Public Service Announcement: Freelancer working on Win 7

This is a bit of an unusual post for me but I've had to perform this twice within a year and a half and I forgot the particulars for the second time... they were not so easily found even with half of the knowledge!

Freelancer was and is one of my favourite Privateer-a-likes. No, not an elite-a-like, more of an elite-a-lite. ;) Anyway, it can be a bit of a pain to get working on modern computers. Win 7 actually is easier to get working than on Vista (though that is entirely possible as I've also managed it by following the below steps as well) though I've no experience with win 8+.

It was pretty hard for me to find the information the first time around as I had nothing to go on. However, the fan sites and forums do harbour this information if you know the key search terms and where to look... So, the following is as much as a reminder for myself for future play sessions as it is a repository for everyone else who's a casual player and not into the online fansites for this game.

Sci-fi tropes: To singularity or not to singularity...

So I've read a lot about the probable, possible and, at it's most egregious, inevitable AI singularity. However, I just don't buy it.

I have come to the conclusion that the AI singularity can never come to pass. Note that I state, specifically, an AI singularity... Whether an intelligence singularity can and will occur is another matter entirely.

Post Thoughts: Dragon's Dogma + Dark Arisen

It's difficult to know where to begin with this Post Thoughts; I've been playing Dragon's Dogma and Dark Arisen on and off since 2012. It's a fantastic game and there's so much there, much like when trying to talk about an Elder Scrolls game, that I'm bound to mix things up, miss details out and worst of all not do the game justice. As always, spoilers ahead...

Scale is not something that this game shies away from - not only in the architecture but also for the enemies as well...

The two map problem...

I blame Far Cry 2 for this, though it may just occupy my earliest memory of this 'problem'... some other game may be the culprit instead! Suffice it to say, The Two Map Problem (TTMP) is a pretty rare but annoying (at least to me) issue mostly regarding open-world games. Let me explain:

Far Cry 2 had an expansive map. I conquered the known universe, like Columbus.. or was it Ghengis Khan? Anyway, I'd unlocked all the safe places, the weapons, knew the routes and settlements - I had explored every nook and cranny available to my time; I had mastered the world and its systems. This was enjoyable. It is enjoyable to complete things even if they are on your own terms (I'm looking at you achievements!).

Then I hit the plot point. In a cutscene I was rendered impotent (yes, by now I'm used to it - damn you, developers!) and then forced into a new world. One I hadn't conquered.

I wasn't reduced in skill. I didn't have my weapons taken away from me but it was, nevertheless, a setback. I didn't know these paths, settlements or landscapes. It was confusing and debilitating. I'd spent countless hours mastering the world and now I had a whole new world to master. 

In a strange way, it was my fault.

I had constantly desired more. I wanted to explore and understand this world even further. To enjoy new vistas and secrets. To clamber, unbound to the limits of the world provided. I didn't like what I was given.

So what went wrong?

I've long thought about this issue since Far Cry 2 and there have been a number of games that have performed this 'insult' to the player: most recently, Dying Light (though both Dead Island and Riptide did the same thing) and it is this game that has prompted me into this dialogue.

The problem with open-world games that use a two map layout is that the instant you move to the second map you have undone everything the player has mastered in the original map - whether that's an understanding of all the places in the world or the optimum travel paths, secret locations, known characters or resources.... Other games that perform what would otherwise appear to be similar mechanisms, such as RPGs with multiple local maps fitting into an overworld do not suffer the same possible negative emotional reaction from changing map due to their relative impermanence. i.e. You don't need to master a map because the world itself is larger than any one map and characters and resources you might need or use are not necessarily in a single place and thus the player's mastery of the game systems is more important than their knowledge of the world layout.

Games that do deviate from this caveat include such titles that remove previously accessible game hubs, removing player's ability to engage in upgrades or character interaction. Usually, these are unlocked again in some different form later on in the game but not until some plot points are driven through by the player. e.g. Borderlands 2.

Let's put it this way - the two map problem is only a problem because the developers have put such importance on the map layout in the first place. To give an example: Dying Light, a great game that I've thoroughly enjoyed, relies on you to be able to successfully navigate the world in order to avoid the predators that hunt you at night or to better reach objectives and deal with hordes of undead during the day... 

You want to learn and explore new areas but at the same time, to be taken from the world you know into a new world without all the comforts of the previous one and with a different landscape is both exciting and annoying - much as, for many humans, the prospect of being thrown into a completely unfamiliar space or society is intimidating until you understand and learn to accept its idiosyncrasies. 

Developers may need to throw players into these secondary worlds due to memory limitations of the hardware or game engines but effectively birthing the player anew into the same universe twice is not an efficient or, in my opinion, effective way of managing the player/world interaction.

At the end of the day, that says more, perhaps, about my mentality and psychological profile than it does about the game... but I'd rather have the ability to move out from the world I've learnt to understand and master than be a baby again in a new world, completely cut off from the old for a second time in the same game. There's a sense of continuity and relationship when moving across a space - even if the architecture changes significantly... but that is lost when you're thrown into what is a space devoid of all relationship to the first landscape you are familiar with,

Standing at the top of the tallest spaces in Dying Light (the Old Town and the Dam) I strain to see the areas I am familiar with in the skybox the developers have given me. A frame of reference for me to get my bearings. There are none and I feel untethered from the world...

On spoilers...

I'm a no spoiler sort of person. Always have been, always will be. I won't get into the reasons for why I don't like spoilers, nor the mentality of those who are for or against them. Neither will I delve into the seeming lack of empathy one side has for the other. What I will address is one particular phrase that does tend to crop up from the spoiler side of the equation.

"The ending isn't any more important than any of the moments leading to it."

It speaks to a belief that the journey is more important than the destination. How you get somewhere is more important than the end point. There's just a couple of things I want to say to people who think this way:

You don't believe in crescendos? You don't think that the whole can be more than just the sum of the parts? 

One of the major storytelling conceits - and even experiences in life itself - is that an event can be lifted past its inherent momentary significance by events that preceded it or that will proceed it. The man standing in Tiananmen Square was a significant event in itself... but without the context of the events that preceded that moment it has much less power and meaning.

It's just a guy on the way to the shops, right?

The way most stories are constructed is to build to a crescendo moment, a scene where the themes of the story are explored or exploited. Even more complicated stories have mini-crescendos within this crescendo where past scenes are hints of future events... This is generally called foreshadowing and is a way of building a rapport with the subconscious of the consumers of the story (and sometimes the conscious of very astute consumers of the story - depending on how subtle the foreshadowing is).

The reason these techniques work is because our human brains work like this. It's as simple as that. We think, therefore foreshadowing allows our brains to accept future events more easily and by doing so allows us to link together multiple events in a way that makes us appreciate the whole story and theme(s) more completely.

Thus, spoilers (or what some people consider spoilers) detract from those crescendo moments. They take that energy and effort expended in building up to a moment to make it more than it is on its own and actually turn every preceding event into a negative build-up emotionally.

I would argue that people who aren't bothered by spoilers have the wrong conception of what a spoiler is and what it does. If someone has already experienced something that was not spoilt for them then spoil the event for someone else it is possible that these people did not realise that the build-up to the event contributed to their enjoyment of it. They are in crescendo-denial. The other type of person is someone who allows themselves to be spoilt of a sequence of events and then go and watch them anyway. I'm not saying they're wrong but I question if they would have enjoyed the sequence of events more if they had experienced them without being spoilt.

It's not a question of each event in the sequence not being enjoyable on its own merits. The question is whether we believe, as a species, that enjoyment of a sequence of events is affected by the way consumption of the sequence occurs. i.e. Can something be more than the sum of its parts? Of course that also implies the corollary: Can an event be detracted from by previous events leading up to it?

I posit that if you think that spoilers do not matter then you cannot hold this belief. The two concepts are logically at odds to one another.