Following the Vanishing Path

How does post-release DLC affect the intended experience of a game?

These days, almost every AAA game receives some kind of post-release DLC (downloadable content). They can vary hugely, from huge expansions to the game and new levels to play through, down to alternate costumes or animations to add some variety and fun. Whilst players were initially sceptical of the idea, and there were some fairly egregious examples of companies abusing this arrangement (just Google 'Oblivion horse armour' or 'Prince of Persia Epilogue') it's now become an integral part of the gaming landscape and on the whole, I think we're better-off for it.

Understandably, developers cater these post-launch experiences to their most loyal customers: the people who are already playing (or have even finished) the game. Since a lot of the time this is content people paid extra for, most games will go out of their way to highlight the new stuff as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the combination of these two factors means that the experience for new players can be weird and confusing. There is a central contradiction at work: DLC is almost always intended to be end-game content, something new for players who have already seen everything, but the game will try to direct the player towards it as soon as possible. Thus a player starting the game fresh with all the DLC installed will often reach a point in the game when they start getting mixed signals from the designers. Should the player continue on the original path of the vanilla game, or branch off into the more advanced stuff that came later?

This problem is exacerbated by the rise of 'Game of the Year Edition' versions of games, usually released roughly a year after the game's original launch, which pack all the game's DLC content together with the base game for the same price as the original release. Due to how quickly games get discounted, a couple of years after a game first comes out it's almost always possible to buy a version of the game with 100% of the released content built in for a fraction of the original cost. During the latest Steam Summer Sale, for example, I was able to pick up Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Presequel with all their DLC for 97% off the original price! I buy far more games this way than on day one, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of other people do too.

Different games manifest the conflict between the original path and DLC in different ways. Folding new content into a pre-existing game poses some challenges, and developers have variously struggled to do it in an elegant way. Fallout 3 came up with the novel, in-world idea of having mysterious radio broadcasts guide players to the new content. Whilst this works great for people who have already been exploring the game's wasteland for tens of hours, the system backfires when it comes to new players leaving the starting area for the first time. Stepping out of Vault 101 is a very important moment in the game, the point where the sheer scope of the world is revealed to the player. In the vanilla game it strikes a clever emotional balance, a cooling breath of fresh air and a wide open vista contrasting the claustrophobia and desperate struggle to escape the vault. The player is given no instructions, just the objective of finding the player character's father and the space to explore the world stretching out before them.

In the Game of the Year Edition, players barely have time to admire the skybox before being bombarded with multiple radio signals pulling their attention in all different directions, most of which they are severely under-equipped to visit just yet. The original feeling of freedom and open-endedness that excited and intimidated players is swept away by a tide of notifications, like returning to your work email inbox after a week's vacation.

A lot of games don't even bother to come up with an in-world way of serving the new content. The opening of Rise of the Tomb Raider is an exciting, dynamic scene in which Lara Croft becomes separated from her companion in the mountains and must find shelter and light a campfire to survive the night. In the Tomb Raider games, the campfires are the checkpoints at which you can do things like level up and unlock new abilities and gear. Thus it was quite jarring after having Lara struggle through the snow, barely surviving the biting cold, to discover that because of the DLC that came with the Game of the Year Edition, she was already carrying half a dozen outfits, some relating to the people of the region that I had yet to explore (see the screenshot above).

These content packs not only break the immersion and flow of the game's story but can also disrupt the game's design. Those DLC packs I owned for Rise of the Tomb Raider came with numerous gameplay benefits like stronger weapons or crafting bandages without using any resources, which is going to change the difficulty and progression curve. Games dole out rewards and abilities slowly as the player gets more familiar with the system, and designers spend countless hours finely tuning this progression: giving the player these special items right out of the gate throws the whole thing off the rails. Imagine if Metal Gear Solid gave the player the stealth camouflage which makes you invisible to enemies on the first playthrough! I specifically decided not to use any of the bonus content in Rise of the Tomb Raider so I could enjoy the 'original' experience as much as possible, which is not something that a brand-new player should need to think about.

This problem isn't going away any time soon, and will only get worse as games embrace the service model and expand their post-release content schedule. The launch version of the game becomes an increasingly small slice of what the game even is. Over a long enough time-frame the population of players who own the Game of the Year Edition will start to become larger than the day-one players, and yet the original intended path for them to walk will be completely lost under the weight of all the bonuses and add-ons.

I hope that developers will start to think about these problems from the start and try to design the path to their DLC in a more elegant way. There are already some good examples of developers avoiding these pitfalls. I deeply respect the designers of Dark Souls for simply adding its DLC to the game world and expecting the player to figure out where it is, but then being obtuse and mysterious is Dark Souls' modus operandi. Other games like The Witcher 3 take a slightly friendlier approach, still sprinkling the new content into the world in a natural way, but also tucking instructions on how to find it unobtrusively into the game's glossary system, and giving larger expansions a slightly different visual treatment on the game map so that they stand out.

DLC has transformed the gaming environment and given creators a new avenue to tell stories and stretch their creative muscle even after the game is finished. I'd just like a bit more thought to be given to those of us who play most games well after the initial release, and may struggle to find that original path that the designer intended us to take.

Digital Tools for Pen & Paper

Tools of the trade from a sophomore dungeon master

Last year I took my first steps into the world of Dungeons and Dragons by diving into the deep end (there's a mixed metaphor for you!) and running my own campaign for a group of friends and family. As someone who feels a deep need to create but suffers from a lack of artistic talent, it's been an extremely rewarding experience. Back in April, after eight sessions of roughly four hours each, my band of heroes managed to defeat the menace lurking within The Sunless Citadel and conclude the first chapter of my planned three-part campaign.

Something I wasn't fully prepared for was the level of organisation that is required from a Dungeon Master. Even using a pre-made adventure like Sunless Citadel, there is still a huge amount of information to keep straight in an average session. I am absolutely in awe of Dungeom Masters of yore who had to do it all without a laptop behind their DM screen! As I prepare for chapter two I thought I would share some of the digital tools that I've been using to make my job as DM easier, including some new things that are helping me build my first full adventure from scratch.

Story, Characters and Setting

As you can probably imagine, I make extensive use of Google Drive when managing a D&D campaign. As someone who very much feels the burden of beginning a task, having all my materials at my fingertips wherever I go is essential. Having all my campaign notes in Google Docs means that if inspiration strikes I'm usually just a couple of clicks away from being able to jot it down. Early on I copied a technique from the source book and assigned a specific font style to things that should be read aloud versus things to keep quiet.

I created a template for character stat blocks that gives me everything I need about them including base stats, armour class, hit points and so on as well as a space for notes about their personality when appropriate. For the new chapter I'm creating I added the area to note down physical appearance and personality traits to try and focus on making characters that are memorable. Here's Maurice, the first NPC my players encountered:

Maurice	Human Man (Commoner)
AC: 10 HP: 8 SP: 30	S: 10 D: 10 C: 10 I: 10 W: 10 C: 10
Passive Perception: 10	Knife: +2 to hit, 1d4 piercing dmg Sneak attack: Extra 1d6 dmg when attacking with advantage
Hair: Black, Eyes: Brown, Skin: Pale Distinguishing Features: Shaggy hair, shabby clothes, stubble Personality: Mistrustful, Dishonest, Cowardly
Petty thief Doesn’t like looking people in the eye, considers himself a perpetual victim

I also used a table like the one below to give quick access to details about towns. I don't know if I'll actually use this format for chapter two since the locations I'm creating are much bigger, but it might prove useful.

Ashbury	Pop: 500, Forestry, Hunting, Some Farming
General Store	Limited selection, can buy food and simple items. Proprietor Ernest Slimpkin
The Boar (Inn)	Sign shows a boar’s head with an apple in its mouth. Food, ale. Landlady Fiona Morgan
Guardhouse	Two guards on duty at any given time, total of six, report to Felosial, constable of Oakhurst
Town square	Well with cross-beam and bucket

A technique I'm trying out for the new campaign is the Google Docs bookmark function. In The Sunless Citadel I had all the character blocks in the same document as the long-form text describing the story beats. This made it easy to get information about a character in the first instance that they appeared, because the table was nearby, but as we got deeper into the story I found myself having to jump around a lot to look up details that might be pages back. For recurring enemies (spoilers, there are a LOT of skeletons in The Sunless Citadel) I ended up having multiple copies of the same stat block throughout the document just so I wouldn't lose my place. Bookmarks allow you to create a link that jumps directly to a specific paragraph in a doc, meaning that I can now have a separate file for all my character blocks that can be easily cross-referenced by the main story doc. If combat requires skeletons, I can create a hyperlink on the word 'skeletons' and now they're just a click away! I anticipate this will be useful for a lot of other things too.

Combat

A big problem I faced in my early sessions was how to keep myself organised when running a combat encounter. With five player characters, up to three friendly NPCs and God-knows how many enemies in a given battle, it was a real challenge to keep up with everything that was happening. To solve this problem I created a Google Sheet with columns for everything I needed: initiative, hit points, who NPCs are targeting, if there are any status effects on them and what their AC is. A bit of messing around with the script editor even allowed me to have the list automatically sort itself by initiative. I've included a link to a shareable version of the sheet at the bottom of this section.

Also in that spreadsheet is a tool for calculating the Challenge Rating of a battle. The Dungeon Master's Guide has a highly detailed method for working out how difficult a given combat encounter will be, so I transcribed the logic into something that I can quickly input all the friendly characters and their levels in to and then tweak the types and number of enemies on the fly until I get the desired rating. It has already saved me a lot of time!

Link to Battle Sheet Template

Maps

Maps wasn't something I had to deal with in The Sunless Citadel because the introduction to the story didn't require them, and the specifics of the dungeons were provided in the book. Now, though, I'm creating my own dungeons, and the non-dungeon spaces are going to be much larger and more detailed. This makes it important to at least have a rough map so I know where all these locations are relative to each other.

Once again, my needs are for an online tool that allows me to pick it up quickly and have all my edits sync wherever I am. A bit of research online has lead me to Sketchpad, which offers not only a healthy array of tools for making maps, but also Google Drive integration and auto-saving. It even allows you to create sketches with a square grid as the background, which is going to be awesome for dungeon mapping!

This is my first time creating an adventure whole-cloth, and I'm sure over the years my approach will develop and improve as I discover new problems to be solved. Right now I'm just very excited because I have discovered some cool online tools that are going to allow me to do a lot more for this new story. I hope other aspiring DMs find this helpful, and if you have your own tips and tricks feel free to share them in the comments!

Getting Back Into Gears

After feeling lukewarm about Gears of War 4 when it came out, I'm surprised to find it sucking me in as I revisit it in anticipation of the sequel.

I have been a fan of the Gears of War franchise ever since the first one truly kicked off the HD era of games way back in 2006. Gears of War 2 is, and probably will remain, one of my favourite games of all time. I spent what must have been hundreds of hours playing with my friends in Horde, the wave-based cooperative survival mode that sparked countless imitators. Gears of War 3 continued the series' upward trajectory, layering complexity on top of Horde, introducing the novel reverse-Horde mode 'Beast', and brought the story to a satisfying conclusion. When I packed away my consoles from that generation, the Gears of War trilogy was part of a mere handful of games that I held on to.

Franchises being handed to a new developer is a double-edged sword. Successful series can become a creative burden on a studio even as they bolster their financial security, and a fresh take on a familiar idea has potential. But oftentimes the result is simply the new studio hitting the bullet points of what fans expect. Gears of War had already undergone something like this: when Microsoft needed a stop-gap game as the 360/PS3 generation dragged on longer than anticipated and the true next gen games were still far off. Gears of War: Judgement, handed off to the studio People Can Fly, was so poorly received that I never bought it. Even a studio with a proven track record like People Can Fly can sometimes struggle to take the reins on a much-beloved series.

Thus, Gears of War 4 had a lot to prove. Microsoft had completely taken over the IP from Epic and had assigned the game to Black Tusk Games, newly rebranded as The Coalition to highlight that this was the Gears developer from now on. I was excited and played the game at launch on my PC, using the game as an excuse to upgrade my graphics card in the process, since Nvidia were giving the game away for free when you bought a GTX 1080. I played through the campaign, had a couple of Horde matches with my friends and then... dropped the game and never looked back.

Whilst I had a good time with the game, it didn't leave much of a lasting impression. The campaign was fun and whilst some of the set pieces were spectacular and there were plenty of good callbacks to the old games, they didn't stick with me. The added depth and progression systems of Horde 3.0 promised something new, but the slow pace of levelling up and exploitative loot box and card system pushed me away. Overall the whole thing felt safe, because it was just more Gears of War with better graphics. Protagonist JD Fenix, son of original protagonist Marcus, was symptomatic of this problem. A carbon copy of what had come before but with Marcus' gruffness replaced with snark.

It was only right at the end of the game that things got interesting. My lasting impression of the game is the way the story ends: a ridiculous climax which has you piloting a giant robot, followed by some seismic revelations about the nature of the world regarding humans and their meaty, insectoid foes.

Recently, in an effort to spend more time connecting with my online friends and because Gears 5 is on the horizon, I've dipped back into Gears 4, and I'm actually stunned at how much more I'm enjoying it. I don't know if they rebalanced the levelling curves but now I'm advancing extremely fast through the multiplayer ranks. The new Horde Lite playlist makes it much easier to play the game without having to dedicate an entire evening to a single match. I finally figured out that I could scrap the cards I didn't want to craft something I did (and I've been playing as Colonel Hoffman ever since!)

I'm also playing through the storyline again and having a much, much better time. And I think I understand why. The ending of Gears 4, and everything that has been shown of Gears 5 so far, indicates that it's outsider Kait, not bland son-of-the-first-guy JD, who is the main character of this new story. In a franchise that took way, way too long to introduce female playable characters it's very encouraging that she is becoming the focus, rather than just a side character. Knowing that the story of Gears 4 is actually leading somewhere, that it's not just "Hey, the grubs are back for some reason" makes it far more interesting.

Suddenly I find myself very excited about Gears again, more so than I have in quite some time. Last week at E3 Coalition revealed their new three-player coop mode Escape which looks interesting, and I'm really hoping that the last few years of players voicing their dislike of loot boxes will prompt them to come up with something better and make it less painful or expensive for me to play as Colonel Hoffman. Edit: The day after I published this post, Coalition published this article on the official website explaining that content will no longer be earned through random loot boxes. Yay!

Gears 5 is coming soon, and this time I'll be ready!

Why I'm Excited About Darksiders Genesis

This morning we were treated to a teaser trailer for a new Darksiders game. At this point I'm frankly surprised that this franchise still exists, but I'm most certainly not complaining. I have loved all of the entries in this odd-ball series, which casts the player as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and pits them against the forces of heaven and hell, but there have been multiple reasons for the people involved to stop making them over the years.

The first game was released in 2010, featuring the gorgeous, gothic, heavy metal fantasy artwork of legendary comic book creator Joe Madureira and was very well received. The second game was also well received but less so, but more importantly didn't live up to the lofty expectations and loftier marketing budget of publisher THQ, who promptly went bankrupt the same year and seemingly took the rights to the franchise with them. The third game was a surprise announcement from the completely-not-related-to-the-old-company THQ Nordic, and whilst I really enjoyed it it left a lot of players disappointed by its stripped-down scale. Until this morning I was fairly confident that we would never see a Darksiders 4.

It's hard to tell if Darksiders Genesis is supposed to be Darksiders 4 or just a spin-off. The top-down perspective is a clear departure from the previous games, which were all third-person action adventures, but one of the hallmarks of this series is that its genre is fluid. Darksiders 1 borrowed heavily from the Legend of Zelda with its dungeons and item-based puzzle solving.  Darksiders 2 took things in a more action RPG direction with procedurally generated, rarity coloured loot. Darksiders 3 saw the series try its hand at being a Souls-like with a heightened focus on difficult combat and the need to collect resources dropped on death. The new game does appear to star Strife, the last of the four horsemen still waiting for his own game, and video game publishers do tend to get squeamish once you start putting numbers higher than '3' on products they hope to sell.

Edit: The official Darksiders Facebook page has confirmed that Genesis is a spin-off

Weirdly enough things seem to have come full-circle for Darksiders. The cliff-hanger ending of Darksiders 1, in which protagonist War proudly proclaims that in the coming war he will be "not alone" before revealing the other three horsemen swooping in out of the sky, left people excitedly speculating about a four-player cooperative game as a follow-up. The trailer above features Strife prominently, but War's bulky frame is easily discernible. Hell, Strife even calls back to that famous "not alone" line. I'm hoping that Fury and Death also make an appearance and we get the full four-player co-op experience, but so far only two players have been shown.

Not only that, but development of Genesis is being handled by Airship Syndicate, co-founded by Madureira himself, and based on my quick Internet research he still works there. Joe hasn't worked on a Darksiders title since the first game, and having now read some of his books I'm excited to see him back. The company's first game BattleChasers: Nightwar (based on Madureira's comics) was an overlooked gem, featuring some ingenious new spins on turn-based combat and traditional JRPG mechanics, as well that that sumptuous, trademark art-style.

It leaves me hopeful that Darksiders Genesis will be a good game that gives people what they've wanted for almost a decade, and allow this franchise, which hooked me as soon as I saw an alpha build of the first game at PAX 2008, to continue to be its weird, disparate, ridiculous self for the foreseeable future.

Learning Patience in the Darkest Dungeon

As soon as I saw Darkest Dungeon for the first time, it was a game that I desperately wanted to love. Its art style, evoking the sharp angles, thick outlines and rich, earthy pallet of the Hellboy comics, was immediately arresting. The melodious voice of The Ancestor, a continuous commentary throughout the players' delvings into the game's dungeons, delivered dialogue that teeters on the brink of absurdity with a plummy lexicon and dramatic tone. It creates an atmosphere that manages to be dread-filled without being oppressive; dark but inviting. As a long-time fan of this flavour of eldritch horror, as well as cool art and writing that uses words like 'antediluvian', I wanted to dive in straight away.

Aesthetics aside, Darkest Dungeon appealed to me because it caters to my idealised vision of what my video game playing looks like. As someone with a wonderfully full life, I simply don't have the time to spend hours every day playing games any more. Honestly, nor do I have the attention span for that. But there's a part of me deep down that is in love with the idea of having that kind of time or stamina. Disgaea, a game so sprawling in its scope that every weapon can become its own dungeon crawl, obsesses this part of my psyche and I've almost bought it on Steam more times than I can count. When I actually bought it on the PS2 years ago I didn't make it past the third mission, and yet it still pulls at me. Darkest Dungeon fits this archetype perfectly: a turn-based dungeon crawler in which heroes can permanently die, or be driven mad by the stresses you place them under, which can only be beaten by slowly building up your resources to tackle the brutally difficult final challenge: the Darkest Dungeon itself.

Unfortunately, with my time being in such limited supply, all I had managed to do was bounce off Darkest Dungeon a few times. I would sit down in front of my PC and begin a new campaign full of optimism and excitement: this time would be different. This time I would not let myself get overwhelmed and stick with it. This time I would fall in love. And every time, the game repelled me. Sometimes it was the setbacks and disappointment that are part and parcel of playing the game, but mostly it was because I could feel the weight of time pressing down on me. I would spend huge amounts of time between expeditions poking around the hamlet (the hub that allows the player to tend to their over-stressed heroes, upgrade facilities, and buy provisions for the next outing) trying to fully understand everything in order to optimise every single decision. What does it mean if a hero has weak knees? Is that worth treating over someone with kleptomania? How much food should I bring on a 'Medium' length mission? How many bandages? Who is most deserving of time in the tavern to relieve their stress? Is it worth upgrading my strongest crusader's skills to give me an edge in the next big push, knowing that if they die the money will have been wasted? Above anything else, crippling analysis paralysis is why I would always stop playing.

Clearly in order to get further into this game, I needed to take a more casual approach to playing it. An opportunity to do so presented itself when I was given the Switch version of the game for Christmas. Now I could play the game anywhere for as little or long as I wanted, able to suspend and resume the game at will (my favourite innovation for this generation of consoles). The mental hurdle of having to go to my desk, sit down, start up my computer, wait for Windows to start, then Steam, then wait for the game to load up....was gone! Along with this new beginning I made a conscious choice: I was going to allow myself to not understand everything. I was going to live in ambiguity and be bold enough to make choices to the best of my ability without spending hours poring over every button click. In short, I would be unafraid of failure.

This past weekend, I faced my greatest test. I pushed hard to defeat the Necromancer Apprentice, an early boss in the game. I came within a couple of turns of victory, when the stresses of their long crawl through the dungeon began to get the better of my heroes. One started to refuse the continuous healing spells that were keeping him alive under a merciless onslaught from the Necromancer's undead minions. Another started to hurl verbal abuse at his companions, resulting in both him and one more dying of heart attacks in consecutive rounds as the boss conjured visions of their grisly demises. Down to the last party member I tried to flee, tried to at least recover the thousands of gold pieces, precious stones and upgrade materials gathered on the long expedition, but she too fell. I was left with nothing to show for the previous 30 minutes except my four strongest heroes buried in the shallow graveyard of the hamlet. This was my first true taste of what Darkest Dungeon is supposed to be.

I will admit, after that happened I put down the Switch and sat staring into space for a while. I had just invested significant time in something and had managed to actually end up in a worse state than when I started. For my entire gaming career, I have always hated losing progress and done anything to avoid it. This was one of the points in the past where I would have just quit.

After a bit of soul searching, I hit upon the thing that would carry me forward: it was my new knowledge, the cruel intangible experience, that was my reward. I should have turned back earlier. I should have recognised that the battle was shifting away from my favour when the first hero died and cut my losses. Up until that point I had been cautious and it had paid off: on a previous run I encountered The Collector (a randomly spawning mini-boss who summons copies of your party members) two rooms ahead of where I had expected to find the Necromancer. I managed to defeat him, but the toll he had extracted meant it was obvious that I wouldn't stand a chance if I carried on. Yet when I saw the Necromancer's life bar at 20% I got greedy. I didn't want to spend another 30 minutes repeating the same dungeon for a third time. I wanted to beat him now, dammit! And for that greed and impatience, the game slapped me in the face and handed me not just another run through the same dungeon, but all the extra work necessary to get a new band of heroes up to the task of attempting it.

It isn't often that I learn a real life lesson from video games, but this is a very valuable one. To find the silver lining in failure: the growth opportunity in defeat. It's taking a lot of willpower, but I'm determined to follow through. I forced myself to push on on a new mission; to begin rebuilding what my lack of experience had cost me. Next time, I won't make the same mistake.

I'll definitely make other ones, but that's okay too...

Jam Enslaver Plays...The Last Guardian - Episode 01

It feels good to get back into making a video series again, and very exciting to be playing something so keenly anticipated as The Last Guardian! Luxleaena and I had been throwing around ideas for a video series we could do together for a couple of months, and even have a solid idea for a continuing series beyond this one. Playing through The Last Guardian together seemed like a good starting point since we both have an affinity for Team Ico's games but have never played them together, or ever really talked about them. Here was an area fertile for discussion that we could experince together for the first time, and get used to talking to each other on-air.

Interestingly, adding an extra person to the recording process didn't make it much more complicated. Last year I bought a Blue Snowball ICE which I've used a couple of times in my videos, which when placed on the desk in front of us picks up both voices easily without much of a drop in quality. It would have been harder to get audio to two different sets of headphones without some kind of splitter, but luckily I have a pair of Bang and Olufsen headphones with allow you to daisy-chain another set of headphones off them, so we were both able to listen to the audio from the game with minimal effort. Once again, I used the technique of running the HDMI audio from the console out of the back of the monitor and into the Line In of my PC, so we could just listen to the audio output from the computer itself.

Not everything was plain-sailing, though. Before we began recording the Roxio started misbehaving, causing Windows 10 to crash twice before I moved it to a different USB port and it seemed to calm down. That wasn't the last of the trouble though. When I hit the 'Stop Recording' button in the Roxio software I had a sudden thought about what happened to my last episode of Shadow of the Colossus, and quickly made a copy of the raw MT2S file before it was automatically deleted in the encoding step. This proved to be a smart move because whilst the encoding completed successfully some time later, about 6 minutes into the MP4 the audio disappeared!

Since I had made a backup I was able to create a new MP4, but this was a huge shock and I have resolved to never again use the MP4 recording option in the Roxio software; it's just too unreliable and when it fails, there's nothing I can do to recover the recording. Transcoding the raw file manually adds an extra step in the process, but being able to keep a backup in case of transcoding failure is vital.

I have no idea what caused it to fail this time. Originally I thought that making my own copy of the raw file was the cause; perhaps my copying the file interrupted the file stream in the encoder and caused some kind of unresolvable desync between the video and the audio. However after re-encoding the final MP4 still had a minor corruption at exactly the same point that the original MP4 lost audio, which you can see in the final video above. This suggests to me that there was a weird blip in the recording that the manual transcoding was mercifully able to handle.

I'm looking forward to diving further into the game, and continuing to develop the on-air rapport between Lux and myself. There were some really great moments between us (when we both say 'Whee!' when sliding down the chain being a highlight) and I know we'll have more in the future!

Jam Enslaver Plays...No Man's Sky LIVE

A couple of weeks ago I started playing the pen-and-paper RPG Stars Without Number online with some of my friends from the Games Only Podcast. If you haven't watched it yet the archive of the live stream is up on YouTube and I can recommend watching it: we've set up some really fun, unusual characters who's adventures I'm looking forward to discovering over the coming months.

Having to buy a webcam to be on Stars Without Number, and then highly enjoying the experience of doing the live stream itself, meant that I had started to think about doing my own live stream playing a game. The thing that was holding me back was the lack of a game I was really excited to play. The week before I had been accepted into the Gwent closed beta and thought it would be useful to show off that game, but since it's a multiplayer game I wasn't confident that I could talk about all the things I wanted to and also concentrate on playing the game.

Then on Sunday Hello Games released their first big update for No Man's Sky, a game I had really wanted to like but bounced off after only a few hours. As soon as I saw the news that they had added a substantial amount of content to the game I had the idea to run a live stream to find out what was the deal with this new patch.

Before I could do that I had to do some set up, which is why I'm writing a blog post about it. Firstly I should mention that I was using OBS since that seems to be the de-facto standard open-source application for setting up live streams. It allows easy combining of various different media sources including my webcam, the Roxio which I was using to capture footage from the PS4, and my microphone. I was even able to compose a couple of different 'scenes' before I started which allowed me to switch the view of the livestream to show off the cool artwork that Hello Games had put on their website to announce the patch. Once again I used the trick of piping the audio out of my monitor into the Line In port of my PC and using the listen functionality to be able to hear the sound of the game through the headphones plugged into the computer.

Since I'm still very new to live streaming I wasn't sure about what would happen to the video after I was done. I spent some time playing around with Twitch's settings and found a way of getting it to archive the stream, but I was also aware that the quality of that recording would be very dependent on how well my internet connection was behaving at the time. Luckily OBS has a really cool feature that allows it to record and stream at the same time, so I had a nice local copy once I was done that I could just upload directly to YouTube.

The only real problem I encountered was with using the webcam, which is understandable since this is the first time I was using it to record. For some reason OBS was recognising that the webcam was plugged in but not showing anything on-screen. The fix turned out to with setting OBS to use the camera's default resolution. Presumably the cheap webcam I bought doesn't present a usable default resolution that OBS can use and it was just showing nothing. Setting a custom resolution of 1080p solved the issue immediately.

Something I discovered after I had finished recording was a sync issue between the video from the webcam and the video from the Roxio. As I've mentioned in previous posts, the Roxio footage comes with a roughly 1 second lag. The footage on the webcam, on the other hand, has no noticeable lag and thus there are times in the video where I seem to react to things happening in the game before they actually happen. I'm going to experiment with introducing a lag to the webcam video to fix this issue, something that you can supposedly do in OBS. I'll report back following my next stream on how that goes!

I had a lot of fun doing this live stream and plan to do more in future! Look out for those soon. I'm also starting to think about what game I want to tackle for my next review...

Jam Enslaver Plays...Shadow of the Colossus - Episodes 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16

The final episodes of my journey through Shadow of the Colossus were largely uneventful from a technical perspective, until I got to the last episode. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but for some reason the two hour original episode that I recorded disappeared after the usual encoding step that the Roxio software does to turn it into an MP4. I suspect that my hard drive ran out of space as it was trying to write the new file.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the whole episode recorded perfectly well, and I even saw the video file sitting where it always does as an M2TS file, which Roxio uses for the conversion and then deletes. I suspect that the Roxio software wasn't written to expect file write errors and even though the newly encoded MP4 didn't get saved to the hard drive it went ahead and deleted the source file anyway!

Oh well, I recorded another episode which was much shorter and finished off the series. I've been thinking of a few ideas of what I'm going to do next, one of which is something not related to videos so I'll talk more about that when I have more to show. Other ideas for different video series that I might do are taking shape so we'll see what comes of that.

Thank you again for watching!

Cable Management: Improving Cooling in My Gaming PC, Part 2

So here was the situation: I had moved a couple of components around inside the computer to try and improve the flow of air coming into the case. Things had improved considerably, but 3DMark was still saying that at 92.6% framerate stability so there was still work to be done.

So many cables!

The most obvious thing to do was deal with the thick bundle of cables going through the middle of the case. I had used a cable tie to make it as narrow as possible but even at the thinnest part it had a diameter of about 2cm. I knew that at some point I wanted to tidy things up, and finding out that even with all the fans on the case I still wasn't getting enough cooling was motivation to put things right. There were two things in my way:

1. The CPU power cable that comes out of my power supply was only just long enough to reach the socket on the motherboard. In my old PC the PSU had been mounted at the top of the case so the cable didn't need to be very long, but UNICORN-31 has the PSU at the bottom.
2. I'm really bad with cable ties. I had a handful that came with the CPU cooler but had already wasted most of them trying to tie up cables and then realising I needed to move them!

Solving the first problem was pretty straight-forward: I just needed to buy an extension for the power cable, which I found on Newegg for about $3! Then I could run the cable through the cavity that the case creates behind the motherboard. I almost had a problem because the hole in the motherboard mounting plate was partially blocked by the motherboard itself, but with a bit of pushing I managed to get the surprisingly wide plug head through the gap and plugged in to the socket.

The obvious answer to the second problem is to just buy a whole bunch of cable ties, but I found something even better: reusable velcro ties! This was a huge help for me as it meant I was completely free to experiment with how I secured the cables and even tie things back temporarily whilst I worked with other cables. I really can't recommend them enough!

With this new-found confidence I tackled the bundle of cables. These could be broken up into a number of categories: main power cables for things like the motherboard itself and the video card, smaller auxiliary power cables for things like the hard drives and optical drive, fan control cables which run from the case fans and CPU cooler, and the myriad of tiny wires running from the control panel on the case that do things like make the power switch work or illuminate the hard-drive access LED. The goal of cable management is to have as much of the wires as possible sitting in the gap behind the motherboard, so step 1 was to untie the cables from each other and push them through the nearest hole.

It seemed like the obvious choice to tackle the bulky power cables first, especially the motherboard cable since it's probably thicker than all the other wires put together. I also have a lot of unnecessary wires of this type because the PSU is presumably designed to support a second graphics card, and also because my old case had a lot of LEDs which had their own dedicated power cable. As you can imagine, this proved to be the hardest part of the whole project. The gap for cables on this case isn't very wide, so anywhere were two of these thicker cables overlapped made it difficult to close the case. 

After about half an hour trying different ways of keeping the cables as separate as possible I decided to change tactics. Instead of running the excess of the main motherboard cable into the cavity, I used the small area in front of the power supply. I also ran the smaller power cables through this area and tucked them into the cap underneath the hard drive.

The last obstacle was the auxiliary power cables. The cables themselves are pretty thin but they have a number of fairly large plugs attached since they act kind of like wall outlets inside the computer (you can see one in the photo above, it has the white molex plugs attached). Again, my PSU has way more of these than I actually need as it has two such cables, each with four molex plugs. All the fan cases are connected to just one plug, and the optical drive needs a plug as well, which leaves two un-used on one chain and a whole other chain to spare! Eventually I found the perfect place: in the empty drive bay below the DVD drive, out of the way of the fans but still in a central position so that all the components that need them can be easily plugged in. After that it was easy to secure the smaller cables behind the motherboard and close the case!

Much better!

As you can see there are now no cables running through the main area of the case. You can see the larger cables tucked into the bottom, and some of the smaller cables through the larger hole in the motherboard plate. Not the tidiest case, perhaps, but much, much better than what I had before!

Now came the moment of truth: with the case still open I turned the power on to make sure everything was hooked up and working properly. At first everything seemed to be okay: the familiar beep from the system speaker and pattern of LEDs showed that the motherboard was happy. Then, I caught a whiff of something burning and panicked! Had I run a cable too close to something hot? Was something not seated properly? This could be really bad! No, as it turns out, my wife had chosen that exact moment to light a candle in the next room! After sharing a laugh and giving my heart enough time to climb back down out of my mouth, I checked everything out on the computer and found it to be working perfectly.

I had one more trick up my sleeve for improving the cooling, but wanted to see the results of my labour with the cables. Closing the case back up I ran another benchmark and was pleased to discover that 3DMark was now reporting a 99.6% frame rate stability (at some point I need to re-run this test because we had had the house's AC running for a while and the ambient temperature was much lower than when I had been experiencing problems). Not exactly a lot of room for improvement, but I had already spent the money on a fan card and wanted to see what difference it made.

I had never heard of adding extra fans to a computer before, let alone one that mounts into a PCI-slot and blows air upwards. It seems like most people use these to increase the flow of air into their GPU, but since my video card already has two pretty good fans I wanted to use this to improve cooling on the top of the card. I mounted it in the slot directly above the video card, close enough to suck the hot air away from the top of the card and blow it towards the output fans at the top of the case (as well as provide more air going into the CPU cooling tower. As you can see from the picture the card plugs into the standard molex power cables, which I had positioned in the nearby drive bay and thus reached easily.

Once again I ran the benchmark and was amazed to see the result now at 99.7%. My time working in my university physics labs tells me that this is probably not a statistically significant result, but pleasing nonetheless! I'm also very pleased that the fan card's LEDs are the same colour as the case fans.

So that's how I managed to sort out the cooling in my computer, only spending around $20 in total and just using a bit of common sense. Things have been working well on the computer since then, although I have yet to try out one of the games that was giving me the most trouble. I'll report back when I have more to talk about.

I hope this was informative and interesting for anyone else like me who's a novice with building computers and is a bit unsure how to proceed with cable management. It seems to make a much bigger difference than I expected, and is very much worth the time and effort.

Edit: I re-ran the stress test twice after a day of not having the AC on in the house, with an ambient temperature of 26°C and the results were 99.5% and 99.6%.

Air Flow: Improving Cooling in My Gaming PC, Part 1

It's been a couple of months since I built my computer, and recently I decided that I wasn't quite finished with it yet. I had just finished playing Uncharted 4, not quite ready to jump into a big commitment like the new Witcher 3 DLC, and I wanted to test out what the new rig could do. As it so happened, one of my friends had gifted me the new Mad Max game on Steam, so I decided to see how well UNICORN-31 coped when confronted with a triple-A video game not yet a year old.

The answer, it turns out, was not well. The game would run fine for about 60 seconds and then start to get awful frame-rate drops that made the game feel like it was running in slow motion! I tried fiddling with the graphics settings for a while but even on the lowest this still happened. I read up about it online, found a number of people with similar problems who all recommended different things, none of which worked for me, and decided that this was why PC games tend to be cheaper than console ones: sometimes your specific hardware setup is going to clash with the way the game is made and not work perfectly.

I moved on to another game, Divinity: Original Sin, which I've owned for a while and wanted to try out, especially since they released a free 'enhanced edition' upgrade some time last year. Things initially seemed good, the gorgeous 3D title screen running at a smooth 60fps. But once again, when in-game, things began to chug after a couple of minutes. Divinity doesn't have nearly so many knobs and sliders in its graphics options, but after trying a couple of variations I was still getting the same problem. From what I read online, my conclusion was that I had a problem with cooling: when first starting a game when the graphics card and CPU were cool everything was running smoothly, but as soon as things began to heat up inside the case performance would drop significantly. The message was clear: I needed to improve cooling inside my computer! 

One of the things I've learned at my time at Facebook is that if you're going to undertake a project, it's important to be able to measure its success. So the first thing I did was take advantage of the Steam sale and buy 3DMark, an application used to benchmark the performance of gaming PCs. It offers a few different functions, including a benchmark suite which renders various graphically intense scenarios and measures how well the system handles them, and a stress test in which it plays the same loop over and over again to show if system performance degrades over time. The results were much worse than expected: the benchmark ran around 10fps, and the stress test showed a stability of only 12% in framerate! I opened up the case and assessed my options.

The first thing that occurred to me was the position of the hard drives. Hard drive bays are always located towards the front lower part of a computer case, which means that they tend to be right in front of the main input fans. When building the computer I put my solid-state drive (SSD) in a lower slot and the hard-disc drive (HDD) above it (see picture), because I knew that platter-based hard drives actually create heat whereas solid-state drives do not and thus it would make more sense for the HDD to be in a more direct air-flow. I also left a gap between them because it matched up with the spacing of the plugs on the power cable. As a result, the bulky hard-drive was blocking one of the fans providing air-flow into the case! A quick swap relegated it to the bottom of the case and put the much smaller solid-state drive in the slot directly above it, meaning that the two input fans were now much less obstructed.

The second thing I looked at was the positioning of the video card. I had it mounted in the top-most PCI-slot, which meant that there was about a 2cm clearance between the top of the card and the CPU cooling tower. The GPU has a pair of built-in fans on the underside which blow air upwards into the heat-sink, which cools the underside of the card nicely. My thought was that with the top of the card so close to the cooling tower and with relatively little air blowing across it this side of the card might be getting too hot. So, I moved the GPU to the bottom PCI-slot, so that the top of the card would get more air blowing over it.

After closing up the case and running the stress test again, I was pleased to find that the stability was now 92% (the benchmark was still pretty low, but it's designed for much higher-end GPUs). Whilst that's a huge improvement over what was happening before, it's still not a pass according to 3DMark. There was still work to be done!

I decided that now was the time to actually make the effort to sort out the huge bundle of cables going through the middle of my computer case. As you can see from the picture, they form a trunk about 3cm in diameter at the widest point which can't help the air flowing from the front of the case. It's a bit hard to see but I also have the power cable for the CPU running diagonally from the bottom centre (where it comes out of the power supply) to the top left (where it plugs into the motherboard) because that's the only way the cable would reach! As a result, it touches both the GPU and the cooling tower, which doesn't seem like a good idea!

Look out for Part 2 where I'll talk about what I did to tidy up my cables, as well as add a bit more control to the flow of air through the case!

Jam Enslaver Plays...Shadow of the Colossus - Episodes 08, 09, 10 & 11

As expected, not a lot has changed in my recording setup for the last month, so I haven't had much to write about here! I'm planning on doing a bit more work on my PC very soon related to improving the cooling and finally sorting out the cables, but until then here are the latest four episodes.

Jam Enslaver Plays...Shadow of the Colossus - Episodes 06 & 07

My new recording setup continues to work well, especially in regards to how much more quickly it allows me to post new videos! Rendering times which used to be up in the 2 - 3 hour range are now a much more comfortable 30 minutes. Not only that, but a subtle other change has been that I no longer need to split up rendering of the videos.

The effects I use in the title sequence use a lot of layering and masking to create the effect of the video clip being inside the book. On my old system I would render this part separately first and then later incorporate it into the actual episode. Now, though, the system is powerful enough to do the whole thing in one go!

Building A New Computer: The Story of UNICORN-31

The time had finally come. DRAKE-22, the PC that I had bought in October 2007, which had taken me through four generations of Windows, which had moved with me countless times including all the way from London to San Francisco, was at last starting to stumble in its duties. Eight-and-a-half years is an extremely long time to own a computer, showing that my initial investment of over £2000 was well made, but with increasingly frequent system hangs and extremely long video-rendering periods it was time to put the old workhorse out to pasture and upgrade to a newer model.

I had never built a computer before because it sounded scary. Hearing people talk about applying thermal paste and being careful not to zap sensitive components with static electricity, it sounded like a recipe for spending a lot of money and ending up with a massive headache. There's an episode of Top Gear where the presenters have to put together a kit-car, upon which one of them observes "Would you drive a car built by us?" That neatly sums up how I felt about trusting myself to build the machine that I would go on to rely on for the best part of a decade.

Having completed the task I'm happy to say that it's not quite as scary as I had thought, but it did involve a lot of time, stress, frustration, worry and sore knees. Things did not go perfectly smoothly, but overall I'm glad of the experience. I learned a lot, and hopefully I can share some of that learning with other would-be DIY PC builders.

Parts

I'll start off by listing the parts that I used:

• Intel Core i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0 GHz CPU
• ASUS Z170-A motherboard
• DIYPC Gamemax-W White case
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU cooler
• G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 2 x 8GB DDR4 memory

Parts taken from the old machine

On top of these I re-used some components from my old machine:

• nVidia 760 GTX graphics card
• 250GB SSD and 250GB HDD
• 700W power supply
• DVD R/W drive

I was particularly keen to make use of the video card because I had only bought it a couple of years ago after the one I bought with the old computer started failing. I had thought about re-using the old RAM as well but since it was DDR2 it wouldn't have fit in the new motherboard.

Putting It All Together

The cooler and motherboard inside the case

Using the How Stuff Works guide to building a computer I worked for a few hours putting all the parts together. The step that I had been the most nervous about, applying the thermal paste, was actually not very difficult. The cooler I bought came with a tiny tube of paste so it would have been quite difficult to use too much. I knew I was aiming to get as even a layer as possible across as much of the CPU as possible to form a seal with the cooler above so I applied a blob in the middle of the CPU and then pressed the cooler on top. It was at that point that I realised I didn't know which direction the cooler should be facing (for anyone wondering, the fan should blow towards the back of the case). There was an anxious period where I was sliding and twisting the cooler on top of the CPU to get it into the correct orientation. In retrospect this might have actually helped get a thinner, more even layer of paste, but at the time I was quite worried about whether I had done it right.

Everything else was faily simple, for the most part it's impossible to plug something into the wrong socket on a motherboard. The main challenge was getting the motherboard into the case, which took a little bit of adjustment to get the ports on the back to line up with the faceplate on the case. After that most effort came from finding the right angle and positioning of the computer to reach in and hook up all the cables.

Troubleshooting

After many hours of fitting components into each other and finding the right socket for very, very tiny wires to fit into, it was time to power up the computer and see what happened.

I saw the case LEDs light up, heard the fans whir into action, but nothing on the screen. When you're tired and have spent a really long time working on something, there's nothing quite like the feeling that you're going to have to do it all over again. Or worse, that you need to spend more time figuring out what went wrong and fixing it, potentially having to deal with faulty components that need to be returned to the manufacturer for a refund. I spent another hour or so that night trying different things, including connecting my monitor up to all the different VGA plugs on the motherboard and video card in case I had the wrong one, and trying different SATA ports for the hard drives. No luck, and eventually I accepted defeat knowing that it would be much easier to continue in the morning after I had had a chance to rest and calm down.

What I did glean from that first evening's frantic work was that the How Stuff Works guide is tremendously unhelpful for the average person trying to figure out why the computer they just built isn't working. The main point of their troubleshooting section is to try to figure out if any components are broken by swapping them out for others. I don't know about you, but I don't have an extra CPU or motherboard lying around for this purpose.

I spent most of the night worrying about what the problem might be. Maybe I had seated the CPU incorrectly, or applied too much thermal paste. Maybe the CPU had been broken when I fitted the cooler; it had seemed to apply a very large amount of force when all the screws were in place. Perhaps the motherboard had a fault somewhere. My imagination had no shortage of ideas for things that could have gone wrong.

The next morning I looked around online and found a check-list that someone had written, and as it turns out this was much more helpful. So helpful in fact that I only needed to follow the first step. This step was very simple: read the motherboard manual carefully. I hadn't really considered this before because I was following a guide, but on opening the manual I discovered pretty much everything I needed to figure out what was going wrong. The motherboard had various small LEDs on it that would light up red to show if something wasn't working, and I was able to use these in conjunction with the manual to figure out that the CPU was actually fine and it was the memory that was the problem. This was surprising because I've installed RAM numerous times before and never had a problem, which is why I didn't try re-doing it the day before.

After re-seating the RAM the computer was finally able to complete its power-on self test (POST), and then it was on to easier things like installing Windows 10 and copying all my backed-up data from an external hard drive onto the new computer.

The Name

I like to name my computers, using a scheme that I came up with years ago that has actually proved quite useful since it gives me an idea of how long I've had a particular machine. My first gaming rig was DRAKE-22, so called because I was 22 years old at the time, and because it was an Alienware and I had just learned what the Drake equation was.

I already had a name picked out for the new machine. I had decided to get a white case because I wanted a change and liked how it looked, and so I was thinking of a white knight motif and calling it KNIGHT-31. However, when everything was finally put together and working, and I plugged in the wireless adaptor to the USB ports on the top of the case to start downloading updates, the right name was immediately obvious.

Thus, UNICORN-31 got its name.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, my main piece of advice for anyone building a PC:

READ THE MOTHERBOARD'S MANUAL

I know it seems like a lot of stuff you don't need to know but it's actually very helpful throughout the whole process. Not only will it explain what all the lights and indicators are on the motherboard, it will also direct you immediately to the right connector for every other component. Mine even had decent instructions on how to install most parts which would have been helpful if I had seen them before I started.

I've been using the computer for over a week now and am very pleased with the performance boost. Episode 05 of Shadow of the Colossus demonstrated just how much more powerful the CPU in UNICORN-31 is than that in DRAKE-22: the 32 minute episode rendered in about 26 minutes, a dramatic improvement from the 3 hours that the old computer took to render an episode of similar length.

I'm sure that I'll continue to tinker with things over time, but for now I'm glad to have completed my first ever PC build.

Jam Enslaver Plays...Shadow of the Colossus - Episode 05

Episode 05, the first video created using my new computer! As promised, I have a dedicated post about the building of that computer that's almost ready so look out for that soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this latest episode.

Jam Enslaver Plays...Shadow of the Colossus - Episode 04

Here it is: the last video produced from my old PC. It's the end of an era...

The replacement is mostly complete, I just have a couple of extra things to do with it before I finally do up the screws on the back of the case and say it's done. I'll be posting about my experience building a computer for the first time fairly soon, and hopefully the inaugural video of the new computer will be up this weekend.