Last night I recorded the very first new Bel Folks Stuff episode, and my hope is before the end of the week to record another. It was so much fun last night getting back into the swing of things, and I am not sure if I could have picked a better first guest to sort things out with. We had a charming conversation that once edited down a bit wound up right around the hour mark, so pretty much exactly what I was targeting. It seems like the whole sending the questions out ahead of time bit works as well because it allowed Grace some time to think about the answers she wanted to give. I am still super shocked that as many people have said yes as they have. Right now we have 22 who said yes, 2 that said no and 1 who is still a maybe… and then some folks that I have yet to get in contact with.
The real challenge however was “HOW” to actually go about recording all of these people. For AggroChat we use a privately hosted TeamSpeak that more or less just has access by the members of the show. Tam has a massive preference towards teamspeak over anything else, and as such it is what we continue to use. There are two problems with that, the first being that very few people have the Teamspeak client and that it is always a pain in the butt to have to ask someone to install it. The second big hurdle is the fact that since it is a fairly private venue with a very specific purpose, I am not sure if I want to invite 22 new people to it. Discord seems to be the most ubiquitous chat option but it doesn’t have a native option to record chat in a channel.
This however is where Craig.Chat comes in and last night was my first time using it. Essentially Craig is a bot that you invite to your discord server and then can issue commands to. So when you issue from a text channel:
:craig:, join general
Craig will join a chat channel named general and begin recording everything that is broadcast to that channel. When you are finished recording you issue the other important command:
:craig:, leave
Craig will then stop recording, leave the chat channel and send you a private message with links to download and delete your recording.
This for example is the page that loaded when I clicked on the recording from last night. I could download as a ready to go Audacity Project that comes with Ogg files that are already aligned perfectly with one track per speaker. If it floats your boat you can download several FLAC or Wav files that represent each user track and merge them together yourself later when you import into your audio editing software of choice. Of if you are lazy you can just download one track premixed and roll with it. I personally went with the Audacity Project as I knew I would need to do some volume adjusting given that Grace tends to come through a little quiet.
There was some weirdness at the beginning with some awkward pops that I am not sure if they were just plosives or if it was something with the recording. However after the first few minutes everything seemed to be perfect cromulent. I plan on doing some more testing with this method but I think it is a completely viable option moving forward with this nonsense. When it comes time to record with each person I will invite them to the discord that more or less exists only for the purpose of recording shows, and one that I don’t really plan on trying to make a thing out of. I am however considering inviting Craig to the Blaugust Discord for example so people could try and record impromptu shows off of it if they so decided. All in all I am really happy with having some option that works for recording Discord.
Yesterday I got caught up in a twitter thread and I thought this morning it might be worth exploring it further. First however I need to take a step back and talk a bit about an issue that has been happening. Escape from Tarkov is apparently the new hotness with the streamers and has gone from a game that I knew existed to being something that is properly cemented into the zeitgeist. Recently it has reached the number one spot on twitch as far as games go for viewership. From what I can tell it seems to be a good game if you like that sort of game, but it has one frustrating omission for a lot of people. It completely lacks any form of female playable characters and at least in some part seems to be focused on building a character with gear and such.
But there will be no playable female characters because of game lore and more importantly – the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting etc#EscapefromTarkov
This has been a thing recently in the gaming press because when questioned about this Battle State Games gave a rather hamfisted response. If you want to know more about this you can check out one of the many articles on the subject like this one over on the Verge. Essentially they are presented with another scenario like Ubisoft was with Assassin’s Creed and they made up some lore reason why women shouldn’t exist in the setting. The thing is… this morning I am not even really going to talk about this decision because while it was the prompt for this discussion it isn’t the purpose. I just felt it was a bit of a primer needed to explain why this topic this morning.
Seems like a lot of people are upset with @bstategames for their stance on adding female models…has anyone asked what that would take work wise/cost wise/time wise? Would you as a gamer rather them focus on the game features or focus on adding a female player model?
So one of my friends posed a question. Would you rather have female character models if it meant cutting some other feature from the game. My answer was essentially “Yes” because representation is super important in a video game where you are given the choice of playing an avatar. On some level I can understand that if I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn I am playing Aloy and not myself or if I am playing Uncharted I am going to be playing the character of Nathan Drake. However if it is a game that features any sort of customization it is super important that you are able to create a character you are happy to be playing. Gender is one of those super important elements that make up the puzzle of what represents you as a character in a game.
The above image is something that I had Ammo draw for me on the seventh anniversary of this blog. It is an amalgam of a bunch of my characters from different games. Left to right you have World of Warcraft, Secret World, Destiny, Rift, Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV. You should notice that there is a pretty strong theme between them minus the Exo but I will get into that character in a few. There is a character that I keep creating over and over which is effectively “Belghast” and if I am going to spend much time in a game I wind up creating a version of that character. If a game has the tools to let me assemble a reasonable facsimile of that appearance then I am super happy and chances are I am excited to be playing it. However if a game for some reason lacks the specific features I apparently want I am going to bounce super hard off of it.
There have been games that I absolutely did not play because they had shitty beard options. There are other games that I refused to play because every character was too much of a “bishounen” pretty boy. Hell there have been times that I could not get into a game because I didn’t like the armor or the weapons. In Destiny I wound up rolling a robot because of the complete and total lack of beards and even then I chose an exo that had a little chin stripe that I could at least pretend was a robobeard. If I am willing to stop playing games for stupid cosmetic reasons like this… or the fact that I couldn’t get my over the eye scar that I end up choosing each time… then damned well I get not playing a game because you can’t play a gender that you feel represents you.
I will always be on the side of all games needing gender choices. We recently reviewed Jedi Fallen Order on a few different podcasts and each time we wound up with the most frustrating part of the experience is that you are locked into playing a male character. There is nothing about the character of Cal Kestis, including the name I might add… that actually matters that it is a character of a specific gender. The game would have been infinitely better and more inclusive had they just let players choose who they wanted to play as. If I had my druthers pretty much every game experience would feature some sort of an option that allows you to tailor to at least the right gender if not being able to do full cosmetic customization. For me and many other players that I know… cosmetic options are pretty much the most important system in a game.
So we get back to the thing that spawned this discussion. Yet another game developer claims that it is too costly to add Female character models, and at least on some level I get that statement. Coming up with lore reasons to justify your position however is bullshit. The problem I have is that it shouldn’t even be a thing we are having to discuss and justify. Games should default to having multiple character options and not instead default to just having “Men”. If they support customization at all they should be designed from day one with the thought of having multiple character models to fit gear to. Sure I can see a period of time when you have one or the other but by the time you reach late stages of the game both should be expected.
So I would personally rather be missing features and playing a character that I feel good about playing than having a bunch of features and being unable to get into the experience at all because I am playing a character I don't feel represents me
— Belghast ⚔️ Warden of Freshtovia 💚 (@belghast) January 9, 2020
So we get back to the original question however. Would I want female character models in video games if it meant I would be giving up some other features? Unequivocally yes. The thing is… I am not going to likely play a female character because I am going to be trying to create “Belghast” in every single game. However I know how important having an avatar that feels like it represents you in a game is, and because of that I will always come down on the side of inclusion for character options. Feeling a since of connection and ownership to the character you are playing is extremely important and I want everyone out there to be able to play characters that feel like a little piece of them walking around in the gamespace. I’m not mad and have no bluster to rage against one developer or another… but I am disappointed that we are still treading this path over and over. Games are better when they support all of their players, not just a handful.
Since this is my first week back for the New Year when I am not in “holiday mode” I am starting to think about all of the assorted topics that one does at the beginning of a new year. I’ve never been very big into making New Years Resolutions, but from time to time the construct seems interesting to me. Given this is also the beginning of a new decade it seems as though it maybe has some greater importance. What I do this year may or may not set the tone for what the rest of the decade is going to look like. As such this morning I am going to share some tweaks that I would like to make in my life for the coming year.
Give Up the Chase
In the year 2000, I got indoctrinated by one of my friends into a little game called Everquest. From that point it feels like I have been chasing the one game to rule them all, or at least the one true game to devote all of my love and attention to. This has been Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Horizon, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, Star Wars the Old Republic and countless other titles that I have placed upon the burden of being my prime source of entertainment. For the last two decades, the majority of my gaming time has been spent pouring resources and hours into a seemingly endless game hoping it would capture my attentions and hold them in perpetuity.
The problem here is that it never really works out and I have had a lot of amazing “honeymoon periods” with new games, in which I will pour my heart and soul for three months before wandering off disillusioned and jaded. In the Post-MMORPG world these have been games like Destiny or Anthem or even Monster Hunter World where I kept trying to make them into something that they were not necessarily intended to be. So in this coming year and decade I hope to stop looking for this magical thing that doesn’t exist. I want to allow myself to enjoy the games while they are enjoyable and fade away without guilt when they stop being that.
Stop Leading the Masses
I have this natural instinct and desire to collect awesome people and drag them along with me in whatever I happen to be doing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it has been the source of my “gaming community” for the last two decades. However going hand in hand with the first statement, I need to stop trying to make magic happen again. Everquest and World of Warcraft were moments in history that may not ever be able to be repeated. I need to stop trying to enter each new online gaming experience and try and make it into something more than it actually is. I have this bad habit of trying to “unite the clans” and get them rallied under a single banner, and then feeling super distraught and guilty when this amalgam of all of these people that I think are awesome never quite mesh together into a larger resilient community.
When we launched House Stalwart in Elder Scrolls Online we had something silly like 150 people on opening day and this was absolutely unsustainable in both just the case of human interaction or trying to make that many people exist in the same space. Then when a month later that it is down to 50 people… which is still a reasonable sized group I end up getting disappointed and frustrated that I could not somehow make everyone stick around. The binge and purge nature of new games and the guilds/clans I have built around them ends up leading to a spiral of depression and guilt that I just don’t need in my life. As a result my hope is that I can somehow stop myself from picking up that mantle of leadership in the future, because it only ends up leading to heartbreak when I can’t live up to the standards I have built up in my brain.
Play More Single Player Games
It was extremely evident when I was pulling together the list of my top games of the decade… that there are a ton of critically acclaimed games that I have never touched. Last of Us for example is by all accounts a phenomenal and game changing experience, and I have never actually played it. The reasons are many but at the end of the day I wind up getting caught up in chasing the forever game and spend all of my time in those sort of experiences rather than knocking out anything single player. I really want to somehow reverse that trend and start playing more of the games that are sitting collecting dust in my backlog that I picked up on sale at some point but never really gave the time of day.
Similarly I would also like to start finishing some of the things that I started but bounced for some reason or another. Jedi Fallen Order for example is a phenomenal game experience and I have no clue at all why I stopped playing it. I need to get back in and figure out where I left off and continue the adventure. In no particular order here are some of the games that I would like to play and or finish this calendar year.
Last of Us
Jedi Fallen Order
Wolfenstein II: New Colossus
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Darksiders
God of War
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Cyberpunk
Dragon Age Inquisition
Red Dead Redemption 2
Sleeping Dogs
Uncharted (collection)
I realize that is a lot of things on that list and it doesn’t account for my whims but it is a goal. These are some things that I would love to spend more time playing.
Read More Books
Over the last two decades I have allowed myself to get out of the habit of reading for personal enjoyment. There are series that I am well hooked on that I will snatch up a new title for and read when it comes out like the Dresden novels, but the total volume of my reading is pretty limited. It is a weird sequence of circumstances and as I have moved away from consuming physical content as a whole… I never quite transitioned books in this direction. For awhile it was because I lacked what I considered a comfortable tablet to read on, and then when I did get that thing I wound up just playing mobile games on it before bed. With my recent obsession about the Witcher universe and trying to consume those novels I am almost rediscovering how enjoyable and relaxing knocking out a few chapters before sleep can be.
My wife is a voracious reader and over the Christmas break she consumed over twenty novels. I am nowhere near as quick or consistent as I will always prefer game time to time with a book. That is not to say that I don’t also enjoy time with a book, and it is my goal this coming year to just keep something queued and progressing. I realize I have a lot of Witcher novels in front of me, but I would also really like to read some Brandon Sanderson because it is something I have never done. I feel like I have a hefty backlog of things I know I “should” read but never got around to. I may actually start using Good Reads as a way of tracking this, just for the sake of having something easily attached to the blog.
Take Better Care of Myself
I am a fat man and will likely always be a fat man. This is just who I am as a person and I lack the desire to change that. However I need to do something because I am currently the largest I have ever been. In many ways it is keeping me from living the sort of life that I want to live. I am not entirely sure what this is going to entail but I want to make some effort to change this. I need to sit down with my wife and make some lifestyle changes in order to support this, and as a result I am being vague for the moment because I am not entirely certain what that is going to look like. I always skimp on exercise in part because I keep trying to play forever games and keep trying to make myself available to lots of different time zones worth of friends when they are available. I need to stop this and spend more time on improving me.
Go To BlizzCon
I am not sure if this is realistic this year or not, but I would like to go to a BlizzCon. I would like to experience it in person and meet up with my various long time friends who are Blizzard devotees. This coming year seems like it is going to factor heavily into Diablo 4… the Blizzard franchise that I care the most about and as a result I think I would really like to be there. Factoring into the previous statement, I need to get to a size where air travel will not be horrible for me in order to make this even a viable option. Anaheim is a really far distance away and as a result there is no reasonable option that sees me taking a road trip to get there. So contingent on the previous statement, I would love to figure out a way to make this work in November or whenever it happens to be occurring this year.
Revive Bel Folks Stuff
Several years back I had a monthly podcast where I sat down with various friends and had a dialog about things and stuff. I greatly enjoyed this process but found the scheduling to be madness and the fact that it felt like no one was actually listening ultimately caused me to stop doing this. It never really seemed to gain any sort of traction, I guess in part because it was super niche and you either new these people I cared about or you didn’t. So one of the things I have been kicking around for awhile is trying to figure out a way to revive this. Maybe record an entire season of episodes before releasing them, making it less of a stretch of trying to figure out how to schedule them. I also think I might want to shift the format to where I ask a fixed set of questions that are of course open ended enough to allow for random discussions to happen. I am not even sure this is going to happen but I figure it is worth trying to make happen. For those curious the original run can still be found on the AggroChat site, and there are seven total episodes.
Over the last few days I have been using a thing and I thought I would sit down and talk about it this morning. I’ve known about Good Ole Games or GOG as they refer to themselves these days for years. They were a handy shop for buying old games that came with dosbox pre-configured to launch without horrible side effects. At some point they launched the Galaxy Client an it was “fine”. It did the job and presented any games I happened to own on that platform in a pleasant manner. The only game I really owned through GoG was Witcher 3, and only then because a download code came with a video card I had purchased. Since GoG is now owned by CD Project Red it makes sense that they would be handing out OEM codes through their official storefront. To be truthful I had the client installed but I never spent much time with it… that is until I was made aware of some significant changes.
Once upon a time there was a thing called Raptr and I loved the way it kept track of my games played. In part a bit of the reason why I started manually tracking games played in each month was because I was no longer using Raptr. The client reached a point where they integrated way too much stuff into it and it seemed to be a bit of a drag on my system. Over the last several days I have seen a bunch of these cross-platform gaming stats showing up on social media, but I think the first one I remember seeing was my friend Maeka. This lead me down a path of trying to see what had changed with GoG and being pleasantly surprised. The challenge with the client is the fact that I am already heavily bough into the Steam store and the inertia tying me there is strong and mostly keeps me from ever wanting to buy a game elsewhere as steam has served as a single launchpad for all of my games.
Seeing this as a problem, it appears that GoG has worked hard on trying to come up with the answer. Instead of creating yet another walled garden of exclusive content, they went the opposite direction and have created a client that seemingly integrates with everything else. Now I have this single pleasant interface that delivers up all of the content that exists regardless of the store front. This is the point where you are just about to tell me “but Bel, Nvidia Experience already does this and offers graphical configuration options”, and that is absolutely true. However what GoG does is give me back some of that Raptr functionality of tracking the time played and achievements earned from every single game on the list and allowing me to see what my friends are also playing.
The activity feed has been real awkward over the last several days as folks on-board their way into the platform and it catalogs the past decade worth of gaming. However past that initial set up phase as people find out about GoG Galaxy 2.0, it then becomes a valuable way of seeing what my friends happen to be doing. I would love to see them integrate with something like Player.me or maybe just outright buy them to add some of the missing social features. Like when a friend earns a hard achievement I would love to be able to do something simple like give them a thumbs up. That said what is there has switched me to pretty much keeping it up and running at all times, and has greatly increased my willingness to venture off of Steam and purchase games from another platform.
This all works because they did something somewhat brilliant. Instead of negotiating deals with all of these publishers, they went down the road of allowing for community supported Python integrations to be snapped into the client. Many of these integrations are currently being maintained by GoG, but are being treated as open source projects allowing anyone to look at what the code is doing and figure out how to adapt this to other platforms. As it stands right now these are the following integrations I have found, and you can get to them by typing in the GitHub Search Box in the settings>integrations interface.
Battle.net
Bethesda.net
Epic Games Store
GOG.com
Guild Wars 2
Humble Bundle
Minecraft
Origin
Paradox Plaza
Path of Exile
PlayStation Network
Rockstar
Steam
Uplay
Wargaming.net
Xbox Live
As you will notice there are still several that are missing, and the integrations all support different functionalities. The biggest thing that I see missing from various store fronts is the ability to synchronize the friend list. The killer feature for me is being able to integrate and list out everything that I happen to have available through Humble Bundle, since more than once I have re-bought a game that I already had access to through another platform. Humble Bundle is also artificially inflating the numbers since a lot of those games I have already redeemed to Steam and are still showing up in their “non-drm” version available as a zip file download.
I realize that Scopique was joking, but I occasionally do feel like I need to throw this out there. My blog is not sponsored by anyone. Every so often I will latch onto a product like GoG Galaxy 2.0 Client like I am talking about today or my many posts about Parsec streaming client and evangelize about them. This is not because I am getting some kickback from the company, but instead because they are products that I really do find indispensable and want to share them with my friends. I live in this weird space where I consider my readers and the folks I interact with on social media to be friends, and that we are all in this together as some bizarre collaborative experiment. At this point I have turned down what would probably have been thousands of dollars worth of payola that I get offers of through the email accounts associated with this site and my podcast. My opinion is firmly not for sale, but having said that… seriously check out Galaxy 2.0 because I personally find it super cool.
