Friday, Saturday, Who Knows Any More?

When I started writing this, it was going to be one of those Friday Grab-Bags again. And on an actual Friday, too! Then stuff happened and now it's Saturday. Not interesting stuff, either. Just downloads and dogs, which could be the name of the least interesting tabletop role-playing game ever...

The Dungeon of What, Now?

I wasn't planning on a portmanteau post anyway. I had it in mind to write something about the new-to-me game I just got free from Amazon Prime Gaming. It's called The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos, gawd help it, although since it's a parody, I imagine the name is supposed to be faintly ridiculous. It's a "tactical RPG", which seems to mean some kind of ultra slowed-down version of an actual RPG like Baldur's Gate. 

Of course, I'd rather be playing Baldur's Gate - specifically Baldur's Gate 3 - but even though my PC now passes the Can I Play It? test, after I bought my spiffy new graphics card a couple of months back, even Black Friday hasn't tempted Larian to drop the price and I'm not paying fifty quid for it so here we are.

Unfortunately, when I came to write the post I'd planned, I just couldn't find a way in. I'd played the game for close on two hours by then and when I stopped for lunch I was still in the Tutorial. About all I can say about it so far is it looks pretty, the humor isn't as irritating I as I expected and there's a heck of a lot to learn. 

There's so much micro-management. So many things to check. You don't just move, you have to choose an orientation or you'll end up facing away from the orc you want to clout. Mobs aren't just melees or ranged or healers or magic-users - they have strengths and weaknesses and conditions you need to study on mousover. There's cover and partial cover and friendly fire and who knows what else to consider even before you begin.

When the fight ends there are levels and talent trees and gear to deal with and there's a storyline and a narrator and all the members of your party talk and bicker all the time and everything just takes forever. The reason I had to abandon the post I started about the game was that I found myself extemporizing on the existential crisis of spending literally the length of a movie just getting through the Tutorial - and not even finishing that - when I can't seem to find the time to watch any actual movies. 

I mean, what does that say about my choices? What am I doing with my time? Or my life?

I was making myself depressed, just writing the damn thing. I couldn't expect anyone to read it. So I junked the whole thing and...

It's Still Patching... No, Seriously, It Really Is...

... decided to download Blade & Soul instead. Because displacement activity rocks!

It wasn't entirely random. I've been meaning to get back to B&S for a long time but I also had this crazy idea I could get a very quick post out of some screenshots of the free stuff I've claimed there from Prime. I think it might be quite a lot of stuff. I seem to remember claiming something most months and I haven't logged in for at least a year.

I thought I remembered having uninstalled B&S a while back, when I was rationalizing my hard drive space. I couldn't see the icon on my desktop so I went straight to the NCSoft website and downloaded the patcher. 

That was easy enough. I still had my login details. I signed in and got started on the 57GB download.

It stuck at about 25% with a message about some file it couldn't download that had an name so long I couldn't remember it. I couldn't copy it from the pop-up window either. I googled but no-one else seemed to be having a problem with the patcher. I spent a good while messing around, restarting the download, running the File Check from the launcher and getting nowhere until eventually I found some useful advice on reddit that had me digging through the partial installation, deleting files. 

I say "useful" but it still didn't solve my problem so I decided to uninstall and start again, which was when I discovered I did actually still have the game installed after all. It was just on another drive. In fact, I still had the old version too, the one from back before the game was ported to Unreal4.

I cleared all the deadwood out and tried to save myself some time by patching up the installed game only to have the launcher tell me I didn't have it, even though I could see the files right there in front of me. It started downloading the entire thing into the same directory alongside the 56GB of files already there. I tried to fool it by moving the new install into the folder of the old one, a trick which always used to work for EverQuest, but times have moved on. 

This went on for some time. The corrupted file issue didn't recur but instead every time the download and installation ended, as soon as I tried to launch the actual game the whole process started over. By ten in the evening I had three full versions of Blade & Soul and not one of them worked so I deleted the lot and went to bed. 

That's why I'm posting this on Saturday even though it's a Friday Grab-Bag. Also because inbetween all of that I had to play with Beryl for an hour, take her out, feed her, then play with her again. She tends to sleep all day and get manic when the sun goes down. Or when the moon comes up. She's probably a weredog.

As I write this, the game is downloading for the fourth or fifth time. I forget how many it's been. If it doesn't work this time, I'm done with it. If it does, expect a post about how great I look in my new clothes sometime soon. Assuming it was clothes I got. I have no idea what it was.

247 - All Switch And No Bait

Since this seems to be mostly a grab-bag of gripes, let me throw in another entitled complaint, this time about Pantheon. Remember the kerfuffle when Visionary Games announced out of the blue they were putting development on hold to work on a survival extraction spin-off called 247? Well, that's not happening any more.

Predictably, the players being extremely invested in the game they thought VG was making (Some of them to the tune of $1000, which is what it costs to get a pre-alpha spot in Pantheon.) not in some fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants knock-off moneygrab (As they would see it.) raised a ruckus, at which point the developers faced the exact same fork in the road as every other in-development game that's tried this malarkey, namely carry on down the new road, leaving most of the people paying the bills waving their pitchforks in the dust behind them or pull a screeching, bootlegger turn back to the non-existent safety of a game they already know is making them bankrupt, all the while wringing their hands and begging for forgiveness. 

(That's all one sentence, you know. Good luck picking your way through the clauses.) 

 

It's a no-win scenario. I'm sure VG wouldn't have opted to make a second game before they'd finished the first if they hadn't been desperate. I mean, I guess they could just have been bored with dusty old Pantheon and thought it'd be fun to work on something cooler but I doubt it. 

Whatever the secret reasons behind the decision, they lost their nerve and 247 is now 007. Er, no, not that. I mean it's dead. Which is kind of a shame. I was looking forward to seeing it. 

I'm not as disappointed as I might have been because although for a while I was looking forward to playing it, I soon found out it was going to be nearly as expensive to opt into 247 as it is to Pantheon, which to my way of thinking kind of undermines the entire point of doing the thing at all. 

Did they really think the same people were all going to stump up a few hundred dollars more just to play a sawn-off version of the game they really wanted? That's delusional. If they weren't going for a much wider audience, why even bother?

Where that leaves Pantheon and Visionary Realms now, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Then again, "wait and see" is all we've ever had from Pantheon so I guess nothing much has changed.

I Think We Used To Play This At School

The Pantheon/247 affair made me realize I have no clear idea what a "survival extraction" game is. I keep seeing the term, or variations that theme, most often in the guise of the "extraction shooter". It seems to have replaced "Battle Royale" as the pot of gold concept for game developers, just like Battle Royale replaced MOBA and MOBA replaced MMO.

I had a vague idea what's involved - running away, mostly, in the hope of getting to a safe zone with whatever you've managed to loot off the corpses of your victims - but how that would dovetail with a retro-revivalist, old school, DikuMUD mmorpg like Pantheon beats me. They seem to be almost antithetical.

I was hoping for a nice Wikipedia article to explain the whole subgenre but there isn't one. It's buried somewhere in the massive "Shooter Game" entry but I wasn't about to plow my way through all of that. The best explanation I found, when I googled "survival extraction game" was, as it so often is, in a reddit thread, this one handily titled "What is an Extraction Shooter?" 

 

The thread is full of people giving their personal interpretations and naturally they all assume the game will be "a shooter", something Pantheon categorically is not. PvP also seems to be a key element, something I don't think is high on Pantheon's feature list, although most of the explanations refer to a PvPvE environment, which can be more of an MMORPG thing.

Group play appears to be strongly encouraged and there's a surprising amount of reference to persistent worlds and even story, too, so I guess it's not such a big leap from Pantheon's underlying principles as I thought.  I came away with a much better idea of what might have been expected, had the game ever manifested itself. 

Even so, it still seems like a very different kind of game. One of the best summations I read was this:

"Simply put, an extraction shooter has a unique gameplay loop, when you die you lose all of your gear and have to perform a "Regain Run" often referred to as a "Zero to Hero Run". This creates Gear Fear and a desire to stay alive for as many runs as possible before your inevitable death. Extraction shooters are unique with exhilarating highs and devastating lows. They're not Battle Royals or looter shooters but the baby they would make."

I was surprised to see one commenter suggest the genre has been around for almost a decade. I can't remember hearing about it until the last year or two but then I don't pay any attention to what's going on in the shooter world. I only really picked up on the term "looter-shooter" a couple of years back.

Anyway, I don't imagine I'm going to playing a lot of extraction games, shooters or otherwise, but it's always good to know what people are talking about when they propose hacking up a game you're interested in and turning it into something else. There's always the chance they might make something you'd like even more so it's never a good idea to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

Always End With A Song

It's a tradition. Although I used to hate it when comedians used to do it in the 1970s. Then again, that was mostly because the songs were terrible. And comedians can't sing.

Well, there are exceptions...

Yes, Syp got there first. Thanks Syp! 

That's Elise Ecklund. Mostly she does short, humorous, satirical or parodical pieces to camera about music and pop culture. Like this:

I love her flat, lack-of-affect delivery. That's what really sells it. She doesn't do a lot of full songs but when she does, they're really good. And not necessarily funny. Like this one.

So I guess some comedians can sing after all. 

And with that, we're done.

Notes on the AI used in this post.

For all of these I just pulled phrases out of the text and added a visual style. All of them were created at NightCafe, using the free model DreamShaper v8, which seems to give results at least as good as the Dreamshaper models that cost credits. The second and third image use the default 50% prompt weight but the first gave me a building on that setting so I upped it to 80% to get the image I used.

The prompts were:

Image #1 : "This download is going on forever. retrofuturism"

Image #2 : "some fly-by-night-and-seat-of-pants knock-off moneygrab . High fantasy." You'll note I changed that phrase in the final edit of the post but that's how it was in the draft.

Image #3 : "What is an Extraction Shooter? hypermodernism"