Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Fallout 4’s “survival mode”

I realize this is the billionth post I have made regarding Fallout 4, but I feel as though I have not quite compiled my thoughts on the “survival mode” Bethesda decided half-assedly to add to the game months after its release into a single post yet, so here it is; while I’m on the rage train after losing my week of progress last night, I might as well make this to finish my raving triad of a tantrum masterpiece.

The amazing new mode

If you still haven’t played survival mode, don’t worry; the only thing of substance it contains is the actual survival element, which, I will once again stress, is a half-assed attempt at “fixing” the old survival “Bullet Sponge Xtreme” difficulty.

Some of the mode’s features are as follows:

  • Food, water and sleep “meters” are added to the game while playing with survival mode on;
  • Fast-travel is disabled, meaning the player has to walk everywhere in real time;
  • The player’s and enemies’ defence damage resistances have been substantially lowered and so take quite a lot more damage;
  • Ammunition is no longer weightless, meaning the player and companions now have to take care not to bring useless ammunition everywhere;
  • Players’ limbs no longer auto-heal after disengaging combat;
  • Locations take way longer to repopulate;
  • Illnesses have been added to the game, such as fatigue, parasites and infection;
  • Companions no longer get up by themselves after being knocked out during combat. Instead, they must be revived using a stimpak or robot repair kit if they’re human or robot, respectively; and
  • Killing enemies grants an adrenaline damage bonus every five kills.

There are more lesser features, but I will only comment on the ones listed here. If you want an extensive list of features and differences from the standard game mode, take a look at the Nukapedia article.

Food, water and sleep

This is probably the biggest feature of the survival mode in Fallout 4, and it is probably the one that brought my attention to it. In the survival mode, it is required that the player eat food, drink water and sleep regularly in order to stay alive. Refusing this results in penalties to S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats and action points (AP).

There is little for me to say about this feature, as I have no personal issues regarding it. If I had to be nitpicky, I would probably decrease the interval within which food is needed, as  a human being can survive for weeks without food.

Actually, there is one issue with this system: mattresses and sleeping bags only allow for a maximum of five and three hours of sleep, respectively. I’m sorry, what? Why would a mattress and a sleeping bag restrict the player’s sleep like that? I have slept a whole night in a sleeping bag before! It didn’t just limit my sleep arbitrarily to three hours. Likewise, a mattress is just an object upon which the player may implicitly lie down but which lacks a bedframe upon which it may rest. There is nothing else differentiating a mattress from a bed in this game. That’s a bit bullshitty, to be quite honest.

Disabled fast-travel

Here’s a feature of which I am not particularly a fan. In the survival mode, the player is denied the ability to fast-travel. This system functions exactly as it does in TESV: Skyrim and Fallout 3 etc.

While it may sound like it would add to the survival experience to force the player to walk everywhere, it gets rather tedious after a while. This is especially the case if the game keeps crashing every damn time I try to open V.A.T.S. However, it is not a bad thing in and of itself, although I will, once again, stress that it gets rather tedious after a while.

Increased player and enemy damage

This is bullshit. Seriously. I keep reading on the Internet that both the player and enemies receive more damage, making it even more of an incentive to stay out of the firing line. However, this has not been my experience. My experience has been that the enemies are still bullet-spongy. Many raiders still take several shotgun blasts to the face at point-blank distance with a fully upgraded legendary combat shotgun. I am not even joking.

If what I just said has not been the case of you reading this, you have been hallucinating. You belong in a madhouse. Enemies do far more damage than the player with a weapon much weaker than the player’s. You cannot tell me this is not the case, for I have observed such utter nonsense with my own eyes.

Massive ammunition

This is fine. I have no problems with this. There is little to complain about regarding this feature. I should not even have brought it up. Wait,,, cut that out. I sound like a little bitch again.

Non-auto-healing limbs

This is also fine.

Locations have longer respawn times

This is not fine. I personally like enemies respawning, but I do know a lot of people are opposed to it. The issue with non-respawning enemies is that it makes a game feel so… empty after a while. I do agree that overly aggressive respawn rates are annoying, though; respawn rates are an artform, and only the chosen may master the superior way of the Respawn. *cringe*

One of the first games that showed me that this could become a problem is “Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates“, a very unknown open-worldish game for the PlayStation 2. I guess the fact that it is a PlayStation 2 exclusive is probably a contributing factor to its effective presence in oblivion, which is sad; I am quite fond of the game, although it is a pretty buggy game, which is funny, seeing how Fallout 4 is also a buggy mess. However, at least the game can run for more than 20 minutes at a time without crashing, and it apparently did not even undergo beta testing! If you want to take a closer look at the game and its exploitable glitches, I would recommend Jasoya’s series on glitches and bugs in the game.

Illnesses

I honestly do not care about illnesses with the exception of two illnesses in particular: parasites and infection. The former results in having to eat more food in order to sate the character’s hunger. I do not think this affects the water intake. The latter, infection, is just a pain in the ass; all it does is cause periodic damage as “the infection spreads”. Whatever.

Other illnesses include fatigue, which results in the player requiring sleep more regularly; insomnia, which results in the player requiring more sleep when sleeping; lethargy, which results in halved action point regeneration; and weakness, which results in 20% more damage inflicted from enemies.

For more information regarding illnesses, check out this article on Nukapedia.

No auto-healing companions

For bitches like me, this is a problem. I suck at this game, so I run away like a pussy when my companion goes down, because when my companion goes down, I will certainly go down. This is just how things go. Feature-wise, however, this is not really a problem, and it is really my own fault for sucking so bad at this game. This is not a bad feature in and of itself. Per se. On its own.

Adrenaline

Yeah, I could not care less. To be frank, I hardly notice this. In fact, I notice this so hardly, I notice it not at all.

That was all I had to say. Now I must install the mod that allows me to quicksave anywhere I want because the game is too fucking unstable for me to be able to handle its bullshit anymore.

Time for take three…

Since I am so unbelievably out of touch with the gaming community aside from GDQ and a few other areas, I did not know this was a thing until right now. Apparently, Take-Two Interactive, the publisher responsible for publishing such games as Grand Theft Auto V and Borderlands 2, has decided that enough is enough and that telling OpenIV, a modding tool ostensibly used in an array of mods for Grand Theft Auto V, to cease and fucking desist!

Oi vey, where to begin? First of all, I have never bought Grand Theft Auto V. I have never played it. I have never even seen gameplay of it aside from a few snippets here and there. The reason is simple: I have had other games to play. It’s really that simple. I also saw the torture scene everybody apparently freaked out about, although it’s a really lame scene people’s reaction to which I really cannot feasibly understand. Regardless, I did not want to spoil the game for myself in the case that I actually bought that which I now consider an overpriced game, especially considering the clusterfuck Take-Two Interactive just made.

So what actually happened between Take-Two Interactive and OpenIV? Well, apparently, Take-Two Interactive had a bunch of illiterate fuckboys sit down and write up a cease-and-desist order to be sent to OpenIV. When I say “illiterate fuckboys”, I mean that in every sense of those words, particularly the first, as lead developer GooD-NTS, in his post on the forum, openly stated:

GooD_NTS_statement01

This has pretty much single-handedly resulted in my decision as to whether to buy the game or not to buy the game NOT TO BUY.  Bye bye, not gonna buy!

To make things even worse, Take-Two Interactive has also managed to get their hands on Kerbal Space Program. As far as the game itself goes, that purchase has already been made, so it’s not like I will just stop playing the game just because another shitstain company has gotten their hands on another game I have had a good deal of fun with over the years. However, I will not be getting any of the DLC releases which are supposedly in development or soon in development.

To finish things off, I will emplore all those who read this to sign this petition on Change.org, which I have realized is just another shithole, but whatever. If you fancy yourself a few mods, stand up against this. Don’t be a cuck.

“The Witcher III: Wild Hunt” – Flop of the Year

Cue the dramatic, angry music.

I would like to begin by saying this is far from the worst game I have ever played. It looks very good as far as graphics goes, and the storywriting and -telling is alright. Plus, I quite like how the quests are set up, though I have mixed feelings about the blatant handholding going on with the minimap and outlining important objects and lootables respectively with red and yellow auras. Nevertheless, I have had an enjoyable fucking experience playing this game… for the most part.

I would like to issue a note advising the reader’s discretion. There will be few positive remarks made aside from the preface you are now reading. Any fanboys pissed off reading this will not receive a single flying fuck from me. That having been said, let’s get on with it.

Noobish beginnings

I suppose it’s worth also worth mentioning I have never played a Witcher game before, and it’s probably for the best. The previous games were apparently not open world games. If you’re like me, you like open world games. To me, open world games give a feeling of freedom and will to explore. Games such as “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and “Just Cause 2” are games that come to mind whenever I hear the words “open world game”, and I, seeing how it was marketed as such, was hoping “The Witcher III: Wild Hunt” was going to be another game to add to that list. Unfortunately, it appears that it was, but only because I keep remembering its being marketed as one, not necessarily because find it to be “open world” in the sense I find the two previously mentioned games to be. I’ll try to cover this later, but, for fuck’s sake, let’s just get to the point, already!

“Can I do this again?”

I would tell how I started the game, but I won’t. All there is to say is I sucked and still suck at the game. Instead, I will complain about the lack of respawning. The first question popping up in my mind whenever there is an open world aspect to a game is: “Can I do this again?” The answer to this particular question in this particular game is: “It fucking depends.” Some stuff respawns while other stuff doesn’t. Some things can be done again while other things can’t.

So what respawns? Most common enemies, perhaps referred to as “trash mobs” by inferior elitist gamerfags; harvestables, which is a fucking pain in the ass when you’ve got OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) and ULS (uncontrollable looting syndrome); and nothing else, really. That’s about it.

I occasionally hear people like Ross Scott complaining about respawning enemies and how they don’t make sense. In some cases, this makes sense, such as major enemies and bosses which really shouldn’t respawn. However, regular enemies not ever respawning makes little to no sense, and it leaves the game feeling dead to me. The same applies to loot: If you steal a loaf of bread from someone’s house, shouldn’t that loaf of bread eventually “respawn”? If not, shouldn’t the container eventually be filled with something at all? How does that not make sense? In “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”, which I will out of laziness hereafter refer to as “Skyrim”, has respawning enemies and lootables. Now, I’m not saying “omg fil ur containrs up afetr liek 2 minuets so i cna paly mroe easy cus fuk gramur adn spelign,” but rather “respawn realistically.”

“This place is dead as FUCK!”

One of my greatest pet peeves in this game is that it feels dead. Well, technically, all games are “dead” in the sense that they are all just graphical representations of lifelike worlds with living beings in them, that they are all just a bunch of electrons zooming around or whatever, but hear me out plz: pseudo-random encounters. This is a gameplay element which has been in every game running in the Gamebryo engine I have ever played (new vegas, skyrim and fallout 3 lololol and oblivion kinda). Don’t leave just yet, because I have an argument to support this. It utilizes a rhetorical device called “appealing to logic”, or logos. It goes like so: “Wouldn’t it be cool if the world felt a little more alive?” Again, I will mention that there are indeed enemies scattered around the game’s world and that said enemies respawn, but the fact that they always respawn in the same location after a few in-game days feels too synthetic and out-of-place. Really, pseudo-random encounters would at least help with concealing this surreal feeling of solitude and instead help with the conservation of players’ suspension of disbelief.

Let’s picture an example: You’re wandering around White Orchard looking for stuff to do when suddenly, out of nowhere, a griffin attacks. No, not a royal griffin; a regular and not overpowered griffin attacks. A griffin which can be fought. Why the griffin attacked is up to the player to decide. Again, not everything has to be explicitly stated unlike most of the fucking quests in this game I have done so far, but that’s a different topic altogether. My point is that the game could have used a little more engagement from the environmental side.

Why?


Why?

There’s a whole world full of beasts and other asorted dangers. Why the hell would you not utilize some of that to create a world where safety is a luxury only to be experienced by a lucky few? As far as I’m concerned, no villagers ever die from wolves unless I deliberately lure some into the village. Well, there was that one freak case where some wolves came a little too close to the burnt-down village in White Orchard and killed everybody they came across until I killed them. That has yet to happen again, and I’m sure it happened that one time because some dumbass wolf decided it would be a great idea to have the whole pack track a rabbit down into town and consequently have itself and the pack killed in the process. There was also the time I killed the cows in White Orchard. Unbeknownst to me, that would summon an infinitely spawning giant mutant cow or goat or whatever it was. At first I thought this was a pseudo-random event, but no! It was just a scripted event to stop people from exploiting the prices of cowhides to earn money. That might sound like a good idea at first, but it’s really just a stupid way to program something into a game when you could just reduce the respawn rate of cows or, I don’t know, put in a bounty system? You know, like that one game? Really, just anything but random infinitely respawning bullshit. “Bovine Defence Force Initiative”? Fuck off with that garbage!

“What the hell was that? That’s horseshit!”

After the incident with the cows, I was a little annoyed, especially considering the fact that they never despawn. So I reloaded a previous save and continued playing, doing various missions… quests until I thought enough was enough and decided to fight the griffin. So I did, and I was fucking angry after fighting the bastard for ten minutes. There’s a fine line between an actual challenge and an artificially fabricated challenge designed to make a game look more difficult than it may seem at first glance all the while really just being a complete cockshit excuse of a difficulty “enhancer” to up the feeling of accomplishment or whatever. This can have two main effects: It can either leave the player excited, knowing that he/she beat the shit out of that one boss, or it can leave the player pissed the fuck off. I was affected by the latter.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with difficulty, but when there is piss-poor game design and programming to blame for the utter nonsense that is the absolutely horrendous hitboxes and hogwash targeting, I conclude that whoever made the decision to push this shit out did not pay any kind of attention to what was going on. I am not kidding when I say the very first “boss battle” with the griffin in White Orchard nearly pushed me into quitting the game and uninstalling, because if that fight was any indication as to how future fights were going to go on, I saw no point in torturing myself any further, seeing how I had yet to be given any reason to think myself a masochist.

The combat in this game is… I want to say “great in some scenarios,” but then I’d feel like a moron with multiple personality disorder while simultaneously hating the combat in other scenarios. In short, I like the combat when fighting lesser enemies. Fighting enemies such as drowners, ghouls, wraiths and, to some extent, humans is a joy when there’s no bullshit involved. However, boss battles are an entirely different matter. I hate boss battles in this game. They feel far too drawn out and repetitive to be at all enjoyable. Case in point, the royal griffin fight at White Orchard. Or, shit, the Shrieker by Crow’s Perch for that matter. That thing was just a reskin of the griffin with a slightly smaller health bar! It had the exact same attack patterns, the exact same hitbox bullshit and the exact same boring, repetitive backstory. “Oh, boo hoo! You guys are so tired of that thing? Well, why don’t you go cry in a fucking corner and give me a break?” I was still angry at the griffin and was worried the Shrieker was going to be equally as bad, so I had to force myself to fight it a few dozen hours into the game after levelling up a bit. I think I made the right choice.

“That’s really funny, people…”

The bugs are really not that funny. In fact, for a game which is supposed to be taken rather seriously, it’s really annoying. I probably won’t be playing this game for a while regardless. I would add more to this, but there’s no reason to. Nobody really cares aside from the angry fanbois who would spam this post with nonsensical shit like “o ur jst bad” and “lol u suk therfor u r mad”.

I give up…

There’s no changing this world. This is absolutely astonishingly bad. Just how incompetent can someone be? Just as I finished work on my previous blog post, I went onto Facebook to check if something had happened. Indeed, something had happened. Now, I’m not a Facebook addict; I quite hate Facebook. The reason I’m mad isn’t because I can’t access Facebook properly, because I honestly don’t give a flying fuck. The actual reason I’m mad is due to the fact that it even happened. There’s a word for this, but hell if I recall what it actually is.

So what is that which is wrong? Remember the post I made just minutes ago, which is actually many hours ago because I scheduled this for posting later, but which in actual reality was written half-an-hour after the previous one I already referred to? Yeah, that one. The YouTube-FuckTube thing with the image I spent an eternity on in PhotoShop because I don’t understand its fuckfest interface. In order to make it look all “proper” and all, I needed to know which fonts were used in the YouTube logo. I looked it up and found a site called “Name That Font” stating that the logo used “Helvetica Ultra Compressed” and the subtitle “Broadcast Yourself™” used “Helvetica Neue 55 Roman”. The former could be downloaded for free on Ephi Fonts, which is weird as it’s for sale for 49 fucking dollars on other websites such as fonts.com. The latter was only for sale, and I couldn’t be arsed paying 49 dollars for a few pixels’ worth of difference compared to the similar font I ended up using for the subtitle, which was “Kartika”, nor could I be arsed to look for a font for a what-should-have-been two-minute project.

Skip forward a few minutes (read: probably a fucking hour), and I published the post. Yay. Happy times. Then I rummage about on the Internet until I stop at Facebook, and I’m met with something like this:

get_out_of_here_with_that_shit____fucking_incompetent_little_shitsSeriously? The entire fucking website is now infected with this horrible font? How difficult is it to make a website which doesn’t change its font based on which fonts you have installed? I installed this font for one purpose, and it just so happened to be a font which Facebook this garbage website is deathly allergic to? You useless, good-for-nothing, overpaid, piece-of-shit programmers and designers! I can’t believe this. Are you so overpaid that you can’t do your jobs? Or… wait… Perhaps it’s the fact that Shitbook is scamming you and giving you shit for salary? *Gasp* An epiphany has been reached!

But regardless, you had one job! Well, you had many, BUT THIS ONE WAS FUCKING IMPORTANT. Scumbags.

P.S.: No, this is not just an issue of mineself:

P.P.S.: It also happens on other websites. I suspect this is a problem which lies with Google Chrome and not just Facebook et cetera. Well, guess what? I guess they better start working on the fucking problem, too! Hop to it!

DMCA – Dumbest Motherfucking Cocksuckers of All

I am going to break one of my own conditions and ask “what the fuck is going on?” When in the name of Holy Shit and Cursed Farts will this copyright claim combo stop? These fucking claims saying “I own this word and I will remove everybody else using this word from existence” are getting increasingly ancient, and people who do it deserve to be castrated and consequently eradicated by choking on their own mutilated genitalia. (Apparently, that’s illegal for me to say somewhere in the world…)

Examples of this idiocy includes Bethesda spraining their vaginal walls because of Mojang’s “Scrolls”, a claim which thankfully was rejected, the absolutely retarded company King clutching their balls in agony after people rioted against them when they tried to trademark “Candy” (use AdBlock before clicking the link) and now the fucking mess going on at Vimeo, where producer little bitch Adam Sandler & co. were removing a bunch of videos from the site (Video below). The dumb fucks even managed to remove their own trailer. Nice. Regardless, it seems Vimeo is doing something about it, though, which can’t really be said about YouTube these days. Anyway, videos that came out before the movie was even a thing had been removed. I think that, if anything, “Pixels” the actual movie by shitty Columbia or whatever is what should be removed.

It’s also worth noting people are actually buying into this “pixels” gimmick. Even though it has gotten near-absolute shit reviews ON EVERY FUCKING SITE THAT EXISTS, except for Cinemablend, apparently, people still go watch it in the cinemas.

On to the YouTube video regarding the Vimeo carnage that was going on. It’s by ReviewTechUSA, so if you still believe he owed BigCheese 200 bananas, don’t watch it.

Update from SGDQ – 8

More useless images. Just bathe in the glory of SGDQ-chat and the fact that I get banned for talking garbage, while these cunts’ comments are let slide. I don’t think so, North Korea.