The Mind Of OverlordTomala
All in an Overlord's day / Gaming / Open Threads

Open Thread

I spent the day doing some Serious Sam gaming as part of my hiatus from The Elder Trolls. I also looked into adding mods for those particular games, then went off looking at mods for anything and everything in my games library.

I also helped my brother with his blog the rest of the way. It looks real nice and he’s happy with it. 😀 If you want to have a look see here’s the link. He makes some awesome pixel art in Garry’s Mod. I’ll also be helping him setup some other things in the near future. He wants to start YouTubing, so I’ll be showing him around the cold wasteland that is the internet and make sure no one mugs him. He’s young and innocent. Me? Not so much… I can impart some questionable wisdom onto him.

Gaming

Took a break from Skyrim because Life Is Strange

LIS

I felt like doing something different today, so I decided to return to Life Is Strange. I’m halfway through Episode 3 so far. It’s a great game to play when I just want to relax. Certain parts of it really tend to give me some serious feels. Like the end of Episode 2 when I was unable to save a distraught classmate from committing suicide. I’m currently at the point where we’re trying to break into a trailer to find clues about a missing person. Decided to stop there for the time being.

Gaming

From Warriors Vail to Solitude

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I spent most of this rainy day adventuring into new worlds. I came across Warriors Vail, which is hidden inside the temple of redemption, a huge haven for vampire cultists… until I showed up. Warriors Vail seemed rather friendly once I entered through the portal from the temple, although this world a bit lacking in a few places. Like on the hunting grounds.

After claiming ownership of a house in the Vail I traveled to Solitude where I had a bath, and then laid with my best friend looking up at the beautiful night sky.

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I was really distraught when I came back the next day in game to find that my corpse buddy had gone away. Did we not bond well that night?!?!?! CORPSE BUDDY WHY?!?!?!?!?!

My friends have been listening to my small bits of commentary during gameplay while we’re chatting in Mumble, and we think I should keep what I spout out in a journal. So that we can place my words into another book for the potential mod we’re working on. I’ve also been toying with the idea of an In Character Skyrim blog, but I’m still not sure. I’d center it around my current Skyrim Character, which isn’t exactly a lore friendly, and parts of my adventures aren’t always lore friendly either. I think for now I’ll keep my ideas in a notepad until I either decide to go through with it, or when the mod is done. I’ll just sit and mull it over for the time being.

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Gaming / Rants

Today I defused a console war between two co-workers of mine… by declaring myself the winner.

One of my co-workers came in to buy the new Tom Clancy game for his XBox One, and my boss is a PS4 user. He started trolling him about how PS4 is the superior platform. So I raised my hand and said “You both lose, PC Master Race FTW” and they couldn’t argue. :v Although my boss for some reason thought PC Gaming wasn’t popular. Which is true, it isn’t popular…. among people who don’t know how to mod. You know, console users.

I also heard today about a guy my father knows. He built him a high end PC for video rendering a couple years back. i5 2500k processor and I can’t remember what type of GPU… but I know it’s an NVidia, a powerful one. He happens to also like playing Skyrim… on console. That was a lot for me to take in first thing in the morning while eating my breakfast. Turns out his reasoning was because he didn’t like the idea of using a keyboard and mouse instead of a controller. And modding? That’s really hard too because apparently you have to use torrents. Yeah I don’t know what he’s smoking either. Sure isn’t what I’ve been smoking.

420yoloswag

I can understand someone playing Skyrim on a console if they couldn’t afford a PC to play it on, but when you have an extremely beefy expensive build and continue to resort to the console version because a keyboard and a mouse are too hard that is just astonishing. Mind blowing, simply mind blowing.

Gaming

It feels like the first time

Last Saturday evening my Skyrim character could no longer save once I returned to Wyrmstooth. But much like the mighty pheonix my character was reborn anew. Starting over again isn’t so bad considering there are lots of different ways of playing the game, even morseo if you add tons and tons of mods. My friends recommended some to me that add extra lands and objects to the game, and I even ventured out on my own to make the game “fabulous”.

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That armor…. That hair!

I found an interesting lair today a bit outside Whiterun.

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Going inside leads you to a gem dragon. Upon destroying it you’ll earn it’s head and some other swag.

I’ve also added some different children to the game. One thing that always bothered me was that you had all these races you could play as and run into… but the children are so plain and look so much alike. So I added a mod that improves how the children look, added extra children’s clothing, and even added little khajits.

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My new character is completely different! I added a scarf…

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My playstyle is a bit different this time around. I’m taking the time to learn more about alchemy, and doing some enchanting here and there. I’m not sure how anyone can properly claim to “finish” this game. It feels like it never ends.

Gaming

Managing my modded nightmare.

I reached a sad point in my Skyrim game that lead my game to crash every time I tried to save after awhile. It happened in one of my castle mods, then I backtracked to an earlier save and had issues again when trying to leave or save within the Soul Cairn.

With guidance of my friends I installed Mod Organizer and went through a clean reinstall of my mods. My goal was to get everything nice and neat, then create a new character. But I loaded my saves and the crashing was gone. So now I’m not so sure… I think I’ll just ride it out until I have problems again. So far I spent a good few hours running around the land doing quests and going about my business. So for now it seems my adventures haven’t been brought to a screeching halt.

Gaming

Cyan releases a Teaser Trailer for Obduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1INKH_iBak8

Well, the graphics look real nice which is to be expected by Unreal Engine 4. The release date is June later on this year. I will definitely have this in my library upon release as a prize for having to mentally torture myself through the whole Kickstarter drama that unfolded by doing tons of exploring (not that I haven’t been doing that with Skyrim already lol).

However I will point out one thing that I’ve thought since the announcement of the Obduction Kickstarter, and I’m only pointing this out because someone over at RPS pointed out what I’ve been thinking since the beginning.

I didn’t play Myst back in the day and have heard wildly differing opinions about it. Obduction sounded interesting but talk of Myst ended up overshadowing talk about Obduction so I ended up drifting away. With this trailer I’m still not sure. I think it’s hard to communicate gradual unravelling of mystery in a trailer – I didn’t really get a sense of that side of The Witness til I was playing it – so I’m not really getting a feel for that side of things and it’s ended up at more of an environmental showcase kind of level for me.

This.

It seemed like whenever Cyan went to talk about Obduction they just couldn’t stop talking about Myst. We get it, Myst was an excellent game for it’s time and extremely unique. You can’t deny that. But it doesn’t quite look right to other people when you keep talking about one of your two successes constantly. This would be like if Bethesda talked about the first Elder Scrolls game ever made when introducing Skyrim, or the makers of Tomb Raider harping about how great the first one from 96 was amazing. Or if Valve kept talking about the first Half Life when trying to introduce a new product. It’s ok to talk about and remember those classics, but we’re not here to talk about your past products when you’re trying to tell us about your newest one. We want to know what you’re making NOW.

Gaming / Technology

Microsoft wants to make an Upgradable Console

I thought I’d be done talking about the latest Microsoft hooplah that’s been taking place, but the other day not long after talking about Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone to go over to their UWP platform I read an article that forced my head to hit my solid oak desk. Microsoft wants to make the XBox One an upgradable device.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” he said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger. And then you wait for the next big step function.”

I can only speculate at this point, but knowing Microsoft the XBox One’s upgrade path would probably consist of starting out the consumer with what one would consider bottom tier hardware, and give them the option of upgrading using Microsoft’s proprietary hardware. Basically the Mac of PC Gaming, only with a Mac at least you can still mod games far more openly than you can with Microsoft’s proposed walled gardened ecosystem.

Even other people, such as the CEO of Epic (makers of the Unreal Engine) has spoken out about how foolish this is.

“Unless Microsoft changes course,” Sweeney says, “all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft’s exclusive control.”

Meanwhile on the Microsoft side:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX (user experience) required.”

Really? Then how come there are two different versions of the new Tomb Raider floating around with Microsoft’s being the one with issues such as missing features from the Steam release? If you buy The Witcher 3 from GOG or Steam for example, you won’t notice a difference. Same with most Steam and Nonsteam games as they both use the same executable and get the same updates. Microsoft’s method fragments the PC Gaming ecosystem by making dev’s choose between UWP and the more traditional means of developing a game, and consumers go over to yet another application (and OS if they haven’t moved to 10 yet) to grab these titles.

This move isn’t Boneheaded, it’s XBoneheaded.

Oh, and on a funnier note I had to change the brackets around user experience. In the original article they used [] instead of (). If I left the quote in it’s original state it would have read as:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX [user experience] required.”

Yeah, I’m happy with my current gaming experience thanks. 😛

News

Valve speaks out about the Winter Sale breach

Some say that it took too long getting back to everyone about it, people like myself say they responded in Valve Time. 😛

Link.

Dear Steam User,

As you may know, for a brief period on December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some Steam users seeing incorrectly cached Steam Store pages generated for other Steam users. If you are not familiar with the issue, an overview of what happened is available at http://store.steampowered.com/news/19852/.

If you accessed the Steam Store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th, your account could have been affected by this issue. If you did not use the Steam Store during that time, your account was not affected.

Between the times above, a requested web page for information about your Steam account may have been incorrectly displayed to another Steam user in your local area. This page may have included your email address, country, purchase history and last 4 digits of your phone number if one was associated with your account. It may have also included the last two digits of a credit card number or a PayPal email address, if previously saved for future purchases. It did not include full credit card numbers, Steam account passwords, or other information that would allow another user to complete a transaction with your billing information.

We are contacting you because an IP address previously used by your account to access Steam made a web page request as described above. Because IP addresses are commonly shared for home networks, mobile devices and by internet providers, we are unable to verify that your account was actually the one that made this request. For example one affected IP address was previously used by over 1,700 Steam accounts. Consequently we are notifying all users who have previously used this IP address.

This event did not make it possible to compromise your Steam account or make a fraudulent transaction from your account, but we want you to be aware of what information could have been seen by another Steam user.

We’re sorry this happened and have taken steps to prevent this problem from occurring in the future.

If you used the store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th and you have questions please email cachingissue@steampowered.com.

– Valve

They responded on March 3rd… 3/3 Half Life 3 Confirmed.

Gaming / Technology

Oh look, another Microsoft post.

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Well, it must be that time of the year again where Microsoft dusts off the Phil Spencer bot to talk about how totally involved Microsoft wants to be in the PC Gaming market. Or sorry… I mean how totally involved Microsoft wants everyone to move to Windows 10 to partake in GFWL 2.0

PC Gamer held an interview with ol Phil, the guy known for telling people about their focus on engaging PC Gamers since 2014 and not really doing much about it… UNTIL NOW!

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming.

Oops, he misspoke. Let me correct that:

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming… By trying to make Windows 10 and our App Store relevant.

Fixed for accuracy.

There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great.

Don’t worry Phil. I hear Ashes of the Singularity runs great with the Steam Controller, even if you have a nonsteam version! You just need the exe and…. oh right.

What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.

As usual Microsoft continues to be unfashionably late to the party. Steam kinda beat you to that… years ago. They even tried to get you guys on board and you pretty much laughed at them and went off doing your own thing. Hell, GOG’s store is becoming great enough to compete with Steam. Meaning even they can go to town bitchslapping your sorry excuse for a store.

I think there are a real two factors that today differentiate what I consider PC and console gaming. One is input. We’ve said we’re going to support keyboard and mouse on console, and clearly you can plug a controller into a PC, so that’s not a trump card, but PC games have to—PC games can support keyboard and mouse, console games today usually don’t and for the most part can’t. The other thing is the play space itself. I’m usually closer to my monitor, it’s a smaller screen. All these are ‘usually’s. And my TV experience on a console, I’m further away, it’s more of a communal play experience. If I take my PC and I HDMI it into my television, and I use my wireless dongle to play with controllers, is it now a console or a PC?

I gotta hand it to him. He really has a way of stating the obvious. He sounds like he could just empty his bowels in amazement if he also found out you could store more than 1 TB of games on the average PC Master Race gamers system.

I think you could kind of get into scenarios where the hardware specs kind of overlap, probably at the fundamental level, or the hardware capabilities overlap enough where the differentiation kind of blurs. But the console experience is a dedicated gaming hardware device that is very appliance-like, instant on, ability to basically do one thing, which is play games, very well.

Really? Fascinating. Lots of people have instant on gaming systems these days too thanks to SSD’s. They make great boot drives, and you can even have more than one mechanical hard drive for storage. Mindblowing amirite?

PC is a multi-purpose device. I love that people play games on their PC. You see a ton of people playing games, even on Windows 10 already.

Good job! Gotta shoehorn Windows 10 in there! After all you guys have been doing a bang up job trying to shoehorn it into peoples Windows 7/8 updates.

But it also can do Outlook and load Photoshop and browse the web. So there are some fundamental differences about the hardware between the two that I think will always mean there are differences between console and PC gaming, and I want to embrace those differences, not try to get rid of them.

YouDontSayBlackWithTextSS

Thanks for clarifying. I was worried you were going to take away the ability to use Photoshop and the internet etc etc etc. I cried for weeks mourning the possible loss and much like a shining beacon of wisdom you confirmed that you are going to let us do computer things on our computers. Thank you Microsoft, thank you…

We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that… it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.

Gaming was great on Windows. Anyone remember how often Microsoft released new versions of Direct X? From 1995 to 2003 we went from Direct X 1.0 to Direct X 9.0b. Then they kept using 9.0c for from 2004 to 2008 because gamers had better performance on 9c than 10 under Vista, which was maintained between 2006 to 2009. Then from 2009 to 2013 they developed Direct X 11. Then in 2015 they announced Direct X 12 because they needed something new to move people to a shitty operating system so that people could forget about Windows 8. Yeah, PC Gaming is important to Microsoft these days. We went from having a new version practically every year to having to run on the same API’s for over a decade. I feel your love Microsoft…

Phil: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.

Things would go better for Microsoft if they didn’t try to shove people into their own little world. Heck, even PlayStation is finally jumping on the Streaming bandwagon. Soon people will be able to stream their PlayStation games onto Windows and even Mac (No love for Linux though), and with Steam we already have the option of streaming from one system to another regardless of OS. Meanwhile you have to own Windows 10 if you want to stream your games from the XBone.

They are not Pro PC Gamer, they’re pro PC Gamer for Windows 10… and the fact that they’re using games like Gears Of War to lure people over to their new OS is absurd. They pulled this shit with Halo back in the Vista days and it failed miserably. Microsoft never learns.