Do Gogh On

Various projects -- and some work politics -- all hit at the same time. Precisely as predicted, of course. Had to fly to Burbank to take some measurements and got a chance to step inside the gates at Sony, at least. But head colds and flying are not good companions.

In any case, I'm finishing of the scene at the Van Gogh Experience. This is the scene that gives the lie to the idea that I just cram everything I know into each chapter (although I will admit that this book is less filtered than the others). My choice for this one is that my protagonist doesn't know much about the painter and doesn't get a chance to learn, either.

So there are a lot of Van Gogh paintings being projected on to the walls, and I am spending time staring at haystacks and cafes and lots and lots of sunflowers. But the narrator is unable to name any of them, much less place them in proper historical context.

About the only one I think I can get away with is to have a cross-fade that suggests that the sunflower was Vincent himself. But the tidbit that he painted scads of these things to decorate the room that Gaugin was more-or-less blackmailed into taking in shared digs at Arles -- an odd couple that would soon enough erupt in violence and the loss of an ear -- well, I can't share any of that.

I have enough name-drops and references and weird jokes anyhow. At some point Penny is across the cornfield (with crows) from the people she is tailing, in a spy-movie version of that one segment from Kurosawa's Dreams, and she remarks there's too much light and they are going to see her "coming through the rye."

That's the problem with spending so long writing. Not that I add new stuff at every pass. The process is different. It is that I take so long between writing sessions, when I write a couple of new paragraphs I've had days to think about the scene and the random ideas and associations and jokes and turns of phrase are just waiting in the wings. All of my re-write passes are about taking as much of that stuff as I can...back out. 

Twenty Hours

There are some books in which the sample chapters are just so engaging you immediately buy the book...then find out the rest of the book does something different and not as interesting.

I've never encountered this in a game. Generally, you know in less than five minutes. (Of course, you rarely get a sample chapter, so you've bought the game already...)

Mostly. It can take a while to get into the core gameplay loop. In Horizon Zero Dawn you are introduced to most of the core concepts within twenty minutes of the (long!) opening cutscene. An important element is the "focus," however, and if you are really, enjoying exploration and listening to all the audio diaries it might take you forty minutes get to Aloy actually using the thing in-game.

Similarly, you don't get the bow and you certainly don't get the trick arrows until an hour into Tomb Raider 2013. But the thing is; whether it is the mostly-passive opening sequence of Bioshock or the extremely long cutscene that begins Horizon Zero Dawn or the big build-up -- you do character creation before you even start playing -- before you actually stride the corridors of the Normandy as Commander Shepard, you still know what kind of ride you are in for.

These games all have a style. There's a strong artistic vision that infuses all the design elements, from as big as skyboxes to as intimate as inventory screens. The music, the sound effects -- and when any element of play begins, the fluidity and intuitiveness of the controls.

I had trouble right out of the gate with Dragon Age, as I did not like the control system. It almost reminded me of the "tank" controls of original Tomb Raider.  Far Cry 3 also felt awkward. I just did not really feel in control of Jason Brody. But that's a me thing; that's a reaction some players will have, and some will not.

Just as the very strong design choices in some games just don't mesh with all players. When you give a whole game a distinct stamp, color, flavor, then some will like it and some will not.

What doesn't work is being bland. I can't think of any game I have really liked that had a bland approach. My favorite games have all had, over and above the game play, puzzles, dialogue, choices, voice acting, and of course graphics, an extremely distinctive style. You can't confuse Portal with anything else out there.

***

So every now and then a game comes along that the advise is not to judge it immediately but play for twenty hours. As I mentioned in my previous "review" (short take?) Starfield takes obscenely long to open up the rest of the game to you. 

Well, okay, the crafting, base building, and ship building are a bit of an appendage. They are to some one of the more attractive parts of the game, though, and they are behind a grindwall that's a good 10-20 hours thick.

Same goes for the main campaign. Considered skippable -- but one of the side quests that is well spoken of (Crucible) requires multiple hours of play just to clear the first barrier. You have to have a specific package of upgraded ship and upgraded skills (and some toughness, too) in order to even get the quest. 

It took me well over twenty hours to get to where I could start building my first outpost. I could have done ship building earlier, but really, not that much earlier. Plus, it took that long to get both the main campaign into an interesting place, and to be able to start pursuing the big side quests (like Mantis).

So, yes. As far as the play opportunities, as far as exploring that "core gameplay loop," I really did need to put twenty hours in.

Which pains me. It means there are some upper-level managers who are congratulating themselves on making a game good enough that most players do a good twenty hours, and none of them quality for a refund. The reality is that they've done such a bad job of staging this game, it really does require that kind of time.

The crafting system is ridiculously grindy, and it is linked in various ways to outpost building (and less so to ship construction but there are similar things going on there). The player just can't experience the game as written without exceeding the refund time.

But...and here's the big but...the five minute rule was still true.

It looks awful. It looks like shit and it runs like shit. The two are connected only in the dreams of the marketers; turn down the graphics and it still bugs out all over the place. Turn up the graphics to full settings -- and it still looks like a game from fifteen years ago.

Almost every part of this game is a regression. The NPCs are less alive, less animated, less realistic. The scenery is less interesting. There's less interactivity overall, really. This still has the Creation Engine stupid of playing long, long animations of your character sitting down, then awkwardly cutting to a different POV of them seated. Same for crafting. This still has the stuck-in-place, dead-eyed NPCs chanting the same stock lines at you without any sense that your input even matters. It is like being trapped in the animatronic Hall of Presidents for twenty hours.

And all the usual stuck on scenery, vanishing heads, and people mysteriously floating into the sky...that's all still there.

But even that doesn't matter. Because when all is said and done, it doesn't have the "it." The design is merely adequate. There's no strong flavor to it. No strong choices. Just...stuff. Generic music, generic assets, generic UI..

I take that back. The UI is regrettably ugly and dysfunctional. It looks and feels and works like the low bid for a mega-chain POS register. Endless unfriendly menus with poor text, poor tactile response, no clear and consistent UI system...

It feels absolutely random, for instance, whether you can click on a quest location and make the jump from there, or if you have to go to your ship, or if your ship pops into space over the planet and you have to navigate down to the surface with another click-and-loading screen. After dodging bigger enemies for hours by having one finger on the hyperdrive controls -- as the game itself, and the NPCs in the cockpit with me, all recommend -- I got killed while staring at a screen labeled "You can not fast travel in combat!"

There's no strong spirit to it. People don't love Portal because of the cutting-edge ambient lighting engine (although Portal 2 does look very, very nice). Or Bioshock because the environments are filled with intricately modeled clutter. They love that these games have a distinctive look and feel that draws you emotionally and aesthetically into their world.

And you can figure this out in five minutes. Seriously -- don't do the twenty hours. It doesn't really get any better. The same poor gameplay loop, the same broken balance, the same crashes, the same ugly graphics and lack of a great style; what you see in a tutorial in a mineshaft really is the game you are going to get.

Monkey!

I decided my Starfield  character would be an incarnation of Sun Wukong. I'd already decided this during character creation -- and it turned out to work quite well.

Bethesda games. You go around solving problems that have been there for decades. Going one-man army on the enemy that somehow has experienced Marine units pinned down. Doing errands and helping people and everyone is amazed at your exploits.

In Fallout 4 you get the reputation as the Vault Survivor (or you can even go around in costume as the Silver Shroud, but only a few people recognize it). In Skyrim you are the literal Dragonborn. So at least there's an in-game reason for you to be so heroically capable in that game. I was starting to have a sort of standard backstory for my Fallout 4 characters that basically the world had gone to shit and one competent person from the past could kick ass. Helped that I tended towards engineers; people who could make their own advanced weapons and elaborate settlements, which I hand-waved as me having had a pre-war education.

And in Starfield you pretty soon get alien powers. But it doesn't matter. You are already both scary competent and also the savior to pretty much every obsequiously thankful colonist out there.

So it worked being the Monkey King. Being a demi-god already, a legendary trickster and warrior, even if I did have to work my way to my first ship as a street rat in the cyberpunk city of Neon.

Incidentally, that's the most fun I've had in the game so far; going around playing with the gangs and corruption in Neon as an ex street rat. So basically a cut-rate Cyberpunk 77. Only with worse graphics, worse stories, worse missions, and much, much, much worse NPCs.

It helped a lot with suspension of disbelief. Why this penniless street kid and one-time Argos Consortium miner is suddenly beating up twenty-year veteran pirate captains. And why all those worshipful colonists are getting stars in their eyes whenever I offer to help out. Because I'm already a legendary hero. Reincarnated, maybe, but after the Journey to the West this shit is easy.

Did make for some weird moments around the alien artifact, though. The Constellation Group kept asking how I suddenly felt so different now that I had alien powers, and I'd shrug because, hey, I was already a supernatural being. Bethesda had not planned for those dialog options.

***

It is a basic problem with games. Somehow the entire Third Army can't move unless Private Jones can chuck a grenade through a window successfully. Sometimes it is acceptable in context. Commander Shepard is a highly. highly, highly trained soldier, top of her class, survivor of legendary battles. And hasn't figured out how to use a rifle, but never you mind. The Doom Marine, on the other hand, just is. It's his thing.

Aloy has her Focus and spent a lot of time learning its tricks -- so even when she runs into other Focus users, she is able to do things they can't. 2013's Lara Croft, on the other hand, is just a student. Even the movie gave her an athletic background. The game does handwave that Roth taught you how to shoot, but still, you should not be doing so well against experienced survivors. "She's just one girl!" ("This one girl is kicking our ass!")

The bigger problem is RPGs. And this is a game design problem. You need situations for the protagonist to solve. In the real world, there would still be problems occurring. There's always business for the long-runner detective show or whatever. But games are cast in bronze before you start playing. When you fix the current issues...there are no more.

And they have to be fixed, too. There has to be that moment when the thing is concluded and you collect XP. So that leaves late-game in a weird place where none of the NPCs have much to say to you (because you already did their quest), but the world hasn't really changed despite all of that (because quests can happen out of order and they can't design for every single option. In Just Cause 3, you can liberate the entire nation but the dictatorship still has cars full of soldiers patrolling around.)

Character AI, as exciting as it is, won't solve all of this. As already implemented (and only in third-party mods, oddly enough, not in any current release) it allows conversations to continue and the NPC to remember and refer back. And, eventually, to have their personality shaped (because that's already happening, but the trigger is actions, not unscripted dialogue). But this stays at a Sims sort of level, as AI is not the tool to create new scenarios, new quests.

Oh, sure, they've been trying. Bethesda has had ongoing open quests using their Radiant system for a while now...and it sucks. A good quest is sculpted, with unique options, locations, dialogue. Not "Another settlement needs your help."

At some point activity ceases. The world becomes static. Might as well go invest in the base building at that point...

Dragon or Draggin'

Bethesda is still searching for the right balance.

Skyrim starts with a slow five minutes, but there is this thing in Elder Scrolls games; you need to spend to first five minutes in a dungeon. Or in Skyrim's case, in a cart to your execution. The thing is, it doesn't put half the game behind a grind wall. You can go anywhere, and you can dip your toes in anything. At level one, you can use a sword or a bow or even magic, you can craft a potion or some new boots or even cook some stew.

Fallout 4 was, I believe, intended to give you a taste of future glory. Unlike Fallout 3 where there is a complete faction quest before you can get to powered armor, you can get your first suit at level 1. And a mini-gun. Which is in a place with several triggers to tempt you into wasting all of your ammunition on raiders so the spring-loaded deathclaw can twist your brand-new armor into wreckage in one epic hand-to-hand.

Starfield is generous in giving you your own ship barely ten minutes in. But, really, the game doesn't start getting fun until about twenty hours of play. It takes that much, well, grinding -- boring stupid grinding -- before you have any skills that make a difference. You aren't really doing an RPG, and you don't have a lot of options. The interesting quests are meat-gated away (you need to level up in order to tackle them), the random planet hopping turns up nothing of particular value or interest...plus of course this is late Bethesda RPG in which your responses to a quest-giver are either agree to do it, or agree but be sarcastic about it.

It simply isn't worth crafting, or collecting most of the materials you can collect, or exploring, because you don't have the skills to do anything with any of that. And those skills only come with a whole bunch of exceptionally grindy combat.

And you can't personalize your experience, because it doesn't matter if you want to be an assassin or a diplomat or a gadgeteer, you don't have any skills and won't be getting any for hours and every single enemy is dropping a leveled spray-and-pray gun for you to use instead.

About twenty hours of play. Less if you don't struggle against the railroading (always a decent recommendation for recent Bethesda games) and just follow the quest markers they throw in front of you. At that point you can start making some choices that feel worth making, and start having some skills other than "picking up gun off ground and holding down the trigger."

It isn't...good...yet. The quests are often frustratingly unfinished, stopping just when you've actually started to get involved. But you can finally survive getting out of the easy plains and into the wild where half-way interesting things to do are. It is still shallow, but I liked the Cydonia mining colony and sort-of-liked Neon and the Mantis quest is actually sort of fun.

Plus, at the end of it I expect to get a ship that might -- like the finally unlocked basic crafting skills -- make it worth doing some of the other activities the universe offers.

Sixteen Times the Elevators : Starfield

For some strange reason of poor optimization or stringent system limits, the original Mass Effect was "blessed" with ludicrously long elevator sequences in all the Citadel scenes. They were ostensibly hiding loading screens, as was the laborious "Scanning for pathogens" sequence whenever you entered the Normandy from dock-side.

Always one to make good bugs out of bad bugs, the team added some dialogue to Mass Effect 2 in which returning squadmates comment about all the lovely conversations they used to have while waiting for the elevators to get there. They also added an elevator to the Normandy itself.

Well, Starfield manages to get the worst of both worlds. It has extremely long door-opening animations, and ship-launch animations, and all sorts of other fill-the-time animations...but still has to stop on a blank screen to actually load the cell. No, worse than that; it stops on the still picture and spinning disk to load the transition scene. Then once the transition is done, it goes to a loading screen again.

This pretty much sums up the game, technically-wise. It obviously has a more hungry engine in it. The first advice in all the materials for lags and crashes is to turn down graphics quality. The requirements for storage, RAM, VRAM and GPU are huge.

And it looks like crap. I mean, it looks vastly worse than Andromeda, and that was an earlier game with less intensive graphical needs. It is barely better than Fallout 4 aside from some fancier lighting. But what really kills it is that all this horsepower is being used badly. All those CPU cycles are going to waste. Skyrim provides landscapes that feel more real and NPCs that are easier on the eye even though they are clearly a few generations back.

It has reached a sort of Uncanny Valley of graphics; the graphics are so "real" that they make the computer cry, but the result is less pleasing to the eye than what other teams achieved with, well, much less.

This is the most poorly optimized piece of garbage I have ever watched spin, and lag, and bug out, and even lock up. And, no; turning down graphics doesn't fix the bugginess or the lag (it does, oddly, make the game look a bit better!)

Not just graphics. The cells load agonizingly slow and have all sort of problems. But as bad as the optimization for running on a computer is, the optimization for the human experience is just as bad or worse.

The menu system is a nightmare. The space combat control schema is a cludge. Nothing is properly tutorialized. They've even managed to screw up maps. I am playing a couple of very large patches down the road, and I have to suspect that they patched around some of the loading-screen nightmare by giving you the option to launch into space without going through your cockpit at all. I suspect this largely because the design of when you can skip the various planet screens feels like a mish-mosh.

But then, so do the other menus. There's no feeling of a single design vision, as there was with the Mass Effect games (not that Mass Effect 1 was a winner for inventory screens, either).

And, ouch, the planets. For procedurally-generated planetscapes, they don't look bad. But there's little variation, little fractal scale. It is just rocks and trees, rocks and trees, out to the horizon. You don't get a sense of having gone anywhere, or having been anywhere, because no part of the map sticks out. There's no "follow the river into the ravine, then climb the hillside and on the other side of the glade..." There's just...more rocks and trees.

Which wouldn't be so bad...again, that's what Mass Effect 1 had to offer. But it also had the Mako (and smaller maps anyhow). The preset landing locations and quest locations are twenty minutes apart on the damned Starfield maps. Twenty minutes of walking. Through rocks and trees.

I am still playing. It is mildly diverting. But oh, boy, what a botch job of a game.

Time to Gogh

I went to the "Van Gogh Experience" when one of them (apparently there's at least three) was in my city. The sign for the restrooms said "If you need to Gogh..."

I did manage to make it through the revised Galerie Vivienne chase, and the brand-new aftermath scene I ended up adding. So now I'm in the middle of the Van Gogh scene...and I'm not ready.

I'm intentionally not having a lot about the artist and his life this time. There's some beats I want to hit, because they play to other themes. But I don't really need to talk about his time as an apprentice preacher, or the way he stayed in South London for a while. 

What I do need is for the exhibit to seem like it makes sense. For the paintings that are playing on the projection loop to at least pretend to tell a story about his life and career. So I need to understand a bit more than I do. I don't need factoids. I need a feeling for the flow of it. And also, a feeling for what parts of his life there are images from him that are memorable enough to people more used to "Starry Night" to at least sort of recall.

The trick about these exhibits is that they really are a lot of favorite hits. And they present a curated and perhaps sanitized vision. The one I saw, I don't remember a single one of his sketches of the miners of the Borinage, for instance. 

And I'm just now realizing I really have only three more of these "chunks" of art history to finish off the novel. There's a bit of the petite ceinture, and some more stuff about Picasso, but really there's three biggies left and this is one of them. The other two are both novelists, and buildings. The Paris Opera House through the lens of the long and strange history of dramatizations of Leroux's book, and Notre Dame de Paris through the (original) preservationist intent of Victor Hugo.

Just as well. The hot weather is over for the moment but I'm not feeling up for much more than watching movies about Van Gogh. And contemplating purchasing Cypberpunk 2077 or (a very, very distant second) Starfield.

A hundred-word toast

Most weeks, all the substantial writing I get in happens over meals. Specifically, meals out. Well, I was finishing up one such and I did another Fermi estimation. You know that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, from my count, a slice of toast is good for about a hundred.

I finally got through my revisions and up to the scene I'd left off on. Which I expanded, then completed. And tonight, somehow managed to create, from scratch, five hundred words of a brand new scene.

That's the way my method works right now. Actually, in the Galerie Vivienne scene just prior to the chase scene, I've got Amelia remarking that Penny's method seems to be to flail about randomly until she bumps into a clue. Penny retorts that she flails about randomly, annoying people and asking stupid questions...until she bumps into a clue.

It is pretty much a description of how The Doctor works. Or for that matter Dirk Gently. But it isn't just a British thing. Robert B. Parker's Spenser operated on the principle that if he annoyed enough people, someone would finally tell him something they shouldn't.

Penny isn't quite at the point where she has to survive having people sent to beat her up first, as seems to be the rule with Spenser. Her stories are always walking that fine line between being a somewhat believable universe, yet her never quite having really serious violence done to her, or having to deal out similar violence herself. The London book was in part showing that there was a line and it could be crossed if she wasn't both careful and lucky.

This book will have the "Apaches" scene (for some reason, that became the slang over a chunk of the belle epoque for a particular kind of violent petty criminal in the low parts of Paris.) But Penny is in just as much danger when she ends up free-climbing Notre Dame (on the night before the fire, as it happens).

I've always worked on an accretion model. It might be an iterative model. Most of it happens when I'm not actually writing, probably because it takes time and serendipity. I've been slowly working up to the Palais Garnier scene that finishes Part II and makes for the big Act II-III turn-around. Too early to start committing anything to paper, but I've been sort of bookmarking any potentially useful resources.

So a media critic (she's got a degree in it or something and does some amazing work) had something that popped up in my feed. I don't even know how I recognized it was about Phantom of the Opera. It was about the character of The Persian, and how infrequently he shows up in adaptations of the original novel. Which is bizarre, as he is not just an important character, but also quite probably the most moral character in the whole tale (Lecroix's Christine might or might not be as vapid as the usual, but his Raul is quite a bit less the selfless heroic leading man type.)

And that started a whole train of thought. Especially as Lindsey went on about fandom, or perhaps phandom.

And I toyed with that new thought and those new insights and it works. I have an uneasy relationship with Penny, still. Sometimes I am very sure what belongs in her character and what does not. Other times, I am uncomfortably aware of how much soft clay remains. When I'm actually writing the stories, the main leeway I have is not what she thinks, but when she gets around to thinking it. I can't keep her from having an opinion but I can tweak when she comes to it; that's my leeway to make the inner and outer plots track properly.

Anyhow, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to work with her inner landscape. She wasn't -- quite -- a Phantom groupie, but it was a near thing. She understands the fandom and she knows the material.

This isn't what I'd originally planned. When I bumped into that video, my plan had been that she has a fairly quick thought about not being an Andrew Lloyd Weber fan but is still annoyed when Nathan Snow and his gang of "MBAs and fraternity assholes" start singing snatches of it. Like, this is her thing.

By the by, I came this close to having Hux sing a snatch of "A British Tar." But it works better with his style for him to drop a broad hint instead. Sigh. I'm doing this a bit myself and I don't know if it is legit homage/genius bonus for certain readers, or if I'm plagiarizing a cool line. The latest steal was during the chase -- heading down the long straight passage of Galerie Vivienne Penny remarks that "Parkour is wasted in cross-country."

So anyhow, I was already puzzling if I could have some Phantom back story while exploring the opera house, and I didn't see a way to do it. Well, now if Penny was at one point a total fangirl of Eric and so on, then she has an excuse. And I can still approach the original beat, just a little crosswise, with her being more mature and so over that now.

That's how they grow. The scene I just knocked out today, started yesterday with the idea that Amelia could be startled when Penny takes off after Jaques and later tells her she didn't expect her "to go all Batman."

And as I thought about it, Penny is still the reluctant hero and she's just gotten hurt and she snaps out something in reply.

And that gives me the argument I'd wanted to work in somewhere. Oh, but now I've got an injured Penny and Amelia walking away and...ooh, there's a chance for her to suddenly go all Southern self-sufficiency on Penny!

And with Amelia already stepping up to the sink with bandaids in her hands, another theme is waiting to hit it's next beat; the one about Penny keeping secrets.

And this is just the first draft. Thing are crazy at work -- both high-profile projects went back on the table, and at the same time (just as I'd predicted they would). It may be a few days before I can get back to finishing that scene.

By then, I expect to have another two or three layers to add in...