construction Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Boring Post Material

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious. Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state… the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window. Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise. We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter. As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence. This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog… but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain. That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts. It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming. We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4. Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast. Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom. They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving. Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them. It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet. When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early. This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning. My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it… which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30. Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard. The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention. With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space. Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks… she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff. We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster. I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game. The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20. The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack. I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience. Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in. My character is the one that does not fit… I am not a nice person… I never claimed to be. My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another. The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead. As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman. We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra… caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship… it was not worth their time to try and take us on. Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count. While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system. I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud. Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side. We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak. To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways. Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion… so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role. The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”. My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf. As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do. I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss. So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to. It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings… and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once. The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands. I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.

Non-Spoiler First Thoughts

War Never Changes…. and neither does Fallout, and that is a statement I mean in the best possible way. When a sequel to a beloved franchise is released, you never quite know if you are going to get absolute greatness like Skyrim… or if you are going to be stuck with a Master of Orion 3. For those who loved MOO3 I apologize… but that game was horrible and broke from far too many of the tenets of the original franchise. Fallout 4 however… keeps all of the best features from Fallout 3 and New Vegas… and applies a next generation coat of paint and features to it. If you have been an aficionado of Bethesda games for very long you will notice that several of the really nice features of Skyrim have been implemented into this engine. Everything from the loading screen item previews… to the ability to favorite weapons and swap between them quickly in combat… are direct lineage to Skyrim. What you also get is some genuine evolution of the engine, in the form of just how content dense the world is and how much of it can be fiddled with.

At this point according to Steam I am roughly four hours into the game, and I have to say… that was the fastest four hours of my life. I mentioned yesterday that I did not stay up Tuesday night to play the game, but instead had to wait until after work yesterday. Additionally we have contractors coming to the house to put a door in our bedroom today… so we had to do a lightning round of cleaning before I finally got to sit down and play with my precious. From the moment I set down… every time I was aware that time had passed… it was an hour and not fifteen minutes like I had thought. Most of that time was spent not actively doing any quests or following the story line really. The first handful of events happen to play out in a pretty organic fashion, and I apparently followed the story line to a point… without really meaning to. I remember watching the demo footage from E3, and I have for the most part made it through the sequence that they showed… which happens pretty early in the game. It gives you a neatly framed vignette that allows you to understand some of the forces in the world that you are contending with.

Packrat Friendly

For me at least the best part of this game is that they have taken things to essentially their logical conclusions. If you are living in a world with limited resources, then essentially everything you come across could be useful. In the past I was a horrible packrat and constantly on the brink over being overburdened. Why was I carrying fifty coffee mugs…. who knew… but I might need them someday. Those tendencies are absolutely paid off in full in this game because quite literally every piece of crap you find in the world is useful either to modify your weapons and armor… or to construct things for the new base building side game. Pretty early on, you end up in the neighborhood you once lived in. This then becomes your base of operations allowing you to scrap materials there, and build new structures. As you venture out into the world you find survivors that you can invite back to your little sanctuary, and in a fashion very reminiscent to State of Decay you have to watch after their well being and their defenses. I am assuming as your settlement gets bigger you will become the target of raiders and the like trying to take your hard earned resources.

The other big noticeable change in this game is that everything seems more dangerous. Radiation is a real problem this time, because instead of causing you to lose health over time… it reduces your maximum health pool. All of the old baddies are also more deadly… Bloat Flies move more erratically, Mole Rats can burrow under ground and pop up when you least expect them…. and move insanely fast… and there are new dangerous like giant mutated mosquitoes. All of this and more I have encountered within a short radius of where you actually start the game. Everything I am talking about is within visual distance of the Vault 111 entrance. Essentially this is a game that is going to eat every waking moment for a long while… because right now I feel like I have not even begun to unwrap the wrapping of the game… let alone actually dip below the surface. The big takeaway is that it is the Fallout game play that you either love or hate… with more advanced systems and more fluidity of character movement and actions. Everything “feels better” and I know this largely because I played quite a bit of New Vegas Tuesday night as a sort of placebo for Fallout 4 while waiting on it to unlock. The changes are extremely noticeable, even from the level the engine was at during Skyrim. I’m now going to shut up about my impressions… and launch the game and lose myself in it again.