Endgame Viable

This past week I found myself trying three free games I got from the Epic Game Store.

A tiny fraction of Halcyon 6: The space map.

Halcyon 6 is a deceptively complex space game in a visually simplistic package. I’m not quite sure what to compare it to because I can’t think of any other game quite like it. It had space exploration and story elements like Star Trek, turn-based land combat somewhat like a JRPG, starbase building somewhat like XCOM, leveling and progression like an RPG, and a lot of pixelated graphics and 8-bit sound effects. It was way more complicated to learn than I wanted to deal with so I only played for a short time, but it might be worth going back to someday when I have more mental energy.

A story of Rats versus Guinea Pigs on Pigmote Island.

Sunless Sea looks like a top-down Victorian steamer ship combat sort of game, but it’s really a choose-your-own-adventure story game. You drive your ship around to different ports, where you then spend a lot of time reading essentially quest text dialogs as a story unfolds. I feel like the game must have started life as a novel, but somebody decided to break it apart and stick it into a simple little indie game. I liked the setting and the aesthetic of it, and I liked the writing. But the “game” part of navigating the ship around felt dull, so I didn’t play very long. Perhaps another time, or perhaps a good game to watch somebody else play (if they’re an audiobook-quality reader).

Rovers and drones landing on Mars.

I thought I’d already purchased and played this game on Steam, so I was surprised to find it’s new to me. This is a base-building and/or city-building style of game, and at first I enjoyed zooming in really close and watching the little rovers driving around doing their tasks. However it’s also a micromanagement simulator game, so I quickly tired of giving orders to the rovers and reading through endless tutorial popups. I’ve never had much patience for that style of game, and I would have preferred watching it run autonomously. But it was fun for a half hour or so.

I don’t get the Valheim craze and I wasn’t wowed by Outriders either. There, I said it.

Everyone’s talking about how great Valheim is, so I thought I’d share my experience with it: I bought it, installed it, played for about 45 minutes, then returned it.

It turns out I’ve played that game before, back when it was called many different names, including but not limited to ARK, The Forest, 7 Days To Die, Landmark, Conan Exiles, Dark and Light, Fragmented, Grav, The Long Dark, Novus Inceptio, Out of Reach, Savage Lands, TUG, etc. Oh, and Vortex: The Gateway.

Don’t get me wrong, Valheim isn’t bad. It just didn’t leap out at me as a quantum leap forward in the genre, so I’m happy to wait for the full release (which will probably be exactly the same as the early access, because rarely do games ever fundamentally change over the course of their “beta” period anymore). I’m glad everyone else is catching on to the build and survive game craze and having fun with it and noticing it’s a lot like early MMORPGs. Finally. What took you so long? Hehe.

I’m a bit baffled why Valheim specifically has taken off, though. My interest in the game is more about why it’s taken off than the game itself. I haven’t seen any reporting on why it’s different from other survival games… all I see are stories that confirm that yes, it’s exactly like every other survival game, where you gather materials and build things to advance and the emergent stories that come out of that process are the most fun part.

There’s almost a religious fervor about it, like people believe they’re making some sort of political statement when they report how much they love playing Valheim on Twitter. Like they’re “sticking it to the man” somehow. I don’t know. It’s weird. I feel like there’s a piece of this puzzle that’s eluding me. Maybe it’s because it’s a small team and there’s a “cheering for the underdog” component? (But every survival game started with a small team. That’s why there’s so many of them. Because they’re relatively cheap to make.) Anyway, I don’t get it.

The water physics were kind of cool though.

Outriders made a brief splash, then seemed to vanish into the void again. It’s Square Enix’s clone of Destiny, because every major AAA studio needs to have one, apparently.

I played the demo for about an hour, and haven’t found any interest in logging back in again. The story was a nonsensical mashup of genres, the gameplay was unoriginal. Once again, it’s a AAA title that’s the same game I’ve played before. If I want to play that kind of game, I’ve got plenty of The Division 2 left to get through, I don’t need to buy a reskinned version just yet.

Some cool scenery in Outriders though.

Those are all the new games I’ve looked at recently. Otherwise, my go-to game right now is Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. The turn-based combat is so much better than the realtime combat of the first game. I can usually only play one game at a time, especially now when I’m juggling and rearranging my daily schedule so much, and neither Valheim or Outriders were good enough to become that one game.

I’m pleased to announce that on March 1st, I started a new software engineering job, working generally in the field of “IT infrastructure lifecycle management.” This is a pretty big, life-changing sort of job for me.

Relevant, annoying clichés:

Sometime in December I received an email from an old online friend from my Quake-playing days. To make a long story short, it turned out he works at Salesforce and they were hiring remote software engineers, and I happened to be in need of a job.

It wasn’t the kind of job I thought I could get, though. Most of my recent experience is in the Microsoft .NET enterprise world, and this is an extremely non-Microsoft company. But they look for what he called “technologists,” people who understand core software engineering concepts and can use or adapt to whatever platform, languages, or tools are required to complete the work. It’s the kind of thing you want to hear from people who hire programmers, but you rarely ever do. That alone was pretty impressive.

So I polished up my resume and applied. I didn’t think I had much of a chance, because this is a big company, far bigger than anywhere I’d worked before; a global company in the top 200 of the Fortune 500 list, somewhere around 5th on the list of “big cloud providers,” depending on which list you look at. [UPDATE: They’re actually more of a service provider than a cloud provider.]

Would I fit in with that kind of “west coast big tech” culture? To say nothing of the scale of projects they work on, which is many orders of magnitude bigger than any of my previous experience. It’s a big jump from enterprise applications on a handful of servers to distributed computing at a worldwide scale.

But I needed a job, the work sounded really interesting, and this opportunity fell squarely into the once-in-a-lifetime “dream job” category. Something I didn’t believe actually existed in real life. “Big tech company” jobs like this generally don’t appear in my neck of the woods on the East Coast. (Although recently a Facebook data center opened pretty close to my house.)

And did I mention it’s a remote position? Pretty important in “these difficult times.” (There’s a vaccine now but if I’m not mistaken there’s at least three new COVID-19 mutations out there, so nature might still be slightly ahead of science on points for a while.) It would have been idiotic not to give this opportunity a shot.

I felt woefully unprepared, so I started studying. There was a grueling period of preparation, through January and February. Combing through one’s career experience to pick out relevant examples and stories that demonstrate an ability to adapt to a completely new type of work isn’t very easy. (Especially when I tend to forget the past quite quickly.) Trying to learn enough about distributed computing and its associated theories and terminology in a few weeks, to show at least a minimal level of understanding of the core concerns and pitfalls to avoid, isn’t very easy.

To make matters worse, I’ve been out of the daily programming racket for three years. That’s plenty of time to forget a lot of stuff. On top of that, the last real job interview I had was in about 2005, and the barrier for entry there was pretty low. This was a thousand times more difficult.

I had to work out my own daily curriculum to drill it all into my head so I could recite it from memory, all in a span of a handful of weeks. I used copious notes, flash cards, audio and video, reading and writing, again and again. I walked around the house saying random factoids about my work history to the dog all day every day for a while.

I did five interviews with five different people, including a coding interview. I’ve never done a coding interview before. The closest experience I’ve ever had was one Visual Basic job interview where they set me in front of a laptop with some code on it and asked me to find and fix the bugs, but they left me alone to do it. (That was around 2002, and it was actually kind of fun.) I thought a coding interview would be similar, and perhaps the easiest part of the interview process for me, but I was so, so wrong.

A modern coding interview is a lot harder and more abstract, because you have to code a contrived algorithm (or pseudocode, or write it on a piece of paper or whiteboard) in real time while the interviewer is staring at you, and explain what you’re doing out loud at the same time. (In pandemic times, you have to do it in a video meeting.) It incorporates a lot of foundational knowledge of data structures and algorithms, but it will probably be a problem you’ve never encountered before in your entire life, and probably will never see again in a practical situation. It’s … not normal. And God help you if you’re prone to performance anxiety (like, say, me!).

In the end, my preparations paid off, because I got the job, and I’m very thankful for it. It’s probably going to change my life. I’m rather hopeful I won’t need to get another one before my retirement days.

I have to admit I’m a little embarrassed about it, given the general state of the economy right now. In some ways, this was a gift right out of the blue, like winning a lottery. There’s a pang of guilt about having a good job opportunity when many people don’t. Having been without a job for some three years, I’m more keenly aware than ever before of how different daily American life is with and without big company employer benefits. It’s hard to process.

Speaking of processing, there’s always a lot to take in when you start a new job, but this is a whole new level. With a company this size (50,000+ employees worldwide), it’s a massive firehose of institutional information. I had about a hundred new emails in my inbox on the first day. I attended roughly ten separate video meetings in the first two days; onboarding lectures, team meetings, manager check-ins, etc. (There were 170 other new hires starting their first day in my “orientation” Zoom meeting! Insane.)

It’ll even out eventually but it’s going to take some time to adjust. It’s fascinating, but tiring. (I was skeptical when I first heard about it, but “Zoom fatigue” is definitely a real thing.) I’d like to write some journals on these new technologies I’m learning as I go, like that Golang post I did. Perhaps some perspectives on moving from a Microsoft world to a non-Microsoft world, or what it’s like scaling beyond a corporate enterprise. But writing time is pretty scarce at the moment.

So that’s my 2021 so far.

P.S. Here are a couple of resources that were very helpful to me in preparing for the coding interview. If anyone thinks they might do one in their future, I recommend starting to prepare early!

P.P.S. Weirdly, recording game videos for a while proved to be a useful hobby in getting and working in this new job. It’s good practice for video meetings, if nothing else. If you’re the kind of person who isn’t very comfortable with verbal communication (like me), recording game videos now and then might be a relatively low-impact way to practice while doing something fun.

Somehow March is almost upon us, and I still haven’t written about Tyranny, the other free game I got from the Epic Store oh so long ago now. It was the next in a burst of isometric CRPG games that I played around Christmas time, which started with Wasteland 2 and then Pillars of Eternity.

Tyranny is another Obsidian game from the makers of Pillars of Eternity. It’s the exact same “Infinity engine” style with real time combat that you can pause and unpause to make strategic decisions.

The art style is more cell-shaded and stylistic than the realism of Pillars of Eternity, which gives it a nice flavor.

I found Tyranny interesting because it’s an entirely different type of setting from your standard high fantasy in these kinds of games. It’s a bit of a spin-off from an Ancient Roman setting, with magic. And you’re playing roles within the army of the Evil Overlord who recently defeated the Good Guys. I found it to be an engaging worldbuilding setting.

Typical of Obsidian, it has a very complex character creation at the beginning. It also has an additional layer of character creation called “Conquest” that builds your character’s backstory and the prologue to the events of the game in an inventive and interactive way. I found it quite fun. The first time, at least. The second time I skipped it, because it’s quite lengthy.

Conquest, part of character creation.

Also typical of Obsidian, it’s hard. I didn’t get very far. First I played a Hard Trial of Iron (permadeath) game, and died within minutes of walking down the first stairs in the game. Because I wanted my video series to be longer than two videos, I tried again with a Normal difficulty Trial of Iron game, and made it a bit longer, but still my game ended abruptly after nine videos.

I haven’t been back to play the full game yet, because I wanted to go back and finish Pillars of Eternity. Then I started Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and then real life got really busy. But someday I want to get back to Tyranny, because it was quite fun.

Recently I started learning Go, Google’s internally-developed language. It’s also known as “Golang,” because it turns out that “Go” is a terrible search term.

You might ask yourself, as I did, why Google needed to develop a new language. I had heard of Go for a long time, but I’d always dismissed it as a vanity project. Google inventing their own language sounded like a supreme act of arrogance, a trick to trap developers into specializing in job skills that can’t be used anywhere outside Google. The old “domain specific language” trap.

But as we roll through 2021, Go is gaining momentum outside of Google. It consistently shows up on lists of programming languages to know (here, here, and here).

But what did Google need a new language for? From what I’ve been able to gather, Google predominantly used C++ and Java internally, and Golang was developed to address the shortcomings of those two languages. C++ is fast, but hard to use. Java is easy to use, but slow. Neither has easy concurrent coding features. For market reasons, Google obviously wouldn’t want to use anything from Microsoft, or any other proprietary solutions.

On the evolutionary scale of programming languages, Go sits exactly between C and Java, meaning somewhere between the Wild West of a low-level procedural language, and the Authoritarian Dystopia of a strictly typed, object-oriented language. It has some features of both.

Among Go’s attractions are:

There are some drawbacks:

My only point is that it’s worth looking into, contrary to my first impressions from years ago. Maybe it will work in a project for you and maybe it won’t. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be able to put down some familiarity with Go on your resume. Especially since it’s the second highest-paid language on that StackOverflow list.

Here are some resources I looked at to pick up the basics fairly quickly:

For completeness, I present this brainstorming session about merging two other kinds of content streams in with blog content, an unfinished draft from somewhere during a Lost Time Period of 2020.

I haven’t written about The Quest in a long time. When last we left our intrepid hero, way back at the end of 2019, he was trying to learn how to use the static site generator Hugo. I never wrote a post about it, but I eventually figured out the issues I was experiencing and was able to generate the beginnings of a static site like I wanted to. Then I set aside the whole project, and now it’s over a year later.

The generic "this is a post about blogging" image returns.

But the other day (which was actually in October 2020, since this is an old draft) I thought about the Quest For The One Blog again, and the side quest of merging all my content into one place. It occurred to me that I create three different “streams” of content for the public these days. One is this blog, which was originally supposed to be a side project to house all the gaming stuff away from my real blog, but somehow now is my main blog. The second is my Twitter feed, which is honestly where I do most of my writing because it’s just easier to compose 288-character sentences than 1000-word blog posts. The third is my YouTube channel, which gets a whole lot more content updates than my blog lately.

While investigating Twitter digests, I discovered that I can make an RSS digest feed out of my tweets, which is pretty cool. It’s a really convenient way to look back over what I’ve written on Twitter, because Twitter itself has an abominable UI for that sort of thing. Twitter generally doesn’t want people to explore old content too much, just write new, easily-forgettable content.

YouTube generates RSS feeds of their channels too, but they keep it on the down-low, because they’d rather you go through their ecosystem the normal way. You can drop my YouTube channel into your favorite RSS reader and see all the videos I upload in a way that makes it look almost exactly like a blog. The exact link for my YouTube RSS feed is this extremely human-readable and friendly URL: http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0bzW6KmGmiq0o2Xs8VwgQ.

Blogs, of course, have RSS feeds as well. So with these three content streams in mind, I wondered if I could somehow merge the three RSS feeds together into the mythical new-and-improved blog site that I’ve been thinking about for over a year now. (It’s probably been at least three or four years by this point.)

Back when I used WordPress, I used to have some widgets over on the left side of the page where I showed some of my latest YouTube videos, but it was pretty janky, if you ask me. I also had a widget over there that showed my latest tweets, but it was hard to see and it was just a random sampling anyway.

My general assumption is that nobody ever sees anything that’s in the “side” column of a blog–the archives, the “latest comments,” the blogrolls, those sorts of things–unless they specifically go to the site to look for them. I mainly put things there out of habit, not with any expectation that anyone would actually see them.

I looked for some WordPress themes that might feature imported RSS feeds on the front page, but I couldn’t find any. I couldn’t think of a combination of existing tools, themes, or plugins, that would accomplish what I wanted. So I’m back to the “create a whole new custom web site from scratch” plan: A web site that simply imported content data from existing RSS feeds, and plastered it onto a front page in a pleasing way. It sounds easy, but of course it’s not.

That was what I thought in October of 2020, at least. By the end of 2020, it turned out that I was able to wrestle Hugo into building a static web site that I liked, which is what you’re reading right now, the first step of the overhaul. Instead of waiting until I had everything exactly right, I just went ahead and demolished the old blog to start fresh for the new year. I intended to do that a year ago, but I lost my nerve. Now there’s no path backwards and I have no choice but to go forward.

Next time, I want to write more about the process of getting Hugo working, and the potential for hosting this new site on Azure for free.

I tried out Pillars of Eternity next in The Great 2020 Holiday RPG Game Blitz, a game that I got for free on the Epic Game Store.

Pillars of Eternity is an isometric Baldur’s Gate-style RPG that’s been on my “to play” list for a good five years, and after I finished up with my initial run at Wasteland 2, I remembered that I had recently gotten it for free on the Epic Game Store, along with Tyranny (stay tuned for more about that one).

To put it succinctly, it’s a note-for-note copy of Baldur’s Gate with vastly improved graphics, implemented in the Unity engine instead of the Infinity engine. It’s also missing the Wizards of the Coast D&D licensing, so it has its own ruleset which is … basically the same as D&D, just with all the names changed. There are variations, and a “Stronghold” (aka. Garrison aka. Farmville) system, but that’s the gist of it.

An isometric view, just like Baldur's Gate.

The RPG combat system is just like Baldur’s Gate, meaning that it’s all real time, but you can pause the game to issue orders if you don’t like the way your characters' AI is directing the party. It’s what they call an “Infinity Engine” style of game, of the type popularized by BioWare in Baldur’s Gate and later in the Dragon Age series.

The realtime-except-constant-pause-unpause combat is by far the worst part of the game, as indeed it’s the worst part of every “Infinity Engine” game. You can never just let the AI do things unless you’re playing on the easiest of the easy difficulties, so you end up having to pause every half-second of combat, issue orders for a few minutes, then resume for perhaps another half-second, then pause again, issue new orders, and repeat over and over again until combat is over. Turn-based combat systems as seen in, for example, Wasteland 2, are far better.

That aside, it’s a fantastic game. I unlocked some 50+ free games from the Epic Store in 2020 and this is, with the possible exception of GTA V, the best of them.

Character creation is incredibly deep. It took me forty minutes to make a new character at the start of the game, pouring over the various options of race, class, stats, spells, backstory, etc. etc. There is no randomize button, either. In most cases, this would annoy me so much that I’d quit before I even started, but it fit the kind of game I was expecting.

A forty-minute character creation process.

Your character’s backstory is completely unimportant, because it’s immediately thrown out so that your character can start out on a trip to Gilded Vale. I’ll never understand why games let you pick a backstory and then undermine it. To be fair, Pillars of Eternity gives you a small hint about how the game’s story is going to start before they make you pick a backstory, but it doesn’t help much.

An interesting aspect of Pillars of Eternity are the “scripted encounters.” These are separate “theater of the mind” narrative experiences that are, presumably, supposed to be like sitting at a table playing an RPG with a Dungeon Master. You’re given a description, and you choose what you want to do, a bit like a “choose your own adventure” situation.

This is a scripted encounter.

I think I like the scripted encounters. They’re fairly rare, so they aren’t overused. When they pop up, it’s a nice change of pace.

A word of warning: Combat in this game is hard. I had always heard that Pillars of Eternity was a difficult game, and I can attest to that. Wrestling with the pausing and unpausing does not make it any easier, either. When they say you might want to start on Easy difficulty, they aren’t kidding. I played for a while on Story Time difficulty and there were still times when party members went down in combat. I initially found Easy to be a bit too easy, but Normal a bit too hard. After my party got to around level 6, I switched from Easy difficulty to Normal difficulty and have found it plenty challenging. Don’t forget to save!

Overall, at the time of this writing, it’s my favorite game, and the one I’m playing the most. I also bought Pillars of Eternity 2 in the Winter sale, and I’m greatly looking forward to that one, because I read that it has a turn-based combat option. It’s hard to imagine a better Baldur’s Gate-style single-player CRPG than a Pillars of Eternity with turn-based combat.

I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year.

Previous awards:

A lot of other people pick their “game of the year” from among all the games that they played in a given year, to give a larger spread of games to choose from. I stubbornly refuse to do so, and only pick from among new games that I purchased and played within a given year. That’s because I specifically want to punish the games industry for failing to make new games that appeal to me personally.

With no further ado, it’s The Last Of Us, Part II on the PS4. That was my Game of the Year for 2020. It’s the only 2020 game I bought in 2020.

Even though it teaches people to play guitar chords wrong...

The story was fantastically crafted, thought-provoking, and particularly relevant to “these challenging times” of 2020. The gameplay was demanding and an improvement over the original. The game shipped in perfect condition at launch, with no significant bugs or problems, possibly the last AAA game to do so we will see in our lifetime.

For the record, I did record my entire blind playthrough, but I have not uploaded it mainly because I never uploaded my The The Last Of Us playthrough. I also like to keep my channel somewhere within the realm of “family friendly” and these games aren’t that.

Buzzworthy 2020 games I didn’t buy, but might get at some unspecified future time in a sale:

Other noteworthy games I enjoyed (belatedly) in 2020:

Incidentally, none of those games were better than The Last Of Us, Part II, so even if I had included them for contention, they wouldn’t have won the coveted Endgame Viable Game of the Year prize anyway.

The only new MMORPGs I played in 2020 were a New World beta (which was technically an alpha) and a Crowfall beta, neither of which impressed me much. I played Everquest II for a short time early in the year, and I played an hour or two of Astellia Online.

And that’s it for 2020. As of this writing, there isn’t a single game on the horizon that I’m looking forward to getting at launch in 2021. Thank god there’s a ton of older games around to play.

Over the winter holidays, I got into an isometric Baldur’s Gate-style RPG kick and played several games in that genre. The first was Wasteland 2, a post-apocalyptic RPG in the style of the original Fallout 1 and 2.

I got Wasteland 2 in the Steam Winter Sale for about $5. It’s been on my wish list for a long time, because I’d always heard very good things about it. I really enjoyed the original Fallout game back in the 90s, and the Wasteland series of games are closely tied with the original Fallout games for various reasons I won’t get into (mainly the same people worked on them).

Incidentally, I tried to play Fallout again somewhat recently, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much, but that’s another story. Mainly I think that was because the game is incredibly tiny and impossible to read when rendered on a modern display.

Anyway I saw Wasteland 2 on the Steam sale and impulsively bought it. I was looking for a change of pace from Pathologic 2 and Dishonored.

Wasteland 2 begins with a very complicated character creation for your 4-member squad, or you can just pick a default team of four. I initially picked the default team to speed things up, but that turned out to be a mistake because I felt no connection to my characters. I started a second time and painstakingly made my own custom group and had a much better time.

Unfortunately, Wasteland 2 also begins with a boatload of story exposition. Even after you can walk around in the game, depending on how thorough you explore and how fast you can read, you might spend up to an hour just talking to NPCs and listening to their life stories before you get on with the mission at hand.

I didn’t care for the slow start to the game. I don’t like to be bombarded with backstory at the beginning of a game, even a slow-paced, text-based RPG like this. (That was one reason I was so enamored with Pathologic 2–it threw you into the middle of the story and left you to figure it out on your own.)

Eventually you get out into the world and fight monsters, which is by far the best part of Wasteland 2. The tactical, turn-based combat is fantastic. It’s very similar to Fallout (and indeed most every other turn-based game I’ve played). I really enjoyed the combat encounters.

Sadly, I didn’t care much for everything in between the combat encounters. The story didn’t impact me at all, the humor isn’t very funny, the quests are tedious, and it’s a slog to get from place to place.

It’s particularly annoying to navigate around indoor locations because of the isometric nature of the game. It’s difficult sometimes to find a section of floor to click on, because walls and other obstacles obscure your view. I’m sure I’ve talked before about how isometric camera views are my least-favorite type of game, because it’s the hardest angle to see from, especially if the game doesn’t make any effort to hide walls, which Wasteland 2 doesn’t. The game expects you to constantly do the work of rotating the camera around to find that one angle where you can see clearly.

Despite the aggravations of the engine, I enjoyed driving my own personal Echo squad to their inevitable deaths. Wasteland 2 is hard. I played on Hard difficulty because I wanted to make entertaining videos, and it was hard. One by one, members of my squad were killed until none were left, and the game ended.

One suggestion I would make to prospective players is to make sure you have someone who has the Surgeon skill. Otherwise, you won’t be able to revive downed players and you’ll just have to stand around your fallen comrades and watch them bleed out and die. Why there needs to be a separate and distinct Surgeon skill to revive downed players, above and beyond the First Aid skill which heals players in combat, I have no idea. It seems like an unnecessary complication to me.

Some day I might go back and play again on an easier difficulty setting, because again, the tactical combat is quite good. But the story was so uninteresting to me that instead, I uninstalled the game after my whole squad died and went on to try a different game.

In this episode: Nora works on a way to get into The Institute.

The Main Quest Podcast: Have you ever been sitting at work, or driving your car, or waiting at the dentist, and thought, “I wish I could listen to the story from a game right now?” Well I have. A lot. So I had this idea for a podcast, and this is the result. Thanks for giving it a try. Let me know what you think.