T w e n t y S i d e d
I learned some useful lessons from the last labyrinthine expanse of killpits and misery-chasms I was purposelessly trapped in. Firstly, a mechanic that shows you where you’re going to jump doesn’t make sense in a game with lots of jumping puzzles unless that mechanic turns out not to work, in which case it makes the worst kind of sense. Secondly, I should start checking my map more often.
Without as many elevation changes and overlapping tunnels, this level’s map approaches usable. The trick is to point yourself like a torpedo at any suspiciously blank parts and once you arrive, aggressively frisk every piece of scenery and lootbag there until a hidden door skulks open or a teleporter kicks in or a candlestick asks a riddle or some other whimsical dungeon bullshit.
Speaking of which:
That hopscotch thunderdome is what stands between me and the latest stretch of frontier. At this point, my standing jump can reach clear from stone to stone, which is a good thing, because this game’s running jumps require:
- Waiting for the icon to spool out some…
- …which is a slow, tedious, and not thoroughly precise process.
- Running…
- …at which point the icon completely changes to represent a different level of progress, so you’ll need a couple seconds lead-in run time to get your bearings, except by that point it’ll be somewhere different or it will have reached its limit and reset for some reason.
- Releasing WHILE RUNNING…
- …because if you stop even for an instant all momentum is chucked down the memory hole. Fortunately, it does not matter in which direction you are running–it’s all added to forward momentum. Much of the time I’m forced to boogie in circles on a small platform to get my yardage correct.
- Praying…
- …because if the game takes a giddy frame of mind, you’ll cant a few degrees off or a foot short and bounce on some magma.
But I don’t have to worry about all that right now. I step to the edge, measure out a series of standing hops, and before long find myself safe and sound stuck in the wall.
There’s a lot of those floating-sigil-of-buggroff thingies I ran into back in CH1 blocking off archways with monsters and treasure on the other side. Attempting to enter without the right daedric fetishes or shibboleths or whatever means sucking down a semilethal dose of magical energy. Annoyingly enough, even approaching the archways has the same effect–in one very important junction of this level, the one you’ll wear holes in once you get lost, there’s an archway just a few feet to the left of one of the regular and safe and very common entrances. So whenever you come there, if you’re a half-step too far to the left of the very middle of the doorway, you get thrown like a horseshoe and lose three-quarters of your health. Or die.
The new spider daedra are actually pretty thick on the ground out here. They’re faster than the vermai and less prone to bombing themselves to bits than my friends the dremora, which I guess makes them my number one adversary–certainly my number one source of trips to the loading screen. Considering how badly I outclass everything else, I sort of wonder how I’d fare against these guys if I was a mortal instead of a mutant steak.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one having basic movement troubles.
Picture that gif with the occasional point-black dremora nuking and you’re beginning to see how I hold my own in here. Say what you want about this game, but the awful broken griefing nonsense is matched equally by awful broken benisons.
Speaking of benisons…
If you’re wondering if the game’s babealicious softcore female avatar was a misguided stab at nonsexual nudity, you shouldn’t. You should never assume that about 90s Bethesda. This is the era of Daggerfall, where an illuminati of naked squatting women ran the taverns, swimwear was formal wear, and you could tell a rogue by the hood she wore over her bra and loincloth. And this, apparently, is how they like their female daedra: recognizably human, stacked, tanned, hips cocked, busting out of a barely-laced swooping fetish vest and handsbreadth loincloth (which also seems to be laced, for some compellingly confusing reason) paired with thigh-high club boots. It’s full-blast pandering as usual, which I’d normally just find somewhat obnoxious, but…uh…
Boy, I’m not looking forward to this. We’ll get into it next chapter.
Hey, look what I found! A spider daedra with a proper name. It’s hidden in a side room and actually wants to talk to me, which is a welcome change of pace. I like to pick the nonviolent options with daedra whenever possible to see if it goes anywhere, which so far it really hasn’t–it’s a choice between learning something you already figured out or getting into a fight, which you might as well do anyway. Maybe this guy will be different. Let’s settle in for another Spireside Chat.
I admit to being more preoccupied with the puzzle that got me into this room. Not because it was hard, but because it was easy and yet for some reason super hard. I realize that’s confusing, so let me clarify: I’d solved it long before I actually solved it.
The “puzzle” is that there’s an obvious secret door. You open it by pressing a button on the other side of a coffin. You move the coffin by hitting the “use” key. I figured that out pretty much as soon as I walked into the hallway–so then I tried that. Didn’t work. Which meant I moved on and was lost and confused for like half an hour before I thought to, I dunno, try moving that weird coffin again.
Sooner or later I’m really going to have to get into how the use key in this game is a broken, buggy pile of…
…of…
Wait, what’s he talking about? What did I just…
…
I just fucked a spider daedra.
NEXT WE–WHAT IS THIS GAME? WHAT IS THIS GOD DAMN GAME??
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
That really explains the expression on your avatar’s face. That is the face of a man who knows that he has daedric spider sex in his future.
…
Goddammit, Rutskarn.
Goddammit Rutskarn I’m at work. That cotton eye joe bit almost killed me.
Nice demon-arachnid-shaming, Rutskarn.
#effyourbeautystandards
It’s just that she’s not leggy enough for him.
She? I see no female arachnid folk.
ZZ Top wrote a song about this.
Did you check its tumblr page before gendering it? Huh? How do you know how that thing identifies?
The main thing with misgendering somebody, once the person says, “Uh, actually, I prefer [x]”–which especially if they’re doing so in person, takes quite a bit of courage–is to just take it in smoothly. Try to use the right pronoun from then on, and if you screw up, try to correct yourself quickly or just apologize.
Using a preferred pronoun isn’t magically different from every other human social convention–pronouncing a foreign name, acknowledging a name change due to marriage or the course of therapy, not staring at a wart. It’s natural and sometimes even inevitable to make mistakes, but simple decency dictates you make an effort.
Warts are easy.Its moles that are the bane of existence.
This game is amazing…
Hrm…
1: That daedra looks decidedly male (both the spider bits as well as the human bits), so who really did the fucking?
2: Assuming the daedra IS male, I wonder if he would be open to you cannibalizing him post-coitus?
If you think it’s embarrassing to get sidetracked with a puzzle story and forget about the sex you just had, just imagine how silly you look if you snap back in halfway through gnawing your way through your partner’s lungs.
“I don’t remember signing up for this, but to be honest it’s the kind of thing I always expected would happen someday.”
Whoa there!When did this turn into a hentai game?
Oh, in about five minutes?
They are chucking shadow balls?
Hold on…Your male character fucked a male spider-demon?Are you telling me that a game from the 90s,a BETHESDA game from the 90s,was so trivially open about homosexuality?!?!Bethesda is the company that broke the inclusion barrier?In a game where every female is naked and with boobs the size of pluto,they had casual gay sex?BESTIALITY gay sex?
Please tell me that that was just some unfortunate accidental innuendo,because otherwise Id have to accept that I live in a world where BETHESDA is the most progressive video game publisher.
No, I’m pretty sure that is the world in which we live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjnZO5ZgWE8
Does accidental progressiveness count?
Not due to any progressive mindset or moral stance though. It’s just that they don’t care and it allows them to get away with coding fewer checks of the player character’s gender.
Bethesda: “Our laziness is often mistaken for progressiveness”
Sort of like the polyamorous relationships in Fallout 4.
On the one hand,it is kind of lazy.On the other hand,not even considering that your players will care whether the npc they encounter is straight or not is kind of enlightened.
You’re not even wrong. In 2002, when same-sex relationships were still scantily presented even by the Black Isle/Bioware axis, Morrowind featured a prominent questgiver who harassed you, demeaned you, and forced you to disrobe for him whether you were male or female.
Bethesda: breaking new ground in intensely creepy but equal-opportunity sexual encounters that, coincidentally, allowed for fewer lines of code.
Don’t forget he wrote a book about how he wants to fuck lizardpeople, using the power of awkward innuendo and euphemisms.
Also don’t forget the hymns of Vivec (or was it the apocrypha?), and the lovely chat you can have with the corprus researcher about his attendants.
Come to think of it, there’s quite a bit of genuinely weird stuff buried in Bethesda’s games. It’s got more discreet (i.e. not directly involved in the second act of the main quest and onwards anymore) as time’s gone on and they’ve attracted a wider audience and a bigger spot in the public eye, but – yeah. I always assumed it was just because they had to fill all that open world space with something, but after Rutskarn’s character’s adventure with the amazing spider man here I’m not so sure.
I wonder if slipping that stuff under the radar is the sub-writers (or whatever they call the literary equivalent of code monkeys, the people who have to flesh out the details, make up extra side-quests to boost the game’s playtime, and write all those damn textboxes) passive-aggressive way of rebelling against the weak, predictable and sometimes just plain incoherent main quest plotlines for which Bethesda is justly infamous.
Actually, Bethesda was beaten to the punch by a game from the 80s which featured not just gay sex, but gay marriage. The name eludes me, but it was some “Rescue kidnapped royalty” generic adventure, only late in development they added the option to play a female character, without either remembering or bothering to change the ending cutscene where you marry the princess.
It’s amazing what you can get away with when basically nobody’s looking.
Whats a gypsy?
I’m not entirely sure.
What’s a Paladin?
That’s nothing. If you have Sherry the mouse in your party you can get HER to sleep with the gypsies.
That’s exactly why I never join House Hlaalu anymore…
That and House Telvanni is already hard enough to get respect from.
Even if – no, especially if you sign on with them.
Though I will say in their defense that none of the other houses recognised my character’s potential for keeping perishables at a constant level of humidity.
In fairness to Black Isle, Arcanum (a game from 2001) actually had a fairly prominent gay romance option with one NPC.
Arcanum was Troika.
Well you’d include them in Ruts’ theoretical Bioware-Black Isle axis I suppose.
Not to mention the Daggerfall version of “The Real Barenziah” has a quite detailed Dark Elf – Khajiit sex scene in it. Obviously that section of the book was removed in future games, but when Daggerfall was made Bethesda must have had a weird person doing part of their lore.
Ultima 7 also had some possible same-sex encounters. But the Avatar can claim it doesn’t count, because travelling through the moongate from Earth to Britannia apparently restores one’s virginity.
I’m not so sure this should be counted as being inclusive rather than vilifying?
So far in this game, same sex attraction is literally being attributed to monster demons (the only other opportunity for equal treatment were the character portraits and monster designs, ie opportunities not taken).
I think if its capable of speech, and therefore of expressing its own wishes, it wouldn’t be correct to call sex with it “bestiality.” Inter-species sex, certainly, but I think “bestiality” is reserved for animals – i.e. life forms incapable of offering consent.
By that definition, it really shouldn’t be any more objectionable than sex between a human and an elf, or a human and an orc – both of which have long precedent within tropey fantasy, given the prevalence of “half-elves” and “half-orcs” (though I suppose the latter might be the product of rape slightly more often than average).
Give it the ole’ Harkness Test:
http://i.imgur.com/6jp4DVK.png
I don’t think this was meant to be inclusive or progressive. Imagine the kind of people who made the rest of this game. Battlespire is supposed to capture the feel of one of their tabletop games. This is a joke. They’re reaction to this would be “haha you’re gay. You fucked a gay spider cuz you’re gay. Roll to save against spider AIDS.”
That last gif might as well be the banner for the serious. It’s a great summary of events.
I assume you mean “banner for the series”.
Geddan yureru mawaru fureru setsunai kimochi!
Futari de issho ni nemuru wintalan!
Rip and tear, until it is done.
Wait, wrong bethesda. Oh god so very wrong context.
I have seen the gates of Oblivion…
nope, still wrong Bethesda, but I think I’m onto something.
I think the protagonist always knew it would come to this. Something in his eyes just gave that vibe…
That female daedra lives in a dungeon. How is she tanned? Does she lie by the lava?