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Fair warning: This episode is bound to be an instant classic. It starts off with some armchair game design, loses its way, makes a bunch of inside jokes, and then goes off-topic, while unendurable ages of indistinguishable combat roll on. Then we discover we came all this way for nothing, before it’s revealed that we REALLY came all this way for NOTHING.
That’s a really strange ending for a AAA game, even in 2003. It lacked closure. Oh well. Next up I think we’re going to play Dragon Age: Origins: The Deep Roads: Maximum Difficulty: Solo Run.
See you there.
Hardware Review

So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Joker's Last Laugh

Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?

Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
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.
Resident Evil 4

Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Well, at least this is one Bioware game that allows you to face the consequences of your actions and doesn’t railroad you along to the next plot point.
Props to them for that. And its not just at this point that they let you have a wildly off the rails ending to your story. This game really is good. What happened to Bioware after this?
Jade Empire also had a pretty cool set of choices near the end that can completely turn your party against you.
Well me2 does allow you to have an ending where everyone dies in the suicide mission even though you defeat the collectors.And technically the extended ending to me3 does have the “everyone died,the cycle continued” ending.So they still do those from time to time.
If they only had autosaves in appropriate places before these instant-death moments.
As someone who didn’t act like a total lunatic, I never got the death ending of that trial. Right up until it went to the main menu I was expecting it to cut away to something happening to save you guys but nope.
Good stuff.
I got the death ending on this. I plead guilty, since I figured that they caught me and there was no disputing that, but afterwords I could justify my actions with a good old fashioned “I was doing it to save the poor innocent Selkath children” defense. They give you three dialogue choices to change your mind and then kill you. Nobody in the room believes it when you plead guilty, it’s kinda the funniest thing in the whole game.
Is there a way to get out of being executed without having started the missing children quest?
Pretty sure you can still reason/lie your way out of it; completing that quest is just the easiest way out of the trial.
Now that I’ve seen the episode I’m pretty sure that the “Sith lured me in —> Sith were trying to turn me to the darkside” were actually the options I used way back in my first playthrough to get a Not Guilty verdict.
I’m quite certain no, there isn’t.
Back when I first played through KOTOR I used 3 saves and rotated between them. So I had 3 lovely savefiles of near the start of the sith base, somewhere in the middle, and right when I realized I couldn’t open the door.
So yeah, I must’ve tried to get through that trial a dozen times at least. In the end I concluded it was a dead file and I needed to restart the whole game over again.
I checked some walkthroughts, and apparently the only ways through are having the kids quest or lying through your teeth about why you went in there.
Yeah, that’s what I did first time around. I never got the missing children quest so I just lied and said something about the Sith planning on violating neutrality.
What I love about this ending is that depending on how you play, you might end the game even though you only played like 1/4 or 1/5 of it.
Also most games these days you just get a game over screen and that’s it, here though you get a long scripted game over screen with interactivity/dialog choices.
Today devs don’t get to do this as that budget must be spent elsewhere. Bioware clearly had enough time and budget to add this ending.
I can’t recall it, but I think on my first play through of KoTOR that I actually did end up dying in this ending, to say I was surprised was an understatement. But I still enjoyed that it existed.
I always enjoy games that allow you the choice to take “the path not taken” or “choice not taken”.
Most games just do not include in the design process at all, I wish they all could though.
Reminds me of the multiple cases you can do this in The Witcher 2.
Even frequently gives you chances to back out!
In Dragon Age, will you be using the mod that doubles the size of the enemies’ health bars? ‘Cause that’s the definitive way to play the game and I will accept no substitutes.
Dont forget the mod that makes friendly fire from mages do double damage.
Oh and the one that makes archery in the game basically useless (o wait thats just the main game lol)
Someone never unlocked Arrow of slaying…
Arrow of Slaying was cool to pick off 1 person, but mages have that AOE kill an entire room thing going on.
I suppose that’s why Awakening’s first new archery tree talent is just an absurd boost to everything. (My arrow damage went from 30-something to over 100 per shot just turning it on, and I think they fired faster too.)
After the one rule was established for Chris, you should have disagreed with each other making it impossible for him to comply.
Lisa the Painful RPG has a way better fish court.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugejZEUNjzg
I was really expecting just a full minute of laughter closing out the episode.
Was that intentional Chris?
Whats funny is you haven’t done the Manaan Manaan joke before, but you did ask before if you’d done it before. Everyone even concluded that you should have just done the joke rather than asking.
On the topic of Chris jokes in the episode, is the pun answer “kilo ran”? That’s the best I could think of, though it doesn’t really work grammatically. Wait, never mind, I was trying to make the whole name a pun rather than the actual likely answer.
Speaking also also of jokes,
I thought the Josh impersonation sounded more like Senor Cardgage than Mr Plinkett.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcYy91_3Dw ]
I’m sorry, I know you guys tried to clue me in on how to embed a YouTube video. I tried to find that but I could use the instructions again. i promise to remember this time.
So…that lead me to a weird Strong Bad mash-up…
I think it works if you just post the bare link, but include an ‘s’ after the ‘http’. Hold on – I’ll test it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcYy91_3Dw
Yep, so that’s just your link plus the ‘s’. No brackets nor nuffin’ required!
You dont have to include the s.You just have to put the link in a separate line.
Yep, you’re quite right (just tested it). I must have added a carriage return whilst adding an ‘s’ one time and mistaken that for the solution.
Thank you both.
And he finally did it,yaaay!
What’s bullshit about that trial is that the Selkath weren’t able to pull any witnesses. What’s that? No one saw me go on a rampage killing everyone in the base? Pft, a likely story concidering that I killed everyone.
I DEMAND A RETRIAL (BY COMBAT)
This being a video game, an RPG, and a Bioware game besides I’m surprised that the Selkath who abhor violence and are fierce about maintaining the delicate peace of their world do not actually allow you to trial by combat your way out of the execution.
Best Episode Ever.
RIP Regina Cuftbert
3994 BBY-3956 BBY
“She felt like showing them who was boss.”
‘Twas truly roleplaying in the best R. Cuftbert tradition.
This is the canonical ending of all Cuftberts. This is arguably the thesis of Spoiler Warning.
So Shamus, as far as RPGs go, as one of about 3 reviewers that actually finished Witcher 3 (or played past Novgorod for that matter), do you have any intention of really sitting down and doing a proper, long form analysis of it?
Also have you got Heart of Stone yet? It’s a return to the form of the original Witcher short stories, this self-contained remix of traditional folklore with Geralt mixed in and it’s easily one of the best parts of the game.
I’m not sure. I’ve got the Mass Effect series cooking now, and Fallout 4 has to come next. That would mean I’d be writing about Witcher 3 in late summer 2016. It’s hard to say what will happen between now and then.
When you say “Fallout 4 has to come next” do you mean an article (maybe in two or three parts) or something novella-length like each of the Mass Effect games is getting?
Don’t forget Mass Effect 4 will happen around summer 2016, Shamus.
Aye – although it’ll be southern hemisphere summer, I think!: December 2016…
I’d love to read more Shamus on Witcher, but I think we’ll just have to be patient and hope that the spirit takes him to have another playthrough at some point. Which may be never … but I’d be surprised! And, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m happy to “make do” with Mass Effects and Fallouts and WhatNots in the meantime… :D
On the one hand, sure.
On the other, ME and FO are both series Shamus has written literally hundreds of thousands of words about, while The Witcher….I think 5 posts, all negative, about the first two games, and one or two positive about the third game. For a game he’s mentioned as “nearly perfect and everything I want”, which he’s played for dozens of hours this year, he’s been surprisingly tacit.
I do understand ten posts saying “I love this. This is great too. That works well. Oh my, that’s good. Oooh, nitpick, this bit only works somewhat okayish.” can get boring, but I’m really curious about his thoughts there. And I, for one, seriously doubt we’ll ever get them, because of FO4 and ME2/3.
Yeah, honestly. I respect that Shamus gotta write what he’s passionate about, and I also respect that it’s his damn blog and he can put what he wants on it, but I’m sick to death of Mass Effect talk. I also really don’t care about FO4, I don’t intend to ever play it. From a purely selfish perspective, I love Shamus’ writings, but wish he would direct them somewhere else.
Uhm… I’m feeling pretty dumb. Can someone explain to me the joke at 7:40 please?
Awesome episode by the way! :)
Ren ran.
No. 7:40 was when Shamus mentioned the EU character Exar Kun and Mumbles claimed that name was racist.
Kylo Ren on the track team was at about 15:00.
“Coon” is an archaic slur towards black people. I’m not sure where it came from or how many people remember that, but yeah.
Woooow. That was obscure (for me). Thanks! Also, happy new year everyone! may 2016 bring you happiness, joy, and lots of content from the BEST SITE ON THE INTERNETS :D
Yep, I ran into this same problem when I played KotoR way back when. Even better, I was in the habit of overwriting my old saves with new ones, so I had no way to get back out of the Sith base and no older save to revert to.
No idea if it was fixed in a later patch (or community patch), but ideally a auto-save should be made in such cases so that you can go back to the moment just before the point of no return.
I don’t recall exactly but I think it was a dialog choice at one point that was the point of no return.
Always fail checks work in games where persuading is not a percentage,but a pass/fail barrier like in new vegas.
I don’t think New Vegas has any ‘always fail’ checks though.
Something great about New Vegas is that they have dialogue (actual voiced responses!) for picking options that you do not qualify for, and sometimes this gives you other options.
I think the always fail checks could be a somewhat meta thing. If the player has a dialogue option that obviously looks like some kind of persuade check but doesn’t have markers they could suspect it’s a case of either always pass or always fail situation. Of course this is assuming that there are markers and that they are given consistently. In case of KOTOR I’m willing to believe that it’s a leftover from tabletop games, a lot of DMs will let the players carry arguments and will only demand rolls in certain situations to verify how convincing the character is or how well they can lie.
Of course in tabletop RPGs this is more important as part of a separation between player and charater, for example if a player is fairly quick witted but they are playing some kind of really despicable dreg the DM may use rolls to demonstrate that even valid arguments get shot down at times because the character simply isn’t liked, same thing if the player is socially awkward but they are playing a charismatic character. In case of video games the player can only use the dialogue options provided by the developers so it would make sense to change or limit those depending on the character’s attributes rather than do “rolls”, like the original Fallout (drink) did if I remember correctly.
I rolled a nat’20 on some kind of diplomacy check, and the DM rolled something behind his screen, made a “huh” noise, and then lifted his screen. The bureaucrat had rolled a nat’20 on his counter check. He explained it as basically our attempt to out-clever the clerk were too good, and he was too dense to fall for it, so he was falling back on bloody-minded stubbornness. We had to try another tactic to get past him.
Another time I rolled a 1 on a check I needed a 2+ to pass. The conversation basically went like a comedy of errors after that.
It’s something that I like about systems with crit rolls, they can turn an entire scene upside down.
Of course!One sounds much younger and charismatic,and the other one is Josh.
Now, have they ever been seen in the same room at the same time?
I don’t think anyone has ever seen Josh ever, so nope.
Wow. This is probably the second funniest Spoiler Warning episode I’ve ever seen. (The first was when the horse killed the dragon in Skyrim. Or maybe when Josh got arrested 8 times in Skyrim. Or maybe those were the same episode?)
I probably sound like I’m being sarcastic, but I really did laugh out loud.
the time when josh aggrod the entirety of whiterun, including the companions was fantastic
A Night On The Town shall never be unseated.
I like the one where Josh punches electricity in frustration.
Canon.
Star Wars Christmas Special is…!
Booo to that title!
Aaargh! Didn’t even notice that at first! (I think my mind just volted past it.)
You just never know watt your mind is going to notice or not.
Ouch, whoever came up with that should be grounded.
Ohm my God that’s dreadful.
I don’t pay too much attention to that kind of thing; it can really ampere your enjoyment of fiction.
Welp, now I can’t unsee
Exar Cooneither. And here I thought I’d left the Space Racism behind on the Planet of the Howling Fur Carpets.As an ending it still makes more sense than KOTOR2 though.
I genuinely can’t think of a better way to close out the year.
EXCEPT A NEW EPISODE BEFORE THE STREAM OOHHHHHHHHHHHH