Gaming

I’ve finished the game last night. I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. It was, to be very honest, a transformative experience, as far as videogames go. I understand why some people hate it and I’m sorry because I understand how much it sucks when you want to enjoy something but can’t. Art is subjective and no one is right or wrong.

That said, I want to talk about what I’ve experienced. Again, this is my experience with the game. I’m sure yours will be different and it is fine. If you hate this game, you’re not wrong. You feel what you feel.

With that out of the way, let me begin with the least controversial theme: the gameplay.

Gameplay

I thought the gameplay was an improvement on the first game. I don’t mean only the added functionality like ropes, and dogs tracking you. But the mission structures were more varied and some of them were, well, epic.

The sky bridge was awesome. So was trying to get near the sniper (Tommy) by advancing behind cover. The stalkers were a fun addition which gave me a lot of jump scares. That huge new infected monster at ground zero was… argh! Kill it now! The entire time spent on the seraphite island was amazing.

I also loved little things like figuring out the code for the safes.

The Story

This is what is dividing people, and it’s fine. Art that everybody agrees on is boring. The way I see the story, it is one of mirrored character journeys (as much of popular culture is.) Through three characters, we see the same journey at different points. I think this is genius. Here’s how I figure.

Joel

First all all, yes, it sucked to see him killed. That’s the point: we are supposed to be angry that he’s dead, that he’s killed in such a way. This is very much intended: it puts us in the place of Ellie. It is perfectly expected that you’d feel rage towards his killers. I think it becomes a problem when that rage is instead directed towards the game itself, a work of fiction, because then it makes it really hard to appreciate the rest of it.

Let’s talk about his character journey, shall we? In the first part, we meet Joel at the onset of the pandemic. We don’t know much about him before then but all signs point to an average joe and a good dad. Then his daughter gets murdered and we skip 20 years, by which time we are to understand that Joel is not a good man anymore. We learn that he was a killer, a robber, smuggler. He says he killed innocent people, he robbed (and presumably killed) good samaritans. He absolutely did not care for Ellie in the least at first. He wanted to abandon her to the soldiers and run when they caught up to them in Boston. It was Tess who made him stop.

In the first game, Joel was a “bad person,” a broken man who then had his redemption by protecting (and ultimately caring for) Ellie. (More on the “bad person” in quotes later.)

Abby

Abby’s journey is the same as Joel’s. Her dad gets murdered by a smuggler and that breaks her. She becomes a bad person. We’re made to understand that prior to the events in Seattle, she was a cold-hearted killer. She rose though the ranks of the WLF by becoming the “top scar killer” and even her friends think she’s, to steal Mel’s description, piece of sh*t. She’s a murderer.

And then comes Lev. At first, she too doesn’t care too much. He is just a scar. You see how Abby dehumanizes the seraphites all the time, the difficulty she has with ever calling them anything other than “scars.” She leaves them there but then she feels guilty and, reluctantly at first, goes back to them.

Abby was a “bad person” who had her redemption by protecting and caring for Lev. In a way, Abby’s journey is what we would have seen if we were able to follow Joel through those 20 skipped years.

Ellie

This is where things get interesting. Ellie is living in Jackson the life that Joel and Abby lived before their own traumatic events. When Joel dies, this matches the deaths of Joel’s daughter and Abby’s father. This is where Ellie is going to turn bad.

And we see that transformation unfold. We see our Ellie slowly go down the same path that Abby and Joel took years before and that we never got to see. She is consumed by rage.

Ellie is now becoming a “bad person” as well. But she’s not all the way there yet.

She’s also consumed by remorse. When she tortures Nora, she comes back to Dina visibly shaking and saying “I made her talk…” She’s devastated about what she’s done. Later she kills Owen and pregnant Mel, and again, that breaks her. And yet, she cannot stop.

Ellie vs Abby: why didn’t Ellie kill her?

The final confrontation is amazing. Abby is now in a different place, she’s now where Joel was after Ellie. It’s hard for us to forgive her, because we have seen her kill Joel, but nevertheless, that’s the place she is in. When Ellie cuts her down from that beach post, her first reaction is to run and cut Lev down. Lev is her Ellie. She doesn’t want to fight Ellie, she only wants to save Lev, just like Joel only cared about saving Ellie at the end.

But Ellie still can’t let go. She needs this! Or so she thinks. And so they fight. The fight fell heavy and, to me, very real. It was amazing and painful to watch and even worse to participate in. I did not want to fight Abby. All I wanted was for those two women to find peace now.

And then Ellie is about to kill her and she remembers Joel. More specifically, she remembers her very last conversation with Joel, about her inability to forgive but willingness to try. She also sees the changed man, who changed for and because of her, the man who went from “bad” to a “good” person. Killing Abby — who’s now on her own redemption path — will only turn Ellie into the bad person that Abby and Joel were.

And Ellie stops the cycle. She will not go down the same road. She honours Joel by refusing to become a bad person, something Joel would never have wanted for her. She will honour Joel by going back to the life both of them wanted for her.

Will she get it? Will JJ and Dina be waiting back in Jackson? We may never know, but I sure hope so.

“Bad people”

I think the biggest takeaway for me in this painful, yet wonderful journey of a game is how none of the protagonists were good or bad. Everybody is the hero of their own story. Since we played the first game as Joel with Ellie, that is our story and we are entirely on their side. But they were not “good,” not when it comes to the many lives they took over the course of their journey. We saw all those kills as completely justified: they were goons, they were going to shoot us! But then, from their perspective, they were doing the same thing we were. And the thing is, that doesn’t mean everyone is equally justified. It only means that from their own points of view, Ellie and Joel were the villains.

If doesn’t matter if we believe Joel was justified in taking Ellie from the hospital: from the point of view of Abby, her loving dad was murdered. It’s also not about convincing you and me that there are not moral absolutes. It’s that none of this matters to the characters themselves.

Conclusions

Again, I’ve finished this game almost 24 hours ago and I am still thinking about it. This game made me feel so many feelings. It made me mad, sad, and happy. Art that gets you to feel something is, well, good art in my book.

If you hated this game, it’s fine. We can’t all love the same thing. I am not trying to convince anyone, just sharing what I felt. I absolutely loved it with all my heart. This game will stay with me for a long time.

Even though I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program for over a year, I have only barely explored the outer kerbolar system. I have been around Jool before and I have even landed on Laythe but never managed to make a round trip until this week.

Traveling all the way to Jool’s moon Laythe and back is not easy^{[citation needed]}. It’s not so much getting there—although that’s not trivial, either—but we want to land on Laythe and we want to get back to orbit later: that takes a lot of fuel.

This is my adventure.

Mission Overview

The Kerbal Air and Space Agency (KASA) will be sending two separate missions: the Laythe Recovery System (LARS) and the Laythe Orbital Landing System (LOLS). The LARS stack is controlled by an automated probe and its function is to carry fuel for the travel back.

Although huge, it is only as heavy as it needs to be to deliver fuel, lacking scientific instrumentation and communication systems other than the Clamp-O-Tron’s acquisition signal.

The second stack is LOLS, which will carry a 3-kerbal crew, the lander itself, and all the scientific instruments: a gravioli detector, a termometer, a barometer, and a Mystery Goo™.

The two stacks will launch a couple of days between them and will meet in orbit around Jool over two years later. LOLS will then rendezvous with LARS, dock, and transfer any remaining fuel from its tanks and then drop its large tank before the LARS will then make the Hoffman transfer to Laythe¹.

LARS Launch and Trans-joolian Insertion Burn

The first of the two missions to launch was LARS, the rationale being that if something were to go wrong later that prevented the LOLS launch, LARS could wait in Jool orbit for the several years until a new interplanetary window opened to allow LOLS—or its successor—to go rendezvous with it. It would be harder to keep a Kerbal crew waiting there².

Also, to minimze the risks, LARS was launched as soon as the window opened, allowing for more time to deal with any issues with LOLS later. This resulted in a night launch.

Showing that LARS was not too heavy, it quickly started accelerating towards terminal velocity and we lower the thrust to about 80% so we don’t waste fuel fighting drag.

At 7300m we start the roll program to begin gaining horizontal speed. A little later, just passing the 10,000m mark our two first boosters run dry and we have a beautiful separation.

At its parking altitude of 240Km, the probe circularizes its orbit and, as Robert Heinlein would have said it, we are halfway to anywhere³.

About 2 hours after settling in its parking orbit, LARS is GO for TJI. This burn adds the 1,907m/s delta-V needed for LARS to reach Jool.

After the burn is done, LARS is on its way. Time to remember to extend our four Gigantor solar panels to ensure the probe will have power in its journey⁴.

With LARS now on the way, the KSP staff turns its attention to their next mission: LOLS.

LOLS Launch and Trans-joolian Insertion Burn

LOLS presents its own set of challenges. It is considerably heavier than LARS because not only it carries a similar amount of fuel—which it will spend much more quickly due to the extra mass—but it also adds the crew, large capsule, and scientific instrumentation.

With the greater weight, the engines struggle to lift off the launch pad. It takes almost 20 seconds to clear the flag pole by the pad.

It never comes close to terminal velocity while in the atmosphere and the throttle remains at 100% all the way. It begins roll program at 7300m and has barely accelerated past the 200m/s mark at this point.

After another beautiful separation, the speed is mounting a bit faster now…

… but it still takes a while. As well, although LARS managed to reach orbit on its second stage alone–albeit running on fumes at the end—, LOLS had to rely on the third stage to reach orbit, spending half its fuel tank.

About 90 minutes after reaching the parking orbit, LOLS is GO for TJI. Delta-V needed is 1,904m/s.

Over a million kilometers behind LARS, LOLS is now on its way for the long, nearly-two-year-long journey to Jool.

Deep space Transfer

During the long transfer period spend after escaping Kerbin’s sphere of influence and before the encouter with Jool, the crew does some science.

Tonmen Kerman goes EVA for a while and reports back to Kerbin. They also do a crew report and use the gravioli detector for some extra science production.

The original plan was to have LARS arriving first and waiting for LOLS to arrive. That would make sense as LARS is an automated probe while LOLS is carrying actual kerbals. That is why mission control⁵ naïvely launched LARS first. As it turns out, it was a mistake.

As you can see in this picture, LARS is indeed ahead of LOLS. However, due to their positions in relation to Jool itself, LOLS ends up getting caught by the Jool sphere of influence before LARS. This caught mission control by surprise and almost ended the mission as all its attention was on the LARS approach and only by sheer dumb luck they noticed LOLS encountering Jool SOI.

In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. In the 1-2 days following the launch of LARS, Kerbin and Jool were moving in relation with each other. Kerbin, having a much lower orbit than Jool’s, was moving faster and since it was “behind” Jool, this meant both planets were actually getting closer to each other so LOLS had a slightly shorter trip than LARS. That’s orbital mechanics for you.

LOLS Aerobreaking and Joolian Orbit Insertion Burn

One year, 270 days into the mission, LOLS, already deep inside the joolian SOI, maneuvered to adjust its periapsis to 110Km above Jool. Jool’s atmosphere begins at around 138Km of its sea level, which is not that much considering how big the planet is. But that atmosphere is very dense, which is good for aerobreaking, saving us some precious fuel.

Two days later, LOLS reaches Jool…

… and falls 30Km into its dense atmosphere for some heartstopping aerobreaking.

Mission control found 105Km to be a great aerobreaking altitude as LOLS re-emerged from the atmosphere with an apoapsis of a tad over 500Km, which required very little delta-V during the Joolian Orbit Insertion burn to reach the desired parking orbit of 400Km. The crew adjusted their apoapsis and periapsis and waited for the LARS to arrive. This was the early hours of 1y 273d MET⁶.

LARS Aerobreaking and Joolian Orbit Insertion Burn

Twenty seven days after the arrival of LOLS in Jool, LARS enters Jool’s SOI. LARS will try for an approach with a periapsis a little lower: 105Km. The 5Km difference doesn’t sound much but considering the density of Jool’s atmosphere, it makes a difference.

Despite mission control’s best efforts to point it retrograde, LARS insisted in going nose first.

LARS leaves the atmosphere with a apoapsis of a little under 400Km, again leaving little delta-V for the JOI burn. It parks at 280Km. This is 1y 386d MET, meaning the intrepid kerbal crew waited in orbit for 113 days for LARS, even though their total mission time so far was a little under 2 days shorter than LARS’.

Rendezvous and Docking

As soon as LARS settled in its parking orbit, the LOLS crew starts working on the rendezvous maneuver. A good encounter happens after 5 orbits around Jool.

Once docked, the crew transfers all the fuel remaining on the LOLS main tank to LARS and ejects it. From now on, LARS will be doing the heavy lifting of the Trans-laythean Injection.

Trans-laythean Injection and Laythean Orbit Injection

(I mentioned early on that rendezvous in Jool orbit proved to be a mistake. The why might become more clear from this picture.)

The two small extra boosters added to LOLS made it a bit too much for the Clamp-O-Tron docking port to hold. When LARS ignited its engine for TLI, the centre of mass shifted slightly but enough to make LOLS wobble and put on too much stress on the docking port, which then broke. (Thankfully I had quicksaved just before the burn and was able to recover.)

The crew slowly pushes on the throttle to ease on the clamp-o-tron stress. Same thing during LOI: easy on the throttle. The crew and mission control also agreed to skip the aerobreaking, the rationale being that Laythe’s atmosphere is low (55Km) and not very dense so it would probably not help them all that much and they did not want to put on more stress on the docking port.

Undocking LOLS and Landing

At this point, the crew transfers fuel from the LARS main tank to the three LOLS tanks and undocked. Time to land.

Laythe is touch to land for two basic reasons:

1. It’s almost entirely made of oceans, with some relatively small islands and continents; and also
2. The islands and continents are rough! Lots of mountains and steep slopes.

The crew ultimately picked the continent that looks sort of like a large ‘C’ with an internal sea.

(It took me a few tries and one big scare as just before landing I noticed a deep valley just ahead.)

LMP Donbro Kerman uses the retro rockets plus the parachutes to slow the LOLS down and slowly descend.

He also has to rotate LOLS around to make sure it lands in a way to prevent it from tumbling over the slope.

It all ends well though, as Commander Roley Kerman steps out of LOLS and steps on Laythe.

Laythe Base

The crew has to remain on the surface until the next interplanetary window before they could go back to Kerbin, which means: time for some science! With some gravioli detection, temperature and barometric measurements, EVA reports, crew reports, Mystery Goo™ observation, and some surface samples, the LOLS crew gets well over a thousand science points.

And they had some fun too, like this little night rave or whatever. This is Donbro standing by the lander legs while Tomner jumps by the flag.

Commander Roley was asleep and missed the shenanigans. Probably for the best.

Takeoff and rendezvous

After a couple of years on Laythe, the crew was eager to go back home.

LOLS rendezvous with LARS, which patiently waited all these years in orbit.

The crew now transfers the remaining fuel from the LOLS tank to LARS’ and jettisons it. Time to go home.

The jorney home

The jorney back is largely uneventful, starting with the transfer from Laythe back to Jool. Now that they got rid of the LOLS tanks, the Clamp-O-Tron docking port is more than capable of holding the capsule in place.

Back in orbit around Jool, LARS is GO for Trans-Kerbal Injection.

And the long journey back to Kerbin is now underway.

Two years later, the crew maneuvers to reach Kerbin with a periapsis of 30Km for some heavy aerobreaking.

They reemerge from Kerbal atmosphere with an apoapsis of almost 2,000Km and running of fumes. The remaining fuel is then used to lower the apoapsis a little bit without changing the periapsis too much. This made sure that on the second periapsis pass, the stack will not make it out of the atmosphere again.

At this point, mission control tries for a bonus mission objective. They plan to land both the LOLS capsule and the LARS rockets at the same time and try to recover the LARS hardware costs. After they stop burning in the reentry, the LOLS capsule undocks from LARS and mission control constantly switch between the two to try and land both.

Unfortunately, saving the LARS was a failure. As soon as the parachutes opened, LARS disintegrated, leaving only the RCS tank and docking port to slowly land.

The LOLS capsule on the other hand had a beautiful descent.

After LOLS splashed down, the capsule, its science payload, and its crew were successfuly recovered. Mission accomplished!

The remaining LARS parts were found to not be recoverable.

A few closing remarks

I was pretty pleased to have completed my longest mission yet. Still, a few things I would have changed.

I wasted fuel by not aerobreaking in Laythe. Also, I am sure there is an optimal altitude that I could have reached Jool for a better aerobreaking. I did try several but going even a bit under 105Km seemed to be too much as the ship never came back out of the atmosphere. A little over 110Km and the apoapsis would end up in the millions of kilometers.

Another thing is that I made the hop in Jool orbit between Kerbin and Laythe. I am not sure it is possible but I think I will try in the future to go directly to Laythe. It must be terribly difficult but a scenario would be to arrive in such an angle that you could aerobreak in Jool and come out with a path leading to Laythe directly, hopefully with some extra aerobreaking. This would be optimal but would require a lot of precision. I don’t think I could make it but it sure sounds like it would be fun.

I should also have scheduled the LOLS-LARS rendezvous to happen in orbit around Laythe instead of Jool to avoid the wobbly lander problem. The LOLS was low on fuel by that time though, so I am not really sure I could have pulled it off anyway.

And I could have taken at least one more Mystery Goo™ as I could have observed it in orbit aroud Laythe for some extra points.

And finally, I love this game so much. You learn more every time you play it. This whole thing, including designing both stacks and doing some testing, was done over the course of a few days, mostly last weekend with the return from Laythe to Jool and then Kerbin done over a couple of nights this week.

I thank Squad for this great game.

May your solar panels be always unobstructed.

UPDATE: this whole story was created way before KSP 1.0 came out. The aerobreaking maneuvers here would not have worked due to the lack of heat shields. As well, a scientist kerbal in the crew would solve my issue above with only taking a single Mystery Goo™ as kerbal scientists can reset experiments in flight.

Last night, as I tried getting my three year-old to sleep so I could play my brand-new copy of NHL 13, I had an epiphany of sorts. It dawned on me how much videogames influenced my real-life pleasures. And the story actually started a long time ago.

Of the games we bought, only one I can still remember: NHL Hockey. To that day, I had only a general idea of what hockey was: Soccer on the ice. We picked it simply because the clerk there told us it was good.

Back to how it influenced my real-life, playing the game got me into Hockey as a sport. A Brazilian hooked on Hockey? Not supposed to happen, but one likes what one likes. It also indirectly started my love affair with Canada, but that’s a different story. Following Hockey was not easy until I found a radio that streamed games and later the League started offering live vide streaming for which I have been gladly paying an exorbitant amount of money for half a decade or so. I’ve experienced a similar effect thanks to the Madden and NBA Live series, but NHL Hockey will always be a special case for me.

I realized that thru hockey I’ve made friends, some of whom are real good friends. And all of this started because a couple of decades ago we got some pirated games in a Saturday afternoon.

Want to make a comment or suggestion? Do you feel like you need to correct me for not fitting the Standard Brazilian Specification? Feel free to talk to (or scream at) me, I’m @robteix on App.net and also on Twitter.