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Firewatch |OT| With Me

Afro

Member
Game was somewhat of a letdown for me, sadly. I was hoping I'd be doing basic forest ranger type duties/fetch quests while the story unfolded.

Would've been fun to have a checklist of missions/tasks to complete like finding and replacing a fuse to restore power in the tower, planting seedlings, finding unlicensed hunters and writing them a citation, helping trapped animals, clearing trails, finding spare parts to fix vehicle motor, reporting random fires via radio, tracking bear prints, etc. etc. all with unique animations, funny dialogue and fuckups/mistakes from being brand new to the job.

The animations were very nice, albeit sparse, which is why I would've loved interacting with more things in the world other than the lockboxes.

Still happy this game sold well b/c the potential is enormous. Looking forward to Campo's next game.
 

rexor0717

Member
After giving it a bit of time, I enjoyed the game, especially the dialogue, but the story they told didn't particularly enthrall me. I felt like I got my money's worth though, and I'm always happy to support Idle Thumbs people. I look forward to what Campo Santo does next.
 

Chickadee

Unconfirmed Member
I got my Firewatch photos in the mail!

Let's just say I am beyond impressed:

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Gorgeous! And the flavor of Henry's handwriting on the outside of the package is really cool! Love that you guys did this. The attention to detail is astounding!
 

Chickadee

Unconfirmed Member
wutttttt you can do that?

Yes, you can! You can only do it on PC and not PS4. I think they're working on getting it as a feature for PS4? Here's an article on it here, and here. It's a neat feature, it costs $15. I made sure to do a special play through to get the exact photos I wanted. :)
 

gabbo

Member
Yes, you can! You can only do it on PC and not PS4. I think they're working on getting it as a feature for PS4? Here's an article on it here, and here. It's a neat feature, it costs $15. I made sure to do a special play through to get the exact photos I wanted. :)

And now I really can't wait for a non-Steam version to do this.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
I got my Firewatch photos in the mail!

Let's just say I am beyond impressed:

<snip>

Gorgeous! And the flavor of Henry's handwriting on the outside of the package is really cool! Love that you guys did this. The attention to detail is astounding!

Holy mother of fucks this is cool. I played on PS4 originally so never saw this. I will definitely pick it up on sale on PC just to do this, though!
 
Man, Firewatch could easily have been about the sexual harassment of women rangers. Really depressing stuff.

Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream - Kathryn Joyce
The dangerous culture of male entitlement and sexual hostility hiding within America's national parks and forests.
cheyenne_szydlo_sexual_harassment_female_rangers_by_digi_matrix-d9w5m9b.jpg

In Szydlo’s recounting of the trip, Loeffler didn’t adhere to this code. When she bent to move provisions or tie up the boat, he commented on a logo on the back of her utility skirt. He asked frank questions about her sex life and referred to Szydlo as “hot sexy biologist.” That June, the temperatures at the bottom of the canyon reached 109 degrees, and when Szydlo scorched her skin on a metal storage box, Loeffler said she had a hot ass. He adjusted her bra strap when it slipped and, one chilly night, invited her to sleep in the boat with him if she was cold. When they stopped to take a picture at a particularly scenic spot, he suggested that she pose naked. He told her that another female Park Services staffer would be hiking in to meet them at the halfway point, and that he hoped they would have “a three-way.” Szydlo told me she laughed uncomfortably and spoke often of her boyfriend and their plans to get married.

By the third day of the trip, it seemed to Szydlo that Loeffler was getting increasingly frustrated. They stopped at a confluence where the Colorado meets a tributary and forms a short tumble of rapids gentle enough for boaters to swim through with a life jacket. Szydlo pulled on her preserver, but Loeffler insisted she didn’t need one. When she entered the river without it, the water sucked her under. She somersaulted through the rapids “like I was in a washing machine,” she recalled. She thought she was going to drown. Then the rapids spat her out into a calm, shallow pool. She came up gasping and choking to the sound of Loeffler’s laughter, and thought to herself, “I’m in deep shit.”​

This field started from military backgrounds so there was insecure masculinity from the start

In 2012 in Texas, members of the Parks and Wildlife Department complained about a “legacy” of racial and gender intolerance; only 8 percent of the state's 500 game wardens were women. In 2014, in California, female employees of the U.S. Forest Service filed a class-action lawsuit—the fourth in 35 years—over what they described as an egregious, long-standing culture of sexual harassment, disparity in hiring and promotion, and retaliation against those who complained. (That lawsuit is still pending.) And this January, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General announced that it had “found evidence of a long-term pattern of sexual harassment and hostile work environment” in the Grand Canyon’s River District, a part of the Park Service.

Ever since the U.S. created institutions to protect its wilderness, those agencies have been bound up with a particular image of masculinity. The first park rangers in the U.S. were former cavalrymen, assigned to protect preserves like Yellowstone and Yosemite from poachers and fire. The public quickly became enamored by these rugged, solitary figures. In the early 1900s, as the Park Service was created, a new breed emerged: naturalists who endeavored to teach the public the principles of conservation. As the historian Polly Welts Kaufman has written, the earlier generation of rangers resented the intrusion of “pansy-pickers” and “butterfly chasers.” Also controversial was the presence of a small number of women at the agency. Male naturalists worried that their job would be seen as effeminate, instead of, as one put it, “the embodiment of Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing.” In the 1930s and ‘40s the ranks were mostly filled by returning veterans attracted by the ranger corps’ quasi-military culture. Until 1978, female rangers weren’t permitted to wear the same uniform or even the same badge as the men, but instead wore skirts modeled on stewardesses’ uniforms.

uniform.jpg

Employing more women but scout boys club tries their hardest to come across as villains. "Cuntsent degree", joking about raping you in your sleep, tying your blood-stained underwear on the antenna of a truck, and more than dozens of allegations still today.
By the 1970s, women held only 2 percent of full-time professional roles in the service nationwide. In California—whose lands are the crown jewel of the national forest system— female employees filed a class-action lawsuit known as Bernardi v. Madigan. The case was settled in 1981 with a court-enforced “consent decree” that required the Forest Service’s California region to employ as many women as the civilian workforce—at least 43 percent in every pay grade. The decision ultimately saw hundreds of “Bernardi women” enter the service, to the disgruntlement of many male employees.

Lesa Donnelly is a former Forest Service administrator who worked for the agency from 1978 to 2002. In 1994, she filed a complaint charging that three of her male colleagues were harassing her. After word spread (incorrectly) that she planned to file a class-action lawsuit, she received dozens of calls. She heard from women who claimed they were being threatened with physical and sexual assault, and women who said they’d been punished for making complaints. One said the men on her crew joked about raping her in her sleep and had tied her blood-stained underwear to the antenna of their fire truck. Two women told her that a notice in their office about the Bernardi consent decree had been defaced with a scrawled reference to the “cuntsent decree.” She realized her own complaint was “nothing compared to what I found out was happening.”

Eventually, Donnelly compiled claims from 50 women, and in 1995 she filed a class-action suit against the Forest Service, including declarations from many of the woman who had reached out to her. The agency negotiated a settlement that allowed for continued court oversight of California’s Forest Service. But when the monitoring period ended in 2006, the old problems soon resurfaced, as Donnelly would describe in testimony to Congress two years later. One dispatcher reported that she’d been sexually assaulted and stalked by a manager. He was made to resign, but after six months the Forest Service tried to work with him again. In 2008, a male supervisor at the same forest said that he hated a black female employee and wanted to shoot subordinates he hated. When the employee reported the comment, the district ranger told her to ignore him.
This year, I met Donnelly, who is 58, in El Dorado Hills, outside Sacramento. Now the vice president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, a civil rights group, she has the demeanor of a friendly bulldog. She told me that nearly every year for the last 15 years, she has traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby the USDA, Congress, and the White House to protect women in the service. She managed to enlist the help of representatives Jackie Speier of California, Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who in 2014 petitioned the USDA to investigate, without success. Each time Donnelly comes to D.C., she added, she brings details of 20 to 25 new allegations. But while her fight against the Forest Service has persisted for more than two decades, in the Grand Canyon, similar questions about the treatment of women have only started to surface.​

sexual_harassment_female_rangers_by_digi_matrix-d9w5m9i.jpg


"When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin."

Many women in the Forest Service told me that “fire is a small world,” and that they repeatedly had to fight the perception that they were only there to meet men. Rice, who exudes a no-bullshit air of competence, prided herself on her toughness. When I visited her at her home in January, she drove to meet me on a four-wheeler, flanked by two bulldogs. “When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin,” she said.

Around 2008, Rice was a captain being groomed for promotion when she was befriended by her boss’ boss, a division chief named Mike Beckett. After about a year, their interactions took on a different tone. By Rice’s account, Beckett would describe sexual dreams he’d had about her and comment on her body. When they texted about work, he responded with crass double entendres. He cornered her in the office, followed her into the bathroom, and tried to touch her or lift her shirt. She said he groped or touched her inappropriately at least 20 times.

Even when she was out in the field, Rice felt as if there was no escape. Sometimes Beckett would wait late for her to return to the office. He took to radioing in to ask her location and seemed to monitor the line for word of her whereabouts: He’d appear, unannounced, when she was in some remote location—say, a tower lookout high in the Sierras. “He was paying a lot of attention to an employee three to four pay grades below him, which is uncommon,” recalled Rice’s former direct supervisor, who still works at the Forest Service. “He was constantly going around me.”

It became so uncomfortable that Rice stopped calling in her location—a significant safety risk. Eventually, Beckett arranged for her to be moved out of the office she shared with a colleague and into a room on her own. It was more of a storage area, recalled the former supervisor, tucked in the back of the building. During this time, her oversight duties were stripped from her one by one, Rice later said in a signed affidavit, and the former supervisor confirmed in an interview. (Beckett declined to answer any questions, and the Forest Service said it couldn’t comment on specific allegations.)

Still, Rice was reluctant to take formal action. She didn’t want to be “one of those women,” she explained. “You don’t cry in front of the guys, you don’t show weakness in front of them. And you don’t file. You just don’t file. You suck up and deal.” But one day in 2011, she said, after three years of harassment, Beckett came into her office and, with a letter opener, poked her repeatedly on her chest, drawing a circle around her nipple. She filed. Randy Meyer, the Eldorado union steward, said he got a phone call from Rice “that scared me to death. She was highly emotional and beside herself.” He told a senior forest manager that he was prepared to alert the police—and “then everybody and his brother got involved in this mess.”

In the ensuing investigation, some 30 of Rice’s and Beckett’s colleagues were interviewed about humiliating details that Rice hadn’t even confided to her husband. “Everybody knew that he took me in the bathroom, tried to take my clothes off, things that he would say to me: ‘I want to watch you pee.’ They all knew,” she said. “And I still work with these people.” Rice said she got sick from the stress. The supervisor added that once, after he went to check on Rice, Beckett threatened him with disciplinary action.​

There's more about the power of boatmen, expecting women employees to sleep with them, upskirt photos, Loeffer the scumbag, the dangers of filing, physical assault like a chokehold, etc.

“Used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.”

The last sections are about actions for better accountability.

Read the whole article, it's an engrossing and haunting read.
 

Jake

Member
I saw that sentiment in a tweet – "Firewatch could (gently implied: /should) have been about this" – and it bums me out. That article is really good and really terrifying and unsettling/shocking, and I think it should be widely read because it's bringing a story and issue to light that people should know about... But why associate Firewatch with it or wish a different subject onto the game, just because it shares a setting with this article? I don't think it benefits either the game or the article to link them that way.
 
FYI, we've been non-stop fixing bugs and improving performance since launch!

PS4 had a really big performance update a couple weeks back that made lots of people very happy &#8212; and there's more to come.

Meanwhile we're up to Patch #9 on Steam. :)

And we're not done&#8230;

I played the game on PS4 post-patch.

You guys did a great job with fixing a lot of the performance issues. It was a great experience for me.

I wholeheartedly recommend the PS4 version to anyone who's interested in the game (and doesn't play games on PC).
 

Chickadee

Unconfirmed Member
I saw that sentiment in a tweet – "Firewatch could (gently implied: /should) have been about this" – and it bums me out. That article is really good and really terrifying and unsettling/shocking, and I think it should be widely read because it's bringing a story and issue to light that people should know about... But why associate Firewatch with it or wish a different subject onto the game, just because it shares a setting with this article? I don't think it benefits either the game or the article to link them that way.

You found a way to articulate exactly what I was feeling in regard to the article and Firewatch.
 

conman

Member
Just played and finished this over the past two nights. Kind of wrecked. I guess in a good way. I was in tears in the prologue. Hit painfully close to home for me. And, man, what a perfectly
devastating
ending.

Bums me out that people wouldn't like this, then again, it's not a game for everyone, nor should it be. I'm so glad it exists.
 
Just finished it. Very disappointed. It felt like a walking simulator, and the ending just had no impact on me. I'm kinda bummed, honestly...wish I felt as inspired by it as other posters felt.
 

jbluzb

Member
just finishied the game, the ending was underwhelming at best. However, the landscape and sunlight was AMAZING.

The atmosphere of the game is top notch. I was in a hurry to go to delaila just to ensure I will be picked up by the helicopter :D scared Deliaila will abandon me, always scared a bear will go after me or a dragon to bite me

I thought it was an accident, but look suspicions though that NED did not bury the body of his own child. Character interactions were great.

the climbing and use of the map hurts my brain out, I guess I can never be a hiker in real life
 

Huggers

Member
Bought and finished this game in one sitting today. Oh. My. Word. I absolutely ADORED it. What a fucking incredible piece of software. Extremely grown up in it's story telling and had a subtle realism in the interaction. I loved everything about it and would heartily recommend it to anyone looking for an intelligent and thought provoking isolation adventure. It just worked for me on every level. So glad I bought it. I have that feeling of sadness that it is over that you get at the end of a really great book. Just brilliant.
 

Jake

Member
Can't seem to use my Apple-approved MFi gamepad controller to play this?

*sigh*

We're working on this. We have a few in the office and are working to get things to work as seamlessly as possible for a standard that has no L3/R3/back buttons and using a totally different paradigm despite otherwise externally exactly resembling a 360 controller :/
 
can someone please tell me why this game is on PS4, but not on xbox one?

it doesnt make sense, my computer is down and I am debating whether I should watch the playthrough on youtube or wait until I fix the computer whenever that is..
 
can someone please tell me why this game is on PS4, but not on xbox one?

it doesnt make sense, my computer is down and I am debating whether I should watch the playthrough on youtube or wait until I fix the computer whenever that is..

We are a relatively small team working on our first game and were already committed to shipping the game on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It just would have been too much to additionally ship on multiple console platforms at the same time!
 
We are a relatively small team working on our first game and were already committed to shipping the game on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It just would have been too much to additionally ship on multiple console platforms at the same time!

but again then why PS4?

either way I just watched a playthrough, gives me the same feeling as Gone Home in the end.

and to explain as to why that is, its because you expect a grandiose story typical of a video game and it turns into a human story.
 
but again then why PS4?

either way I just watched a playthrough, gives me the same feeling as Gone Home in the end.

and to explain as to why that is, its because you expect a grandiose story typical of a video game and it turns into a human story.

Probably because the PS4 is in more homes than the Xbox? Or maybe they had a deal with Sony.
 

Jake

Member
Probably because the PS4 is in more homes than the Xbox? Or maybe they had a deal with Sony.

The start of it was "we only want to bite off one, what does everyone have at home?" and at least at the time, PS4 was the system everyone on the team owned. From there of course we did a lot of other things to figure it out, but as an emotional starting point that's where the conversation began with the team.


BTW, me and Sean were on this VR talk show pilot hosted by our friend Will Smith (formerly of tested.com, not the actor). It starts off as a normal talk show style interview but then transports into the interior of Two Forks where low poly 3D mocap versions of us talk about the props and construction of the tower. There's an Oculus version of the show up now, and SteamVR is coming soon.

Here's a still from it that someone tweeted: https://twitter.com/ncgames/status/716075580676923392
 

Jake

Member
Oh nice! :)

Will the photo print feature work with this version too?

Yeah that works anywhere that is a computer, because on computers we can easily store really big photos and then upload them over the internet without running into weird space/network certification requirement issues.
 
My photos never came. I waited three weeks after I should have gotten them and contacted customer support. They supposedly sent out another pack, but I never got that one either. Really sucks because I was looking forward to getting those, and was even going to frame a couple.
 

Jake

Member
My photos never came. I waited three weeks after I should have gotten them and contacted customer support. They supposedly sent out another pack, but I never got that one either. Really sucks because I was looking forward to getting those, and was even going to frame a couple.

Wow uh that's really shitty. Can you PM me your info?
 

Chickadee

Unconfirmed Member
Yeah that works anywhere that is a computer, because on computers we can easily store really big photos and then upload them over the internet without running into weird space/network certification requirement issues.

Thanks! Happy to hear it! :)
 

Parham

Banned
because its a PC game, and typically porting from PC is easier to XBO.

and last I checked XBO surpassed 20 mil easily

You're still talking about a difference of 15 million units. Now consider their team size, and the fact that all of them own a PS4, and it should be pretty clear why they chose to release on the PS4 first. Maybe circumstances will change and they'll bring the game to XBO later down the road.
 

Jake

Member
Also Steam and GOG versions now have subtitles in English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and Simpliied Chinese. These languages will also go to PS4 but we don't have a date for that PS4 patch yet.
 

Coffinhal

Member
Hi.

Is it normal that I have framerate drops every 30-40m on PS4 when walking ? It was already here in Day 1 and became worse during Day 2. I have all the latest patches and try not to run. Lots of popping in front of me too. I believed the technical issues were fixed, especially since it's not 60fps anymore.

I really enjoy the game so far though. I love how you have to use your surroundings to find where you are and where to go, even if Diallah helps you a lot too.

I take few pictures with the camera because I fear I can only take 18 but I'd like to take more... gives some nostalgic vibes.
 
I bought this the other day. Will try to find time to play it this weekend - seems like the kind of game which would benefit from being played over one or two sessions.

because its a PC game, and typically porting from PC is easier to XBO.

Uh, do you have anything to back that up?

and last I checked XBO surpassed 20 mil easily

A) It would seem that's not necessarily the case, and B) I was referring to them making the decision when the game was still in development, when sales would have been lower than they are now.
 
Started playing this yesterday.

Loving the interaction between Delilah and Henry
up to day 33 love the scene where Henry hallucinations a conversation with with his life. The following is up also quite touching.
 
Just finished this, great experience, love the story. Unfortunately I can't see any replay value now that the mystery of the story won't be there anymore.
 

Ragarra

Member
I was kinda sad that the Firewatch Dynamic Theme Bundle is not discounted 20% as well. Really wanted to pick up the theme as well as the game.
 

Chickadee

Unconfirmed Member
Just finished this, great experience, love the story. Unfortunately I can't see any replay value now that the mystery of the story won't be there anymore.

I think it depends. I've played through it 3x now. I wanted to go through and hear all the different dialogue options. :)
 
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