Another Destiny

I'm kind of surprised that there still aren't any novels set in the lore-rich universe of Destiny.  It strikes me as being especially odd considering how many Halo novels there are now.  We are talking about the exact same developer for both games here, Bungie Studios.  I've heard some people claim that the grimoire cards are a substitute for the lack of any books, but to be honest those little snippets of background information feel like excerpts from a much larger story (one that is never communicated during the actual game).  It's an unfortunate situation because the limited plot and characters developments in Destiny leave much to be desired.  The entire thing is akin to a junk food snack, something to play when you have a hankering for a blend of FPS and RPG.  For me the question at launch and continuing to this day is, where's the meat?  Despite being out for over two years now, there isn't a whole lot for players to sink their teeth into.  Sure the shooting is highly polished, but it comes across as rather pointless when the only motivation for doing so is some vague, mystical mumbo-jumbo.  It's especially aggravating when one considers the setting, which is ripe for storytelling.  The concept of a fully colonized solar system provides an excellent foundation for all kinds of epic sagas and high adventure, and yet Bungie continues to squander the opportunity to do so.  Perhaps there is a reason for it though, one that goes beyond the realm of video games.  There's a recently completed trio of novels out now that basically tackles the same setting as Destiny except way better.

The "Red Rising" trilogy by Pierce Brown takes place in a distant future wherein humanity has become highly stratified.  So much so, each cast has a particular color associated with them to show where they stand in the social hierarchy.  At the top are the "Golds."  Roughly equivalent to royal families, they believe themselves to be the pinnacle of human development (both mentally and physically).  Directly under them are "Silvers" and "Coppers," who deal with the economics and bureaucracy of running an interplanetary empire.  Further down are a variety of specialized roles, such as the "Blues" (who handle space travel), "Yellows" (that apply medicine), and "Grays" (a combination law enforcement and armed forces).  Elite troops are referred to as "Obsidians," although they do not lead others.  Only gold can occupy the command structure that makes up fleets and armies, and this is where the uniqueness of the setting comes to the forefront.

Borrowing a page (or several dozen) from Dune, the author makes a point of demonstrating how technology has been bent and molded to suit the structure of society.  Case in point, spaceships only ever have one bridge (command center) because gold philosophy demands that all power be focused on them.  The best personal armor and armaments are reserved for gold use only.  Highly destructive weaponry is forbidden because it diminishes the importance of gold fighting prowess.  When two rival Golds face-off it more often than not takes the form of a duel.  Ship-to-ship combat revolves around boarding operations because capturing one of these pricey vessels brings far more prestige than simple destruction.  Additionally, the victor has a prize to impress his peers with and thus enhance his or her standing within the social elite.  Sure a lot of Grays and Obsidians might perish in the process, but by gold logic they are nothing more than expendable assets anyway.  On top of that, lower ranking colors are obligated to transfer loyalty in the event that their commanding gold is deposed.  In this Darwinian command structure, the ideal is the "iron gold," an ruthlessly determined individual who does not shy away from adversity or waver in the face of a challenge.  Golds who seek pleasure and indulgence over temperance and self-discipline are labeled "pixies," while those deemed of inferior disposition are called "bronzies."  In order to hold the reins of power a gold must attend the academy on Mars.  Without going into spoiler territory, let me just say it's a school that asks a lot of its students.  Those lucky few who graduate with honors become "peerless scarred" and are given important posts in political and military spheres.  Of course, all this becomes subject to change when a small group of individuals decide they want to bring down they system from the inside.

Red Rising isn't exactly the same as Destiny, but it's suited to the medium in which it was created (literature, instead of video games).  That said, there are a lot of aspects to the setting that wouldn't be out of place in a first, or third-person shooter.  For example, there are energy guns ("burners"), super-swords ("razors"), stealth devices ("ghost cloaks"), and regenerating health ("Aegis shields").  Generally speaking, the nomenclature is much better than Destiny as well, with names and terms borrowed from Greco-Roman history.  The various planets and moons of our solar system are also depicted correctly with respect to gravity (might sound like a nit-pick, but it's something that always stick with me).  Red Rising also has an easily relatable conflict, none of this nebulous light versus dark.  It's a class struggle along the length and width of a social pyramid in which everyone below the tippe top is miserable, doubly so for all the folks at the very bottom.  Oh...I almost forgot to mention that there are no robots in the setting for the simple reason that Golds want to dominate everyone else.  They have no desire for mindless automatons.  Instead the prefer to demonstrate their self-imposed superiority by forcing others to obey them out of fear and envy...and that's ultimately why the Reds, the bottom most cast, are fated to rise up against their oppressors.

War and Peace

I'm going to start this post off with an anecdote from World War 2.  Pacific theater (1942), the Imperial Japanese Navy is planning an invasion of the American held Isle of Midway.  In order to test the feasibility of their plan, Imperial Navy high command arranges a war game aboard the battleship Yamato.  Senior officers take their respective roles, while a junior officer assumes control over the opposition (in this case, the United States Navy).  Early on in the simulation, American aircraft carriers launch a surprise attack from the north-east resulting in the sinking of three of the four Japanese fleet carriers committed to the operation.  A referee overrules the result claiming that such an attack would be impossible because the Americans could not have know Japanese intentions so early in the battle.

The feeling among the naval staff at the time was that the simulation had failed to capture the reality of the situation.  In actuality it was spot-on.  During the real Battle of Midway, American aircraft carriers were able to launch a surprise attack from the north-east thanks to a partial decryption of Japanese naval codebooks.  Three Japanese carriers were knocked out of action in rapid succession from initial airstrikes with the fourth and final fleet carrier falling victim to the same fate due to a follow-up dive bomber attack soon after.

This war story doesn't have anything to do with video games directly, but there is a new game out on Steam called Children of a Dead Earth that is tangentially related.  If you're not familiar CoaDE claims to be an accurate simulation of what warfare in space would be like.  I've seen a fair amount of criticism directed at this game because of its design goal and central premise.  While we could argue over the theoreticals, I don't see why a simulation using proven mathematical formulas and basic applied physics would be any less accurate at depicting warfare than pushing counters around a map and rolling some six-sided dice.

Now, I should stress that my knowledge of computer programming is pretty limited.  I've only ever coded in Basic, Fortran, and a bit of Turbo Pascal.  Having confessed my relative ignorance though I'm going out on a flimsy limb to say a lot of people who claim to know how to code really don't.  A few months ago, while watching a twitch stream of Kerbal Space Program, one viewer asked about the ETA for the next update.  The streamer's response was to say the bug fixing process would take a long time because (according to him) correcting one issue in programming creates many more.  My response is simply this, only if you are doing it wrong.  Even though I'm a total armature I know enough to understand the importance of structured programming.  It can be tedious and at times and feel like a creativity restraint, but when the time comes to squash bugs the entire process is much quicker and easier.  More than once, I've seen KSP development blogs that go on about some nasty bug that was difficult to track down and isolate.  The layman's term for the cause of these kinds of problems is Spaghetti Code.  I'm pretty confident in saying that KSP has a bad case of it.  A lot of different programmers have worked on this game at different times, some of which were more skilled than others, and while steps have been taken to clean up "legacy code" (basically an eloquent way of saying "poorly planned mess"), I think the best course of action would be to simply start over from scratch.

Doing so would allow Squad, or whoever the developers are now (it seems like most of the original team has jumped ship), a chance to address long standing issues with the game - floating point precision errors, the lack of N-body physics models, and most of all the dreaded Kraken.  A number of improvements that are impossible in the current Unity engine could also be implemented.  The Kerbin system could be fleshed out and expanded.  Internals for parts and astronomical bodies would be great to see.  I'd love it if the damage modeling system allowed deformation (a.k.a. soft body physics) as well.  If you look at how long each update is taking, despite the relatively limited scope of new features) it's clear that there needs to be a sequel, one that incorporates everything learned from the original in addition to a number of excellent ideas from the mod community.  Instead of early access, it would be nice if this hypothetical successor came out the door as a fully fledged campaign (complete with a proper beginning, middle and conclusion) in addition to the sandbox mode we all know and love.  After all, if we can have a well made space war game why can't we have a nice new peaceful space exploration game too?

Figurine Box Art

Glory to Youtube!

Normally I use the fifth and final blog post of each month to show some video game related artwork, screenshots or animated GIFs.  However, I'm going to make an exception this time and talk about Youtube a bit instead.  Don't worry!  I'll still put up the normal end of the month stuff.  I'm just putting it off until the start of next month.  Anyway...on to the reason for this blog post!

Youtube has had a long running string of bad ideas in recent years.  An automated copyright ID system (that is open for abuse), Youtube Red (a paid service that limited sharing of videos internationally), and an ad-friendly policy (that allowed advertisers to influence the kind of content found on Youtube).  Which brings us to Youtube's newest blunder their "heroes" program.  In a nutshell it allows people to volunteer their time to moderate Youtube.  People who prove useful to the website will have increased privileges such as the ability to mass flag videos and remove undesirable comments.  Another way to gain advancement is by "sharing information"...you know...a small part of me almost gets this...like at a board meeting somebody in a suit stood up and said "I know how we can solve our cesspool of a comment system for free!"  Apparently, none of these highly paid, "brilliant" people had ever heard of the term political officer.  Youtube isn't asking for "heroes," they're asking for "commissars."

Actually, I take that back.  Commissars at least got paid for what they did.  Youtube is too cheap to even offer a salary which is pretty insulting considering how much money Google rakes in every year.  So, there's really only three types of people who are going to go for this kind of thing.

1. People who have an sociopolitical agenda they want to foist upon others
2. People hoping to abuse the system for their own amusement/entertainment
3. People who are actually being paid to do a job

Since we've already established there's no money in it for these "heroes" the vast majority of volunteers are coming from the first two categories.  Sure there might people a handful of folks who really are idealists willing volunteer their free time toward the task of trying to make the internet free of trolls and bigots, but they are few and far between...and lets face it, I doubt many of them would last long, or worse yet some might even eventually turn into villains.

Now, I know some readers have made it this far and are wondering what the heck any of this has to do with video games.  Well...nothing directly, but tangentially quite a bit.  Even if you're not a fan of LPers or even video reviews of games there are people on Youtube who do quality work when it comes to the craft and industry.  Guys like Jim Sterling, Errant Signal or Noah Caldwell-Gervais are just a few examples. Yes, I know there's a ton of garbage on Youtube. Guess what? Regular old TV Broadcasting (in the USA at least) is just as bad...if not worse...and has way more obnoxious advertising to boot.

The joke here is that Youtube had a very obvious solution to their problem. Give individual channels the tools to moderate themselves. RPG.net is a great example of how moderated communities can work. Instead of just banning users or deleting comments mods can do stuff like issue warnings, remove individuals from particular threads, or even suspend an account's posting privileges for a certain number of days based on the type of infraction. Sure, it isn't a perfect solution. There's a danger of some rogue channel trying carve out their own little den of hate-speech or whatever on Youtube, but an appeals process (again like they have on RPG.net and law courts in real life) should address that potential hazard.

Sadly, that idea was too simple of a solution for the "geniuses" at Youtube.  So instead we have this "heroes" program instead.  You know what really bothers me most about it?  The tagline at the end of their promo video that says "...Because all heroes deserve a little glory."  Glory?  Glory to these fools?  Nay!  Glory to Astortzka, I say.

Sunken Tresure

"Space pirates!  Brutal! Merciless!  Coming to a theater near you...rated R."

- Wak, Explorers (1985)

Obscure movie quotes aside, I think it's kind of funny how little these cannon fodder enemies of video games have in common with their nautical forebearers.  Off the top of my head, Space Run, Master of Orion, Stardrive, Stellaris, Infinite Space, and most recently Halcyon 6 are just a few examples of video games that all have space pirates integrated into the experience...and yet they feel so comically shallow they might as well not be there at all.

You see...historically actual pirates (not the kind you find on torrent sites) were really only in it for the money.  Just like any other profit deal, it's all about maximizing the return on investment.  Ships and the mercenaries that crew them cost money so there needs to be a lot of easy-to-get plunder out there along with a bunch of capable and unscrupulous individuals looking for short-term employment.  In the case of Caribbean piracy, it got as big as it did in large part due to the support of various Continental powers.  Often referred to as "privateers," these men (and even a few women) existed through sponsorship from powerful nations trying to disrupt the colonial trade routes of rivals without diverting valuable military assets away from places closer to home.

Of course all the games I've mentioned earlier have none of this.  There are no pirate-friendly nations, nor is there any way to turn pirates into privateers.  To me, it really doesn't make sense.  Where are the pirates supposed to sell their stolen goods if there are no friendly ports?  Some games float the idea of a pirate base, but this doesn't make sense either unless there is some kind of thriving black market...which brings me to another big problem, logistics.

Transporting commodities from one place to another during the age of sail wasn't easy.  Move that kind of situation to space and you amplify the difficulties a thousandfold.  Even if you want to hand wave most of the problems with science fiction gadgetry there's still the question of the value of the cargo.  In the Americas it was largely gold and silver, while in the Far East silk and spice were what made piracy economically viable.  However, in Stellaris, Master of Orion and Stardrive (three games that emphasize economics) the net financial losses from pirate raids typically doesn't come anywhere near the value of the ships used, let alone the maintenance costs involved.  Then there are risks to consider...which brings me to the biggest question of space piracy, motivation.

Any pirate captain that doesn't turn a profit doesn't stay captain for long.  Surprising as it might sound piracy is, was, and has always been a democratic enterprise with the elected leader being the person who gets the best results (i.e. lots of booty for the least amount of effort).  In the case of video games though that almost never rings true.  Space pirates are suicidally aggressive and seem to have more in common with petty dictatorships than cunning profiteers.  I get the reasoning here.  Game developers want to give players an easy challenge early on so they throw a few mook units at the player to squash without consequences or repercussions.  It can be useful as a combat tutorial, but once the player has got the basics down space pirates become a nuisance at best, and at worst a wasted opportunity for a more satisfying game.

In a sci-fi setting a game developer can do pretty much whatever they want, which is why I don't understand the desire to take an interesting concept and whittle it down to a bland stereotype.  Come on game developers inject some life and color into this trope!  At the very least it will deepen and enrich the gaming as a whole.