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Too long it has been, since a gaming post graced DWR. The Battle Royal first person shooter game PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG), still in early access, has made its way on to my gaming list.
First and foremost, like all early access games, there is a dire need for optimization and stability as frame rate and connectivity to the game servers can sometimes be quite questionable. When things are going great though, watch out, this is one of the games in which you say to yourself, ‘Okay, just one more before bed…’ and then suddenly it is 4am.
The concept is quite simple. I’ll let Wikipedia do the talking:
“The game is based on battle royal-style game mods previously developed by Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene for other games, but expanded into one standalone game under Greene’s creative direction. In the game, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island and scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill others while avoiding getting killed themselves. The available safe area of the game’s world decreases in size over a match, directing surviving players into tighter areas and forcing encounters. The last player or team standing wins the round.”
And that’s it. Throw 100 avatars onto a 8km island and see who comes out the winner. It is the chaos that comes with each round that brings me, and others back again and again. What makes the game so darn replayable is a series of risk/reward decisions must be made in every phase of the gaming experience.
Firstly, where does one jump out of the plane? Choosing a city or hamlet will increase your chances of getting the guns and gear you need to survive but then twelve other people have that exact same idea and are heading to the same area. So then it becomes a frantic race to see who can arm themselves first and have the advantage over their unarmed opponents, or do you go more out of the way, with less chance of the good loot, but also less people.
Secondly, layer on top of the loot vs people decisions, the geographical considerations involved in having a good run. The available playing area cordons off after five minutes, what happens is that a large circle appears randomly on the map and after some time an ominous blue forcefield slowly closes around that circle effectively shepherding the players into a new smaller playing area. Being far away from where the circle is drawn is never a good thing and forces you to make decisions that e often not tactically sound. Thus, dropping toward the middle of the island is generally a fairly good idea because you will never be too far away from the initial circle boundary.
Thirdly, add to the mix the randomness of the gear available; sometimes you just cannot find a scope, or enough ammunition, or armour and you have to make due with what is available.
Of course, on top of all these points is the fact that you are playing against people who will be as conniving and opportunistic as humanly possible as everyone is trying to win the match. You can bet your bottom dollar that people are lying in ambush waiting for the likes of unwary players who are not being careful. Every corner must be checked, wide open spaces avoided, tree lines inspected, ridges surveyed – because the bastards are out there and will unhelpfully remind you of their presence, and your misfortune, with gunfire.
PUBG allows the option of teaming up with either a squad of 2 or 4 people, the new caveat being that rather than dying outright when injured, members of your team can revive you if they get to you before you bleed out. Thus, more dynamics are added as then people tend to stick together and fight together leading to nasty 4 v 4 firefights and ambushes.
Playing this game has brought back some of the early pulse pounding experiences I’ve had with first person shooters when they first made their appearance on the market. Running that flag in Soldier of Fortune 2, or being the last team member alive in Counterstrike were all heart rate quickening good times. PUBG has brought those sorts of experiences back in a new setting that I’m finding most enjoyable.
This game has a long title, it is called Warhammer:Endtimes – Vermintide. Vermintide is a four player cooperative survival game, set in the Warhammer fantasy universe. People familiar with Valve’s Left4Dead series will be familiar with the play-style and challenges to be encountered in Vermintide.
The plot of the game resolves around the actions of the five playable heroes as they travel around the besieged city of Ubersreik. As this is a first person melee combat game all missions will revolve around you introducing the sharp end of your sword into the assorted Skaven rat beasts that serve as the enemies in Vermintide. Certainly, there is variation in theme, as there a missions where supplies are gathered or objectives are required to be destroyed, but make no mistake of where the focus lies in this game.
The focus of Vermintide is melee and the developer, FatShark, has done an excellent job of making rat smashing an exciting and challenging experience. Each character has a range of melee weapons that require different strategies adding a fair bit of depth to the game – for instance, choosing a two handed hammer versus a sword and shield combination will effect how the the player interacts with the levels.
The interaction with enemies is modelled very much on the Valve’s Left4Dead series with the Skaven hordes standing in for the zombie hordes that swarm the players. Being swarmed in game encourages the players to stick together and use the environment to their advantage to minimize the damage hordes can do. Facing down hordes would become stale quite quickly though, fortunately special classes of Skaven exist to only to wreck havoc and break apart tight knit groups of player characters.
- Skaven Gutter-Runners are agile, teleporting assassins that leap onto a player from medium distance. Assassins knock down their targets and require another player remove them.
- Skaven Globadiers or Gas-Rats throw area of effect poison clouds that break up the group.
- Skaven Ratling Gunners bring a mini-gun to the party and focus fire one of the members of the party.
- Skaven Packmasters bring are armed with a medieval man-catcher and will drag their victim away from the party.
- Skaven Rat Ogres – Huge, Durable, Uber-Rats that will punch or pound the players into submission.
The special Skaven force players to make quick tactical decisions as these specials are all high priority targets and always seem to show up with the party knee deep in regular Skaven.
Knee deep in regular Skaven and constant besieged by specials – this formula keeps the pressure high through most maps. The difficulty level in Vermintide is quite challenging. This is one of those games where skipping the ‘easy’ and ‘normal’ levels is not a good idea. Without a firm grasp of Vermintide’s blocking and dodging mechanics novice players quickly succumb to the ravages of the Skaven horde.
Vermintide can be a grind, as better weapons are awarded only at the end of a completed map. Wiping halfway through a map grants only a small pittance of raw materials, and this barrier to progression can be frustrating at times.
Optimization issues still plague Vermintide as this game will put a heavy load on your CPU and GPU. Scaling down the graphics helps, but much work still remains for Fatshark when it comes to streamlining their code.
I’ve had a great deal of fun with Vermintide and if you have a beefy CPU and some friends who like cooperative action I would heartily recommend this game.
So many rats…
I swear, there is a helpful graph for everything on the internet.
Where do you fit in? :) I’m pretty sure I firmly inhabit the rectangle of snooze…*sigh*.
For those of us who like lists –
The list describes the basic ethos of killing in a fantasy setting according to each alignment type. ( nuanced version here)
I’ll kill you because…
Lawful Good: you look evil, you stinkin’ orc!.
Chaotic Good: you are evil.
Neutral Good: you did something evil.
Lawful Neutral: you broke the law.
Neutral: you just tried to kill me.
Chaotic Neutral: its Tuesday.
Neutral Evil: I want that nice sword you have.
Chaotic Evil: I’ll get this tingly sensation in the back of my spine, OOooooo.
Lawful Evil: your interfering with my conquest of the world.
It is amazing the amount of turgid self serving drivel that gets posted these days about Gamer Gate. We’ll investigate today, one individual along with the trusty RPOJ (Red Pen of Justice), embattled gamer -“Maverick”- and his quest to achieve victory over Anita Sarkeessian and the evil wimmenz gamers in general. This post is about Anita’s recent appearance on the Colbert Report and what a crafty manipulator she is. Let’s look at the video first just to get some context of what is going on here.
“I have watched the interview of Anita Sarkeesian on The Colbert Report. I called it, the interview was all about how Anita is a victim and we gamers are bad people. I am not surprised by this in the least. When you have a battle where it is the people who take in journalism vs. the journalists, this is how it goes. “
You mean the person who has been the subject of online harassment, rape and death threats for years gets to speak about her experience then *you* get to use victim in a pejorative sense? What fucking planet are you from dude?
“Journalists side with their own, and because mainstream culture is out of touch with the issues that sparked GamerGate, on the heels of some BRILLIANT marketing by women like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, we are being singled out as the enemy.”
Woah, slow down their Mr. Tinfoil hat. Professional journalists follow a code of ethics and ‘siding with their own’ would happen only if the facts of the matter dictated thus. You see my gamergater friend if this was actually about ethics, the focus would be on the collusion that does take place between game production companies and game journalists. Strangely though, most the focus seems to be on how amazingly “reprehensible” these damn woman are – Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu. Your analysis, Maverick does not deviate from the usual misogyny and victim blaming that gamergate is known for.
” You are the single-greatest professional victim I have ever seen. You have branded your name and gotten fame all on the coattails of you being a victim. Your audience doesn’t care about why of who. They only care that you are upset, and they are upset. You know how easy it is to exploit your audience, so you do. That is impressive.”
Wow Maverick your brazen victim-blaming makes you eligible for high-douchlord status. Congratulations?
“And so, a zealot by the name of McIntosh got ahold of you, and thus began your rise to fame. For McIntosh, I believe that it is genuine. I’ve read some of his older stuff, and that guy is a Looney Tune.”
Ah, because a woman couldn’t possibly do this herself. I’m guessing that Maverick, the noble defender of the status-quo, is also a firm believer in ‘equality’ too.
“But you, you are too smart for that. You’ve come to realize how easy it is to sell your cause. After all, you got your cause to get you $160,000.
And don’t tell me how far that money went. Come on. You made videos that were of the same caliber as your old ones. Your ‘research’ was using people’s Let’s Play footage. You never show any context in your videos, because you don’t know any”
Wow, these dudes never forget the butthurt. Maverick, hates….just hates that fact that a Kickstarter project started by Anita was resoundingly well funded by people seeing the need for the feminist analysis of video games. Despite that fact that this was known upfront, and people made the donations of their own free will we still get shit like this.
Furthermore, making general claims based on zilch means nothing outside of your toxic community. So this is just your baseless opinion.
“You didn’t even do the bare minimum of research. This was just finding clips and using the right rhetoric to get your audience to get all huffed-up and angry. It was a calculated decision.”
You’re making that claim of “no research” based on what? It would seem that there in the Feminist Frequency videos there is a list of sources consulted. I imagine feminist theory does sound like rhetoric to you, but like instead of adult behaviour of actually addressing the points brought up by Anita and her video’s you engage in name calling and attacks on Anita’s credibility. It’s almost like you know that if you actually addressed the issues, you’d lose.
“You are now famous because of the threats. You are famous because of the anger, which you are able to hold up. That recent threat that you got when you were going to speak at USU, you couldn’t have asked for better timing. It elevated you to mainstream acceptance. Now, I bet raising another $160,000 would be child’s play. Hell, I bet that you are going to get a lot of money from here.”
Exposing the misogynistic undercurrent of our culture – who would have thunk that would be a popular topic? Anita is famous because douche-lords like yourself can’t handle criticism. And you get nasty when you’re called on fact that your treasured status-quo is shite.
“You are a con artist, Anita. A very, very good con artist.”
No, actually she’s a woman whom, despite the huge threat to her, continues to call out and expose the misogyny in “gamer-culture” despite the toxic backlash she has to endure.
Confused about the who Gaming Gate fiasco? Go to the Ace of Geek for a comprehensive run down on how badly this “movement” fails.
Ah, misogyny. Definitely a feature of society not a bug. Amazing the amount of fuss dude-bros can whip up in their crusade against the evil double X conspiracy. I’m still gathering information on the whole debacle, but I may as well share what I’ve read about Gamer Gate so far.
Amanda Marcotte has a succinct analysis over at Raw Story –
“Not that there was any doubt, but the entrance of right wing ideologues into the faux controversy “#GamerGate” makes it almost comically clear how this is not, was not, and never will be about “ethics in journalism”, but about harnessing the inchoate anger of a bunch of people who feel left out by the Cool Kids and aiming it directly at the goal of eroding women’s right to basic equality with men. (For those who wish to argue that point, feel free to read this, and please comment there, in the wasteland where zero #GamerGate enthusiasts have yet to actually argue with any of my actual points.) It was a grassroots movement of 4chan misogynists who just want to punish individual women online to get back at women as a group for some incoherent sins against them (insufficient blow jobs, not sneaking into their houses to clean shit while they’re away), but now the conservative vultures are swirling. They see some marks and they, by god, are going to pick them up. And like watching a vulture tear into carrion, it’s simultaneously revolting and fascinating.”
“For those who have been following this ridiculous “#GamerGate” story, where a bunch of misogynists who have been harassing a video game developer named Zoe Quinn because her vindictive ex-boyfriend sent them after her, have probably been happy to see that Quinn just dumped a bunch of screenshots disproving their already flimsy excuses for the harassment. From the get-go, it’s been obvious that the real reason all these haters have been attacking Quinn is that she’s a hate object for them to dump their misogyny and resentments all over, but the “official” reason is they are very concerned about the integrity of gaming journalism. The accusation is she “bought” positive press by sleeping with a journalist for it. The fact that the press she supposedly bought with sex doesn’t exist hasn’t slowed this bullshit down. But Quinn shared a bunch of screenshots showing that, in fact, the “concern” over “ethics” was a paper-thin rationale for what’s really going on, which is a widespread semi-conspiracy to harass a few targeted women in games in an effort to scare off anyone in gaming who insists on believing women are people. So I recommend reading the link. But I do fear this won’t slow any of the harassment down, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because it was evidence from day #1 that there was no real concern about the ethics of gaming journalism going on.”
For more information on the gamergate fiasco, check out Vice, Recode, Deadspin, and Death and Taxes.
Why yes, yes they are. Next question. But hey, here’s a video with a catchy tune replying to the anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.
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