T w e n t y S i d e d
As I said at the end of the show: SoldierHawke is coming to town. It’s been a year since her last visit. The plans aren’t finalized, but it looks like Monday January 13 2020 is going to be her show. If you have any questions for her, the show email is in the header image. Be sure to say that the question is for the SoldierHawke episode so it doesn’t wind up in the standard queue for Paul and I.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
00:00 End of an Era
I don’t know why I felt compelled to bring this up. It’s silly and sentimental, but I guess I needed to talk about it. I think the car had just gathered enough mileage to make it to the moon – in the neighborhood of 240,000 miles.
05:18 Lights and Sound
Anyone else think that “Christmas lights” are a superior form of outdoor illumination and that we should use them year round? I guess it depends if you live near street lights, but for me they’re so much better than traditional lights for helping people find the stairs in the dark.
16:18 Streaming Services – Disney+ vs. Netflix vs. Hulu vs. Amazon
I know Netflix is a major player in online streaming, but given their financials and their catalog, I don’t see how the company can continue to exist. The old saying is, “Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.” I have no idea when the company will die / sell itself to a competitor, but my guess is that in ten years we’ll be talking about the company in the past tense.
I like to cheer for the underdog, so it pains me to admit just how good Disney+ is. They’re the John Cena of entertainment. I know it’s boring to see them win all the time, but that’s the world we live in. Their movies are really strong.
Okay, Disney products aren’t deep, challenging, or thought-provoking entertainment. It’s broad and safe and carefully engineered to be inoffensive to the general population. But if you want a couple of hours where it stops hurting inside, then Disney is a pretty safe bet, box-office wise.
37:53 Islanders and Bad North
42:12 Prey 2017
Deer Dyecast,
I finally got around to playing Prey (2017). After I finished the game, I went to your blog, swearing that I remembered you having a retrospective on it that I skipped reading because I wanted to play the game first. Searching the archives, though, I found surprisingly few articles/Diecast references to it, considering how much you loved the game. Am I going crazy here? Is there stuff missing from archive or at least not showing up in the search for some reason, or did you actually never talk about Prey that much? If not, why not?
“Terrance”
47:21 Mailbag: More interesting Lara Croft
Dear Diecast,
How would you go about crafting a more convincing Lara Croft/Jason Brody (Far Cry 3) style character arc in a video game? You know, where the player character goes from a crying mess to a one person army through the course of the game as you level up and gain abilities. The problem always seems to me that the pacing required to pull it off would be to slow for a mainstream action game; can’t spend to much time in the first part of the arc because the player will want to be shooting more things at this point. But maybe this idea could work better as more of a straight up stealth game? Well those are my thoughts and I’m curious to hear yours.Thanks you,
Kaden
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Disney+ seems good on paper, but from the technical side it’s still a mess – HDTVTest channel on YT has several tests of their “HDR” content which is basically just a SDR export wrapped in a HDR container, all you get is the HDR badge and lower overall brightness when viewing it on a HDR display, no actual HDR (which is absolutely the biggest game changer when it comes to movies and TV shows, IMHO much much more impactful than any resolution bump).
More info:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/disneys-the-mandalorian-joins-a-long-list-of-fake-hdr-content-analysis-finds/
I dislike Chrismas on the whole. But the lights are less offensive than the naked commercialism or the music. At least small displays. When someone slathers them all over the house, then it looks tacky.
You might want to hold off cancelling Netflix for a couple of weeks. It’s about to have the Witcher show. Will it be good? Apparently the early reports are promising.
Also, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Mandalorian on Disney+. It’s pretty good. Not the be all and end all. But pretty good. However, there’s this one development. Everyone knows what I’m talking about. I’m mostly immune to displays of cuteness not from my younger relatives. In fact, it annoys me a little. But I seem to be alone here. When they eased back on it for the most recent episode, there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Only Shamus and I may be old enough to remember this, but in 1647 Christmas was banned. Personally, I dislike governmental authoritarianism, but it was nice to have a few years of peace and quiet.
Tacky? Or glorious?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWBjl-jPcVM
I’d like to put something like that on my house all year just to annoy the neighbours.
I remember when this video made its way around the internet.
https://youtu.be/rmgf60CI_ks
This was before the arduino, when the automation required to control all these lights was difficult to wrangle. It was also before Youtube, when the .mov was still unplayable in Windows Media Player. The sorceries required to obtain and view this made it that much more impressive. It was also before LED christmas lights, so running all those incandescent lights would have been a major expense.
But even today, it’s still no joke.
If I remember correctly this guy apparently also broadcast the music over an FM frequency, so if you knew it you could tune in your radio for the full effect and he avoided annoying his neighbours any further.
Well in the Netherlands we have our buying presents spree at 5 Dec (saint Nicolas). And since we have no Thanksgiving we have Chrismas as the national stuff yourself and go to family time. And nice lights, with no commercialism. Which makes it really nice.
Although since foreign companies bought all Dutch stores they force Christmas on us lately.
Streaming Services
One of the big differences between cable and the current crop of streaming services is that you can sign up/cancel them on month-to-month basis. You can sign up for Netflix, binge for a month, then drop it and sign up for Disney+ instead.
Prey
Definitely looking forward to a retrospective on it. I never played System Shock, so my only point of reference was Bioshock, and Prey is far stronger both mechanically and narratively (Bioshock starts off strong, but really flags after you kill Andrew Ryan). My biggest real complaint is that I didn’t get to complete all of the sidequests, since you pretty much trigger the endgame once you try to go talk to your brother and the board guy shows up.
Hellgate London
That game was an interesting mess. They were way ahead of their time with the Destiny model of looter-shooter, but they were too small a studio to pull it off and didn’t have the business model down. It was an ambitious project- Bill Roper was used to having Blizzard’s resources at hand, and didn’t adjust for running a startup.
Convincing Lara Croft
You could also just have relatively weak enemies in the beginning. I mean, that’s how RPGs do it.
-“Terrance”
If this becomes common, look for the streaming services to try to find ways to stop people from doing that, especially if they are putting money into creating new content.
The higher prices (non-discounted price) for year subscriptions will get much steeper.
Which is a shame, because it’s my current strategy. Rotate every few months and catch up on all the completed series I want to see
The other big advantage with streaming services is the ability to share them among households. We’re paying for Netfilx and Disney+, while also using the Hulu and Amazon accounts from my wife’s family.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription several years ago, just after they started charging separate fees for DVDs and streaming, but they keep trying to lure me back with free trials. Every couple of years I get Netflix for a month, watch whatever it is that they’ve got at the moment that looks interesting, and then cancel, cancel, cancel before they can charge me again. I used to love Netflix. They had everything. Now they don’t. It’s absolutely not worth subscribing on a perpetual basis, but I could see myself paying for a month or two if they suddenly got a bunch of stuff I was really interested in.
I don’t have any other streaming subscriptions, but my wife and I have talked about maybe getting Disney+ for a couple of months at some point, possibly during the summer, if only to give our daughter something to watch other than the stuff we’ve already seen a million, zillion times.
Even though I don’t have a horse in the running when it comes to Netflix vs Disney+, I really hope Netflix doesn’t lose that much ground, mainly because I really don’t like the fact that Disney owns nearly all popular IPs, and just because they’re the epitome of the cyberpunk fantasy of huge companies owning everything worth owning, and ruling the world with an iron fist (or Mickey Mouse ears, as the case may be). I think it’s really nicely represented in this sketch.
With regards to AAA procgen, I think the only place they use it is in ARPGs like Diablo, Warframe, and the like. But it is different to what Shamus is talking about in Prey.
I feel like Disney’s more similar to the megacorp in Mirror’s Edge. It’s brightly lit, and they came to power because they’re largely inoffensive to the average person. I think Shamus’ comment “Disney products aren’t deep, challenging, or thought-provoking entertainment.” sums them up nicely. Almost nothing they’ve produced recently has interested me; That’s going to be a bland future, I think.
It’s just the way it goes, unfortunately. Once upon a time, there was a really passionate author/artist/director/game developer who took a chance with his original work which then proceeded to become more popular than he ever dreamed of. He then proceeds create sequels, each of which takes less and less chances than the last due to the enormous audience and investor expectations they carry, being a continuation of something so popular. And so, you get homogenized works that are almost indistinguishable from each other.
What I’m starting to get tired of is just how strongly you can see this in Disney’s business model.
You mean 100% of the Star Wars films post-Disney, weren’t just re-hashing the same old stuff? /sarcasm (?)
I used to work in HVAC, and we did a number of jobs for Disney. The level of commitment to their corporate culture is quite impressive. “Youthful and Ebullient” is how I would describe it. The stubble-faced executive from the skit isn’t right. Even the janitors are chreub-faced and wearing baseball caps and tailored vests.
Of course, they don’t even tell stories of what happens when you have a bad week. I’ve met them on the train though. The ex-Disney employees, with the glee shucked off. Disney’s a great client though, they know what they want and they pay on time. More than can be said for most, sadly. If you had to choose a corporate overlord, you could do much worse.
Having a strong corporate culture is such a strong advantage. But most companies end up trying to be too many things and their ‘culture’ becomes five bullet points of mush.
Disney, Steve Jobs Apple and Google have (had) real cultures which everyone in the world recognised. They didn’t compromise even when there were downsides.
Even the street level staff in the theme parks live and breathe Disney, and it pays off
Steve Jobs should have compromised more. He mismanaged the Apple III, mismanaged the Apple Lisa, made a bunch of terrible hardware choices for the original Macintosh and offended and alienated people at Apple until, in the midst of underwhelming Macintosh sales and declining Apple II sales–the Apple II being the company’s bread and butter in those days–he quit after bitter corporate in-fighting in 1985. People remember him now as the savior of the company, and I won’t say it’s entirely undeserved, but once upon a time no one was sorry to see him go.
If he did compromise, he probably couldn’t have done the good bits either. I don’t like Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t ever want to work for Apple and I’m personally a fan of Tim Cook doing things like ‘not working his employees to death’, but that zealousness did build up a following which drove the biggest product launch machine around.
Disney is well on it’s way to cyberpunk. Enough clout to extend IP laws and they even already have some extra territorial land. Now all we need is a really big arcology and about 10,000 fog machines.
Warframe = indoor procgen.
Is it? Pretty sure the Warframe environments are hand-made. The player ship interior, anyway, seems like it’s always the same.
The missions are proc-gen maps using tiles. Every door that has to open is a new tile. It is a different tile each time an objective waypoint moves as you get closer. The tiles are handmade but the overall layout of enemy bases, which rooms lead to which other rooms etc, those are all pro-gen.
The player ship interior, player hubs, quests etc are static and not proc-gen.
That things are splintering into multiple streaming services divided up primarily on content and not on function is probably not a good thing. For me, at least, one of the huge benefits of cable services is that you get one box and one bill for all of your TV entertainment. Turn on the TV and go (and the only streaming services I’ve ever had have been ones that I get through my cable provider). Will people be willing to maintain Disney+ for Disney stuff, CBS streaming for Star Trek and some other things, Netflix for their exclusives, Amazon for their exclusives, etc, etc? Not only is that harder to manage — for the things that aren’t famous you have to try to remember which service has which content, for example — but the separate bills are likely to make people thing that this is too complicated and they are spending too much on the content even if they aren’t.
This adds to a new risk for those making the content. If the content goes exclusively streaming service, and the streaming service falters because people have to focus on a few that have more content they like, what happens to the content that people would have watched if they didn’t need to take on a new streaming service to watch it? Will we be able to get sleeper hits now that new content is rarely going to be the draw for a streaming service and so you can only assess how successful it is looking at the existing audience for your service?
As for me, in general I still prefer DVDs, which have a higher up-front cost but with rewatching get cheaper. I have cable, but only for live sports (mostly curling and baseball). I have a streaming service but haven’t watched anything on it for months, after watching the first season of Doom Patrol. It’s worth it for the price I pay, but I greatly underutilize it.
This is basically the same problem with the internet as a whole – innovation peaked when the platform was most open, but when everything’s carved up into fiefdoms, content-creators have to take gambles on who to work with (at best), or whose market-research / whims to pay fielty to (at worst). This is not a good way to create lots of new, interesting content.
Back when cable was king, people wished they could pay for only the channels they wanted. Now, I’ve heard it argued that with streaming we *can*…but that’s not really true. With the exception of smaller niche services like Shudder, streaming services aren’t trying to provide a channel where you’ll be interested in 80% or more of the content – they want to provide *just enough* that you’ll subscribe, and no more. If a sci-fi focused consumer wants to watch Star Trek Discovery, Altered Carbon, and The Expanse, they’ll need to subscribe to three separate services to see them. We’re reverting to a model similar to the old “Big 3” broadcast networks, except A) without a set broadcasing schedule, each “network” can host a multitude of shows with smaller audiences, and B) consumers have to pay for it directly.
We’re definitely closer to the “pay for channels you want” model: it’s just that “channels” are less broken up by genre, and are more arbitrary collections of content. Except streaming services are a lot better because you’re not at the mercy of broadcasting schedules.
Cost-wise, streaming services are still a lot cheaper than cable. Especially if you drop and pick-up subscriptions, but even if you don’t you can still have a lot of streaming services for the price of a month of cable (which generally runs for like $50-$60 per month, in my experience).
And streaming services are still doing better about producing “niche” content than cable – the “channels” aren’t as specific but because it’s not tied to a broadcast schedule, you don’t have to relegate “niche” interests to specific channels or weird hours – stuff like “Love, Death, and Robots”.
So, I think the current model is better than cable in pricing, content, and convenience. The main reason I think people are increasingly complaining is that the current model is inferior to the “Netflix has everything” model that we basically had for several years. Netflix’s content monopoly was largely a good thing for consumers, but it just wasn’t sustainable.
Yeah. At the time, no one but Netflix had conceived of the Netflix business model so most of the rights-holders saw streaming rights as nearly worthless. A big component of Netflix’s initial success is that because of this, they were able to pick up the streaming rights to a ton of content for pennies. Even if we passed a Streaming Service Consolidation Law forcing all the content onto one platform, we couldn’t get back to the old “Netflix has everything for cheap” model because that was all powered by people undervaluing streaming rights, and no one in 2019 fails to realize the value of those any more.
The issue here is that streaming services are being explicitly set up by the content providers and so are being divided up by content provider instead of things like type of content or functionality. Originally, you had Netflix and then something like Hulu which focused more on TV shows and the like. You could easily imagine a competitor coming in and focusing on science fiction and gathering up and paying for that content, or a service focusing on curating content around themes, and so on. In fact, when Canada started up its streaming services what happened was that you had Crave which focused on TV shows and Shomi which focused on movies and curated content (although both did some movies and TV shows themselves). Crave won, but that was a divide that wasn’t primarily on content; as they were run by big companies that owned cable networks and channels as well, they did divide themselves up a bit based on the content that they already had rights to, but the focus was more on functionality than on content.
Now, though, content providers want control of the pipeline themselves. This leads to streaming services divided up by content. The more services someone has to subscribe to to get the content they want, the more annoying they’re going to find it and the more they’ll wonder if they’re paying too much. Even for content providers, it would probably work better for them to get paid by multiple services than to run one entirely themselves.
I had the exact same feelings about it and it’s interesting that the show ended up padded. It’s not like Youtube has to fill 30 minutes of airtime the way syndicated television does, where did the pressure come from to add a bunch of not slowmo content to something with slowmo in the name? Was it just a bureaucracy thing, someone very high up declared Youtube Originals should run X minutes per episode and it was easier to comply with the stupid rule than convince people it would pad their slowmo show?
I heard the camera guys didn’t even want Gavin touching the cameras for that show, which is bonkers
convincing Lara Croft
A Plague Tale: Innocence tried this once again. I cannot say, that the game nailed the concept – only that it did a little better than Tomb Raider 2013. It is a stealthier game and after Amicia (Player Character) is forced to kill a person for the first time there are 2 chapters where the gameplay shifted to avoiding the rats and no enemy encounters. The next kill is most likely executed by the rats and it’s a pig not a human.
Her bodycount continues to grow by the end of the game – understandable but it still doesn’t feel right.
( I watched the LRR playthrough)- It also helps that killing people is pretty hard in that game. You’re allowed to try basically from that beginning, but some guards have more or less armor and your sling is slow and loud and if you aggro more than one you’re probably dead. So it’s not until the game has given you more upgrades (including alchemical sling shot for various purposes) that you can really just decide a particular guard is going to die now. And of course that’s also when you start having more instances where killing is required, until eventually you’re holding ground against a dozen guys- which still only works because they come straight at you one at a time.
Hmmm, it seems like I could get the Diecast in the Podcast app for a while and then…not. Does anyone know why? I tried refreshing the RSS feed but it tried to go through News, which can’t handle audio. I am pretty new to trying to listen to the thing this way rather than a desktop so I apologize if this is really basic stuff.
Regarding the more convincing / interesting Lara Croft:
Weirdly enough, I’ve had that experience that Tomb Raider (2013) intended in Morrowind: At the beginning when I’m a level 1 nobody I’m almost dreading combat because it’s going to take what feels like 2 minutes to land a single hit on this low level mud crab. And at the end of the game when I’m the level 50 saviour of Vvardenfell I’m killing mud crabs (and also much harder enemies) in a single hit.
However, I don’t know how we could translate this feeling to an action focused game like Tomb Raider or Far Cry. Maybe these kinds of games with a gain power / confidence over time narrative need to fully embrace the RPG mechanics they’re only tacking on as an afterthought?
A game that does these successfully is Rodina (buildings-caves-spaceship debris), which incidentally is being developed by a former Bethesda dev who wants to make Daggerfall set in space.
Yes! There’s the garbage graphics I’ve been looking for!
The graphics have neither graphical fidelity, nor artistic style. I think indies are usually better picking the latter and abandoning the former – it usually scales better with low money, and lasts longer as the game ages. For example, I can replay Invisible Inc, Wind Waker, or XIII years later without worrying about the visuals, but New Vegas[1] looks like butts. :S
[1] And that game was more like A or AA, not indie, for budget.
New Vegas looks like butts? Let me introduce you to Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario 64. Those games’ visuals have aged like fine milk.
Mario 64 at least has a cartoony aesthetic. It’s aged a lot better than other games which tried to look “real” given the limitations of the time. System Shock 2 came out 3 years later, Thief 2 was 4 years later, and both look far worse.
There were some assumptions of financials made herein, and I just wanted to post for the record that Netflix brings in billions of revenue and makes hundreds of millions in profit, and Twitch doesn’t actually pay any of their partners; users pay the partners, and Twitch takes approximately half of that for the trouble. The only way Twitch could possibly be losing money is if the cost of all their staff is more than the infrastructure brings in (which does not mean they aren’t losing money, as a lot of people work for Twitch).
Also, Twitch is wholly owned by Amazon (this is why Amazon Prime gives you a free sub each month.)
As I listened I could not help but think that Shamus had somehow got Netflix mixed up with, say, Uber. Netflix has occasionally disappointed analysts in the last few years with worse than expected subscriber numbers, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate that they’re hemorrhaging money.
Netflix are burning mountains of cash, but it’s an investor approved burn. They’ve never really been profitable, but that’s because they always invested all their profits + piles of debt in original content each year.
The theory is, when the investors want to make a profit, they’ll turn off the investment in content tap and rake in the subscription money they’ve built up. Facebook was similar. It’s a common model in modern venture capital.
But they might have missed the best point to recuperate cash. With all the competition, Netflix has begun to struggle to grow subscriptions and increase prices and that has very recently disappointed some investors.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/netflix-lost-us-subscribers-in-q2-over-price-hikes-how-can-it-win-them-back/%3famp=1
What’s your source on Netflix being profitable? According to the link above, they take in a lot of money ($12 billion a year or whatever) but spend it all and more on ‘content’.
This is a model that can only succeed if they keep growing. With the increased competition from Disney, Amazon, etc, this is unlikely to be possible for much longer. At some point they might switch to a strategy of not spending much money and relying on their old content and whatever they can get for cheap, which may or may not cause mass subscription cancellations.
I think STALKER (Shadow of Chernobyl is the best of them) cracked the “first half no combat, second half murdertown” problem. I think it basically does two things which, together, make the arc work. It adds horror elements and open world elements. Open world means there can be core gameplay elements and loops that run through the whole game without needing to go to Murdertown. Tomb Raider is a shooter where sometimes you do platforming, while STALKER is a spooky exploration game where sometimes you shoot things. Strictly speaking the amount of shooting required doesn’t even increase throughout the game, rather the player’s ability to resolve things by shooting does.
Horror works extremely well with STALKER’s open world because in a linear horror game you think to yourself “Oh man I really don’t want to go into the creepy basement” but it’s a videogame, there’s only one way to advance the game state so into the basement you go. In STALKER, you can see the creepy basement, run away never to return and that’s a valid game experience. Similarly if you see a pack of monsters when you’re walking back to the city hub, you don’t have to shoot them or engage in a stealth sequence, you can just turn away and walk the long way around them (the game even encourages this mechanically: there’s no XP and most monsters have no loot: even if you kill them without taking any damage, all you’ve accomplished is expending ammo). The ability to avoid encounters makes it way more meaningful when you do have an encounter: if you’d been more perceptive you could have avoided this monster, this isn’t a scripted helicopter crash, things have legitimately gone wrong and that’s scary.
In general, horror is good at forcing the player into the same headspace as the character because the player and character have the same level of ignorance about what that monster can do, or what’s in the dark cave. This falls down because of player meta-knowledge: Obviously that monster is the level boss I’ll have to have a big fight with, it’s been a while since the last stealth section so I’ll probably have to sneak through the cave, etc. Open world does a lot to erode that. Sure the monster can be killed but there’s no more guarantee that player power will match encounter difficulty: maybe my crappy AK isn’t enough to fight it and I’d get splattered if I tried.
Player advancement (both through in-game equipment and player skill/understanding) also creates the possibility for empowerment in horror. In e.g. Outlast, you might get really good at running away from badguys and hiding under beds, but you never really get the “beat a boss without taking damage” rush from the experience of running away really well. In STALKER, I spent most of the game terrified of this darkened cave full of monsters and randomly-moving fireballs. By the end game, I had seen fireballs elsewhere and figured out how they worked, plus acquired a bunch of useful equipment. Walking back into those caves with night-vision goggles, a fire-resistant suit and automatic shotgun really channeled the spirit of Lara’s “RUN YOU BASTARDS!” It wasn’t just that I now felt capable of taking on the thing I had been scared of, but I was choosing to do it rather than being forced to murder my way through it in Chapter 9: Return To Fire Cave.
STALKER is a really good example and I’m surprised I didn’t even consider it.
Somebody else also pointed out that that the game handles progression from ‘weak and terrified greenhorn’ to ‘biggest badass in the Zone’ in a pretty graceful way. A big shift occurs with the shooting and approach to the world when you finally get a decent scoped rifle, and the gameplay organically pivots from fearfully reacting with crappy pistols and AKs to detecting hostiles and controlling engagements at long-range; sorta turning into a stripped-down faux MilSim.
Another game would have you overcompensate by pumping numbers into a ‘Pistol’ or generic ‘Firearm’ skill, or giving you a badass new weapon in a cutscene or start of a level. But stumbling across one in a stash out in the wild – or successfully scrounging one after a kill – makes the change in dynamic feel so justified in STALKER.
I think another important part of what makes STALKER work is the stark difference between fighting humans and fighting monsters. Humans are your standard FPS enemies: fragile shootmans with very deadly hitscan weapons. Monsters tend to have lots of health, tend to use melee attacks, and are weird and varied enough that the exact behaviour of a monster you’ve never seen before will be unpredictable. This delineates between the stripped-down MilSim of human vs human combat and the horror-themed monster combat. I loved the contrast of simultaneously carrying a sniper rifle because I knew it was the best tool for safely killing humans, and carrying a heavy rocket-propelled grenade launcher with its extremely rare ammo because I didn’t know what was out there and wanted a panic button guaranteed to kill any strange new monster.
Yeah, it helps horror / tension a lot, when the game actually allows you to flee, or choose to die to a powerful force, rather than always knowing you can overcome all “forces” in the game. :)
I made a comment that got posted, then tried to edit a typo and for mysterious reasons this resulted in the whole thing being flagged as spam and deleted. I’ve given up understanding why it might have done this, but checking with Shamus: does that get referred up to the site admin for re-approval, or has it been banished to the second circle of hell where it’s lost forever under piles of Viagra spam and I’ll need to retype it?
Found it. Should be restored now.
If this happens, the sooner you tell me the better. Your message was still on page 1 of the spam queue so I was able to find it. After a few hours, it will probably be buried and too much trouble to find.
I’d suggest waiting another month before cancelling Netflix – looks as if The Witcher might be pretty decent.
Otherwise, yeah, there’s basically nothing worth watching on there. The last series I saw on Netflix was ST:D season 2, and, well, that’s a bunch of time I’m never getting back.
About the only thing that I see Netflix doing that Disney (currently) isn’t is a surprising amount of original non-English content. They seem to be carving out a niche getting Hollywood (behind-the-camera) talent involved making shows for smaller markets around the world. This might be something that gives Netflix a lifeline if Disney bullies them out of the American mainstream; then again, Disney could just as easily usurp them in this market if the House of Mouse wills it.
STD is a good abbreviation for a series.
Prey (2017) sort of does the thing Paul suggested of having the ending react to what skills you use. There’s a vague narrative aspect where the game puts a story to the signifiance of what skills you chose, but it’s pretty open to interpretation so I prefer the mechanical aspect. You can put upgrade points into either the Human Skills or the Alien Skills, and the alien skills tend to be much splashier (shapeshifting, fireball throwing, etc) but the lore is that you’re gaining these skills by injecting DNA/brainwaves/whatever so if you take the alien skills, the space station’s security bots will scan you as an alien and attack. In Prey I think it’s binary: any amount of alien skills sets all the bots into murder mode, but in theory this could be generalized to a system that provides incentives to avoid pulling out all the super sweet tech in level 1: sure you could, but the game will get reactively harder so you should be careful about when you do it.
Echo does something similar. It’s a stealth game where the hook is that all the enemies are clones of you: at first all they can do is walk around and melee attack, but whenever you take an action it gets uploaded to the Clone Control Computer and after a minute or so the clones gain that skill. There’s a really interesting metagame in stealthing around the clones and controlling their patrol routes by managing things like “okay I can open this side room to dodge the patrol, but then they’re going to learn to open doors and start patrolling all the rooms so instead I’ll take the elevator because I’m okay with their patrols learning to take elevators.” It also leads to interesting emergent gameplay when things go wrong. If the clones are closing in on you you can sprint and get away from their zombie walk, but then they’re going to be running, so the next time they corner you you’ve got to shoot them, and now they’ve learned how to use a gun…
This moved away from Paul’s pitch more than a bit, but Echo is really cool and I’m sad it didn’t sell better so I had to take the chance to shill for it.
It isn’t quite binary in PREY; there is some small number of Typhon powers you can unlock without the security system turning on you. I think it’s three, but it might be even fewer.
@Shamus Thought you might enjoy this video that breaks down how Portal’s portals work (in the rendering engine) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SmPR5mvH7w
“How would you go about crafting a more convincing Lara Croft/Jason Brody (Far Cry 3) style character arc in a video game? You know, where the player character goes from a crying mess to a one person army through the course of the game as you level up and gain abilities.”
A design challenge! I love a design challenge! There are a lot of ways you could do it, and do it well.
1. Have the initial long section of the game be mostly platforming/puzzles with *very few fights*, ALL of which are (effectively) boss fights.
2. Give the player a teacher/trainer/helper who, for the first half of the game, does most of the heavy-lifting combat-wise.
3. Have a failure mechanic where losing/failing doesn’t mean “game over”, so you don’t have to succeed at EVERYTHING to progress the game. It’s hard to convincingly tell people “you’re not a badass” when they have to be a perfect badass at every step or they don’t get to go on.
4. Change the combat as the game progresses, so you start out carefully plinking at things from a distance, striving not to get hit, and end the game wading in and smacking things aside.
5. Have your character start out injured/sick/cursed, and get healed/recover partway through.
6. Find the Mega Sword.
The more I list the more I can think of games that do all of these things perfectly well, to the point where I start to wonder what the heck games people are playing. I mean, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones both do this perfectly well–toward the end of the game the combat is DELIBERATELY trivial because they give you a Mega Sword that can one or at most two-hit enemies. And then at the same time they take AWAY your ability to rewind time. So you lose your free pass AND become a badass simultaneously. It’s great–you feel really strong at the same time as the stakes go way, way up.
4 was going to be my suggestion; have a shooter where the main character doesn’t know how to shoot, so at the start their aim is all over the place, and if you don’t stand still for a second before firing they’ll end up hurting themselves because they’re holding the gun awkwardly. Then… I dunno, they get gloves and stop giving themselves slide bite all the time.
With 2, you can also play the heavy-lifting character in the first half of the game, taking care of Whiny Wimperson, then plot happens and now you’re playing Whiny Wimperson, as they learn to transform themselves into Whiny Revengeperson.
Maybe the game could use a more System Shock 2 style of upgrade system. If put only a few points into guns you can’t use most of them and the ones you can use you’re really bad at. In Far Cry 3 you go from badass to extremely badass.
“Terrance” et al:
If you’re so desperate for material on PREY that you don’t mind reading any old jerk’s take on it, or if that take is relentlessly negative and just doesn’t seem to end no matter how far you scroll, you can navigate yourself here, where I basically take the game by the throat and tear it right out. And then recommend the game anyway, because it’s by far Arkane Studios’ best game, and a steal at twenty bucks. Twenty five if you’re really desperate for an unlicensed System Shock spinoff.
I think you could do the Laura Croft thing by just adding a timeskip. You have an “I don’t think I can do this” intro where you escape from the bad guys, then it cuts to later on, and you’re a badass. This also would be a good time to switch game styles, from a more linear experience to Ubisoft open-world or something.
Funny that you talk about Hellgate London and how it was like Diablo, since it was made by the core developers of Diablo after they left Blizzard.
Basically they bit off more than they could chew in making an AAA game with the funding they had available.
I know what you meant, and I haven’t listened to this new podcast yet, but Disney did plenty of hurt, in my opinion, with the bullshit “Leia levitates back in the ship and ignores basic physics/biology” in that next-to-last Star Wars movie..