This is a special reward just for Destroyah. For being the first one to plant a flag on the Mun, she gets to strap a solid rocket motor to the Director's car and attempt a land speed record on the KSC runway.
"We tried this with monkeys first, right?"
"Yes. Now get in the car."
"Steer to the left and try not to run over the burning monkey carcass."
Notice I've added wings. There's no way rover wheels can steer under rocket power (I've built rocket powered rovers before, they don't go well) so I'm hoping that aerodynamics might afford us some steering. They don't.
Acceleration is a little less impressive than I hoped, 0 to 40 takes 7 seconds.
45 seconds in, the car breaks 100 miles per hour.
Top speed: 142 mph.
It's about this time that I remember these wheels are rated for 20 mph. The front two tear off, and the middle two overheat and explode when Destroyah hits the brakes.
The Space Car rolls off the end of the runway and breaks off a few bits and bobs, but that looked pretty survivable.
She's alright, everybody!
Kerbin MegaRelay
I launched two of these, as planned, but simple infrastructure missions like this I won't fully document. As the game proceeds I'll be placing a number of additional relays and might give a little summary. This one is pretty impressive, though, so it gets a full entry.
The old Tundra 1 rocket makes a return with a new aerodynamic fairing that definitely doesn't look like anything at all.
I just love clean fairing separations. I would put fairings around my fairings if it wasn't just a waste of mass budget.
We get the satellite into a nice ~1000 km orbit. It doesn't need to be too exact, as you'll soon see, this relay is a bit excessive. It doesn't need much of a constellation.
The unfolding process takes a bit.
Yeah, James Webb ain't got shit on me.
Unfortunately a crash ate most of Muna 2 and I'm too tired to redo that fiddley equatorial LKO to Mun polar transfer again, so that will be next time.
Just for the record. I’m not paying for the wheels. Design flaws are not pilot error.
…Same story for the skid marks on the runway or any damage to the runway edge lighting.
Also, when can I drive the mk2 rocket car? That was fun!
Extraction shooters seem to be all the rage currently. Have any of you come across an 'extraction shooter' but in a turn-based, pve, fantasy setting instead? I think that might be fun. Run a short mission, get some loot and get out again.
Dark and Darker does it in first person and it looks promising, but that's still a ways off.
This is a special reward just for Destroyah. For being the first one to plant a flag on the Mun, she gets to strap a solid rocket motor to the Director's car and attempt a land speed record on the KSC runway.
"We tried this with monkeys first, right?"
"Yes. Now get in the car."
"Steer to the left and try not to run over the burning monkey carcass."
Notice I've added wings. There's no way rover wheels can steer under rocket power (I've built rocket powered rovers before, they don't go well) so I'm hoping that aerodynamics might afford us some steering. They don't.
Acceleration is a little less impressive than I hoped, 0 to 40 takes 7 seconds.
45 seconds in, the car breaks 100 miles per hour.
Top speed: 142 mph.
It's about this time that I remember these wheels are rated for 20 mph. The front two tear off, and the middle two overheat and explode when Destroyah hits the brakes.
The Space Car rolls off the end of the runway and breaks off a few bits and bobs, but that looked pretty survivable.
She's alright, everybody!
Kerbin MegaRelay
I launched two of these, as planned, but simple infrastructure missions like this I won't fully document. As the game proceeds I'll be placing a number of additional relays and might give a little summary. This one is pretty impressive, though, so it gets a full entry.
The old Tundra 1 rocket makes a return with a new aerodynamic fairing that definitely doesn't look like anything at all.
I just love clean fairing separations. I would put fairings around my fairings if it wasn't just a waste of mass budget.
We get the satellite into a nice ~1000 km orbit. It doesn't need to be too exact, as you'll soon see, this relay is a bit excessive. It doesn't need much of a constellation.
The unfolding process takes a bit.
Yeah, James Webb ain't got shit on me.
Unfortunately a crash ate most of Muna 2 and I'm too tired to redo that fiddley equatorial LKO to Mun polar transfer again, so that will be next time.
Just for the record. I’m not paying for the wheels. Design flaws are not pilot error.
…Same story for the skid marks on the runway or any damage to the runway edge lighting.
Also, when can I drive the mk2 rocket car? That was fun!
Don't worry, all the damage is covered by all the money I'm stealing from the program insurance.
First Kerbal to plant a flag on Duna will get a ride on a larger rocket car.
Let the animus choose is the canon answer and the one everyone should pick.
There are story reasons behind why the genders switch at various points you lose if you peg it to one. Most of the time its female Eivor anyway.
If you hard peg to male or female there’s significant context on a major element of the story you might miss.
Not interested.
The menace and delivery of female Eivor is too good to pass up.
Its like a whole different character.
You still get female Eivor for most of the story.. Male Eivor is like maybe a 5 hour chunk of the main game and 1 DLC.
But that 5 hour chunk really needs to be male Eivor. Like I’ve known people that literally didn’t understand the ending because of it and it turned out they’d played the whole game as a single gender and thats why they weren’t getting it.
For those who don’t care about spoilers (big endgame spoiler)
Eivor is Odin reincarnated. When you play certain supernatural segments, you are actually reliving a dreamy version of Eivors memories as odin. In those memories she is male. In the present time she is female. You as a player are supposed to be getting the connection that the character you are playing in the supernatural sequences are a different incarnation than the present day sequence. But if you just have a monogender Eivor, its easy to just write those off as “eivor has weird hallucinatory supernatural adventures.” I’ve had people at the end say “where did all this odin shit come from out of nowhere. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, its built up, they just missed the signaling because they didn’t recognize that Eivor in the memories was supposed to be a different incarnation of the character”
Extraction shooters seem to be all the rage currently. Have any of you come across an 'extraction shooter' but in a turn-based, pve, fantasy setting instead? I think that might be fun. Run a short mission, get some loot and get out again.
Dark and Darker does it in first person and it looks promising, but that's still a ways off.
Are you the person who wrote into the Jeff Gerstmann Show about this? The argument is that they're only as competitive as you make it, and that they're really PvPvE, fun to watch as a stream game, etc. The email suggested they could be the trend of the future, but Jeff was skeptical.
Let the animus choose is the canon answer and the one everyone should pick.
There are story reasons behind why the genders switch at various points you lose if you peg it to one. Most of the time its female Eivor anyway.
If you hard peg to male or female there’s significant context on a major element of the story you might miss.
Not interested.
The menace and delivery of female Eivor is too good to pass up.
Its like a whole different character.
My understanding is . . . there's story reasons for that as well. However, if you like a thing a certain way, play the thing!
Can you spoiler why? I’m kind of curious.
(Nevermind, someone got to it before me. )
Edit: Jealous Deva got the major stuff up above, they are spoilery though and it sounds like the major reason is actually spoilers as well. I'd check their post.
Kalnaur on
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
It is bad design. Ubisoft executives mandated it because they think some players are scared of vaginas and won’t spend money on a game with a female protagonist.
It is bad design. Ubisoft executives mandated it because they think some players are scared of vaginas and won’t spend money on a game with a female protagonist.
This has been the same issue since at least Oddessy, which the team also wanted to be just a female lead.
rahkeesh2000 on
+3
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
I think I’m done with AC so spoilers is fine.
And yeah thats just bad design, though with it being Ubisoft it’s not unexpected.
And yeah thats just bad design, though with it being Ubisoft it’s not unexpected.
Its been a lot longer IIRC it goes all the way back to Unity. Every game since then was proposed with a larger female role and the execs changed to to a male protagonist or mandated a gender choice. Though if they had a female protag for unity they probably wouldn’t have had 4 more female games, its more the devs kept saying “we want to do this” and ubisoft kept saying “you can’t do that” then the next game the devs would say “we still want to do this” over and over until they finally figured out they could have an actor do some extra voicework and reuse another character from the game in Alexios and Havi as a male protagonist option just to make the execs happy.
This will be a flight to the Mun's south pole because I've run out of poles on Kerbin to strand Pixie at. Don't worry, Pixie, there's no ice at this one!
The lander has been beefed up from Muna 1, with heavier landing legs, a larger engine, and a stretched fuel tank.
The Muna 1 rocket was grossly excessive, but the Muna 2 lander is heavier, so the logical thing is to absurdly upgrade the rocket, right?
Ok, I may have overdone this. The rocket is not supposed to reenter going up.
Booster separation with no explosions!
An equatorial-to-equatorial transfer to the Mun is easy. Going to a polar orbit is a bit harder. With a little help from the maneuver planner, we plot a direct crash course into the mun...
Then in transit we do a second burn anti-normal (that is, perpendicular to the orbit but parallel to the axis), to drop our course out of the mun and over the south pole.
Muna 2 eliminates the transfer stage from Muna 1, going straight from the ascent stage to the munar capture stage. Thanks to the giant boosters we still have just as much extra fuel, allowing the same dead stop vertical drop from orbit.
Landing at the poles is a major challenge, because everything casts huge shadows. Is that a gentle incline? Is that a giant crater? Is that the remains of the three rockets full of monkeys I crashed testing this mission? WHO KNOWS!
This engine might be a bit overpowered as well, it has to throttle way down to about 2% to keep from blasting the ship back into space.
Pixie is the first to go on EVA and promptly faceplants into the regolith.
HAHAHAHA I LIED THERE IS ICE THERE!
More disrespectful flags, the Director barely complains at this point.
After deploying all the surface science stuff, I discover that Akjak is an engineer. Most of our scientists are stranded on the MOL, so we can't actually activate the deployable stuff. Oh well, these take way too long anyway (the one at Muna 1's landing site is still at about 25%).
Getting into the ship to leave, I think Pixie stepped on something climbing in.
SAS settings are there, but don't actually orient the spacecraft, and the engine won't throttle up or down. I can only slam it back and forth from 0% to 100%.
This is going to make the return trip... interesting.
Wow, that sure is an orbit.
Actually I think the game took a shit on me. Or maybe my keyboard is broken? Because staging doesn't work either, so I have to manually decouple the ascent module.
"Uh... shit, how do you manually trigger a parachute?"
Wiki: "Right click the parachute and click the Arm button"
Me: "This modded parachute/RCS combo doesn't have that oh fuck! FUCK FUCK! Oh wait, there it is."
Muna 1 gets us 413 science, so it's time for a spending spree! Tier 5 techs are more expensive than tier 4 was, but our range is now vastly increased, so where tier 4 regularly required two missions for one node, a single mun landing clears us three nodes in tier 5.
First off, Advanced Electrics. This gets us a couple new science experiments, but more importantly it gets us good solar panels. Our current ones are just surface mounted, these unfold and can rotate to track the sun.
Next, Very Heavy Rocketry, which brings us very close to the pinnacle of conventional rockets (there are a few methane engines left in tiers 6 and 7).
Lastly, Command Modules, which is a doozy. It gets us a total of ten command pods, seven reentry-ready and three lander cans. The reentry-ready pods range from a couple 2-kerbal options larger than our current Corvus pod all the way up to a 7-kerbal behemoth. The lander cans come in 2- and 4-kerbal sizes.
Mission: Munar Prospector
Munar Prospector is a dual purpose probe to the Mun. In the short term, it carries mapping cameras and radar altimetry. In the long term it has three relay antennas to help provide communication coverage to the Mun and Minmus.
I've gone for a more Russian-style rocket, wider rather than taller.
At about 11,000 meters the first stage explodes, scattering boosters in a beautiful display of destruction and sending KSC crews scrambling to the bomb shelters.
So instead I settle for a slight upgrade of the rocket we used for the Muna program. The core and upper stage have new engines out of the Very Heavy Rocketry node.
85% fewer explosions!
Basically a repeat of Muna 2, a course correction en route gets us into a Mun encounter across the south pole.
Finally! Now that's a satellite that actually looks like a thing. One antenna is pointed at the MOL, one back at Kerbin, and one is open for incoming connections.
Speaking of the MOL, we haven't checked on them in a few weeks. I turn the radio back on and after they stop screaming something about the toilet exploding I manage to get them to transmit 61 science they saved up.
We really have to get them out of there one of these days. Not today, though. Today I turn the radio back off so I can't hear their howls of inchoate rage.
The next mission will be the MOL Not-Rescue, in which two random guys we grabbed off the street will be stranded forever in the MOL so our named Kerbonauts can come home.
After that is the already announced Mina 1, an orbital mission to Minmus, the tiny second moon of Kerbin. This mission will deploy a relay satellite and perform a variety of science before returning. This mission has been expanded from previous plans, and will now include one additional Kerbal to be announced. One of our intrepid heroes will be attempting something truly insane! They will retrieve a surface sample from Minmus... Without a lander.
After that is the already announced Mina 1, an orbital mission to Minmus, the tiny second moon of Kerbin. This mission will deploy a relay satellite and perform a variety of science before returning. This mission has been expanded from previous plans, and will now include one additional Kerbal to be announced. One of our intrepid heroes will be attempting something truly insane! They will retrieve a surface sample from Minmus... Without a lander.
After that is the already announced Mina 1, an orbital mission to Minmus, the tiny second moon of Kerbin. This mission will deploy a relay satellite and perform a variety of science before returning. This mission has been expanded from previous plans, and will now include one additional Kerbal to be announced. One of our intrepid heroes will be attempting something truly insane! They will retrieve a surface sample from Minmus... Without a lander.
Any volunteers to go down in history?
*hand goes up!*
Ok, then! This should be awesome. I never tried it before, but it should be fine. I saw Matt Lowne do it on Youtube.
I mean it's a good twist that uses the player character's gender to maximum effect, But the fact that I can be broken is an issue.
I mean I had a similar idea once but gave up on it when I was prototyping because I didn't believe I could stick to landing and not come off as an asshole
I mean it's a good twist that uses the player character's gender to maximum effect, But the fact that I can be broken is an issue.
I mean I had a similar idea once but gave up on it when I was prototyping because I didn't believe I could stick to landing and not come off as an asshole
Yeah agreed I feel like the main failure was not clearly indicating for the animus option “this is the canon option and the way the game is meant to be played” and for the other two options “this is just a cosmetic option and some elements of the game may not reflect your character model.”
Funny story, Eivor is not a gender neutral name in Scandinavia, and some characters in the game still refer to you as female in game (it doesn’t really come up much… but when it does people still refer to you as “she” or “her”).
Its really the equivalent of if Tomb Raider let you pick a male character skin but everyone just still referred to you as Laura and nothing else changed.
There I was watching Canada go down two goals early to the US in the first period of the World Junior semi-finals. Fortunately, Canada was able to straighten things up and wound up winning 6-2.
After flipping the TV back over to the PC, I noticed a new window had appeared.
Apparently @CorriganX confused me with someone else, but I still appreciate the game ;-). I've not heard of it, but I'll make sure to let you know how it goes when I get through my SMT IV playthrough and probably a couple of others.
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
Xbox - PearlBlueS0ul, Steam
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
I guess I'm going to ask a completely different question: Why isn't your wife getting living room time? A Deck may not actually help with this, and this should be considered.
It's an amazing device and I love owning one, but as someone who also has to scrape and claw for any gaming time, I thought the Deck was going to liberate me and give some of that time back to me, and the result was: A little?
Like sometimes when I go to someone's house and they want to chit-chat (which I would rather gargle razor blades and broken glass), I play Kingdom Two Crowns and stay mildly in the conversation. But a lot of times I end up in a weird social limbo where I'm rude if I do anything fun and the Deck is seen as a negative so I just sit there and stare at the wall instead anyways. Often my wife doesn't want me to play games while she is home and also not asleep, so having a Deck doesn't actually help in that instance because even though I'd like to do literally any other fucking thing than talk about our work days for 2 hours in our living room, that's often what we end up doing, and oh look, 2 hours of my evening gone and the Deck remains dormant.
I'm not saying your wife has the same situation, it sounds like child-raising is probably the big time sink, but it's something to consider: The Deck may not actually free her to play games at all. If she doesn't have time to turn on a console or fire up a game on a PC, she is very unlikely to have the time to fire up a Deck, either.
I firmly love this device and think more people should get one, and I'm really looking forward to Valve making future versions of it, because at this price point they might actually save the PC gaming market for people who aren't independently wealthy, but given how much I've used mine, when I had reasoned I'd use mine a lot more than I do, I thought I'd offer an alternative perspective from everyone else.
First of all, kudos for being willing to touch that subject. It’s all much simpler than that though. The way we split up watching the kids in the evening is that I watch the kids in the living room first. I can squeeze some gaming time in most nights there on the Xbox, which used to be our main shared gaming device. In fact, Xbox had been our console of choice for generations because Halo and Gears is some of the best AAA couch co-op campaign left.
But when she watches the little one during bedtime routine, she is in bed. That’s an hour or two until we’re both asleep she is mostly watching TikTok. I thought she was just really into TikTok! Turns out she misses gaming and wants something Xbox-like. I’m happy to hear that and tell her about the Steam Deck, which is maybe a little janky but I think will serve her needs. She likes the idea.
I look forward to when the kids are older and we’re back to couch co-op. Until then I want her to get all the quality gaming time she wants.
And yeah thats just bad design, though with it being Ubisoft it’s not unexpected.
Its been a lot longer IIRC it goes all the way back to Unity. Every game since then was proposed with a larger female role and the execs changed to to a male protagonist or mandated a gender choice. Though if they had a female protag for unity they probably wouldn’t have had 4 more female games, its more the devs kept saying “we want to do this” and ubisoft kept saying “you can’t do that” then the next game the devs would say “we still want to do this” over and over until they finally figured out they could have an actor do some extra voicework and reuse another character from the game in Alexios and Havi as a male protagonist option just to make the execs happy.
I'm honestly annoyed that they didn't just tell the execs (for Valhalla):
"this is the creative decision that, if we give the players a choice, will negatively impact the narrative twist of the game, and we can't "just make them a dude" because that's part of the goddamn twist. This character, the main character of one of our flagship games, must be a woman (primarily) throughout the game or we're making a worse game overall. So if you want a worse game, then that's what you're getting, and that's what you're choosing. A worse game."
That said, yeah, I really need whoever is making those decisions over at that Ubisoft to just . . . walk off into the ether and never give their opinions ever again? That would help so much.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
0
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
That makes me wanna play Valhalla more than before tbh.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
@Spoit sneaking in under the final hours of the sale to smack me with some animal goodness! This looks so cute, def gonna get this going soon! Thank you kindly!
And yeah thats just bad design, though with it being Ubisoft it’s not unexpected.
Its been a lot longer IIRC it goes all the way back to Unity. Every game since then was proposed with a larger female role and the execs changed to to a male protagonist or mandated a gender choice. Though if they had a female protag for unity they probably wouldn’t have had 4 more female games, its more the devs kept saying “we want to do this” and ubisoft kept saying “you can’t do that” then the next game the devs would say “we still want to do this” over and over until they finally figured out they could have an actor do some extra voicework and reuse another character from the game in Alexios and Havi as a male protagonist option just to make the execs happy.
I'm honestly annoyed that they didn't just tell the execs (for Valhalla):
"this is the creative decision that, if we give the players a choice, will negatively impact the narrative twist of the game, and we can't "just make them a dude" because that's part of the goddamn twist. This character, the main character of one of our flagship games, must be a woman (primarily) throughout the game or we're making a worse game overall. So if you want a worse game, then that's what you're getting, and that's what you're choosing. A worse game."
That said, yeah, I really need whoever is making those decisions over at that Ubisoft to just . . . walk off into the ether and never give their opinions ever again? That would help so much.
Honestly, this isn't a good argument. The vast majority of the playerbase will NEVER see those scenes. They're too deep in a game that's far, far too long. What EVERY player WILL see (and would see immediately) is that Valhalla (in this scenario) went backwards on a feature that Odyssey had (the ability to choose Male or Female MC). Losing that feature could be a deal breaker for some players or it could just make them like the game less. For story scenes in a game where many players don't care too much about the story and will never see all of it. From a design perspective, forcing that choice that way just isn't ideal. Honestly, deleting that part of the story and changing it to something else would be a smarter design decision vs chucking out a major feature.
People get super into "Female Shepard is the REAL Shepard!" which ignores the fact that in the original games, players picked MShep 82 percent over FShep 18 percent (Legendary version changed that ratio to M68-F32, so the attitude on it is shifting over time). Just because you'd prefer it to be a certain way doesn't mean the playerbase would appreciate you trying to force the issue (they DEFINITELY would not).
shoeboxjeddy on
+1
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Well the other thing they could have done is
Copy the template they already had in Odyssey and always make those sequences the other gender.
+7
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
That would have been the easiest solution.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I mean it's a good twist that uses the player character's gender to maximum effect, But the fact that I can be broken is an issue.
I mean I had a similar idea once but gave up on it when I was prototyping because I didn't believe I could stick to landing and not come off as an asshole
Yeah agreed I feel like the main failure was not clearly indicating for the animus option “this is the canon option and the way the game is meant to be played” and for the other two options “this is just a cosmetic option and some elements of the game may not reflect your character model.”
Funny story, Eivor is not a gender neutral name in Scandinavia, and some characters in the game still refer to you as female in game (it doesn’t really come up much… but when it does people still refer to you as “she” or “her”).
Its really the equivalent of if Tomb Raider let you pick a male character skin but everyone just still referred to you as Laura and nothing else changed.
As long as he still has giant conical pecs, everything's ok.
Copy the template they already had in Odyssey and always make those sequences the other gender.
It doesn’t really work that way either because of the nature of the twist.
Odin is a specific person. If you’re playing a male and switch to a female in the Havi parts you lose the “Havi is Odin” inference the player is supposed to be making.
+2
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Circus Electrique is a fun Darkest Dungeon type game
This will be a flight to the Mun's south pole because I've run out of poles on Kerbin to strand Pixie at. Don't worry, Pixie, there's no ice at this one!
The lander has been beefed up from Muna 1, with heavier landing legs, a larger engine, and a stretched fuel tank.
The Muna 1 rocket was grossly excessive, but the Muna 2 lander is heavier, so the logical thing is to absurdly upgrade the rocket, right?
Ok, I may have overdone this. The rocket is not supposed to reenter going up.
Booster separation with no explosions!
An equatorial-to-equatorial transfer to the Mun is easy. Going to a polar orbit is a bit harder. With a little help from the maneuver planner, we plot a direct crash course into the mun...
Then in transit we do a second burn anti-normal (that is, perpendicular to the orbit but parallel to the axis), to drop our course out of the mun and over the south pole.
Muna 2 eliminates the transfer stage from Muna 1, going straight from the ascent stage to the munar capture stage. Thanks to the giant boosters we still have just as much extra fuel, allowing the same dead stop vertical drop from orbit.
Landing at the poles is a major challenge, because everything casts huge shadows. Is that a gentle incline? Is that a giant crater? Is that the remains of the three rockets full of monkeys I crashed testing this mission? WHO KNOWS!
This engine might be a bit overpowered as well, it has to throttle way down to about 2% to keep from blasting the ship back into space.
Pixie is the first to go on EVA and promptly faceplants into the regolith.
HAHAHAHA I LIED THERE IS ICE THERE!
More disrespectful flags, the Director barely complains at this point.
After deploying all the surface science stuff, I discover that Akjak is an engineer. Most of our scientists are stranded on the MOL, so we can't actually activate the deployable stuff. Oh well, these take way too long anyway (the one at Muna 1's landing site is still at about 25%).
Getting into the ship to leave, I think Pixie stepped on something climbing in.
SAS settings are there, but don't actually orient the spacecraft, and the engine won't throttle up or down. I can only slam it back and forth from 0% to 100%.
This is going to make the return trip... interesting.
Wow, that sure is an orbit.
Actually I think the game took a shit on me. Or maybe my keyboard is broken? Because staging doesn't work either, so I have to manually decouple the ascent module.
"Uh... shit, how do you manually trigger a parachute?"
Wiki: "Right click the parachute and click the Arm button"
Me: "This modded parachute/RCS combo doesn't have that oh fuck! FUCK FUCK! Oh wait, there it is."
Muna 1 gets us 413 science, so it's time for a spending spree! Tier 5 techs are more expensive than tier 4 was, but our range is now vastly increased, so where tier 4 regularly required two missions for one node, a single mun landing clears us three nodes in tier 5.
First off, Advanced Electrics. This gets us a couple new science experiments, but more importantly it gets us good solar panels. Our current ones are just surface mounted, these unfold and can rotate to track the sun.
Next, Very Heavy Rocketry, which brings us very close to the pinnacle of conventional rockets (there are a few methane engines left in tiers 6 and 7).
Lastly, Command Modules, which is a doozy. It gets us a total of ten command pods, seven reentry-ready and three lander cans. The reentry-ready pods range from a couple 2-kerbal options larger than our current Corvus pod all the way up to a 7-kerbal behemoth. The lander cans come in 2- and 4-kerbal sizes.
Mission: Munar Prospector
Munar Prospector is a dual purpose probe to the Mun. In the short term, it carries mapping cameras and radar altimetry. In the long term it has three relay antennas to help provide communication coverage to the Mun and Minmus.
I've gone for a more Russian-style rocket, wider rather than taller.
At about 11,000 meters the first stage explodes, scattering boosters in a beautiful display of destruction and sending KSC crews scrambling to the bomb shelters.
So instead I settle for a slight upgrade of the rocket we used for the Muna program. The core and upper stage have new engines out of the Very Heavy Rocketry node.
85% fewer explosions!
Basically a repeat of Muna 2, a course correction en route gets us into a Mun encounter across the south pole.
Finally! Now that's a satellite that actually looks like a thing. One antenna is pointed at the MOL, one back at Kerbin, and one is open for incoming connections.
Speaking of the MOL, we haven't checked on them in a few weeks. I turn the radio back on and after they stop screaming something about the toilet exploding I manage to get them to transmit 61 science they saved up.
We really have to get them out of there one of these days. Not today, though. Today I turn the radio back off so I can't hear their howls of inchoate rage.
The next mission will be the MOL Not-Rescue, in which two random guys we grabbed off the street will be stranded forever in the MOL so our named Kerbonauts can come home.
After that is the already announced Mina 1, an orbital mission to Minmus, the tiny second moon of Kerbin. This mission will deploy a relay satellite and perform a variety of science before returning. This mission has been expanded from previous plans, and will now include one additional Kerbal to be announced. One of our intrepid heroes will be attempting something truly insane! They will retrieve a surface sample from Minmus... Without a lander.
Any volunteers to go down in history?
Speaking of, Kerbal should be free on EGS tomorrow
I have a back procedure in about an hour, so was super anxious last night and instead of trying to sleep and being unable to I instead played Astlibra for 7 hours straight.
Its a very good game. Side scrolling action game, you collect materials and gold to create weapons and armor in the shop then level those up to unlock new skills. You've got a limited number of 'points' you can have active at a time, and skills cost anywhere from 1-5 so you have to juggle what you want active at any one time. Theres also spells you unlock that you have to input a command mid battle to use, Holding Y (on an xbox controller) will open up the menu then you press 1-2 directional inputs to cast a specific spell. All together the combat is very fun, even if the animations are a bit stiff. Its definitely got that indie-jank feel to the animations, and the combat isnt as smooth as it could be, but its absolutely very enjoyable still.
The story is pretty solid so far, nothing crazy but i'm not super deep into it. There are multiple difficulty settings letting you adjust to your own playstyle, the hard, hell, impossible ones give you more experience and loot drops to tempt you into harder content. I'm currently playing on Hell Difficulty and while it was rough at the start once I got my feet under me its been not too bad. During the first act you can adjust difficulty up or down to find your place, but once you beat the first real boss you can only adjust the difficulty down, you can't increase it.
If you like side scrolling action games (its not really a metroid-vania like I originally thought) its a very very solid one. I recommend it so far, but keep in mind i've only been playing for 7 hours. If I end up beating it i'll come back and say how it goes through the end game.
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It's super good!
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My understanding is . . . there's story reasons for that as well. However, if you like a thing a certain way, play the thing!
Can you spoiler why? I’m kind of curious.
Just for the record. I’m not paying for the wheels. Design flaws are not pilot error.
…Same story for the skid marks on the runway or any damage to the runway edge lighting.
Also, when can I drive the mk2 rocket car? That was fun!
Dark and Darker does it in first person and it looks promising, but that's still a ways off.
Don't worry, all the damage is covered by all the money I'm stealing from the program insurance.
First Kerbal to plant a flag on Duna will get a ride on a larger rocket car.
You still get female Eivor for most of the story.. Male Eivor is like maybe a 5 hour chunk of the main game and 1 DLC.
But that 5 hour chunk really needs to be male Eivor. Like I’ve known people that literally didn’t understand the ending because of it and it turned out they’d played the whole game as a single gender and thats why they weren’t getting it.
For those who don’t care about spoilers (big endgame spoiler)
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Are you the person who wrote into the Jeff Gerstmann Show about this? The argument is that they're only as competitive as you make it, and that they're really PvPvE, fun to watch as a stream game, etc. The email suggested they could be the trend of the future, but Jeff was skeptical.
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(Nevermind, someone got to it before me. )
Edit: Jealous Deva got the major stuff up above, they are spoilery though and it sounds like the major reason is actually spoilers as well. I'd check their post.
It is bad design. Ubisoft executives mandated it because they think some players are scared of vaginas and won’t spend money on a game with a female protagonist.
This has been the same issue since at least Oddessy, which the team also wanted to be just a female lead.
And yeah thats just bad design, though with it being Ubisoft it’s not unexpected.
AC:Valhalla has a lot of bad game design going on.
Its been a lot longer IIRC it goes all the way back to Unity. Every game since then was proposed with a larger female role and the execs changed to to a male protagonist or mandated a gender choice. Though if they had a female protag for unity they probably wouldn’t have had 4 more female games, its more the devs kept saying “we want to do this” and ubisoft kept saying “you can’t do that” then the next game the devs would say “we still want to do this” over and over until they finally figured out they could have an actor do some extra voicework and reuse another character from the game in Alexios and Havi as a male protagonist option just to make the execs happy.
Mission: Muna 2
Pilot: Pixie
This will be a flight to the Mun's south pole because I've run out of poles on Kerbin to strand Pixie at. Don't worry, Pixie, there's no ice at this one!
The lander has been beefed up from Muna 1, with heavier landing legs, a larger engine, and a stretched fuel tank.
The Muna 1 rocket was grossly excessive, but the Muna 2 lander is heavier, so the logical thing is to absurdly upgrade the rocket, right?
Ok, I may have overdone this. The rocket is not supposed to reenter going up.
Booster separation with no explosions!
An equatorial-to-equatorial transfer to the Mun is easy. Going to a polar orbit is a bit harder. With a little help from the maneuver planner, we plot a direct crash course into the mun...
Then in transit we do a second burn anti-normal (that is, perpendicular to the orbit but parallel to the axis), to drop our course out of the mun and over the south pole.
Muna 2 eliminates the transfer stage from Muna 1, going straight from the ascent stage to the munar capture stage. Thanks to the giant boosters we still have just as much extra fuel, allowing the same dead stop vertical drop from orbit.
Landing at the poles is a major challenge, because everything casts huge shadows. Is that a gentle incline? Is that a giant crater? Is that the remains of the three rockets full of monkeys I crashed testing this mission? WHO KNOWS!
This engine might be a bit overpowered as well, it has to throttle way down to about 2% to keep from blasting the ship back into space.
Pixie is the first to go on EVA and promptly faceplants into the regolith.
HAHAHAHA I LIED THERE IS ICE THERE!
More disrespectful flags, the Director barely complains at this point.
After deploying all the surface science stuff, I discover that Akjak is an engineer. Most of our scientists are stranded on the MOL, so we can't actually activate the deployable stuff. Oh well, these take way too long anyway (the one at Muna 1's landing site is still at about 25%).
Getting into the ship to leave, I think Pixie stepped on something climbing in.
SAS settings are there, but don't actually orient the spacecraft, and the engine won't throttle up or down. I can only slam it back and forth from 0% to 100%.
This is going to make the return trip... interesting.
Wow, that sure is an orbit.
Actually I think the game took a shit on me. Or maybe my keyboard is broken? Because staging doesn't work either, so I have to manually decouple the ascent module.
"Uh... shit, how do you manually trigger a parachute?"
Wiki: "Right click the parachute and click the Arm button"
Me: "This modded parachute/RCS combo doesn't have that oh fuck! FUCK FUCK! Oh wait, there it is."
Muna 1 gets us 413 science, so it's time for a spending spree! Tier 5 techs are more expensive than tier 4 was, but our range is now vastly increased, so where tier 4 regularly required two missions for one node, a single mun landing clears us three nodes in tier 5.
First off, Advanced Electrics. This gets us a couple new science experiments, but more importantly it gets us good solar panels. Our current ones are just surface mounted, these unfold and can rotate to track the sun.
Next, Very Heavy Rocketry, which brings us very close to the pinnacle of conventional rockets (there are a few methane engines left in tiers 6 and 7).
Lastly, Command Modules, which is a doozy. It gets us a total of ten command pods, seven reentry-ready and three lander cans. The reentry-ready pods range from a couple 2-kerbal options larger than our current Corvus pod all the way up to a 7-kerbal behemoth. The lander cans come in 2- and 4-kerbal sizes.
Mission: Munar Prospector
I've gone for a more Russian-style rocket, wider rather than taller.
At about 11,000 meters the first stage explodes, scattering boosters in a beautiful display of destruction and sending KSC crews scrambling to the bomb shelters.
So instead I settle for a slight upgrade of the rocket we used for the Muna program. The core and upper stage have new engines out of the Very Heavy Rocketry node.
85% fewer explosions!
Basically a repeat of Muna 2, a course correction en route gets us into a Mun encounter across the south pole.
Finally! Now that's a satellite that actually looks like a thing. One antenna is pointed at the MOL, one back at Kerbin, and one is open for incoming connections.
Speaking of the MOL, we haven't checked on them in a few weeks. I turn the radio back on and after they stop screaming something about the toilet exploding I manage to get them to transmit 61 science they saved up.
We really have to get them out of there one of these days. Not today, though. Today I turn the radio back off so I can't hear their howls of inchoate rage.
The next mission will be the MOL Not-Rescue, in which two random guys we grabbed off the street will be stranded forever in the MOL so our named Kerbonauts can come home.
After that is the already announced Mina 1, an orbital mission to Minmus, the tiny second moon of Kerbin. This mission will deploy a relay satellite and perform a variety of science before returning. This mission has been expanded from previous plans, and will now include one additional Kerbal to be announced. One of our intrepid heroes will be attempting something truly insane! They will retrieve a surface sample from Minmus... Without a lander.
Any volunteers to go down in history?
*hand goes up!*
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
Ok, then! This should be awesome. I never tried it before, but it should be fine. I saw Matt Lowne do it on Youtube.
I mean I had a similar idea once but gave up on it when I was prototyping because I didn't believe I could stick to landing and not come off as an asshole
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Yeah agreed I feel like the main failure was not clearly indicating for the animus option “this is the canon option and the way the game is meant to be played” and for the other two options “this is just a cosmetic option and some elements of the game may not reflect your character model.”
Funny story, Eivor is not a gender neutral name in Scandinavia, and some characters in the game still refer to you as female in game (it doesn’t really come up much… but when it does people still refer to you as “she” or “her”).
Its really the equivalent of if Tomb Raider let you pick a male character skin but everyone just still referred to you as Laura and nothing else changed.
After flipping the TV back over to the PC, I noticed a new window had appeared.
Apparently @CorriganX confused me with someone else, but I still appreciate the game ;-). I've not heard of it, but I'll make sure to let you know how it goes when I get through my SMT IV playthrough and probably a couple of others.
Thank you very much!
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
First of all, kudos for being willing to touch that subject. It’s all much simpler than that though. The way we split up watching the kids in the evening is that I watch the kids in the living room first. I can squeeze some gaming time in most nights there on the Xbox, which used to be our main shared gaming device. In fact, Xbox had been our console of choice for generations because Halo and Gears is some of the best AAA couch co-op campaign left.
But when she watches the little one during bedtime routine, she is in bed. That’s an hour or two until we’re both asleep she is mostly watching TikTok. I thought she was just really into TikTok! Turns out she misses gaming and wants something Xbox-like. I’m happy to hear that and tell her about the Steam Deck, which is maybe a little janky but I think will serve her needs. She likes the idea.
I look forward to when the kids are older and we’re back to couch co-op. Until then I want her to get all the quality gaming time she wants.
Thanks
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Thanks @Karoz for Horizon Zero Dawn! I've heard plenty of good things, looking forward to playing this soon!
Thank you! I'll try to work this into my 2023 gaming!
Edit - Wrong image
Edit 2- Correct image
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However i will soon be forced to go further and further afield as i exploit the countryside of trees, bushes, palms, and minerals.
I see several bears
#forceofnature
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I'm honestly annoyed that they didn't just tell the execs (for Valhalla):
"this is the creative decision that, if we give the players a choice, will negatively impact the narrative twist of the game, and we can't "just make them a dude" because that's part of the goddamn twist. This character, the main character of one of our flagship games, must be a woman (primarily) throughout the game or we're making a worse game overall. So if you want a worse game, then that's what you're getting, and that's what you're choosing. A worse game."
That said, yeah, I really need whoever is making those decisions over at that Ubisoft to just . . . walk off into the ether and never give their opinions ever again? That would help so much.
Honestly, this isn't a good argument. The vast majority of the playerbase will NEVER see those scenes. They're too deep in a game that's far, far too long. What EVERY player WILL see (and would see immediately) is that Valhalla (in this scenario) went backwards on a feature that Odyssey had (the ability to choose Male or Female MC). Losing that feature could be a deal breaker for some players or it could just make them like the game less. For story scenes in a game where many players don't care too much about the story and will never see all of it. From a design perspective, forcing that choice that way just isn't ideal. Honestly, deleting that part of the story and changing it to something else would be a smarter design decision vs chucking out a major feature.
People get super into "Female Shepard is the REAL Shepard!" which ignores the fact that in the original games, players picked MShep 82 percent over FShep 18 percent (Legendary version changed that ratio to M68-F32, so the attitude on it is shifting over time). Just because you'd prefer it to be a certain way doesn't mean the playerbase would appreciate you trying to force the issue (they DEFINITELY would not).
As long as he still has giant conical pecs, everything's ok.
It doesn’t really work that way either because of the nature of the twist.
Its a very good game. Side scrolling action game, you collect materials and gold to create weapons and armor in the shop then level those up to unlock new skills. You've got a limited number of 'points' you can have active at a time, and skills cost anywhere from 1-5 so you have to juggle what you want active at any one time. Theres also spells you unlock that you have to input a command mid battle to use, Holding Y (on an xbox controller) will open up the menu then you press 1-2 directional inputs to cast a specific spell. All together the combat is very fun, even if the animations are a bit stiff. Its definitely got that indie-jank feel to the animations, and the combat isnt as smooth as it could be, but its absolutely very enjoyable still.
The story is pretty solid so far, nothing crazy but i'm not super deep into it. There are multiple difficulty settings letting you adjust to your own playstyle, the hard, hell, impossible ones give you more experience and loot drops to tempt you into harder content. I'm currently playing on Hell Difficulty and while it was rough at the start once I got my feet under me its been not too bad. During the first act you can adjust difficulty up or down to find your place, but once you beat the first real boss you can only adjust the difficulty down, you can't increase it.
If you like side scrolling action games (its not really a metroid-vania like I originally thought) its a very very solid one. I recommend it so far, but keep in mind i've only been playing for 7 hours. If I end up beating it i'll come back and say how it goes through the end game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1718570/ASTLIBRA_Revision/
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
two eccentric games.
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