T w e n t y S i d e d
If you’re one of my many text-based fans, then this week is probably looking a little lean for you. I didn’t write a column. I didn’t do a Monday post. It’s all podcasts and video content this week. Sorry.
I canned my column at the last minute. I just wasn’t feeling it. I wanted to talk about the conflicts between classic videogame boss fights and the current trend of “games as interactive movies”. But the thing kept sliding into “Top X crappy Boss Fights” territory, which is a sure sign there’s not enough meat in the column.
I’ve spent the rest of the week touching up little details on the site. The front page has been updated. Same goes for the Spoiler Warning page.
But while we’re here, now would be a great time for another batch of article requests / suggestions.
And one final note:
Earlier this week we talked about how Google bought Twitch, and we figured they were probably going to add content ID to Twitch at some point. Well, they did. I guess they just couldn’t wait. So now any stream with copyrighted music will be muted. This is kind of stupid, considering how many streamers use music for their streams or as bumper music. And I don’t just mean random nobodies. I mean big, important streams. Like the Twitch weekly podcast / vidcast thing:
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If we just make our mindless buggy unaccountable software powerful enough, then we can go back to the old days and everything will be okay again.
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Yep, I ran into their content ID system this morning when I went to watch a replay of a favorite streamer and found 90% of the stream muted. They have since stopped listening to all music, which has added a huge amount of dead air into the stream (he normally plays turn based strategy).
Did you also hear Twitch are no longer going to store your replays (they are removing the “store forever” button) and it going to be up to the streamer to upload a recording of the stream to youtube instead.
Pro tip: What to watch a stream that has been muted? The muting happening within the twitch player, so if you have an alternate way to accessing the stored videos, they are not muted.
“Did you also hear Twitch are no longer going to store your replays (they are removing the “store forever” button) and it going to be up to the streamer to upload a recording of the stream to youtube instead.”
Wow,that is really stupid.
But hey,at least now some very careless people can argue that they deliberately didnt save aunty paladin because they knew those wouldve been lost forever because of google.
Thankfully, people also have alternate ways of streaming video that aren’t Twitch.
Twitch doesn’t seem to realize this though, and will happily do everything in its power to make its service unbearable to both streamers and watchers alike. With the huge 10-30 second latency between what the player does and what the streamer sees plus the content ID system, I’m kinda wondering who the service is supposed to be for.
I think Twitch is supposed to be for PS4 users, and only PS4 users.
But the PS4 *also* has UStream…
…
…Oh, it turns out UStream has a similar problem – to the point that their version of ContentID dropped a stream of the 2012 Hugo Awards because it showed clips of the nominated shows.
…Hopefully Sony can get Hitbox up there then.
Its pretty much clear that(at the time)the only way to make these things work properly(avoid false positives)is to hire people to manually check every red flag.
Any service with user-uploaded content that’s going to get popular enough will eventually draw the ire of the powers that be. Jumping ship to another service will only work as long as it stays niche.
And hope that niche service doesn’t then pull a Viddler on you.
Best boss fights? For some reason, the things that come to mind are certain fan-made modules for Neverwinter Nights 1. Shows how superb some of this content has been (and still is), since I remember it years and years after completing it and moving on :)
The fight against the prince in Bloodlines was fantastic.
Sadly, it was preceded by that awful fight against the Sheriff.
I always found the bossfights in Bloodlines particularly jarring. You spend most of the game avoiding fights and using powers like Dominate or Dementation to deal with the fights you can’t avoid, and then you hit a particularly hard boss and die horribly because it’s a fight that can’t be avoided and the tactics you’ve been using against mooks are completely useless against the boss.
I rather liked Alpha Protocol for this.
The whole game I’m chain-killing Mooks with my pistol, and when the boss fight comes I just chain it all on him, resulting in pin-point accurate bullets to the face. Just rip them apart, no problem.
They are just muting replays. The live streams will be unaffected.
This. I knew a bunch of sites were going to misreport this but I didn’t think Shamus was going to be one of them.
If the pic above is any indication, replays also includes things like podcasts and other recorded videos.
And I don’t get to watch a lot of live streaming, I do watch the replays and this hits me where I live.
Boss fights can still be featured in games.You just need some creativity.Heck,even if you go the realistic route,you can always get a boss in a vehicle,boss with a bunch of mooks,boss behind a shield,epic boss conversation(no,not like the crap in mass effect 3,damn it!),etc,etc.
Or make the big insurmountable boss be a vehicle with shields and mooks. I’m thinking of the Scarabs from Halo2 & 3. Every time you took one of those suckers down it was an EVENT and a memorable one too. Especially if you elected to do it on foot.
The best boss fights would probably come from having the main character be baseline, and having the boss be augmented in some way instead. Like the Tank in Left4dead. Storyline wise, anyway.
I disagree. I would very much like to see video games move away from boss fights altogether. One of the best video games of the past decade, Spec Ops: The Line, had no boss fights whatsoever, unless you count the recurrent helicopter. Boss fights are by no means a necessary thing and we’d be better off without them.
I count the heavy troopers as bosses; they take far too many headshots to kill.
Oddly, this was ridiculed in the Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 season. Colonel Autumn was “the final boss” and Rutskarn was going on about how this dude must be one helluva badass to have survived the water filter meltdown, Raven Rock exploding, plus he’s the final fight before you complete the main vanilla quest, so he MUST be a huge challenge.
But he went down like any other lightly armored mook with a gun if you chose to shoot at him. Which is pretty realistic, actually.
Yes,they are not a necessary thing.But their complete exclusion is also not the way to go.For example,the missing link had a boss fight that was not out of place,and was satisfying to deal with.
Not every game needs a boss fight,but not every game needs to be without boss fights either.
I mainly have issues with boss fights which invalidate previously used mechanics and introduce new, very limited ones to use exclusively for these fights. I want a level playing field for all foes, and while naturally the toughness of each will be variable (and there’s good reason story reason as to say why Bowser is tougher than his kids), toughness needs to be firmly decoupled from plot importance – lest you end up with situations where say, the toughest, Final Fight of the game is against a guy in a wheelchair.
A example of it done right is Daud, who has lore-appropriate abilities but otherwise fights with the same rules as you and the rest of the enemies in the game do, including the stealth takedown. Divinity: Original Sin goes partway towards returning the RPG genre towards this, most ‘boss’ creatures are still vulnerable to almost all your special abilities, stuns, burning, knockdowns, etc (though some arbitrary immunities do slip through, sometimes I wonder whether because it was too hard to do the animations on the unique boss models).
Contrast to just about any MMO boss where none of your abilities except for damage dealing ones even work.
” lest you end up with situations where say, the toughest, Final Fight of the game is against a guy in a wheelchair.”
Well,if you are playing a game where you are magneto,your final fight will be against a guy in a wheelchair,and he sure wont be a pushover.
Daud is a great example of how a boss fight can work in a narratively driven video game.
Well, he kind of will, won’t he? Professor X vs. Magneto is generally a walkover in either direction: either Magneto is wearing his helmet, in which case he wins, or he isn’t, in which case Xavier wins. (Which is why they mostly don’t do solo confrontations with each other.)
It’s the presence of the X-Men (and optionally the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or other minions) that actually extends the conflict between them long enough to fill a comic or movie. It’s hard to really get a boss fight out of that without bringing in a third factor like Sentinels.
A boss that does not utilize player skills built up to that point is not very well designed, IMO. That seems to me to be the main reason to have boss fights in general – not just on principle, but to have something of significant challenge to act as a pseudo-final exam of ‘have you been learning to play this game?’
There’s quite a bit of leeway in that, though. Part of what it could test is how much the player is ready to adapt the skills they have to an unusual situation – RPG bosses come to mind, as they should serve as a method to test how well a player is prepared for varying combat situations.
I’d also argue immunities are not bad, but it IS more interesting when they aren’t prevalent. But it all comes down to how things are designed.
“lest you end up with situations where say, the toughest, Final Fight of the game is against a guy in a wheelchair.”
I see what’cha did thar!
Boss fights don’t belong in every game, and aren’t always handled competently. But that doesn’t make the very idea of boss fights some poison on the art-form. For the same reason that, even though they’re not always needed, there is never one completely useless tool in a carpenter’s belt.
Instead of moving away from boss fights, I think it would make more sense for the industry to move away from bad game designers. The solution to bad game design is not: “Make fewer games like Shadow of the Colossus.”
Every time that I have visited this website I went directly to the front page, I kept wondering when you would update it. I got so accustomed to the little sentence with a link to the blog that I kind of miss it. The new front page looks really nice though and got me to reread a few things.
Maybe there should be a link from the new front page to that page.
You’re getting an Oculus Rift DK2, aren’t you? I suggest when you have it, please do check out Elite: Dangerous, which should already support it. Oh, and then of course write about it. :D
As a programmer myself who also sometimes dabble in OpenGL, I always find your programming posts very interesting. I also like the text posts. So my “suggestion” would be more of that, please :)
And your experiences with developing for the Occulus Rift would be very interesting.
Breathe deeply giant unaccountable megacorporations. Everything is going to be fine. It will all be over soon.
Requests? Totally!
Can you tell us what’s going on with Good Robot? Have you started refurbishing the graphics engine yet?
How is the new apartment? Is there still a lawn you have to get your son to fix the lawnmower in order to mow? Leaky roof? Crazy quirky downstairs neighbors?
What are your kids up to these days? Painting? Programming? Give us a life update!
Actually, I personally think these big corps are making people accountable.
Why should some guy in a basement with a video camera get around the same broadcasting restrictions that other TV shows have to do regarding music rights, for instance? Rules should be equally applied.
People want cool music in their streams–either pay like the other guys do, or get some other people to create cool music.
The big fat broadcast corporation knows that is has every right in the world to broadacst copyrighted music as long as it is within “fair use”, i.e. background music while filming a documentary in a restaurant/disco/whathaveyou, part of a game (which itself is copyrighted…) or excerpts from movies while discussing said games or movies…
All these things are completely allowed without paying anyone licence fees or even asking for permission. Twitch, however, will not let you do that, Dave. And while a broadcast corporation will send their lawyers in case there’s doubt, you will not be able to make a case at all if your stuff is muted on twitch.
The rules are not applied equally, because of these restrictions.
In order to apply the rules equally, whoever owned the rights they think are being violated by some online content, would need to contact the perpetrator of the alleged breach, talk about it, send a cease-and-desist if they think they have a case, and take it to court in case both parties don’t agree. In order to make this fair, the defendant would need to have a free lawyer (because most guys in basements with cameras couldn’t afford one and therefore simply would have to fold, independent of who’s right).
You may have notice dthat the above process does not involve Twitch at all, and why would it?
Of course, that’s to expensive for the big corporations owning large amounts of copyrighted stuff, and therefore they are conspiring to make the intermediary into police,judge and hangman at once. There’s no process, there’s no way to object (and noone would listen anyway).
We’re lucky that for most people* is only about immaterial goods of little importance, but otherwise this is a very good example of a repressive Orwellian/Kafkaesque system. So, yeah, it does take people to account. In the worst way possible.
* some do earn money with their content, though… for them this will be serious.
I’m not going to touch the enforcement or policy issues, as that’s straying into political territory. In an effort to keep this as purely philosophical as possible, I’m pretty sure that every concept of “intellectual property” is fundamentally evil nonsense. I’d be glad to discuss it on philosophical grounds… but I doubt it will change the every-day realities much. Disney and the patent trolls own the deep pockets… for now at least.
Yeah, well that’s on top of everything else. The current state of laws does lead to some fairly silly behaviour, but even then the law can be followed in different ways, and this is just the good old simple “kill them all, let god decide” method.
This is bad irrespective of which law you want to enforce.
Attempting to discuss any type of ethics and morality without addressing the attendant questions of law, enforcement and social shame sounds like a huge waste of time.
That’s like trying to discuss space travel while ignoring the sticky questions of gravity and relativity. Nothing of practical value can be achieved.
I mostly agree, although ethics & morality aren’t the same thing (my definitions would be ethics = what is good/not good; morality = what a particular society judges to be good/not good). It’s very difficult to talk about the latter without straying into politics, and we’re not – for exceptionally good & useful reasons – allowed to talk about politics here. It isn’t much easier to talk about ethics without straying into politics either!
But I like that people make the effort on this site. You are correct in your latter point too – but sometimes when we ignore such sticky questions and just go with it with a smile on our faces we end up with things like Star Wars and/or Trek.
The game may be copyright by the publisher, but arguably the gameplay video is copyright by the player/broadcaster.
Nope the copyright only moves to the creator of the content if it is sufficiently ‘transformative’ in much the same way that Red Letter Media videos with hours of LucasFilm content are OK but just uploading a cam copy of that film with rowdy teenagers is not. The trick is what is sufficiently transformative from a copyright point of view.
Take 3 scenarios:
Streamer A streams a game full screen with no or only occasional commentary that does not talk over cut scenes
Streamer B streams a game full screen with a lot of commentary frequently making the game audio inaudible
Streamer C streams with an offset screen or with significant portions obscured with video feeds (I’m excluding chat windows here) and frequent audio commentary
To me Streamer A would appear to be in most trouble as there is little transformation of the work but from another perspective the mere act of playing a game is transformative. Scenario B seems pretty clear cut to me as fair use because attempting to enjoy the narrative of the game is all but impossible due to the commentary. Scenario C seems easiest as there are significant portions of the screen and audio content that are obscured.
For a rights holder though the reply is fairly simple, watching any of these will deliver the narrative as a whole to the viewer without any compensation for the creator of that narrative. I still struggle with this as watching The Last Of US streams when it launched last year and reading threads prior to the relaunch this year there was a significant ‘I already saw it on YT’ brigade that has cost some sales.
All of this however runs into the problem that the only ‘old media’ equivalent to game streaming is Mystery Science Theater 3k and that has never had a complete DVD release because of the challenge of proving that their work was sufficiently transformative to entitle them to claim the whole work as their own. Hip Hop and turntablism ahave suffered from this over the years also with both good transformative works ambushed by rights holders and blatant rip offs leaving rights holders with nothing.
In the past, you folks have talked about Nintendo’s relatively bad fortunes on DieCast, but that was before the launch of the PS4 and the XBox One. Could you talk about how those launches have changed things for Nintendo?
That said, Mario Kart has changed things for Nintendo by orders of magnitude greater than the other consoles have combined.
Having played it, I am not at all surprised. It is incredibly fun.
Like the new flowing columns on the Spoiler Warning page, which lets me get at what I want much faster (usually the specials links since there’s no practical way to navigate to them using YouTube’s interface) but not so much the choice of font, which works for headings but not so much for the body text.
Couple other nitpicks in that poor Chris has been left off the credits for the specials and for Marlow Briggs, and there are a few long-standing typos in “Russain” (Metro), “gamepaly” (Dishonored), “Itialian” (AC2) and “complaince” (ME2).
Thats not a typo,I always spell russain like that.
Yes, but two different ways in the same sentence?
Maybe they’re two different words? You probably just don’t get it :)
Other things that are missing are links to some of the specials like the Slenderman episode and the Dark Souls special that you guys did back before/around Skyrim. Unless they don’t count for some reason.
Got it, thanks!
Also also, I noticed that the Half-Life 2 section is missing Episode 21. It’s on the Youtube playlist that was linked, and I’m sure anybody actually interested in going back to watch it will just hit the Next buttons on the previous episodes, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to say something in case you’re anything like me and want everything you do to be *just so*.
Fixed. Thanks!
Whatever font you’re using for the links to individual episodes on the new Spoiler Warning page doesn’t seem to like certain special characters. The uÊop-Çpısd∩ ƃuıƃuÉH episode is a particular victim of this, and the name just comes out as gibberish.
Functional programming! John Carmack’s recent talk about VR! Strangely punctuated sentence fragments!
This guy! Get’s: it.
Neither Google nor Twitch have actually confirmed the rumours of the purchase and I am pretty sure that at least one of them would need to make an announcement before the purchase is completed. However this does mean that at this time Twitch is not owned by Google and it is thus Twitch doing these things not Google.
Could certainly be related to the acquisition to meet particular terms or requirement, or it could be evidence that something has fallen through and Twitch is kind of panicking.
Some of their actions don’t seem to make sense from a Google purchase point of view.
He makes a good point. Especially regarding storage–I cannot fathom that Google would be worried about not enough storage space.
Well, with Justin.tv videos being deleted, people are scrambling to store their movies online elsewhere. Where can they take them? Youtube.
If anything other than 2 hour or less highlight reels are being deleted on twitch after some time, where are people going to keep their archives? Youtube.
Seems to me these all hugely benefit Google massively.
I’ve been on Twitch for quite a while and these actions fit perfectly with several past events, where they reacted to discomfort with immediate HULK SMASH mode, followed by the expected drama.
I love the splash page. I was pushing for a splash page years ago and it turned out better than I imagined. I love the randomness of it too. That said, there is a problem with it. There’s a rather unfortunate match-up between an article caption and its photo.
Oops. You know, I chose that picture just because it was the most interesting picture in the series. Didn’t even occur to me how “Twelve Year Mistake” over the picture of a ~12 year old kid might be interpreted. Hm. I need to either change the title or the image.
Thanks for the heads up.
Speaking of the revisions, I don’t know if this is supposed to be the case, but the Spoiler Warning page has a “0 Comments” link at the top of it and “Comments Closed” at the bottom. Were these there before, or were they not rendered “invisible” after revision?
There are, and has been for some time, two Spoiler Warning pages, one is a blog post (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16386) and the other a separate webpage (http://www.shamusyoung.com/spoilerwarning/). I don’t know if they’re pulling data from the same place, but both are up to date as of now.
P.S. There appear to be some broken image links on the blog post version.
I wanted to move to the blog post version, but Google page rank was having none of it. I changed every link on my end, but all other links (esp. big ones like TVTropes) pointed to http://www.shamusyoung.com/spoilerwarning/
I have given up on the blog version and am now trying to point everything at the original page. Of course, there are links all over and it’s tough to find them all.
Whew. This sort of business can eat SO MUCH time if you let it.
Can’t you just put a redirect in the site’s .htaccess file? Something like:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/spoilerwarning/ http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16386
Could do the same thing with your two “author” pages.
Someones going to get a pretty crappy fathers day present because of that.
No, no… leave it! It’s hilariously out of context!
Aw, man… shattered illusions. I was under the impression all this time that it was an intentionally hilarious tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek juxtaposition. But I’m an evil bastard at heart anyway…
Yikes! If ’twere me, I’d temporarily put up the box art from Duke Nukem Forever whilst I hunted down a more appropriate image. It would still cause confusion but it would be a different kind of confusion…
I had forgotten that series, so when I saw the title with that picture, I was assuming it was some sweet retrospective on your then-12-year-old eldest, who was a “mistake” in the unplanned pregnancy way.
Welcome back to the days where appearing to do something that might under some circmumstances be interpreted as proabably in a legally gray zone is the same as doing that thing.
I hope that large amounts of contributors will just pack up and leave but since they haven’t done so with youtube, that hope is very faint, especially since alternatives are both rare and not quite comparable.
… and any new service that tries to target dissappointed twitch users too openly will proabably have to face a PR attack from youtube and twitch along the lines of “you conspire with criminals”. Hooray!
One set of posts you were doing I really enjoyed that I wish you had continued was your discussion of Space Sims.
Yeah! You were going to review X4 or something, but you never posted the ending. And now you’re never going to hear the end of it!
Rather apt since the developers never finished making the game either.
I’m not sure if it was X:Rebirth, but there was a definite mention of a review/post/whatnot about X:Something. I’d certainly be up for reading that, if it wasn’t binned for reasons.
PS I’ve spent much of today trying to think of a more specifically column-worthy topic, and have totally failed. It’s a real struggle to come up with something that might work for a broadish audience! (And I’m only talking about finding a bloody topic! Let alone writing the damn thing. So, not that there was a prior shortfall, but ’nuff respect to Shamus for managing to pull it off most of the time.)
PPS As mentioned down below, I’d happily read any “Top n Crappy Boss Fights” post. Maybe that’s gone back into the filing cabinet for a future do-over. However, there’s a chance if it did go up here, the comments would help bounce Shamus’ thinking along towards the column he wanted to write in the first place. Or not! Who knows…
Here’s a random idea:
1. Pick a game.
2. Find a way to build basic logic gates using the game’s mechanics.
3. Work your way up to having a full in-game CPU.
4. Blog about it.
I’d read it, at least.
Is this a reference to the Minecraft 16 bit CPUs?
Dwarf Fortress was doing it first.
Though I think those are even slower than their Minecraft counterparts.
Someone proved that Magic The Gathering is Turing-complete.
Tell. Me. More. About. Your. Gathering. Of. The Magic.
What do you want to bet that it involved Urza era cards? Voltaic Key anyone?
Since the last update prison architect includes logic gates.
Build a fully automated prison system. :)
Dragon Age Origins (which I’m replaying in prep for DAI) does it the obvious but bad way. Whichever bad guy has the greatest story importance gets a big life bar.
Was kind of silly when I was fighting Paragon Branka. She’s a paragon because she invented a smokeless powder, not because she’s an awesome fighter as tough as the golems she commands.
Likewise I’m sure Prince Bhelen is a pretty good fighter but is he really tougher than his entourage from the warrior caste? The game had only established that he was an excellent backroom dealer up to that point. But hey, whatever.
Fights like the Broodmother make a little more sense. She doesn’t really fit with any part of what you’ve been doing in Orzhammar (her presence doesn’t say anything about the caste system, the political turmoil or Paragon Branka) but she does show you something new about Darkspawn at least.
How are you still excited for DA:I after playing DA2? The writing certainly hasn’t gotten better.
Its less about being excited and more about closure. This is the last game EA has me on the hook for. If its not good, these are the last dollars EA will ever get out of me (and if they try anything like the ME3 multiplayer BS where there is something in my single player game that can only be improved through the multiplayer, then they’ve already gotten their last dollars out of me.)
Just looking at the development videos, I get the sense that Bioware is aware that they’ve used up their goodwill and that they need this to win to stay viable. Or that they at least need to pretend that for our benefit. So that gives me a little bit of hope. And DA2 suffered from a development crunch, which shouldn’t be a problem this time.
If anything, I feel that the game will fail from having listened too much to fanboys/girls. We aren’t collectively always good at expressing (or even understanding) what went wrong in a game to put us off. There may be a thing we can point to but that thing might have worked just fine if this other thing had been done right. They seem to get that but the fan chatter might still confuse them.
Excited, no. Anxious would be a better word.
How are you still excited for DA: Anything after DA:Origins? I got suckered into buying the game based on a “gameplay video” that made it seem like “Skyrim”. Then I play it for 5 minutes and find it’s more like Baldur’s Gate, and never played it again.
That, and the blatant DLC promotion with that NPC in camp offering a quest I’d not be able to do.
“Alas, my situation is dire, but thou musteth giveth me fiveth dollars before thout canst helpeth me!”
…being “more like Baldur’s Gate” is considered a bad thing? If it was more like BG I’d *like* it.
I still want you to come play DDO and do an article on it. Does that count as a request?
Also you should really check out the gaming utility site Obsidian Portal. https://brave-new-world.obsidianportal.com/dashboard
And a friend of mine wrote a book (I’m editing the 2nd one in the series) that you might enjoy: http://www.amazon.com/SLEEPY-HOLLOW-Headless-Jason-Crane-ebook/dp/B00F2FF080
And I want to know what you think about Dragon Age: Inquisition.
“If you're one of my many text-based fans, then this week is probably looking a little lean for you. I didn't write a column. I didn't do a Monday post. It's all podcasts and video content this week. Sorry.”
No writtey bits to press against my eyes makes my brain all not… ummm… thinky?
Maybe? Something. Sure. “Thinky” sounds like a thingy.
Long words! Too Big! Can’t follow!
For the record, I would LOVE to read your ‘Top X Crappy Boss Fights’ article, but I can totally grasp that it wouldn’t be the right fit for your Escapist column. That’s why you need a blog where you can just spill your thoughts on any old thing and your loyal fanbase will eagerly read it. You should check that out!
Content ideas?
– Games rejected (unconditionally, so as to avoid spoilers) for Spoiler Warning, and why. Except maybe that would be a better podcast question, and also, I know it’s been discussed before, but I would read more thoughts if there are any. (Or listen to them, if podcast… ed?)
– Playing games, or games enjoyed, for their technical merits (Rage, Fuel) rather than their strength as a game in more traditional senses. Maybe a list of games that fall into the tech demo genre you mention in the Fuel video, and why they can be included in the genre.
– Do your kids play tabletop games? Board games? Are there thoughts about them?
– I’ll add a vote to Jennifer Snow’s request for thoughts on DA:Inquisition. Again, maybe this is a podcast question? Sorry.
– Your musical tastes intrigue me. Electronica without words? Sign me up. Do you have a public playlist or artists to suggest (aside from mentions in the podcast from a couple weeks ago)?
I can’t help the feeling none of this is new and different enough to justify your time, but if I’m wrong and you feel like tossing out some words on any of these topics, I will be here waiting to absorb them through my eyeballs. Or earbits.
“I canned my column at the last minute. I just wasn't feeling it”
One of the most important skills for a writer, in my unskilled opinion, is to know when to bin something and start over. Not just edit it, but chuck the lot and start from scratch, or even give up on the central concept as just not working out. So congratulations; maybe you didn’t publish a column this week, but at least you didn’t publish a bad one…
A followup on Good Robot would be amazing. It’s been some time, and a whole lot of fiddling with renderers, I am kinda curious to hear what kind of concepts you have rolling around in your head for fixing the issue you had with the “lack of replayability” the game was having; on top of the graphical issues.
I’ve been missing text on twentysided this week! Thanks for the apology, which I now feel slightly guilty about since I contribute nothing whatsoever to the running of this site (except for the occasional rambly comment)
Anyway – I spotted you updated shamusyoung.com – way to go Shamus! And as a result I read your comparison of life as a medieval king with life as a poor American person. Who knew such gems existed?
Article suggestion: I’m dying to hear what you have to say about Gunslinger (which I think you mentioned you might play a while back)? Fascinating game since it contains loads of elements that arguably sound like bad things (corridor gameplay, two-gun limit, QTEs) but it uses them well and many people agree its a fantastic little game. And it comes with the added bonus of being a Ubisoft game that doesn’t have UPlay.
I wish you’d finish a game so I could buy it and play it. It kinda bums me out to see all these projects never reach full release.
Isn’t Good* Robot the only game we’ve heard about so far? Not counting the Tetris clone with no function calls. I don’t recall any other games – if there are others, tell me! :D And I think lots of the non-game project stuff has been released for those who know what to do with it (which I absolutely don’t, so don’t quote me on that).
*Do we really know enough about the Robot to make a moral judgment at this stage? Hmm…
I didn’t see a release of Octant, but Terrain, Pixel City, and Frontier have all been released. As in, the source is available somewhere on the site. Or, I have all three hanging around in my home directory somewhere, and I must have gotten them from somewhere…
It’d be amazing if the title splash dynamically changed the name of the game depending on your choices and actions throughout the game. Do you ruthlessly gun down the fleeing mooks? Do you greedily devour all the power-ups that you don’t actually need? Do you save the children from that burning orphanage?
Small correction, copyrighted music is only being muted from archived shows. However, the system is so heavy handed that it actually mutes the sound in 30 minute blocks.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/07/twitch-trimming-archives-muting-copyrighted-music/
I don’t know if this is helpful to your Spoiler Warning needs, but I actually read an article in a local newspaper about a rather new Austrian company that specializes in providing live-streaming technology, particularly for people who regularly do Let’s Plays. It is called Hitbox, and this is their website: http://www.hitbox.tv/
In the article they say that they manage delays of only 2 to 10 seconds between the streaming person and the audience (depending on the former’s internet connection), while Twitch has delays of up to one minute…
I have absolutely no idea about the details, but perhaps you’ll want to give it a look. :o)
Spoiler Warning indeed already uses Hitbox, after the debacle that was the Amnesia 2 recording.
Huh, I had forgotten about that.
Oh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info!
Looks like Twitch is doing damage control–the CEO just did an AMA on Reddit.
To sum up: no, they’re not backing down on this stuff, and they recognize they should have communicated about these changes before doing them. To which I can only say, well, duh. I will never quite understand companies that make changes this huge and think it’s OK to not communicate to your customers… did they think people just wouldn’t notice or that it wouldn’t be a big deal or something?
I think in general companies know that they can do what they want, brace for the inevitable shitstorm, offer a brief non-apology with exactly the same moral weight as “your call is important to us,” and then carry on regardless.
I hate YouTube, avoid it whenever possible now. SO HAPPY that Twitch will be gaining the same annoying, broken, horrible ‘features’ that YouTube has. So happy. -.-
I realize the chance is slim, but I’d love to read an article (or several) on tabletop gaming – the site is called “TwentySided” after all. Barring that, I’d even go for some anime reviews. I came to this site through “DM of the Rings”, but it was these sorts of topics that kept me coming back to the blog posts.
I agree with this guy, completely. Most of your text-based stuff over the past 2 years (that weren’t Escapist columns) have been about programming. (Also, the autoblography, which was very interesting) I can’t really get into the programming posts. You write them very well, and make a lot of concessions to try to to make them interpret-able to the layman, but I don’t ever retain much after reading a post cuz I don’t code myself, and so the value is kinda lost on me and I just skip them nowadays. Would love to see writings on other hobbies.
That being said, I am fully aware that you can’t write about what you don’t do, and if you haven’t rolled some dice or watched anime in years, then posts about those subjects ain’t happening. Ain’t trying to make you feel pressured or anything, just stating what I would like to see like you asked. Might as well take the time now to say that I came here around 3 or 4 years ago for DM of the Rings and have stuck around for your writing and Spoiler Warning, and I don’t regret a minute of it. You made something really special here. Thanks for putting it up for all of us to see.
+1. Get yourself back into tabletop gaming if you can possibly find the time.
And the release of a new D&D edition should make for a great excuse to do so.
I’d like to hear more of your explorations into Space games – even if they are brief. I’ve tried X3 a few times, and just bounced off, so I was curious about your experiences.
One thing I’ve wondered about is the status of AI for the purposes of conversation in games. It just seems a bit silly that we put so much effort into making “smart” mooks to kill, but little is done to improve the conversations we have with people.
The dialogue solutions I’m are of are: 1) dialogue trees, 2) hyperlink systems like in Morrowind, 3) Fallout 1 did have textbox you could type questions into, but I could never get any interesting content out of that. And that’s it. I had wondered if a chatterbot could improve the illusion of talking to a person.
I realize AI is a very hard problem, but I’m curious for Shamus and the community’s thoughts.
I’m curious what everyone thinks about Blizzard’s Hearthstone card game thingy. If it’s not your thing, you might not have much to say about it, but it’s interesting to me how it sort of quietly asks for money and patiently waits for you to get bored of normal things and perhaps spend money. It’s sneaky DLC. Also I don’t know how much money it is making but I assume lots. Seems to me to be very designed to bring in as much money as such things can.
Another thing is on my mind since I’ve been playing some “games for engineers” by Zach Barth, the guy who made Spacechem and some other card thing I don’t like much. The quarter or so that I’ve tried are not too very technically involved yet. Anyway, those make me think, I wonder how feasible the narrow target audience games are? I get the impression that indies still try to get sales from very wide groups. And I really like the idea of games for the engineer brain.
I am probably the only person who thinks like this, but to me, this is a huge improvement. I absolutely hated it that most of the twitch streamers had loud music running in the background. I frequently watch twitch on a second monitor, and play a game on the other. That’s fine as long as the two don’t conflict. By that I mean one of these three: Both require very high attention (Starcraft match plus Super House of Dead Ninja), or both require the same kind of focus (reading text plus listening to speaking), or if both have music. Most games have a lot of music.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the content ID system sucks in general, but no music on twitch is a huge improvement. If I want shitty pop music, I will buy a radio!
No problems about the lack of text. Some weeks have more of A, some have more B. As long as you don’t try to sneakily change this into a video-only pay-per-article site which demands us to download a proprietary viewer app with in-app purchases to “continue reading” (or wait 10 minutes) or “unlock sound of another host” (only $1.99 per host or $5.99 for all hosts!), I’m not complaining (too much) :-P
As for article suggestions:
A) Continuing the 4X-games
B) Board games
C) With 5th Edition coming out…Perhaps a look at the new D&D and how it’s better/worse than the last versions you’ve played? Both B and C can only happen if you’ve actually played any of them lately :p
D) It’s been a while since we’ve heard you about DRM or EA. :p
E) More Stolen Pixels!
F) DMotR-meets-the-Hobbit-movies
G) Anything (semi-)autobiographic
H) Some of the things suggested higher-up
I) It may still be a bit early, but an overview of how having taken Patreon up has changed your income stream/life style/etc.
J) What you feel like writing – this usually comes out best
K) An update on what you’re doing novel-wise, if you’ve got a writing project going on. Witch Watch 2?
Can you put a popup on your site that shows up on each article the first time I read it, fades out the stuff I’m reading, and asks me to sign up for your newsletter?
I don’t feel like I’m reading a real web site without one.
Hum, hum. I know it’s a bit late, but I’ve been wondering lately what the difficulties are of modeling accurate, fluid water in 3D. It seems there are a lot of 2D water manipulation games, but (apart from Assassin’s Creed 3 and 4, and even those are basically flat planes), I can’t think of any game that’s done actual 3D. It seems to me that being able to control and manipulate water for puzzles and combat in an open-world environment a la inFAMOUS would be awesome.
all the time i used to read smaller articles that as well clear their motive, and that
is also happening with this post which I am reading at this place.