GTA5 - not love at first sight, but love did come

 

At some point after getting the newest model XBOX the other year, I picked up Grand Theft Auto 5. I had seen game play at friends' houses for years and knew I would try it sooner or later. I mean, I was long used to being years behind on my games.  But had gotten into playing with others online in other games, especially with my old friend "T." She had been a Skyrim nut for a handful of years, and I had suggested we try Elder Scrolls Online as a thing to do together, since I had been playing ES since the original Morrowind. Though we could still play together, little dungeon delves and fishing and such, she had been putting much more time into it on her own. She is now in guilds and in far off lands, while I sort of futz around when I play alone. Since she is playing ONLY ESO, and I like to diversify, we will never be anywhere near equals in that game. 

Imagine her as Valeria from the Conan movie. 
Now imagine this is me..

As I was trying to keep up with T for several months, GTA5 only got a little play here and there. Maybe an hour every weekend or so. Though much of it is intuitive, it is also hard at times for a noob. Driving was bad enough, but driving and shooting? Yeesh. Fairly early on there was a mission for main character Michael that had you chasing crooks on a big rig that had stolen his yacht (don't ask), and you drove your sports car on the equivalent of the 405 Freeway, shooting at dudes on the yacht who were trying to kill your buddy Franklin who had climbed aboard. Man, it was hard. Must have played out that mission a dozen times before being successful. 

I figured that even harder missions would follow, and that was intimidating. It may have kept me from playing it as much as ESO. But man, this game setting did appeal to me. So much of it was not just based on Los Angeles, but even parts of my home town Venice Beach (Vespucci Beach in the game), the side streets and alleyways, was spot on. Buildings I had been in and neighborhoods I grew up around were recreated, often in loving detail. My favorite was the Venice Canals, my birth place. Having a gunfight in my childhood neighborhood was mind blowing. 

And this familiarity with Los Santos/Angeles was super appealing to me. But what else to keep me involved? I mean, every time I got in a car to drive I ended up rear ending other cars, and accidentally running over pedestrians. You see, if you don't drive crazy, you are pretty much just stuck in traffic. The main reason I actually Left Los Sant...uh, left Los Angeles. So even just tooling around you are blowing street lights and driving on sidewalks. Otherwise its an LA traffic simulator. Yeah, fuck that mess. Then the cops chase you, and you crash and get out to run as bullets blast into your body. 

Yeah, a bit disappointing at first. But in the last couple of weekends I suddenly went from "meh" to "omigawd I love this shit". Here are some reasons why:

Maybe some 10 or 12 hours into it, I get it. Understanding has come to me. You see, you spend 10's of hours putzing around, driving and walking around nice areas, getting into occasional fist fights and gunfights and wondering what the hell is the point. Well, it finally dawned on me. As I started getting better at driving and other activities, I realized that the game has a grand plan. It is training you for what is to come. Basically, this is the prelude for you putting together your gang of bank robbers. The game is letting you fuck around so you can get familiar with just being alive. The physics of your world. It knows you will be a bad driver at first. It knows you will be bad at shooting people. And it wants you to get better by just plain experiencing the school of hard knocks in Los Santos. It knows that no setback is permanent. You die or get caught by cops, the just try again. 

When I turn the game off and go to bed I imagine
myself as that Mayhem insurance guy walking
away leaving this behind..

I started regularly going to the shooting range to be a better gunman. I started driving at high speeds around the city to be a better driver. I stopped worrying about being a better driver, and just drove at high speeds through the city. And suddenly I was exponentially better at that.  School of hard knocks.

 

Suddenly I could feel the improvement. Not just in my personal skill, but the game engine itself eases up on you, steadies you. A sort of smoothness starts setting in. 

The other night I was playing the main character, Michael. I decided to go down to "Santa Monica Beach" at the California Incline (his psychologist lives down there), and ran into a jogger lady. You know, one of those older, cut, kinda pretty but hard jogger ladies you see who are way serious about it. She challenged me to a race down the incline stairs to the beach, and though I was wearing a suit and dress shoes, I took her up on it. I was doing OK for a middle-aged guy dressed up, but I kept faltering. I clearly did not have the stamina to keep up. So another activity goal; do some jogging to get better at running. I'll probably need that for bigger missions later anyway. And to eventually beat that lady. Oh, sensible shoes probably don't hurt.

The boy from the hood character, Franklin, gets in a street race. All the other racers seem so much better than me. I try and try but just can't win it.  I keep crashing into poles or houses on tight corners. Then around the 6^th try I remember that Franklin has a special ability to go into "slow time" when driving. Boom, I win that race. Again, this will likely be important skills during a heist. The game is prepping you. School of hard knocks. 

OK, also, for whatever reason playing Tennis was unlocked. Michael's big Sunset Blvd house, surrounded by office buildings, has a tennis court. Wandering over to it, the choice to play is activated. Michael's alcoholic, cheating wife shows up to play. I quickly get my ass handed to me, while she chides me and insults my manhood. Ugh. My vow to get better at tennis happens. And there are other tennis courts around the city where I can play other people to get better on the side. And this isn't for nothing. I looked it up, and playing tennis makes your character all around stronger. Hell yeah. School of (kinda) hard knocks. 

Now that's my kind of hard knock school 😍

As an aside, an encounter happened to me playing Michael last week that just blew my mind. I was tooling around downtown, and saw a question mark in the courtyard of some big office building. I got out the car and walked over to see what was up, and some guy had a marijuana legalization table set up by the fountains. After his speech he gave me a doobie. And when I hit it I realized it was clearly sprinkled with some stronger drug, because ugly aliens suddenly appeared in the area. A ray gatling gun appeared in my hands. Suddenly here I am, in the heart of downtown, being charged by weird aliens as I gunned them down one by one with my Buck Rogers blaster. It blew my mind. This was truly when I knew I loved this game. Anything can happen. School of hard knocks.

They have mental powers. I have a Sci Fi
gatling gun. I like my odds.

But yeah, the improvement of mechanics and physics as you go along is something I always loved in games.  The Elder Scrolls seems to have lost that, but I remember loving it when it was present in Morrowind and Oblivion. But it is so obvious in GTA5. I can actually feel myself getting better as I do things. Yeah, the feeling has won me over. 

So Michael's old geek buddy Lester has a jewelry store heist in mind. We staked out the Rodeo Drive jewelry store and everything so far. But before the mission I think I need to maybe put a few more hours into practice to get prepared for the big time. More driving around the city. More time in the shooting range. And of course, more tennis and jogging. For the job. And of course to be able to beat my nagging, ball busting adulterous wife at tennis, and to win a race against that mouthy jogging bitch down by the beach. School of hard...well, you get the point. 

I predict I will be playing the campaign mode for a long time to come. Hell, I'll probably mostly be jogging and playing tennis around the city for the next month. Just driving around there are always nice things to look at as you level up your skill set..

And testosterone level

Cheers

Elder Scrolls games and Elder Scrolls Online - part 2

 

In my last post I described how I was on the search a few months ago for an online multiplayer game to enjoy with my friend "T", from back in my hometown, on our XBOX's. That search had lead me to broach the possibility of delving into Elder Scrolls Online, an MMO I was only marginally aware of. I have a history with several Elder Scrolls games, and T loved Skyrim. Like, LOVED. I liked it as well, despite not having anywhere near the crunchy character development stuff and depth of the previous titles. But making an Elder Scrolls game more accessible to less hard core gamers lead to Skyrim's popularity while maintaining most of the things true fans loved about the games. 

So we bought the download and on the following weekend dove in. We both independently created out characters and they both turned out to be Dragon Knights. Great fighters who eventually breath fire and stuff. Both were female. Mine a Redguard, hers a Nord. The Nord is tall. My Redguard is a good bit shorter though I thought I had made her tall. But I think T went with max height. Like 6'5" or something. 

I was going for a nice tanned Rachel Welch look, and I think I captured it to some degree. She's dotted with tribal temporary tattoos (the fact that they have a drippy look gives the impression she paints the dots and lines on her body every morning). Meanwhile the Nord is pale as a ghost. I jokingly called them "Salt and Pepper" when we first started, but in the long run we started referring to them as the "Fire Sisters." 

The Fire Sisters fish. A lot. 

We both had created out characters and played them solo for a couple hours or so before we actually played together. So just like every Elder Scrolls game, ever, you start in some slave/captive scenario, escape it, and end up before a city official. And just like that you are turned out onto the streets in your ratty slave garb and sandals to start your life in this weirdo land of ugly elves. 

And that was my first impression. The mushroomy, pandora-ish flaura and fauna of Morrowind. You see, the original ES Morrowind was my first experience with Elder Scrolls. And the land is still weird, the elves still sort of beat-up looking. I played Oblivion second and Skyrim third, and after those pretty normal fantasy lands Morrowind once again is striking. After many hours of play its still unique. You almost never get used to it. And its more beautiful at this graphics level. In old Morrowind everything seemed so dark and muddy.

Impression numero two. The cantons. This cool multi pyramid city were like run down old tenements in the original Morrowind.  And off the beaten path you start the game on. Here they are a thousand years younger, and part of them still actually under construction. And you spend a TON of time there. 

Impression three. The other players characters. Oh my god. And I thought the people watching in major Las Vegas casinos was amazing. But the main gathering places such as Vivic City, are crawling with them. Especially on a Saturday night. They are visiting the bank, the Argonian shop, the crafting tables, and often just milling around. 

You will end up doing a lot of repetitive stuff, though there is a lot of it to do so variety abounds. Want to level up blacksmithing? Do as much of that as you can. Want to be a master tailor? Get to using the clothing crafting table. And get yourself out into the world for the materials needed for all this fun.

And did I mention fishing? We do a lot of fishing.

So that is how you spend your early levels. Going out to search the land for various materials to harvest and mine. Fighting the monsters lurking in such areas. And of course stumbling across the earliest quests. The game does a pretty good job of levelling with you, and as you go from 1st to 6th or 7th not only do you evolve in all you do, but the world around you does as well. Chests and Runestones to get resources from start showing up. More monsters and tougher ones. You can really feel that change, in what seems like a natural way. And of course as in any ES game, you collect the quests. Better start doing them! Deliver this message, find this person, fight those bandits, locate that Skooma stash. 

 Quest quest quest. Mine mine mine. Craft craft craft. That is a lot of your life in Morrowind. Lots of hours. Its all good fun, though the questing is what I'm about. You see, I didn't craft much in the other games. None at all in Morrowind. In Oblivion maybe a little. It wasn't until Skyrim I embraced it, at least the blacksmithing. There is some importance to it, thought just like the older games I think you can play the game fine without ever raising your crafting past half a dozen points. Its just that there is experience for doing it so I devote some game time to it. Its all fairly repetitive so far (have yet to learn a lot of crafting items in different racial styles). But like a lot of little activities in the game you do get that small tinge of satisfaction at completing these crafting mini-quests. Watching those abilities slowly level up. 

But T has gone coo coo for Cocoa Puffs for the crafting. For all of it. She's all in. She spends as much time as she can. That was the thing that blew me away the most. Its the "unexpected" thing I mentioned at the end of my last post. She is devoted to it. Well, maybe devote is too strong, since she has sworn to god she will never pay for the subscription. At something like 15 bucks a month I can understand. Who needs another monthly subscription money hit. 

She plays so much, she started another main character. We play "The Fire Sisters" together on the weekend. But in order to maintain a similar character level with our Dragon Girls she started another guy to solo with during allllllllll those hours playing during the week (weekends). The Sisters are around level 29. Her other dude is 40th, and has moved on from the main island Morrowind to Daggerfell and other outer areas in the expansion. Always a bunch of steps ahead. 

And here's the real kicker. All your personal characters you create share the same bank account and storage boxes. That means that a high level character can find greater stuff and leave it in storage for one of the lower level characters to be stronger from stuff they didn't even find themselves. And there are other cheats/hacks for this character item-share. You can create one or two extra characters you won't really play. Just exist in their own reality in the city from the other characters of this player, and act as item storage by dipping into the shared bank etc to take less needed items to leave room for the main characters. You just switch to that character, do your banking and stocking, and shift back to a main character who gets to enjoy that extra space. And let me tell you; without a subscription your space is very limited and you are always trying to shift things around to make room. Selling at the shop helps with this. 

 I have other games I like to play so I will never catch up in ESO.  Jedi Fallen Order (it came with my XBOX), Mad Max (kind of a hard game in spots, but a cool sort of fantasy version of Max), GTA 5, and a couple oldies like Dead Rising (nabbed it free in the XBOX store) take up some of my solo Mio Time. Playing with another person online is kind of a secondary thing to enjoy for me as far as my video games go. I still love my alone time with my precious consoles. 

And so for my solo time in ESO of course there is my Khajiit, "Zebra". A cool albino catman with dreadlocks and zebra stripes  (I sort of imagined his people evolved alongside zebra herds they preyed on). 

Zebra Kahn putting on a little performance.

 Zebra is currently around 17th level. And that has been a lot of work. I don't play him more than an hour or so here and there. I do a lot of levelling up activities with him. But I have to be honest, I kind of get bored after an hour or so. I really do like the two player experience more in this version of Elder Scrolls. It's way less about solo immersion, though its clearly a way to to go. Though you see a lot of solo characters running around, like most MMO's its designed so you need the multiplayer to experience everything it has to offer.  One thing for sure is that I learn things better on my own though; taking my time to sample the world and experience it when I'm alone in it.  Playing with somebody who knows it so much more means you are getting your hand held a lot so as to not slow things down. So I do need to spend more time alone in the that world. 

So anyway the Fire Sisters go out questing and just wandering and grinding, but also like to spend time in town stripping off our armor and playing music and taking turns dancing. Sometimes other characters join in from time to time, and it can be hilarious.

And other player characters are fun to just watch. Mostly very high level (800+ is common), they have had the experiences and gained the skills and items to look amazing. The variety is out of this world. Sometimes I just just sit back, play the flute, and watch the world go by in front of me. All the other characters going about their business, and sometimes taking a few seconds to check out the two Dragon Knights doing suggestive dances. Yeah, everything is so beautiful to look at. So much more so than cartoony Warcraft. 

Can you wait in line at the bank in Warcraft? Not as far as I know.

And we have slowly gotten some experience doing instanced dungeons with other players. Some you just encounter in a public dungeon, or if you have the right item that lets you get in a que for a special dungeon to wait for a couple of other players to que up, and when the number is there (usually 4 players total) you all meet in the dungeon and grind it and fight the boss together. 

They have done a great job with this game. There is so much. But of course things are left out I miss. I remember just sitting around in the woods in the original Morrowind, or on the porch of my house in Balmora, watching the moon and the stars move above the spotty clouds. You see, in those original games there was a fictional heavens and constellations that meant something, and moved in life like cosmic patterns. It was so cool. But it does not seem to exist like that in ESO. Also as was the pattern started by Skyrim, character development upon creation, deep astrological stuff etc, was softened up for more mass appeal in the general game play. Goodbye character gen crunch. 

Other things are minor. You cannot collect books, and the ones you  read don't often do anything for you. You also cannot dive underwater. But its an MMO, and a lot of things just are hard to replicate from what is available from a solo game. But man, do they do a great job with this. All this gameplay, so far, for just around 20 bucks. But they do try to temp you at all times with greater possibilities if you are willing to open that wallet. 

So we plug away. Me for my maybe 4 or 5 hours a week, T with her 15-20 (or more?). ESO has really been a game changer even for me. And after a couple beers or cocktails the role play comes easy for me. Yes, even this. No, we don't talk over the headphones in character (sometimes semi-in character), but I differentiate my Dragon Knight and My Khajiit Nightblade in terms of what they do. My Redguard is tough and abrasive, but also fairly noble of character. Nightblades are kind of assassins so yeah I'm a stone cold killer with Zebra. Doesn't matter in the long run though. If you steal, trespass, or even kill somebody you just have to go on the lam for a half hour or so till the bounty on your head goes away. I like to hang out in secluded beach areas fishing and looking for chests while I wait till I'm legal again. 

Along with other things mentioned in the last few posts, ESO is part of a parcel of things that are making up for my lessening interest in running tabletop RPG games like D&D right now, in person or online on Roll20. This game, Talisman online, and my beloved handful of boardgames are taking up my play-with-others time. In person or on tha' internets. 

Elder Scrolls games and Elder Scrolls Online - part 1

 

I'm usually about 5-7 years behind on video games and consoles. I guess that makes me not an avid gamer, but I never put more than an 2-4 hours of play into a video game a week. OK, there were exceptions. The oldest being Super Mario Bros 3. In the late 80's when I was in my first decent job (clerking in the MGM/UA studios legal department) I truly fell in love with what home video gaming could offer. I would come home and play it for a couple of hours every night. On the weekend it took up a ton of my time, that was only slowed down by me discovering my life time love of Renaissance Faire. 

"itsa me! Flying Squirrel Mario!"

A lot of my weekends were suddenly full during the year, but I played it fairly often for a couple of years. One of my older brothers, no longer living at home then, would come over to play it when he knew I wasn't around. I would come home occasionally on a lunchbreak to play (my drive to the house from Culver City was at least 15 minutes, but it was worth it for a half hour extra play) and he'd be there on it. I'd go out to the big den on a Saturday morning to play and he'd be there. At one point I just took the small connector cable and said it was broken. He immediately bought his own Nintendo. But that is the power of a great game like SMB 3 that you love. My brother coveted it and I became like Gollum with the ring of power. 

my precious

But there were also Silent Hill games, Castlevania games, Final Fantasy 7 (the first game I actually logged my hours...I put just under 100 hours into that one), Fallout 3, Knights of The Old Republic (one of very few games I actually played more than once all the way through...a total of 4 times). 

I love you, Bastila Shan. Especially in the dark side ending...

And then there were the Elder Scrolls games. Whoa. I discovered Morrowind at least a year or two after it came out. What a game. A new level. The type of play that had become famous for "see that mountain in the distance? Walk to it through lakes and forests and find a dungeon on it to delve into" swept me off my feet. In many ways I was overwhelmed. There was just too much to unpack. Just deciding on all your characters ability scores, aspects, and astrological signs could take a couple hours. So many quests. There was so much to do and I was so often blown away by everything I didn't even try blacksmithing and other crafting. My eventual home in Balmora was strewn with hundreds of alchemy and enchanting ingredients. I didn't know what to do with them, but I'd be damned if I was going to throw them away. I even loved the massive glitches. They were never game breaking. But you would come across a town you had visited before and all the people in it were now suddenly floating up in the sky. Another town suddenly was full of water like a great flood had happened, and the townspeople were swimming about their business instead of walking around. I always looked on such as huge curses or something from a mage. It was part of the fun. 

Oblivion was my next step up, and another level. Instead of ignoring the main quest like I usually do for a good while as I went about step and fetch quests, I dove right into trying to close all the Oblivion gates that were popping up all over. 

Again and again going through that portal and into that fiery realm of hell to fight the demons and get the Mcguffin. I was really playing it like a true role playing game. I would do things as I perceived my character would. My Redguard went to the amazing Imperial City, and worked his way up the gladiator ranks (I spent hours just betting and watching other matches from the stands before deciding on a gladiator career). The grand champion had to be killed in order for me to become champ, but I liked him (I helped the orcish champ with vampire trouble his family home was having) so I gave up on my championship dreams.  

Imperial City

Then of course came Skyrim. An amazing entry into the series. It was dumbed down and lost a ton of the character creation possibilities and depth of play, but the trade off was a beautiful looking setting with epic things to do, including the dragon related main quest. Again, I was a bit late to this game by a year or two, but when I started I was hooked. Another wonderful living world. I created a nord character and got him looking very much like Sean Bean. Fitting, as I had become a Game of Thrones fan by then. Skyrim was hella GoT in flavor. And by now I had started experimenting more with blacksmithing and other crafting. 

Around a year or so ago my friend "T" from my home town and long time player in my tabletop before I moved had gotten the gift of gaming head phones, and suggested to me that we start doing a little multiplayer online on weekends. Smashing idea! I had been playing my old XBOX 360 forever, and this was a good excuse to trade up to the latest. And the virus was just getting out of control so this seemed like a good time for it (even though since I now worked in health care I still had a job). T is a bit of a Hollywood socialite (former actress) and is usually out at big parties on weekends, but now she was stuck in like a lot of people. So I ordered a pair of gaming head phones from Amazon, picked up my new nifty XBOX at Best Buy curbside, and it was a go. 

So the search was on for a game I knew we could both like to play. My choice ended up being an indie game called Necropolis. It had a great, goth cartoony look I liked, and the play was based off the Dark Souls engine I think. It was only 6 bucks or so, so it wasn't a big gamble or anything. 

 It was fun, with your alien fighter or assassin slashing and bashing their way through a terrifying alien mega dungeon full of undead. 

A world so alien people don't even have feet

But in the end it was a frustrating experience. Not the game play, though there were glitches here and there. Often you might find yourself falling through the floor and plummeting down through the levels to your death, or get perma stuck on a ladder. But the killer was just trying to get together in multi player. It was hard as hell. It would often take up 20 minutes to log in together. And you more often than not did not restart with your gear from the last save. After a few weeks, with hat in hand I told T I was done with it. It was a waste of time if you could barely even get the game going. 

So the search for a new game was on. T wasn't really into looking at the games in the XBOX online store, so it was really on me. And I had to pick something good that would not be a controller throwing experience like Necropolis ended up being. So I looked at the reviews, and even games that looked amazing had lots of bad reviews, especially about the multiplayer experience. But then it struck me.

I had known about Elder Scrolls Online since it had come out. Years ago. But never heard much about it. World of Warcraft was the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. They even made a movie about it. But hey, T was a big Skyrim fan. I was an Elder Scrolls fan in general. So that simple math added up. Was an MMO the way to go?

My doubts were many. This was a higher level of multiplayer. What if one of us had internet that wasn't strong enough? Though T runs an office, she can be a bit of a non-techie. Would this require a lot just to get up and running? Plus games like this tried to constantly sell you on expansions. How intrusive would that be? Also in an MMO you had to play with people you didn't know. Not sure T would appreciate dumbshit, horny 14 year olds doing what they do in games. This might have been especially problematic in the MMO I was considering besides ESO. I loved stuff I saw of the game play of a game called Sea of Thieves, where you and friends pilot ships around various islands looking for treasure and chickens or whatever. But this game was automatically player v. player. Beginners usually end up being attacked by pirate gangs who kill you and sink your ship. No, this game was out. 

Female characters are a thing on
the seas (80% run by 13 year old boys)

As a fan of Red Dead Redemption I also considered Red Dead Online. But I knew T would probably prefer something with magic and spell casing. 

Is a boomstick magic?

So I went ahead and pitched T on Elder Scrolls Online. The basic game (that currently comes with the Morrowind expansion) was only around 20 bucks. She was intrigued. We decided to give it a shot, download it, and play it the following weekend. 

My worries remained till then. Also, I thought that there was not way they could have anywhere near the deep experience of the solo releases I had come to know and love. 

What happened next was totally unexpected.

to be continued...