T w e n t y S i d e d
So there I was, Tuesday morning, chatting with Shamus. And he was bemoaning the fact that without any Spoiler Warning recorded, the content on the blog this week would be sparse and he would have to spend more time this week being Rich Successful Internet Personality-Man and less time being Awesome Cool Legit Indie Game Developer-Man. So I said to him, “Well, hey, why don’t we do a hangout? It’ll be easy, free content to fill out a few days on the blog and, hell, they probably wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t show up.” He liked this idea, so I went about planning it.
And then Shamus started writing about Fallout 3 again, and oh dear god what are you even–
Uh, right, so there’s going to be a hangout tomorrow, at 4 PM Pacific. Same twitch channel as always. We’ll probably be playing Killing Floor 2, or something.
When the stream is live, you’ll find it here: www.twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
6,000 words about the plot of Fallout 3, painstakingly repeating points most of you have heard dozens of times already, for years, on this very site.
WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE I SHOULD GO BACK TO MCDONALDS.
How about a Top 10 worst things in Fallout 3?
I couldn’t Believe number 6!
Is it “What do they eat?”?
mrBtounge’s got you covered on the front man!
In order of least bad to worst
1. The Plot
2. The Plot
3. Dad
4. The Plot
5. The Fucking Plot
6. Three Dog
7. The Colours Green and Grey
8. The Plot
9. The Plot
10. Little………… Nope not saying it nope. NO NO!
And yet general consensus seems to be that Fallout New Vegas had better gameplay and Fallout 3 had the better story. Fallout 3 had the deep story about the folly of mankind and their redemption in ruin, while New Vegas had the shallow story about random factions and messing around in casinos for no reason.
I totally get why someone would like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas, but that reasoning was always…odd to me.
Judging by your Twitter feed, I suggest 6,000 words about the Witcher 3. Specifically, 6,000 words about this one quest you’re doing.
I mean basically it and Fallout 3’s main plot are the same thing right? Except I assume Dandelion isn’t voiced by Liam Neeson.
The payoff for that quest is Geralt’s going to find Dandelion just in time for his funeral, then shrug and say “I guess that was a dead end”.
And then you have the quest to gather flowers for his grave,right?But what flowers would be appropriate,I wonder…
I don’t know if you’re joking, but I feel like saying that, while the Witcher universe is very much shades of gray, and often dark, it is almost never that grimdark about its main characters. Especially Dandelion
…I’m electing to read this as “all puns are grimdark”, and it’s great.
I’m hoping he’s joking, because if not, that’d be a pretty jerk thing to say without spoiler tags.
The joke is that he died of old age while Geralt was looking for him.
That joke totally went whoosh over my head. Maybe because I love all the Witcher universe main characters.
Nah, it’s only a spoiler if people believe you.
Dandelion is an annoying prick. At one point you can almost see Geralt pondering about leaving Dandelion to die due to his own machinations. He’s like the ally you don’t want, causing more issues than any antagonist ever could.
No, 6,000 words is the fewest lines of dialog you hear in your conversations with that guy who had his vault robbed of “20 tons of gold”. He looks like the Heavy from George R.R. Martin’s “Game of TF2.”
Don’t worry, some of us, myself included, have not played any Fallout game, and have barely an inkling of what the plot of Fallout is possibly about, despite having watched its Spoiler Warning season (more like listened to, but still). So this read will be most welcome.
I am not hyped for Fallout 4 either, the whole series feelsl like something of a strange beast to me. It’s an RPG in the sense that you talk to people and do quests and there are (occasionally) consequences, but then there are guns and there’s that weird aiming system, and what am I even supposed to think about it? I guess years of playing the original Neverwinter Nights does that.
(too bad this hangout is at 2 am my time, I guess I’ll be watching the VOD again ;( )
And another edit: Shamus, I admit the Dandelion plot is longer and more convoluted than it could be, and if you are so sick of the Dandelion plot, you should be able to go to Skellige to Skyrim up your Witcher experience. I’m pretty sure you’d have to finish the Dandelion plot at some point, but the ‘search for Dudu’ part is pretty interesting, as it has Geralt in a role that is not typical for him and doesn’t appear anywhere else in the series. And Skellige can take you oh, 10-20 hours to start up, by which time you might be OK with finishing the Dandelion part. I should probably dig up my twitter account..
Its about cycles.
Specifically, motor-cycle handbrakes and the shishkebabs you can make out of them.
I wish the devs for Fallout would just make up their minds about the real-time and turn-based stuff. Like, we could have a real-time-only game like System Shock or Deus Ex, or we could just have all combats happen in turn-based like, I dunno…X-COM or something. The problem with having both combat systems in the same game, is that now there’s twice as much to balance, test, develop, etc, so both systems suffer for it. Plus for the most part, the player is incentivized to use the real-time elements to bypass the character’s skill and attribute points. Why can Deus Ex from a jillion years earlier do real-time properly, but Fallout 3 can’t? :S
I’d prefer to see them use the turn-based system of another game. Like, let’s say, Fallout.
But I’m a curmudgeon who prefers turn-based combat in games, and I know I’m in the minority.
I love turn based, but barring a full turn based fallout 4, I would prefer full real time. The compromise between them (VaTs) is terrible.
I disagree, and here’s why: Fallout isn’t a great FPS, though New Vegas is pretty good (by which I mean “fun”). The VATS system is a way for those who stink at shooters (no matter the quality) to survive combat they’d normally have to replay multiple times to win. It also allows one to bypass the occasional “impossible” shot and/or see where the heck incoming fire is originating.
As for turn-based games… No. Just no. Not only is combat a slog when you have more than six characters involved, because it’s turn-based, large-scale combat becomes nigh impossible to sit through, let alone survive. “The 20 bandits attack! Let me kill one with my pistol… and now I have to sit through 19 more actions, assuming I live through them before I can kill someone. Then I have to sit through 18 more actions…” Caravan escort duty is annoying enough, but the battles were as epic as playing “Angry Birds” on your phone at the gaming table until the DM let you know it was your turn to roll the dice.
I played the hell out of Fallout 1 and 2, but they’re not as easy to play or as “fun.” F3, for all its flaws, is still fun. I can shoot stuff or do quest stuff. I can decorate my house, lob nukes at caravans, etc. Same for New Vegas, only even more so.
More than that Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are absolutely defined by immersion. New Vegas is the greatest roleplaying game ever created because you can absolutely live as your character and all the fun weird interactions between the real time systems only enhance that.
In Fallout New Vegas I sleep in a bed when night time falls even without hardcore mode, because I like to play out my character. I can’t imagine ever doing that in an isometric system with God RTS controls (or even worse, fully turn-based!)
My friends and I were thoroughly immersed in Ultima IV (entirely turn based) when we played it in high school. It was state of the art back then and we didn’t know any better.
To be fair, I would have a hard time with that today, jaded as I am by 30 years of technology advances since then.
Well, of course this is all a matter of opinion, and there is no “one true best game style”.
My preference for fallout would be Borderlands style combat with an Obsidian style story (preferably one actually written by Obsidian).
I say this even though I am not terribly skilled at FPS myself. I just find Vats to be immersion breaking. I think that a forgiving difficulty slider and lots of health potions (and maybe some sort of respawn mechanism, like a wasteland ambulance, or something) are a better way to help players who are unskilled at shooters.
I think immersion-breaking depends on play style. I mean, I love the ability to target weapons in the hands of enemies and to have perks/skills that reflect, say, an amazing ability at using a sniper rifle to make headshots. Having an FPS as forgiving as the higher-level perks would be problematic, I think, since not only would you not be able to effectively target objects/body parts (at best, your chance of doing more damage to that part would increase if you scored any hit at all), a largely forgiving target zone could encompass multiple targets as well as friendlies when all you want to do is make sure you don’t mangle Cook-Cook’s head.
I find giving orders far more immersion-breaking because I’m now playing a boardgame. As you say, tastes differ, and I’m by no means holding up F1&2 as the Platonic Ideal of turn-based isometric combat.
For what it’s worth, I find Final Fantasy turn-based combat far more un-fun, but again, that’s only my opinion.
Its unfair to use combat of fallout 1 and 2 as an indicator of what turn based combat can be,since that was the worst part of those two games.You can make turn based much more interesting and fun,like they did with xcom,for example.Note that I dont think xcom was perfect,it still had problems,but it was way better.
Also,that thing about combat against 20 enemies having you kill just one then wait for the other 20 to move is untrue.By the time you get to fight more than 3 enemies at once(and have a chance of winning,that is),you had access to weapons and perks that would allow you to kill 3+ of them in one round.Though,at the same time your allies were also having those,and you were more afraid of whether friendly fire will be the end of you(again,combat was very frustrating in those two games).
I’m only using the comparison in the same way that F3 is compared to F1 & 2. Taken on their own, I’m gauging it by how much overall enjoyment and/or mindless entertainment I get out of their various mechanics.
On a completely unrelated note, I do have to applaud F3’s environmental storytelling for something new I noticed recently. I loaded an old F3 save and was poking around, and in the tunnel leading to the Presidential Metro, you can find a car in the middle of the sewer. On either side of the car are makeshift ramps. Past the car and the ramps is a crashed motorcycle. This time, however, I noticed the skull and ribcage of the Cuftbert-esque Evil Knievel in the ceiling, as they apparently got their head wedged in a light fixture during their stunt show. It’s totally pointless and hilarious to discover.
I think the problems you have with turn based games are a symptom of bad design more than anything. I’ve been playing a lot of XCOM (the firaxis reboot) recently and it is definitely is the best turn based tactics game I’ve ever played. Sure it still is possible to get into a situation with 20 dudes shooting at your 6, but a lot of your decisions are going to be based around trying to avoid such a situation. Even if you do get into a bad situation like that, the game gives you tools to get yourself out of it. Move everyone into good cover, fall back to avoid being flanked, drop smoke grenades to reduce the enemies chance to hit, launch a rocket or throw grenades to kill or wound a clustered group of enemies and blow up their cover. Most of your soldiers probably have the ability to shoot multiple times in one turn given certain conditions are met (the soldier hasn’t moved, or didn’t use this ability last turn, or is flanking the target, or kills the target). Basically, if you brought the right tools and know how to use them, your 6 man squad can wipe out those 20 aliens in a single turn, or at least kill the problem ones and use smoke grenades to survive until next turn.
I will give you that there isn’t much to be done about the amount of time combat takes. The average engagement easily lasts half an hour to an hour. Though XCOM in particular is designed in a way that no engagement is really trivial and almost every single one helps to advance your goals in a significant way. Even then though if you don’t like waiting to take your turn then there isn’t much to be done about that. But I don’t get bored watching the aliens turn because every shot they take could kill someone and every move they make causes new problems or presents new opportunities. Also the game will punish you for not paying attention when something scurries off into the fog of war and you don’t plan for it.
That said, Fallout and XCOM seem to have very different design philosophies. For one, a lot of the fun in XCOM comes from being dis-empowered and overcoming more powerful opponents, while Fallout is mostly a power fantasy. I wouldn’t expect Fallout to take a complete 180 and embrace a lot of the mechanics that made XCOM fun, so I would expect a turn based fallout to have exactly the problems you outlined.
Fallout was also based on tabletop RPG mechanics of the 80’s and 90’s which weren’t known for being particularly forgiving (there’s a reason “no saving throw” still strikes fear into the hearts of older gamers). Not to mention your party size is always far smaller than the larger forces you might run into. When I last played Fallout 2, I was basically kitted out with the best weapons & armor in the game and even with a handy bottleneck on my side, I’d still get pasted by more than 9 or so raiders just because they could plink away at me and never seemed to miss.
Really?Because after I got energy weapons and the power armor in 2 I was able to storm trough super mutants by turning most of them into mush.Raiders didnt even register as a threat at that point.
On the other hand,getting up to that point was a grueling task,and I had to sacrifice much of my early game effectiveness in order to become the energy weapon god(going through that god damn temple with basically no strength and endurance is a massive pain in the ass).Definitely a huge balance problem.
On the gripping hand,even fallout 3* had a balance problem,in that melee weapons build was an order of magnitude above the rest.
*I guess.This was true for new vegas,so probably just as true for vanilla 3.
While Josh’s effectiveness with melee builds is beyond question, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I can feel my armor’s pristine-ness vanishing as I force myself to run into enemy fire so I can punch them with my ballistic fist.
It’s not a good feeling. It makes me want Christine’s sniper rifle.
I too would love the return to isometric turn based combat,with some improvements.But,as I know that wouldnt happen,Id prefer if they would adopt the combat system of mass effect 2 than the vats crap.Getting the ability to easily issue orders to your allies and use items without having to go to pipboy for it would be great.
For a while, there was a group trying to make a kind of expansion/sequel to Fallout in the isometric form. I’d stumbled on their sprite art on a long-forgotten DeviantArt page.
While the attempts to convert F1 & 2 over to the Bethsoft engine never went anywhere just due to the massive amount of work needed, I wonder if the reverse wouldn’t work? Maybe as a kind of Easter Egg in-game or a pre-order bonus, Bethesda could convert F3 and/or New Vegas into the F1 engine?
It’s not always about what you write, but often simply about how you write it that keeps me reading. It’s easy to say ‘Indigo prophecy made no sense’, it takes skill at humour to come up with Mr Trofy.
Interesting question though: is Maccas better or worse at being food than Fallout 3’s story is at being a story?
Said Fallout plot article hasn’t been released yet though, right? Just making sure I didn’t miss it somehow…
It’ll be a series. Possibly 5 parts. Should start next week.
I’m Kind of curious about how articles affect its on previous content. ie: I wonder if next week there will be a spike in views op the fallout 3 season.
5 parts?Does that mean you may consider going back to “Shamus plays” written series?Because that would be awesome.Id love to read “Shamus searches for dandelion” saga.
But I didn’t even tell you guys about my new gaming schedule. WHO’S THE MOLE?!
It was me, Krellen! IT WAS ME ALL ALONG!
Play Payday 2 instead, so I can show people how hilariously broken a dodge build is. Well, I say show, but I’ll be kind of disappearing into the distance at warp speed, killing everything with critical hits.
Sadface. I’ll still be at work…
Oh well, I guess I’ll watch it later.
just … just make sure the vod is saved and can be viewed on a later date. My insomniac mind does not want to stay up that late.
It’ll be fine as long as they don’t entrust the responsibility with Rutskarn.
Hey Josh!
Witcher 3 please!
Thanks in advance. =)
After Shogun 2!
so somewhere around 2023?
My guess is that Shamus will write something on Witcher 3 once he’s finished the main plot (assuming he doesn’t get a stroke trying to put up with Dandelion).
Witcher 3 has a lot of good and not so good things about it. Deconstructing it (or rather seeing Shamus do so) might be interesting.
You know, instead of playing Fallout 3 you could do Tale Of Two Wastelands – the mod for New Vegas which imports all the Fallout 3 content. All the terrible writing, with a slightly less terrible engine and no GFLW!
Plus being able to jump back and forth between the two totally breaks many quests – take all of Mr House’s books to The Brotherhood for example.
I suspect the chief attraction would be punching all the Fallout 3 NPCs with the Ballistic Fist.
I’d tear through the wasteland with the Pulse Gun and all the perks vs. robots.
For those that never found it, it’s deep in New Vegas’ Vault 34, but when I was using it as an energy weapons build, it could one-hit kill just about every robot short of the Giant Roboscorpion at Big MT.
Also, the multitude of skill books in the Capital Wasteland now give the New Vegas bonus, meaning you can easily max all your skills. At least that was true when I played it, they may have fixed it.
A-and I missed it by 45 minutes =X. It’s not often that I wake up at 6 am though, being an owl sort of person. The guest’s voice during the start of the Witcher 3 segment is really annoyingly loud :( I’d be able to comment more when I listen to the entire thing
I want you all to know that I have incredible timing.
Because of you, I now want a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich. They should hire you.
will you be uploading these to youtube? i always have problems with twitch, it barely loads videos for me, live or not.
They usually upload their hangouts to Youtube, no worry.
shame their saints row and xcom streams were lost.some funny stuff there. i would love to see a legit full spoiler warning of enemy within.
I blame Rutskarn for that.
That depends on whether Josh will ever be able to calm down enough in order to edit and upload the thing.He did sound pretty angry by the end of it.I guess he should go to wendys to cool his head a bit.
Maybe with a cool refreshing chocolate frosty?
As far as I am aware Josh did record everything without issue and is planning on uploading it.
In other news, I’ve sold my name to Wendy’s. I hope you all enjoy my new username.
You forgot to add the link to Wendy’s in your name, so no ad money for you.
You both make me so proud!
It’s weird to me as an Australian because we have a Wendy’s chain as well, they sell ice cream and only ice cream.
What does your version of the Outback Steakhouse serve?
Knuckle sandwiches.
Dont you mean Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Knuckle Sandwiches?
It’s the Australian Wendy’s, so it’d be Spicy Chicken Knuckle Soft-Serve.