T w e n t y S i d e d
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That was the most laughs I’ve had on the show in a while. I’m glad we covered this game. And I think we pretty much cracked the secret of this thing. Remember, if you’re having trouble with a particular section: Be Careful!
Someone should put that advice on Gamefaqs.
Next week: Probably Fallout 4.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
I’m surprised Shamus didn’t enjoy this game more, considering how salty he’s been about Mass Effect.
I’ll just see myself out now. No, no, don’t get up, I can leave under my own power.
That pun was insalting my intelligence.
It’s an assalt on my sense of humour.
It used to make me sad that Shamus doesn’t like Dark Souls because DS is so good
But now his impressions of the Dark Souls community have become so funny I kinda like it.
‘So you don’t like the game, have you tried enjoying it?’
‘You are getting hit by those arrows a lot but I think the best thing for you right now is to not get hit by them’
‘Dark Souls is actually pretty easy if you just play perfectly all the time and never make any mistakes. Do that and you’ll be fine’
And from what was said in the previous entries,I figured out that its pretty easy if you raise your perception to 10,so do that as well.
Just put some points into ENERGY WEAPONS FOR ONCE, DAMNIT!
wow, do we have to do FO4 instead of more of this?
I wasn’t planning to watch FO4, but I was totally hoping for more of this. That game looks fun.
They can’t do a Spoiler Warning season of a good game, they just did one. It’s time for another bad game first.
Though I’ve gotta say, it’d be nice to see some more S ‘n S periodically, like the Marlon Briggs season.
Marlo Briggs was the best season no-one expected.
Maybe occasional breaks of this once the bile gets to be too much w/ FO4? That’d be lovely!
I wanted to say I think this is a great idea. Though I look forward to the fallout 4 season, It might be a good thing for the cast to switch it up a bit so that they don’t get quite as…. filled with bitterness, anger, depression, sadness, and an emotion which the human mind is not adequately suited to explain but which perfectly encapsulates all the is wrong with the universe. You know like the ending of the KOTOR season.
It might even be a good idea to go so far as to maybe pick a game like this and switch it off weekly. That way you might be able to keep both games feeling fresh.
the buddhists call it “unsatisfactoriness”
Yeaaaah.
Having seen now seen Joseph Anderson’s thorough takedown of Fallout 4, I don’t even care for Shamus’ much entertaining 30,000 word nitpick essays, I just want it to go away and be forgotten entirely.
It still suffered from the ’10/10 it’s okay – IGN’ issue of being overrated by the industry, but a lot of prolific game journalists as well as a sizeable portion of the community has turned on it for its complete lack of roleplaying, gameplay getting more dumbed down with each iteration and general Bethesda bullshit.
I feel as though it might even be a big turning point for B. Turns out 2011 was a much different era and F4 getting released in the same year as Witcher 3, aka what might be objectively the highest quality video game ever made, made a lot of people turn and think whether ‘duh did you expect quality, it’s a Bethesda game’ and ‘mods will fix it’ is the right attitude to have towards one of the biggest video game developers out there.
I’m looking forward to the FO4 season because I’ve seen what other people think of it. I’ve read the RPGcodex review, I’ve watched that video, I’ve read a bunch of comments about it on other sites, and I cannot wait to watch the Spoiler Warning crew descend into screaming madness.
For the record: I’m looking forward to FO4. This isn’t an attack or argument with any of the other commenters, just wanted to go on record. Not everybody is dreading the upcoming season!
Me too. With that said, I hope they don’t stick with it if the experience becomes too miserable for them.
I’m not sure about Fallout 4.
There’s not a lot of scope for Cuftbertness because, well, there’s not a lot of scope for roleplaying.
So it’s probably going to be quite a lot like the Skyrim season. Long, not a lot for the hosts to react to (beyond generalised kvetching about Fallout 4) no matter how much Josh tries to comically break the world, and at the end it doesn’t feel like much got achieved.
In case Rutskarn ruins everything again, I really want to s/zee Reginald Cuftburt in the Sunless Sea. I’m fairly certain there’s a muttonchopped captain portrait…
As much as I love Sunless Sea, that would be an awful idea. The game is 90% text, you might as well stream reading a book.
A little text let’s play though, like the Dungen Crawl posts… though I do wonder if Sunless Sea doesn’t have too much narrative of its own to work with those.
… Like the Alan Wake season?
Signs
IYou Might Be A Hopeless Fanboi: you’d watch them stream reading a book.Something like this?
The real issue is that the stream they use is low-quality and text tends to be unreadable for the other hosts.
They did do the Yahwg special…
They also did a hangout of Crusader Kings, and it was dreadful. The lesson: slow-paced games where you can’t tell what’s happening instantly by looking at the screen don’t really work for SW.
Heresy! The Cuftbert dynasty was the greatest of all time!
That one needs to have Mumbles on board(pun intended).
They should play apotheon on hard difficulty.
All right, you got me. All I wanted was for Rutskarn to make S/Z puns and the other commentators to use irrigo to burn them from their memories…
I think the lesson to take away from this: if there’s a trap in the area, lead with that.
This seemed like a very cathartic week for Shamus. I’m glad he could take that emotional journey with Josh, Campster, and Reginald.
Good to get all that grief and revulsion out of the system before settling in for Fallout 4.
I’m sure they are going to love every second of it and will have nothing but good things to say about it.
I’ve no doubt just ruined it but the “Eight comments? Nobody’s THAT hungry.” message feels very appropriate for this video.
Come on Shamus, why would you take a shield from someone you just killed? If it was any good you wouldn’t have killed the last guy who owned it.
This always amuses me in DnD: so you loot the bodies, they’ve got magic armor and magic shirts. Oh you’re putting them on right now? Oh no, the blood’s fine but you might want to do something about all the gaping holes from your crits and sneak attacks and horrible body mangling doom spells.
Never mind that. What I want to know is why does the same set of armor fit both my halfling and her half-orc sidekick?
Although if you actually play by the rules-as-written (including the Wizards FAQ), the same set of armour won’t fit both your halfling and her half-orc sidekick, at least in v.3.5 and Pathfinder. While it says that magic armour will resize to the wearer, that’s supposed to be only within its size category. It’s to account for full plate being sized to the owner, and in fact looted mundane full plate armour needs to be resized by a blacksmith, else you’ll take penalties or some such.
To be fair, this is a pretty good analogy for 3rd and 3.5e D&D. A bunch of overly complex and situational rules designed to approximate common sense.
Videogames, alas, work by the rules-as-coded instead of the rules-as-written. I suppose I should feel lucky that Neverwinter Nights at least implemented the restrictions on weapon sizes.
You must have grabbed the half & half.
Hah,I cooked him with fireball,his armor will be fine once it cools down.
And germ-free! Yay.
Actually … are there germs in D&D? Like, are there are micro-organism with stats & so on, or would it all be abstracted into saving throws & suchlike?
Most diseases,mundane or magical,are just a save.But I think there was a statted germ in one of the appendices to monster manual.
There are disease rules, which involve multiple saving throws over a time period to determine if/when you recover. The microbes aren’t statted out.
That’s why in the one game I had to deal with that, my druid only wore wood armor. Sure, it’s hard to find, but so so easy for a druid to fix. Ah, fond memories of the week the DM had the flu and let me (somehow) make a suit of Ironwood Elven Chainmail. He was very into “realism” in games and it kinda drove him crazy that there was someone in wooden chainmail wandering around. Me, I just wanted the best armor I could get and well, the armor’s pretty! Pic of armor
(Yes, it’s supposed to be made out of mithril and I have no idea if ironwood could approximate mithril, even with druid magic. I didn’t care, it was approximately equal in value to the armor the rest of the party was running around in (so not unbalancing), and I hadn’t gotten an armor upgrade since 3rd level because I had to stick with something I could repair)
What does the grass eat in the cave?
Passing chefs. It’s carnivorous grass.
Offtopic:
I was pondering playing Dragon Age Origins and wile poking around a game wiki I saw a mention of the writer for a character, I wikied that name and found this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gaider
That writer has been with BioWare for 17 years and written some of my favorite BioWare characters, but in February he left BioWare. What a shame considering that he apparently was the lead writer for Dragon Age Origins.
I wonder what the author that created the world of Thedas and the characters Morrigan and HK-47 would have done if he had been lead writer on ME3 (he never worked on the Mass Effect games it seems).
By the looks of it he had less involvement in DA2 and most likely even less in DA:I. I’m assuming he kept writing Morrigan and Cassandra and the other characters he had created.
Looking at wikipedia it seems like maybe there was a shift in BioWare around 2012 (when BioWare founders retired?)
But he stuck through DA:I.
I wonder what that means for the 4th Dragon Age game (there obviously will be one). But David Gaider will not be writing Morrigan or Cassandra etc. Somebody else will (if those characters appear in DA4 at all that is).
Here’s a thought Shamus, maybe look at which writers worked on BioWare games, what they did and if they are still working at BioWare. It may not be easy (you’ll need to don a tiny journalism hat) but looking at BioWare game credits (youtube videos or maybe some wikis or websites).you should be able to see recurring names.
Going from Lead writer to not lead writer is a sign that a writer may be getting pushed aside or not feeling it any more. Especially if their role does not increase (up to game director for example).
In this case, if the writer did such a good job designing the world/lore and main characters for DA:O, why not let them be lead writer and or game director for the sequel as well?
My guess, halfway through DA2 something changed (in management? direction?)
Doesn’t that somewhat reflect what happen with ME2 as well?
BioWare in the last decade or so seems to make a great first entry in a series but then fumble partway through the sequel, they managed to to recover for most of the trequel but fumbles near the ending. Really odd, it’s as if somebody is saying “This is going great…now let’s change who’s working on what!”
They’re owned by EA. ‘Nuff said.
DA2 was made in sixteen months, so I’m guessing that what happened was just their insane time crunch catching up with them.
Several answers to this:
A) Both Mass Effect and Dragon Age began development while BioWare was an independent studio. Mass Effect was released before they were acquired by EA; Dragon Age after. There was a semi-major culture shift right then.
B) By the standards of AAA game culture, neither Mass Effect nor Dragon Age were “going great”; sales were not the multi-millions that AAA demands, and so changes were “necessary”.
C) Very few things in business are actual meritocracies. Promotions come because of whom you know, how well you shmooze and toe the company line, and through attrition by just managing to not get fired long enough. Most business executives don’t actually know which members of their (especially creative) team are the best, most skilled or talented workers.
I was so disappointed with this game. I found it completely uninspiring and completely unchallenging. I started having fun for 10 minutes when I discovered a couple exploits then it got boring fast again. It seemed like it just blindly copied dark souls stuff, including the stuff that wasn’t smart in dark souls.