put an icon for you to indicate where your corpse lies. Which is all very good, because it’ll probably be like hunting for a needle in the haystack otherwise.

Not too horrific in a singleplayer or friendly game, it’s not permadeath by any means, but I suppose it’s pretty much wave goodbye to your stuff on a PvP server.

Cold is the nastiest and most punishing meter to maintain in the Savage Lands. Wandering anywhere without shelter or clothing, especially when it starts snowing, plays utter havoc on this bar. Naturally, if it drops to zero, bad things happen to your health bar after that. The sound effects when your avatar gets cold and starts shivering and panting do offer pretty immersive and useful audio feedback. To recover one’s body heat, you are essentially required to stand by a campfire or other shelter for an obnoxiously long period of time.

Let’s see, from 21%, it needs to rise to 100%. *sighs* *admires my other campfire in the distance for lack of anything better to do*

Apparently, this contributes to a communal gathering of manly men around a campfire on a friendly server, and I suppose produces enough boredom in players that they might start socializing with each other to kill time, but in a solo singleplayer game, it’s mostly a good excuse to flip screens and look for a video to watch.

As for resource collection and crafting, there is nothing terribly new or earthshaking here, it seems to stick to the same conventions as its genre – conventions that I wasn’t used to and did throw me off for a time.

Use axe to chop trees to get wood sticks and logs. I got that part. No problem. Seems “realistic” enough.

Except for the part where all my logs insist on rolling away from the campfire because of a tiny nearly imperceptible gradient change in elevation.

Get leather and sinew and hide from hunting animals. Got it. Makes sense.

Get stones and flint. Where the hell do I get those? I ended up operating off vague recollections of A Tale in the Desert’s gathering of flint from shorelines and picking up bits of stone from the beach. It took a significantly longer time before I remembered Don’t Starve and thought to a) make a hammer, and b) hit rocks with it.

Manna from rocks…

Oh my. What a sudden bonanza of flint, stones, coal, and metal ore of varying qualities and more…

Things Survival Games Taught Me #1 – If you’re ever trapped on a desert island, you just need to break rocks with a sledgehammer and you’ll be fine and on your way out of the Stone Age.

The crafting window in Savage Lands is also somewhat ugly in terms of UI, but functional. Pressing K brings up an entire window of options, with tabs for different things like armor, food, miscellaneous gear, repairing tools. Select the option you want, click the “Craft” button, and given the availability of resources and any necessary buildings in the vicinity like a firepit or a forge, it will auto-magically appear with a clang into your inventory.

The last interesting bit about Savage Lands at the moment is its lack of a map.

This, coupled with the biome presently being all snowy trees and bushes and plenty of grass and undulating gentle slopes and random bits of rock scattered possibly procedurally across the landscape, makes for an instant recipe of getting lost in the wilds fairly quickly and makes exploration rather difficult, to say the least.

Hell, every time I take off after a deer that takes off, my stomach clenches slightly because it’s liable to take me far into the woods and make it hard to find my way back.

Fortunately, it is possible to craft a rudimentary compass that assists somewhat with general directional navigation.

So far, my main strategy is that I’ve set up camp by a scenic part of the beach, with mainly three directions I travel in. Along the shoreline in one direction, along the shoreline in the other direction, and more or less a straight line inland.

Following the shoreline is relatively easy, and allows me to navigate back by virtue of turning around 180 degrees and following the shoreline back the other way.

The straight line inland has been more of a challenge, even with the compass, and I have concocted an awkward strategy of setting up multiple firepits and campfires (since I need to keep warm constantly anyway) in a straight sight line (any foliage in the way is chopped down) so that I can follow the trail of firepits back to base camp, even if the fires have gone out.

My lifeline firepit on the horizon… Home lies thattaway.

Savage Lands, unfortunately, has a present dearth of content. Beyond the occasional wolf, deer, skeleton or even plague wolf and armored skeleton encounters, traveling inland generally leads to seeing trees, trees and more trees and the odd burned out ruined building every once in a blue moon.

Biggest village I’ve stumbled across. All abandoned though.

Oh, and the dragon responsible for said burned-out buildings can be sometimes seen circling in the sky or perched on a rock being a right terror.

Apparently, when you’re the king of a deserted island, you amuse yourself at night by spewing fire around at nothing whatsoever. Or maybe he just -really- doesn’t like mosquitoes.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much of a brain, or it fancies itself too high-and-mighty to worry about a little mouse busy making the world’s largest smoke signal with a line of burning firepits and it hasn’t flown down to investigate yet.

Every so often, I think about lobbing an arrow in its direction to begin the “dragon boss” combat encounter (as is announced in the scrolling ‘updates’ bar before you start the game proper) and then just as frequently think the better of it and decide to do more tree and rock-punching until I accumulate enough resources to craft the ‘best’ armor and weapons first.

The game does have some potential. What it has, does function. With more content and interesting things to see and do and fight when exploring, it may be fairly promising.

As of now though, this is pretty much what you expect to see everywhere you go. Trees, trees, more trees, grass, snow and oh, that dragon flapping around.

This post was brought to you by the letters B for Belghast and Blaugust, S for (not-quite) Skyrim  and Started-Early-On-Blog-Post-For-Once, and the number 10.

GW2 Hype Meter Unmoved & Quickie Steam Game Impressions

The whole Early Access phenomenon, coupled with Steam sales, has produced some rather odd behavior in me.

I don’t know how to get hyped up over anything anymore (or more precisely, when.)

Guild Wars 2 announces some sweeping, massive changes to traits, gears and stats for all classes in a pending patch.

I think, “Wow. Ouch. Wow. Er, ok. Hrm. Eew. Hrmf. Wow. Hmmmm…” and end up curiously neutral, uncertain as to how it’s all going to pan out and resolving to wait and see before emotionally overreacting, positively or negatively.

(I don’t like the idea of making Ascended gear more important or effective over Exotic, because of that whole level playing field thing and the perennial tendency of players to exclude others and become toxic under the influence of beliefs that don’t even vaguely resemble true fact. I don’t like being forced into vertical progression, and I’m ready to drop a game at any point if they tell me I now have to do such-and-such activity in order to get such-and-such stat reward, or else become useless or below par.

However, some quick Excel calculations later, my hypothesized extrapolations suggested that while the patch note percentages -look- big, the actual effective stat change is kinda… not that big a deal. It’s like a 5-7% primary stat difference now between full exotics and ascended, and we might go to 7-9% primary stat difference with the change.

Then there’s comparing Ascended trinket+weapon+exotic gear versus full Ascended, which is the more usual state of affairs since it’s the Ascended armor that is prohibitively expensive. The difference in primary stat is now somewhere between 1-2% going to 2-3%, which sounds a bit more negligible.

Of course, since all the stats on both exotics and ascended rose, maybe both are objectively better than what we’re already operating with. Except except they’re doing something with the level scaling again, and there’s the condition damage change, and I have no idea what this would actually translate to in terms of actual damage done after all’s said and done with the new traits, new gear stats, new level scaling, new everything.

So, you know, fuck it. Record damage done and stats now. Wait for patch drop to compare, paper theorycrafting is kinda useless with so many moving parts changing…)

Guild Wars 2 announces some big things regarding guild halls at E3.

I think, “Kewl. Mental note: Watch Youtube or Twitch video at some point in the future to know what was said” and stay unhyped, having not actually seen the video yet.

Guild Wars 2 announces that pre-purchases for Heart of Thorns are now available!

I go, “Sweet!” and rush to the website…. then promptly deflate at the available options, having mentally calculated that I’d probably pick up the best Ultimate deal, but eesh, that’s a lot of money… and for what, uncertainty right now. We haven’t even see how the pending patch changes are going to play out. We haven’t even heard half of the elite specializations yet. We’ve seen -one- Heart of Thorns map (that is, if you qualified for the betas, and half of it seemed unpopulated anyway.)

Come on, we’ve all been here before. It sounds exactly like something out of Early Access. Please give us money now to support us as we’re developing the game you want to play!

I rarely ever buy into this Early Access thing, so it’s not a scheme that works for parting me from my wallet. Steam sales have trained me to wait for the magic 75% off mark if I don’t urgently -need- to play this game now. (And with so many games available on my plate, be it from the Steam guilt trip list, free-to-play MMOs or other games, it’s a rare game that I -need- to play right this moment.)

Furthermore, I find myself confused over the best time to hype (or feel hyped) about something now.

Early Access spreads out the excitement. Ok, some people are playing it now. Some other people are playing it now. Some are still waiting for launch. Some are waiting for sales. The hype has spread out into one long tail, there’s no more spikes of excitement. (For me, anyway.)

My reaction, more often than not these days, is to simply wait-and-see.

Some early adopters will grab it first, stream it, review it, tell me what they think. I can get a better picture of what it really contains, what it really offers, whether I might like it or not.

With that information, I feel better about my decision to purchase, rather than buying it sight unseen, on wisps of hope. Gimme evidence. Gimme facts.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll be over here, playing games that are actually already made and launched, and better yet, on sale.

—

In Verbis Virtus

The concept sounded ridiculously cool and innovative. Cast spells using your own spoken words, picked up via microphone.

Immersion is one of the things I’m constantly looking to experience, in games that care to offer it to me, and actually having to learn and memorize arcane words of power is as immersively mage-like as they come.

Except… I’m not one for using mics. Ever. There’s the hassle of setting it up, of making sure you’re not blowing somebody’s ears off (including your own) with misconfigured volumes, there’s having to put on a headset instead of relaxing free and easy with 5.1 speaker surround sound, there’s the weirdness of hearing your own voice come back to you, not to mention the general weirdness of talking to a screen (in tongues!) while your family wonders what you’re doing, and oh, it’s late at night and all is quiet and folks (including neighbors, land area is scarce here, people are packed into buildings where sound might travel through walls, floor or ceilings – I can hear kids bouncing balls on the floor above me) are asleep, and HERE YOU ARE, ARTICULATING STRANGE NOISES TO YOURSELF, YOUR MICROPHONE AND YOUR COMPUTER GAME.

All of that can kinda wreck the immersion.

I’d resolved to save the money and watch a Let’s Play of it instead, enjoying someone with a more resonant voice than I have perform on my behalf.

Somewhere along Video 6, I found myself caving in to the temptation of the personal experience and ended up buying it.

The first caveat is that you have to not mind puzzle games. In Virbis Virtus is not a first-person shooter, in the sense that there’s not going to be a million and one enemies to kill. (Lichdom: Battlemage might cater to that more. Not sure. I bought it. On my to-try list.)

It’s about learning a bunch of weird spells, like light and telekinesis spells, so that you can solve door opening puzzles with them. Along the way, there might be some platforming and jumping, some speed reactions and rehearsed sequences at certain parts, block stacking and object manipulation, plus riddle-like clue reading and thoughtful thinking interspersed.

The second caveat is that you have to be a little bit more competent at setting up (or already having a microphone configured) than I am.

There was a great deal of preliminary cursing and swearing at the beamforming microphone that was -supposed- to be built into the Audio Control Module of my Soundblaster ZX, but turned out to have ridiculously wimpy pickup (had to turn boost and volume up all the way to even catch something, with awful garbled noises and feedback threatening each step of the way.) There was a debate with oneself on whether to use the secondary backup of a plug-into-USB and go headset, but that seemed like wimping out from the problem device. There was digging around and de-dusting of another microphone to plug into said ACM to test (obviously pickup is -much- better when the microphone is nearer my mouth. Duh,) unsoweiter.

That said, the game itself deals rather well with audio recognition, better than I expected, certainly (though it can fail about 5% of the time, often at critical moments when you’re panicking and trying to remember the proper enunciation in order to not die and promptly fail miserably. Lesson learned: I would make a very good -dead- mage if I lived in a fantasy world. It’s certainly ‘realistic’ and immersive in that sense.)

I had occasional bouts of broken immersion every time the microphone tried to poke me in the mouth, but that’s probably just me being an old-fashioned text user. All the newfangled voice-preferring users of TeamSpeak and Mumble and Ventrilo and Twitch should have very little issues on this front.

The best praise I can offer (being such a staunch anti-mic hermit) for In Verbis Virtus is that when it all goes well, it really does feel magical.

It’s as close to virtual reality or a holodeck as anyone has come so far, until someone either figures out how to pair it with an Oculus Rift or writes a game that does both.

Pixel Piracy

We now take a complete 180 into the land of the cutesy and comical.

I am still trying to figure out what is so utterly appealing about this game that I lost three hours to it and wouldn’t mind playing on.

It’s pretty simplistic, it’s no elaborate Terraria, it’s a game about leveling up your pirates so that you can earn more gold and more loot to buy new and better gear and items so that you can blow up bigger and badder ships owned by other pirates or slaughter savage natives on tropical islands so that you can take their gold and loot to rinse and repeat.

Yep, an incrementing numbers game, along with a “just one more turn” schtick, in the form of one more ship or island.

Combat is RTS-like, in the sense that you just tell your units where to go, and after that they’ll take over the fighting from there. (Better hope you prepared them well with good weapons and levels and training and such!)

I suppose part of the appeal for me is the sense of unknown discovery – like the first time one plays Minecraft or Don’t Starve and -doesn’t- refer to a third-party source to tell them what to do. Some things are not that well explained or documented in game, so there’s a bit of trial-and-error experimentation involved to figure out exactly how this little part of this system works and fits together.

Forum reports are not terribly positive regarding bugs and such as the game progresses though, so only pick up at a sale price where you won’t regret the expenditure if stuff breaks later on down the road.

The shipboard AI wakes you from cryo-sleep.

The spaceship’s on fire, it’s venting poisonous gases and there’s runaway electrical shorts all over.

You’re a xenobiologist by occupation.

Oh, and incidentally, everyone else but you seems to be dead.

Fortunately, you don’t actually have to physically go out there and turn firefighter. There’s machinery that can solve your various problems for you, but curiously, the computer seems to need your brain and input to operate said machinery.

After dealing with the immediate crisis, you promptly turn detective as you piece together the last moments of the crew on the research station on the surface of the planet that your ship was orbiting around… a grand saga of paranoia and poisoning and murder.

J.U.L.I.A. is essentially a point-and-click adventure game with an intriguing premise (and apparently, according to reviews, a decently good story.)

It does away with some of the tropes of the adventure game – there is no avatar you have to watch walk around the screen ever so slowly, instead you’re ostensibly giving commands to a remote bot that does the actual work. Both the bot and computer are capable of conversing with you, providing the necessary NPC dialogue chatter to keep you company while you poke around at clues and try to figure out what’s going on. Pixel hunting is kept to a minimum, as the bot can ‘scan’ for interesting objects which are highlighted for a short time.

I’ve not completed the whole game yet, but it definitely seems like a game worth trying, as long as you like a bit of mystery, exploration and puzzle-solving in a sci-fi story.

NBI: Talkback Challenge #2 and #3

It wasn’t until Cleeyah posted her response on being a gamer that I realized that I was late for Talkback Challenge #2. Oops.

So you all get a combination post instead!

Talkback Challenge #2 – Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

Maaaaybe, but mostly leaning towards no.

I don’t have any massive issues with either scheme, and I really like the idea behind Kickstarter.

My main problem is that games tend to be very hard to scope properly and it’s also very hard to evaluate if a game team is capable of doing what it -says- it wants to do. There’s just a lot of in-betweens that can cause what is put down on paper to not resemble the final product at all.

I don’t like throwing money into the ether. I believe that Kickstarter is a great platform for crowdfunding what interests you, but if you ask me to give some money to you, personally, I need reassurance that I’m going to see a concrete product back in return, within a reasonable timeframe.

The way I evaluate this is simple. Is this an established company that is used to working together and has processes in place?

(No, a brand spanking new company just formed from a whole bunch of ‘pioneers’ does not count. I’ll give you some time to get your hierarchy hashed out and ego/political games in place to see if you can produce something functional despite the natural dysfunction of any company.)

How difficult do I feel the finished product will be for you to create, based on what you tell me in the Kickstarter?

If you give me vague promises, a design document that reads like marketing copy, and no prior track record, you’ll find it really hard to move me into giving you money up front. Even if you really can put out.

Pillars of Eternity was one of those that I just couldn’t bring myself to fund, despite liking Baldur’s Gate a ton. I needed to see a final product and reviews saying that it is good, before I consider putting down money for it.

But let’s say they ask for money again, to produce a sequel or some additional DLC content. Given this track record that they’ve produced one game in this vein before, I’ll find it much more reasonable to assume they can do something similar again.

Conversely, I found it much easier to contribute to the Defence Grid 2 Kickstarter (they already made Defence Grid 1 and they had a plan for additional funding if KS didn’t work out), and to a company like Reaper Miniatures that wanted a cash infusion to buy a machine for their special plastic/resin molding or whatever (all the creative work is either already done or the processes are in place, they have already produced Bones plastic minis via a Chinese company, the only major risk is shipping/transit issues.)

I might also find it easier to fund a solo person creating a tabletop RPG pdf (not yet though), since that is mostly desktop publishing. The scope of the work is not that colossal, one is only essentially paying to support the author for the time spent on the creative work. But again, said author must have a track record of having written prior PDFs that contain content I find worth paying for.

As for Early Access, meh, I just can’t fit my head around the concept of -paying- for the privilege to alpha or beta test your game.

(I might do it for free, there’s mutual benefit in that. I get a sneak peek, and you get me poking around attempting to break things with my presence.)

If it works for others, go nuts. I’m happy that these guys are helping to increase the chances that this game will see the light of day and become a finished product that I can pay for. But don’t ask -me- for money to test your game for you. Just… don’t.

—

Talkback Challenge #3 – What made you a gamer?

I can’t remember a time when I -wasn’t.-

Before I was old enough to hold a joystick, my mum was playing a vast variety of Parker Brothers board games with me.

We’d inherited her Cluedo and Monopoly set, painstakingly saved up for when her whole family was not that well to do, and I took a special delight in these two boxes of history, since they were editions that were no longer being sold in stores and reflected a different time and age. (He’ll always be Reverend Green to me,  not Mr Green! And Dr Black died, not Mr Boddy!)

Now that the family was a little better off, it seemed we were doing our best to sample every board game that caught our eye on the Toys R Us shelves, from A-Z.

My dad was a big enabler when it came to computers and a tech early adopter.

There was an Amiga in the house very early on, and it naturally came with little game disks that I would happily browse and pop into the computer based on the name alone.

Most were arcade games of some kind, spaceships shooting multiple bullets or little soldiers shooting guns, since that was the type of game he liked, but occasionally, and more so once he started bringing Amiga games magazines home now and then, I would find or beg for different games – Secret of Monkey Island, Dungeon Master, Zak McKraken, the works.

When the Game Boy console launched, my dad had to have one. Naturally, it was taken over by yours truly fairly early on in the process. Turns out my dad just couldn’t really stick to games, or train up his reaction time to do as well as he liked, thus getting frustrated and losing interest quite quickly. That was ok by me. Next step, finagle a Final Fantasy RPG cartridge via a birthday present or getting good grades for that semester.

My mum passed me more of a stubborn, obsessive streak, perfect for that video games addiction. (To this day, she’s not much of a computers person, but boy, can she pwn that Solitaire game. Or any other simple casual game I put on her phone or laptop.)

By the time I graduated to my dad’s PC (ie. seemed old and tech savvy enough that I wouldn’t break anything via learning DOS), I was very much a gamer.

First step after mastering DOS commands? Locate whatever games he had on that system. Which wasn’t much, he was moving out of his game phase, alas, but I did find Alley Cat, Ninja, and a couple of others.

I’d scavenge around in his greatly messy study for any more lost and forgotten game boxes – Rocky’s Boots was one of the treasures I did find (I was learning about AND, OR, NOT gates at a mindblowingly young age and I hadn’t a clue this was happening, because to me, this was a fun game to play.)

Before long, I was spending much of my pocket money on saving up for games. My dad, the great enabler, would bring the tech into the house. e.g. a Sega Genesis console, with an odd game or two. And then I’d end up drooling over more interesting looking games in the games store and bringing those back home. He picked up the arcade games, I went for RPGs or adventure games or top reviewed classics and that seemed to cover enough (especially given how long it took to beat RPGs in those days.)

Any time he upgraded his PC system, I got his cast offs. (That was probably a strategy devised to ensure I wasn’t hogging his computer all the time.)

My friends and I were playing PC games all throughout the Age of Shareware.

At some point, 3D shooters became the in-thing. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Heretic and Hexen (the latter two firm favorites, given our fantasy propensities.)

Somewhen during that era, we transitioned from merely talking on the phone while simultaneously playing games separately and began our first steps into multiplayer when again, our respective dads brought in modems.

Modems naturally meant visiting BBSes, and BBSes meant door games. Good ol’ Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars 2002.

I learned fairly quickly on that my friends weren’t any match for me. I blew one friend up in Hexen repeatedly, and that was the end of deathmatching for me, we had to play co-op after that.

Another classmate professed to love some version of Command and Conquer, and I was pretty gleeful to find another potential player. I guess it was a mistake to say that I hadn’t ever played the game before, but somehow managed to luck into unleashing a whole bunch of nukes onto said classmate. That was the end of that too. (I really hadn’t played C&C before either! I did play all the versions of Warcraft out at the time though! Who knew RTS principles held that true?)

The internet couldn’t come soon enough.

Alongside frequenting various first-person shooter game servers (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, etc. where I actually found people better than me to blow me up and thus learn from,) I’d discovered that fascinating phenomenon: MUDs. Online chatroom, text adventure game and RPG all mixed into one.

I was hooked.

And it’s been all up and down hill from there.

—

NBI Writing Prompt: Prompt? There is no prompt. Go answer one of the Talkback Challenges instead!