GTA Online: The Joy of Incompetence

Being stuck with a bunch of complete dipshits, who have zero clue on how to run a mission in GTA can be frustrating to the point or rage-quitting - or it can be the most fun you'll ever have online, if these dipshits happen to be your friends.
So I grabbed two of these friends, let's call them Peter and Felix, because those are their names, and started dicking around in Los Santos together. There were some small latency issues at first (I'm in the UK and they're, well, not), but one restart later the multiplayer experience was incredibly smooth and stable. Well... save for Peter's "oh hey, my teamviewer popped up" induced crashes, which weren't really related to the game.

One of my absolute favourite features is the insanely immersive first person view. We started our adventure with a fun SUV ride up a mountain for some parachuting. Which is fun, because one player can handle the driving, the guy next to him handles the radio and I get to sit in the back and throw grenades, because you have to pass the time with something, right?

"No, fuck you!"

I packed a sandwich and turned the bag into a cool mask later.

Parachuting is pretty fun. It got even better when I realized you could use a gun whilst floating around with one. Felix helped me test that.

"Hey, I think I can fire my pistol up here!"
-"Stop shooting me, asshole!"

We also ran a few races for shits and giggles and it turns out I'm pretty decent on a motorcycle, Felix is ridiculously good with just about anything that flies and Peter... um... well, he should really try and figure out why his teamviewer pops up all the time to crash his stupid game.
Things went horribly wrong when we tried to run a few missions. You know, shooty stuff.
You see, most missions provide your crew with a limited pool of lives. One of you dies, you use a team life to respawn. That usually works once, maybe twice, then your pool of lives is depleted and the next one to die remains dead until the mission ends - one way or another.

So we hopped in a car, drove to the mission and lost our team lives, because Peter decided to take a motorcycle. He also decided to speed face-first into traffic. So we went there with zero lives left. But that's okay, because we were supposed to kill a bunch of gangsters and retrieve a mission-critical package they held, which Felix decided to blow up with his RPG - mission failed.

Now I'd love to write about how we gave it a second try, went back there, killed all the bad guys and retrieved the package without blowing it to bits, but it got nuked. By a rocket launcher. For the second time in a row.

Pink beach buggy racing was fun, though! ♥

We got the hang of it and finished the mission in the end, so I have a great feeling about our first attempt at heists this weekend. I gifted a copy to Haggy, so there'll be four of us. I'm sure it would have been just as great to have Claire join us, but I could only afford one extra copy, and ultimately, the game went to the loved one with the bigger tits. I have a great feeling about this...

Do you ever have those moments where you laugh so hard you can't breathe and creep everyone out with weird zombie noises? GTA V is that good. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard at something so completely stupid. I'm hooked. I'm supposed to be working this weekend and I'm about to motherloving procrastinate like I'm back in school.

Pew! Pew! You can set people ablaze with a flare gun. They call that social warmth in Germany.

-Cat

Cat Torture Simulator

I have this thing that prevents me from concentrating on stuff for more than just a few minutes at a time. There's always at least a dozen open browser tabs on my computer, I'm jumping back and forth between writing this blog, watching random shit on youtube and telling people on Facebook how much I hate my job right now. And somewhere in this room is a giant monitor lizard, lurking to eat my comically bite-sized cat. And now that GTA V on PC is actually a thing, I'm trying to decide whether this game is the greatest thing ever made just for me or whether it's gonna be the end of me. Probably both.

Look, the game has been out on consoles for a while and everything I could possibly say about this game has been said by other people, it has been said a lot and it probably has been said better by some of them than I ever could. I'm just talking about it, because I need to get it out of my system. Frankly, I have no idea wtf you're even doing here. But hey, who am I to tell you what to do with your time? You know what I've been doing? I've stalked a cat.

Los Santos is full of people and some of them walk their dogs. All kinds of dogs in all shapes and sizes, there's some random gay dog humping, which I assume is all over Youtube. Also random rabbits, cows that love to stand in the middle of the road, random suicidal foxes and all kinds of other critters. And cats. Last night I saw a cat walking down the sidewalk, so I stopped my car and followed the kitty for a while. It went into some dark alley, sat down behind a dumpster and took a nap right next to its cat-buddy, which had already been sleeping there. They just slept next to one another, purring away, sound and everything. So I fired a gunshot, just to see what would happen and the cats jumped up, totally lost their shit and ran all over the place for about 28 minutes until I lost sight of one of them and the other one kinda ran into traffic. I felt genuinely bad when that happened.

No dogs were hurt, though, so there is that.

Many of the things you can do in GTA V shouldn't even be fun and they probably aren't if you look at them on their own. I think I've spent over an hour playing Golf on there on my first day. I don't even like Golf and the way it works on GTA isn't all that great. But I guess the fact it was there, seeing how my character would do all that shit and having an actual, interactive golf course on there was fascinating enough to keep me entertained for a while.

Bank heists? Jet plane stunt flights? Fuck that, man, I gotta work on my handicap!

Tennis is pretty decent. Sometimes I sit in my online character's 500k apartment to watch weird cartoons and the seriously ridiculous advertisements on the working tv screen whilst drinking wine or broccoli juice or hitting the bong or wasting my time with other such useless virtual bullshit. All that stuff is interactive and... hey cool, I can take a shower and my character is suuuper hairy!

Sometimes I drive to a mission and I just don't get out of the car, because the music is too damn good. And then I can see my character rocking out and dancing along to the music in his seat, because hey, we built this city on rock'n'roll! Cars are fun. Then I figured out how bicycles work.

You don't know online gaming until you've beaten over a dozen people in a virtual bicycle race!

But you know what? Fuck those, because speedboats is where it's at. And fucking rollercoasters. Definitely not darts. Maybe monstertrucks. Oh hey, they're playing Queen on the radio now! Absolutely EVERYTHING about Los Santos screams at me, says, HEY! Look at me! Fucking interact with me, asshole! And I obey! Holy fuck, do I obey! I can dial 911, order a firetruck, steal the firetruck, drive around in it until I get bored two minutes later, then set a bus on fire and watch as the entire street starts to burn and random cars explode everywhere five minutes later.

Because all the best stories start with a little arson.

Maybe I should have tried doing something about that rapidly spreading fire using that sexy firetruck I stole, but then I had all those cops chasing after me.

Los Santos isn't just incredibly interactive and alive, but it's also full of crazy little details. I love shit like that, even though I assume most other players probably don't even care or notice. People sit down on a sofa and you can watch as the cushions flatten under their weight. Who does that? Who even thinks to put stuff like that in a video game and who the hell notices it? Well, I do apparently.

One of the glorious story mode's protagonists falls out with his wife and you can watch as his place gets a little messier all the time. Random takeaway bags piling up, used ash trays all over the place, whiskey bottles and painkillers on the tables. Rotting apples in the fruit bowls attract flies, all the flowers are wilting, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, another main character hooks up with a lady for a while and his place looks a little nicer each time you visit. Then again, I'm already freaked out at the fact that you can drink a glass of wine in first person and actually watch the liquid disappear, which is so much cooler than all that pretend eating and drinking in other games. I'm easily amused.

Tattooing a dick on to this guy's body was pretty fun, too.

This is the first GTA I've actually ever really finished. I played GTA 3 with all the cheats in the world, had tons of fun with it for about two days, then never looked at it again. Vice City was great, but eventually I got frustrated with the annoying and complicated missions. GTA V feels easy by comparison, I don't feel incredibly challenged, you get your shooting gallery kind of events, there's a lot of scripted stuff happening and you know what? I don't fucking care. Because it looks great, it's not full of annoying quicktime event bullshit like certain other AAA-franchises and the characters are so fucking great, I'd still watch this shit if it was a movie and no game at all.

Their butts flatten the fucking pillows! Is it even possible not to be impressed by that?

Characters' facial expressions, their body language, movement, everything is motion-captured and you get to read such glorious things about it on IMDb:

"Steven Ogg would actually record his lines in his underwear to help him get into character."

"In the beginning mission "Fresh Meat" Trevor is going to meet up with Franklin and hops over a small fence and trips, sending him into a rage at Franklin who laughed at his accident. This scene was accidentally improvised, as Trevor's voice and motion capture performer Steven Ogg actually did trip over the fence and Shawn Fonteno (Franklin) broke out laughing as a result. Steven Ogg completely improvised his freak out reaction. Look closely at Franklin and Trevor's faces during this scene, they are visibly trying to hide laughter and smiling, since the motion capture software also captured their facial expressions."

It's also one of the best games to feature love-making to the face of a teddybear.

I see critics, who say they can't get themselves to finish the game, because the main characters are all evil, they're criminals and one of them is fucking, shitting or pissing in more cutscenes than I dare count. I'll never understand why that's such a big deal in videogames. Walter White let Jesse's girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit. He pissed in the kitchen sink. And there are legions of morons naming themselves "Heisenberg" on the internet, most of which have absolutely no fucking clue where that character in Breaking Bad even got the name from. Or take Game of Thrones. House of Cards. Orange is the new Black. We love asshole characters. Granted, most of them aren't as fucked up as GTA V's Trevor, but why are some people okay with psychos on tv, yet hate them in games?

I assume it's really because you sort of have to be them. And GTA V can be pretty damn immersive.

I LOVE shooting shit in first person!

I LOVE driving shit in first person!

I can't get over the detailed interiours of all the cars, planes, helicopters, forklifters, taco vans, buses and all the other stuff you can board and drive around on there. Fully animated dashboards, the fucking radio even tells you what station you're listening to on its little display inside the damn car, everything looks great, except the lousy rear view mirrors, which do practically nothing for some reason. Which is weird, because windows, polished surfaces, even your freaking windshield, EVERYTHING reflects stuff, so why not the mirrors in the cars?

No two pedestrians ever seem to look the same (within the game's character creation limitations, obviously). Sometimes I hang around in one of the buildings on there, look through the windows and see a tiny little car somewhere on the horizon. And I know there's a little NPC driving around in it and his little dashboard is all animated and tells him how fast he is going. And it gives me a raging boner.

Don't you dare judge me!

It's weird how in a game world so detailed, so realistic, they didn't think to give people umbrellas. But nothing is ever perfect. The game runs like total ass, too. There's a lot of people claiming they run the game on "ultra" settings on relatively moderate hardware at 60 FPS, but benchmark tests say you can't even get this game to run at a solid 60 FPS without frame dips on a Titan X when everything is cranked all the way up, so there's that. But there will be patches, driver updates and Direct X 12 is on the horizon and one day I'm just gonna have to cough up for some new hardware. I just don't know how to find the motivation to get any more work done when I could be playing GTA V, instead.

-Cat

Once a whore...

The worst possible job you can get as a freelance games journalist is writing a guide to an MMORPG. Guides are always written by the grunts, by the crazy people willing to spend 8-12 hours a day playing a game over the course of weeks in order to figure out the most efficient way to level up, specialize a character, what gear to use and so on and so forth. You will never see any actual editors working on these things, except for one poor fuck who has to coordinate the whole thing. Everyone else is a freelancer of sorts, ranging from people who do this thing for a living to progress guild members and students and the like.

It's the kind of job that is really just worth it if you're the kind of guy who is going to play the game all day and night, anyway. I had to write a class guide to SWTOR and the job just ruined the game for me. I never came back after my work was done. Same thing with TESO - I hated the game by the time I was finished and only came back a few weeks ago when I was asked to deliver a quick re-review. I had a max level character, I knew what the game was all about due to my news job, so it was quick and easy money. But I didn't want to write any more guides about this game or any other MMO, ever.

So when I was asked to help contribute to yet another class guide, I instantly refused. I didn't even give a reason, because I keep telling my employers that I don't really play MMOs much anymore, that I hate writing guides, that I want nothing to do with any of this. Why repeat myself when they already know, right?

Yeah well... they raised a pretty good point when they said I already had a maxed-out character, I had all the resources and knowledge at hand and there's really not a lot of research required here. Just write down what's already in my head, anyway. Surprisingly decent pay, too, while everyone else has been offering so little that I never really wanted to go back into games journalism to begin with. And my old PC is craving that yummy i7-4790K 4GHZ CPU and a side of juicy DDR3-RAM. Fuck.

I told them what I could and couldn't deliver and how long it would take me. Nothing is set in stone, but right now it looks like I'll be writing another big, fat guide. I'm usually too lazy for that kind of work and I don't really need the extra pay for anything, but it would be nice to run GTA V a little faster in all its glory. It's quite possibly the greatest game ever made.

Everything that could possibly ever be said about GTA V has already been said. I want to talk about how much I love the story, the heists, being able to experience the whole thing with my friends, exploring the insanely huge, realistic game world, bla, bla... look, it's fucking GTA V and you already know what it's all about. And now I'm hoping to do a job I initially refused, because I hated it, just so I can run GTA a little faster. Fuck me.

-Cat

My Wife, The Cold-Blooded Killer

The internet is an exceptionally annoying place today. Frontier Developments' fine space-sim Elite: Dangerous went live on Steam this week. The Steam version features no extra content or any features not present in the non-Steam version. But that didn't stop the forum community from complaining about it on 164 pages. These people backed the game on Kickstarter and received alpha and beta access, as well as a key for the retail version of Elite: Dangerous, so now they're demanding Steam keys on top of it. Again, the Steam-Version adds nothing extra, but apparently there's a principle involved or some shit, the customer is always right, so let's all lose our collective shit and complain.

Meanwhile, we can't have nice things on Pillars of Eternity, because that would be transmisogynistic. I'm all for tolerance and I'm pro LGBT, but... seriously? A silly little user-generated poem about a guy who couldn't get over the fact that his last girlfriend turned out to be a man is hideously offensive in 2015? And having it changed is somehow making the world a better place? I'm clearly getting too old to understand what the fuck is happening.

But at least there is justice. In Tamriel, anyway, thanks to ESO update 6. Also, Lion King:

Uploaded several hours ago in 1080p, still only shows in 360. Grrr!

Elder Scrolls Online's latest big update, which went live a couple weeks ago, allows people to steal, burgle and murder their way across Tamriel. Which sounds like a fun idea until you decide to visit a tavern with the family. We listened to the crappy bards for a while (Malukah is overrated and the male bard sounds like Randy Marsh from South Park) and then I dared Claire to steal a potato off some old lady's dinner plate. But Claire got caught and the old lady punched her in the face, then Claire punched back, then all the other patrons joined the brawl, then the bard got shot in the face and Claire had to flee from the city guard as they had placed a rather massive bounty on her head. Meanwhile, the bard had respawned, so Claire's mother shot her in the face again, murdered all the remaining patrons and finally got butchered by the guard. I just sat in the corner till everyone was dead, rose from my chair and took the potato like the smooth criminal I am. Good times.

-Cat

Man Period

You will always be my favourite.

Funny thing - Baldur's Gate is quite possibly my favourite game of all time and there's this new RPG, which every idiot out there hypes as "Baldur's Gate 3" and I can't help but feel fucking annoyed about it. Heck, these days I'm annoyed about a lot of things and I'm not entirely sure why, so I must be on some kind of period. I miss enjoying things.
Anyhow - Pillars of Eternity is a great game, but it's not the fucking messiah, it's not the one true RPG to end them all and if you're one of those nutjobs, who keep on blabbing about how it's oh so much better than Dragon Age: Inquisition, then you seriously need to have your head checked.

Pillars' non-D&D setting is interesting enough, though it also means you don't get to play cool multiclass characters. It also means no D&D ruleset and some of the most fucked up class balancing I've ever seen. A few hours into the game I've settled for a party that consists of nothing but rangers and rogues, all of which use bows or pistols or any variety thereof. You see, each ranger comes with a free, immortal tank pet. They can be knocked out in a fight, but they never die, so there's your bunch of frontline fodder right there. Park a ranger behind a bear, deal a shitload of damage with a blunderbuss, job done.

Meanwhile, rogues don't get pets, but they can oneshot most enemies from stealth even with a ranged attack, so why waste any time using fighters, chanters, wizards or whatever other fucking useless classes there are? Besides, the AI in this game is so hilariously braindead, it's not like melee classes were any useful without massive amounts of hand-holding and babysitting. Case in point:

Fucking pillars, man! How do they work?

This spider kept on running into the pillar during the entire fight. It couldn't figure out how to walk past it, it couldn't get through it, so it was sweet face time with Mr. Pillar here until my rangers finished it off. Is this the dreaded 'Pillar of Eternity'? Oh the excitement!
The same kind of shit happens with your own melee units. Rangers will stand and block doorways, melee characters can't get past, so they sit around and do nothing. Sometimes they stand right next to an enemy and do nothing. Remember how in Baldur's Gate you could set up basic AI scripts, which made characters switch from ranged to melee, allowed them to use certain spells and basic tactics if the situation required it? They weren't so clever and sophisticated enough to make the game play itself, but they helped. There is no such thing in this "Baldur's Gate 3", 16 years later.

Yes, battles without pillars, doorways and other such nasty obstacles can offer a lot of tactical depth, at least until you run into a certain boss, who takes over ten minutes to kill on god mode if you don't exploit the crappy AI. Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers.

Shittest boss battle since Conker's Great Mighty Poo.

The artwork is beautiful, I love the character portraits, but the 3d models are some of the ugliest ones I've seen in any modern RPG. They're not Wasteland 2 ugly, but they're still pretty bad.

Meh.

The story is pretty great, the writing is good, but not perfect. Shit such as, "I could care less". That's not how you use this phrase. Saying it like that means that you do care. Of course I'm nitpicking here, the really awful shit happens in the localized versions. Then there's the fact that the game world is littered with random useless NPCs and their incredibly retarded names, because those were all added as a thank you for backers, who donated a substantial amount of money for the development of the game. Which is great, mind, the game is still good and everything, but I don't need a ton of people named Yakatomi Yoshikama all over the place in my generic high fantasy games. You're not fucking Japanese, stop using names like that!

What really annoys me is how certain reviewers rave about the freedom this game supposedly gives you with the story and with how you want to progress through the content, because that's a big load of bullshit. Not only is the progression almost entirely on rails, but the game does nothing to tell you how or why you can't progress if you're trying to do stuff in the wrong oder.
For instance, you get your own fortress very early on in the game, which comes with its own dungeon underneath. And a quest, telling you to go all the way to the bottom of said dungeon to meet its master.

So I went into the dungeon, fought my way through level after level until I ended up in front of a talking door, which would not let me pass. Dead end. No hint as to what I was missing, no nothing. That's until Google revealed to me that this door won't budge until I've finished a certain part of the main storyline. I just thought I missed something or maybe this part of the dungeon was broken. Instead, I had to leave, play the main quest some more, then come back to the dungeon to talk to the fucking door again.

Alright, dungeon is closed, let's run all the way back and play a quest!

And that shit happens in other dungeons as well. Second floor or another dungeon I went to for a quest? Flooded. The game doesn't say how or why or how to get around it. The water just magically disappears after finishing Act 2 of the storyline. Again, no hint as to why the water is disappearing, the game sure as fuck doesn't tell you and I just found out via Google. Some "Baldur's Gate 3" this is.

And every review is full of how incredibly polished and bug-free Pillars of Eternity is. That is, until you try and equip new gear via double-click, which strips you of all buffs and bonuses. Ranger pets can turn invisible and will forever stay that way if you save your game before you notice their disappearance. Some voiceovers don't work and some of my party members are mute, whereas one of my pets didn't get its name saved, so he now known as Lion Companion.

Pillars doesn't suck. It's not a bad game and I'm deliberately pointing out just the flaws and problems. And I'm doing so, because this game is not the hottest shit since the invention of tits. It's not fucking Baldur's Gate 3, just because it uses some cursors and sound fx and visual elements from the old Infinity Engine games, you click-hungry, lying shitbags! And it's stupid, exaggerated, overhyped reviews, which cause me to enjoy this game a lot less than I should. It ain't bad, but it only makes me want to play Baldur's Gate for the nth time. I'm not giving this one another playthrough.

And why the fuck are massive walls of text with almost no voiceovers suddenly better, more sophisticated storytelling, which allegedly beats the action-packed cutscenes and story elements of Dragon Age: Inquisition? Are you fucking kidding me? You're like those poncy-ass cunts who "prefer the weight of a real book" over a Kindle, so everyone can see what you're reading and who tell everyone that the book was better than the movie, in any movie, whether you've read the book or not. I'm so very sick and tired of all that stupid indie game hype and how it's super hip to hate on Bioware, because they're suddenly "too manstream". Right. Because Dragon Age, Mass Effect and KOTOR were total niche-games for only the truest of core gamers or what. And then you're already waiting to go premium on Star Wars: Battlefront and to preorder the next Assassin's Creed.

In other news - no more expansions for Everquest 2. Instead, they're now offering overpriced DLC packs with almost zero value. The first one is titled Rum Cellar and has been slated to hit live servers at the end of the month. It contains a solo stealth section, a heroic group section, which takes 30-60 minutes to finish (since when does ANY group dungeon on EQ2 take 60 minutes to beat?), as well as one raid. I don't raid, so I'd get about 30 minutes of content out of this one - at the price of 15 Dollars. Except, I can't fucking play it, because it's level 100 only, which I can't reach, because I didn't buy the game's last expansion. In the past, every expansion would be included in the following one for free, so I was waiting for AoM to go Free2Play, which isn't going to happen now. Oh yeah, future cap increases, new races, classes or any other actual content ain't really gonna happen now, either.

So much for the whole, "Don't worry, you won't notice any negative changes and we'll have more resources than ever to work on this game" bullcrap. Though I should have figured that out when they said their community always comes first and will always be their top priority, whilst cancelling the annual fan convention the exact same second. Oh well, I guess there's always Elder Scrolls Online, which is now better than ever.

- Cat