Diecast #380: Mailbag Mania

By Shamus Posted Monday May 9, 2022

Filed under: Diecast 52 comments

I’m spending most of the day asleep. And even when I’m awake I’m still grouchy, distracted, and befuddled. Things are rough, but hopefully they’re about to get better. With any luck, I’ll have better news next week.

Anyway, this is it. The mailbag is finally clear. If you still have unanswered questions now, it’s because you didn’t send them in.



Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast380


Link (YouTube)

00:00 Uremia!
I do not recommend.

01:24 Mailbag: Prey

Greetings, Paulmus (Shaul?)

So, I assume you have already seen this video by Yahtzee on Prey, from a couple of days ago:

While you’ve already discussed this game and the possible reasons for its failing to find an audience, Yahtzee here introduces the possibility of it being too polished for its own good and as such not really having anything memorable to latch onto.

Weird West has now released (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097350/Weird_West/), made by a few of the developers of Prey and being marketed as a non-first person immersive sim, and while first reviews were less favorable due to strange design choices and bugs, it has been garnering more and more positive attention as the days go by, seemingly giving credence to this whole theory, going by what the Steam reviews say.

Do you think it’s possible for a game to really be “too well crafted for its own good”? Have you ran into such a thing before (well, besides Prey, I guess)?

08:02 Mailbag: Modding vs Unity

Dear Mr. Young and Mr. Spooner!

I hope these lines reach you and your families in good health! To cut to the chase: you mentioned that Warcraft 3 spawned several genres, like Mobas and Tower Defense. That made me reminisce about the late 90ies and early oughts, where mods like the ones already mentioned, but also Counterstrike and Team Fortress and several others hade huge impacts on gaming. Often, that was attributed to the tools made available with the base games enabling the creation of mods.

But if it were only the tools, we should have a similar era of experimental games that might blow up into industry defining hits, due to the availablity of tools like Unity or the Unreal engine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Now here’s my hypothesis on why that is, and I hope that might spark a little discussion:

I think it’s because mods already have had a congregated audience of buyers of the base games. If you played HL or WC3, you might seek out mods to either give you more of the same gameplay, or to check out what crazy different stuff people wrestled out of the mod tools to contrast with the original gameplay.
On the other hand, small, experimental games made in Unity or the Unreal engine kind of get thrown into a vacuum, almost impossible to be discovered or garner a growing audience.

The only time that felt somewhat similar were the early years of consumer level VR in 2016/17, where small teams would experiment what was possible, and there was a small target group of owners of VR hardware that were hungry for games and curious to try out anything.

So do you have any thoughts on that? And are you nostalgic for discovering mods?

regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

13:00 Mailbag: Character transposition

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are well.

If you could take any single character from any game and put them in another game, who would you put in which game?
You could put Seymour from FFX in Mass Effect 3 so he and Kai Leng can compete over who is the best villain.
You could put Duke Nukem in Silent Hill 2 so he could give Pyramid Head the mighty boot.
You could even put Mahbu in Nyan Nyan ga Nyan – Light Fantasy Gaiden, the possibilities are endless.

Looking forward to hear what you come up with!

Vale,

– Tim

22:13 Mailbag: Pro-Factorio

Hello Shamus and Paul,

What are your views on using a SAT solver to play Factorio? https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT
Is this heresy, or is this a word from the gods beyond? Is this the advent of a dark age, or the new enlightenment? Is this an evil of the old world, or the virtue of a new future?

Take care,
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

27:02 Mailbag: Changing Moral Compass

Dear Diecats! (Yes, I’m gonna leave that amusing typo in!)

We all know the phenomenon of replaying player/moral choice heavy games and still always picking the same options we did on our first play-throughs. But me being on a bender of playing choice heavy games like “Yes your Grace” and “The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante” (which I can both recommend), I replayed Banner Saga. Now excuse my slight spoiler to a six year old game, but the end of the first game has you make a somewhat hidden decision which either had the main character Rook or his daughter Allette survive the final battle. When I played it first in 2016, I remember reloading an earlier save so Rook survived, since I identified stronger with him than with Allette, which was more of a side character in the story, and I didn’t want to “lose” him for the sequels.
Between then and now, I have become a father of two, and it became impossible for me to even entertain the thought of sacrificing Allette in my most recent play-through.
So, have you had shifts in your life that affected your moral compass in a way that made it perceptible via the moral choices in games?

Kind Regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

33:59 Mailbag: Star Trek Picard

Dear Diecast / Shamus,

It is surely low hanging fruit, and apologies if you have already mentioned this, but have you considered doing an analysis of the Star Trek Picard series? I have been indulging in watching reviews (by e.g. RLM) and it seems the writing issues and tonal shift from classic Star Trek are Mass Effect sequels levels of nonsense. I found myself wondering about what technically has been done to the type of story and its telling, vs TNG or other Trek, in terms of your ‘details first vs drama first’ and ‘character driven vs plot driven’ analyses. It occurred that it would be good to hear your story/writing-analysis on the series.

All the best
PPX14

40:20 Mailbag: More Rocketeer?

Dear Diecast,

I’m really enjoying the long-form critique from The Rocketeer on FFXII (despite having never played the game). Like Shamus’s retrospectives, it’s been a deeply interesting and insightful read that’s opened my eyes to/helped illuminate a number of useful concepts and mental models, clothed in highly amusing snark and wit.

So I was wondering if there were any plans or possibility that he’d do more write-ups for the blog afterward, Final Fantasy related or otherwise?

Hope Shamus is doing better and is getting what he needs to help recover.

Warm wishes,
Andrew

41:36 Mailbag: Moon Knight

Dear Diecast

Considering the season finale is this week and while I’m not sure when you guys record, what are your thoughts on Marvel’s Moon Knight show?

Love, bumpkin

46:47 Mailbag: The Blogosphere

Dear Diecast,

Does Shamus still read other blogs? If so, any suggestions? (Namely to do with gaming and storytelling, but other recommendations are also welcome.)

All the best,
Andrew

After recording the show, I remembered that I used to follow developer Jay Barnson. I’m not sure how I lost track of him, but it looks like his site is still going. So I’ve got some catching up to do.

49:24 Mailbag: SqEnix Yard Sale

Dear Diecast,

Hope you’re doing well! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Squeenix just sold its Western franchises to the company that owns THQ Nordic and Saber Interactive – https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/square-enix-sells-tomb-raider-embracer-microsoft-activision/

Most notably, the deal includes Tomb Raider, Thief, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain.

The last name in that list is what I’m personally most excited about. In fact, it’s the only gaming news of recent years that’s made me excited! But what do you think? Did Squeenix do the right thing – especially at that low price point? Are you optimistic about the future of these series?

Keen being Awesome,
Lino

54:35 Mailbag: Worldbuilding

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are doing well.

I was just wondering what you think makes for good worldbuilding? Do you think there any fundamental principles or good rules of thumb for stories in general in this regard, if worldbuilding is to be taken seriously?

Also, I came across a video that used the term “silent worldbuilding”. From that alone, any idea what that means to you?

Kind regards,
Andrew

 


From The Archives:
 

52 thoughts on “Diecast #380: Mailbag Mania

  1. MerryWeathers says:

    Star Trek Picard

    I heard that show went off the deep end recently, maybe I should try it sometime. Should be fun.

    Moon Knight

    Moon Knight was really good, second best D+ Marvel show behind Loki. The most compelling parts for me was the Marc/Steven’s whole relationship. Ethan Hawke did a good performance and elevated the scenes he was in even though his character was basically your average MCU villain.

    I also think a major reason why I really enjoyed the show was because it was uncharacteristically (for this franchise) standalone from the rest of the MCU and was allowed to tell its own  story without ever getting hijacked by the need to setup a bunch of spinoffs or movies.
    They don’t ever mention or acknowledge the Avengers or the Snap in the show, they only mention like two minor locations in the MCU and then the rest are just background easter eggs. Stuff like this actually makes the universe feel genuinely bigger.

    Mailbag: Worldbuilding

    “Show don’t tell”, introduce the unique aspects of the setting casually as the story goes along. Don’t barrage your audience with all the weird terms, concepts, and definitions at like the beginning, you’ll just confuse people.

    1. Geebs says:

      I heard that show went off the deep end recently, maybe I should try it sometime. Should be fun.

      It really isn’t. The writing in Picard is such a mess that, even if you aren’t particularly invested in Star Trek, you’re constantly left questioning whether you’re watching something that doesn’t make a lick of sense or whether your brain has just broken. That might sound fun in itself, but it isn’t.

      1. Trevor says:

        Yeah. I wish I could recommend it to you as a so-bad-it’s-good show, but it’s not that.

        The second season was 10 episodes long and they had no idea how to manage a season of that length. The cast is pretty big and they tried to give each member a full season’s worth of storyline and that turned into everyone getting rushed and shortchanged.

    2. SidheKnight says:

      only mention like two minor locations in the MCU

      One is Madripoor. What is the other one?

  2. Mattias42 says:

    Whole article on front again, boss. Heads up.

  3. Syal says:

    I think Yahtzee has a point, and the level of jank in a game works a lot like the Uncanny Valley; a janky game like Skyrim, Nier: Automata, or Deadly Premonition feel like lower-budget games, and so the good points stand out in a “I can’t believe they pulled this off with their budget” way. Whereas if everything is polished, it’s easy for the audience to forget there were any limitations on development at all, and they’ll be comparing everything to the most polished games they can think of. People think in ratios, and the key to exceeding expectations is to start with a low bar.

    On worldbuilding: I’m certainly not an expert, but I would say, if you want the audience to take the world seriously, make sure your characters have opinions on the worldbuilding. Treat every event as a philosophical question; have characters think about what it means. Every deviation from real life should have a direct impact on at least one character’s personality. If the characters just accept your world’s weird things matter-of-factly, you run the risk of it becoming a joke to the audience.

    And of course you need to follow your rules, and make it easy for the reader to follow them as well. If you ever watched RIPD, that’s a setting that doesn’t follow its own rules and inevitably comes crashing down under scrutiny.

    (“Silent worldbuilding” sounds like the kind of worldbuilding where all of your characters are completely familiar with everything in their world, so you have to bring all your changes up in passing mention, instead of being able to explain it to the new guy. The reader learns these characters worship Hegnur, God of Lean-tos, because your carpenter ends his carpentry spiel with “should Hegnur bless it”, and humbly crossing his fingers across his eyes.)

    1. MerryWeathers says:

      I think people finally got sick of Bethesda jank after Fallout 76 came out and at the same time as Red Dead Redemption 2 too.

      1. Lino says:

        I think the Witcher 3 had a lot to do with that, as well. It showed that you CAN have a big world full of interesting NPCs and role playing without constant bugs and jank. I mean, look at how many “Best Games of 2015” lists have the Witcher 3 as number 1, and look at how many of them have Fallout 4 – even though both games that came out in the same year.

        1. Simplex says:

          Witcher 3 was a bit janky when it came out. Leagues below CP77, but still. For example, the infamous bugs with Roach became the stuff of memes:
          https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/69op7b/roach_being_roach/

          https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d1/4b/23/d14b239bfd75ec592824a22383a244a2.jpg

          CDPR even acknowleged it and self-mocked themselves by making this Gwent card:
          https://media4.giphy.com/media/3oKIPquzH02iOXQeyY/giphy.gif

        2. Aceus says:

          I mean, TW3 was pretty buggy on release for a lot of people (I waited a long time to play, so I didn’t get this experience myself. So I can’t personally vouch for how pervasive or frequent the bugs were, but I can believe it’d be a considerable amount, considering the sheer scope and complexity of the content. Speaks volumes to how much was done right that it still managed to make virtually every top game list of the year), and I know at least one person who played the GOTY version years following the release and somehow still had to contend with quite a bunch of bugs (i.e. falling through the map, random crashes, sudden permanent weapon disability until reload, etc.).

          I had the opposite experience where I was only impeded by major bugs maybe two or three times in a whole playthrough. It’s a massive game, full of an astonishing amount of detail and dense intersection of mechanics, so I wouldn’t really fault it much for having bugs here and there. And if I’d played the particularly janky early version of the game, I might be irked after a series of them, but I’d at least be understanding and less miffed than I would about other smaller less complicated games, considering the high ambition and exceptional execution thereof on display in TW3.

          To have so many lively NPCs to pass by and talk to and get riveting quests from, all with compelling stories of their own in some shape or form, and supported by incredibly consistent top notch voice acting and very welcome dynamic camera work (as well gloriously expressive facial expressions, body language and secondary actions), sets an insane gold standard for the genre and industry. To have such lavish and constantly fascinating worldbuilding/environmental storytelling everywhere you go in a world that very much sells operating independent of the player-character and will change in various meaningful ways even while you’re away somewhere else, and often when you returned there will be a noticeable difference to the place and its people. It’s such a wonderful miracle of a game, I can’t help but be awed every time I go back to it.

      2. Ander says:

        We’ll see if that’s still the case by the time of ES6. The jank keeps me out of Bethesda games, generally.

        1. Mattias42 says:

          Morbidly curious about Starfield, TBH.

          Like, this is the first original IP Bethesda has made in a LONG~ time. Even if you’re generous and count Fallout 3, that’s fourteen freakin’ years since a non-TES in a “new” IP.

          If you’re feeling non-generous… well, freakin’ Arena was about twenty-eight years ago. Dedicated graphics cards weren’t a thing back then for the main-stream.

          There’s countries that haven’t lasted that long, so one way or the other, Starfield is going to be… interesting.

        2. MerryWeathers says:

          Part of the reason why the wait for Starfield is taking so long is because they actually spent a few years upgrading the engine first so the might end up being more polished than your typical Bethesda fare although I still think there will still be some jank, it comes with the territory of making sandbox open world RPGs.

  4. Lino says:

    I always love me a good mailbag! Regarding Yahtzee’s video, I’m not entirely convinced. E.g. Witcher 3 was pretty polished when it came out,* and it’s still one of the most loved games in recent memory. So were the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I think the main reason Prey did badly was the lackluster shooting mechanics which put off a lot of people who wanted a new Bioshock (even though the game is a better 0451 game than Bioshock).

    When it comes to worldbuilding, the more natural you can make the exposition, the better. I like the way it’s done in games like Half-Life and Hollow Knight – it flows naturally, and doesn’t break up the game for an info dump. And it’s basically a masterclass in “less is more”.

    As for the SquEnix acquisition, I’m cautiously hopeful. Especially for Legacy of Kain!

    * Yes, there was some jank in the start, but it wasn’t nearly at the level of Skyrim

  5. Vladius says:

    “Too polished” is nonsense. People didn’t like it because it’s not a traditional shooter. None of the guns feel particularly weighty and the combat doesn’t feel particularly satisfying, because that’s not the focus of the game and you’re generally supposed to avoid fighting where possible. The enemy designs are all blob-like, they don’t have the same feeling of crunch that you get from killing humanoid enemies or more traditional aliens (marked contrast from Arkane’s other games.) To someone who goes in without any background knowledge, they’re going to be looking at it as an FPS because that’s technically what genre it is. Or they’ll come at it as a horror game and find that it’s not that scary.

    1. Chad+Miller says:

      Yes, I love Prey and I’m sad it didn’t do better and I haven’t watched Yahtzee’s video but I’m inherently suspicious of any argument being summarized as “this didn’t sell because it was too good“. It seems far more likely that it’s just that the things Prey is good at are the things most people don’t value, and they’d rather play games focused on the things they do value.

      Janky games don’t do well because they’re janky; the janky games you’ve heard of that do well generally do something else really well and people who are playing it are doing so because there’s something else great in there that they can’t get anywhere else (this has really always been the case with Fallout games; every Fallout game has outrageous bugs that are tolerated because its fans can’t replicate the experience in many, or sometimes even any, other places)

      From the podcast itself, I also found the arguments about Final Fantasy rather shaky. There’s an attempt to tie their recent design trends to linearity, but if I sort the last 4 single-player FF games by linearity I get XIII -> X -> XII -> XV. XIII may actually be as linear as it is because it was cobbled together from the cutting room floor; that was meant to be an extended universe that never happened (and XV was rolled together from some of the scraps from that). I certainly wouldn’t accuse XV of being polished by any metric; apart from the obviously stitched-together story, there’s also stuff like one entire chapter that had to be rebalanced (and DLC gives you the option to skip it because people still hated it)

    2. Steve C says:

      I don’t think Yahtzee’s metaphorical limb can support his argument. First “polish” is straight up the wrong word. “Smooth” would be better, and I’m sure there are better words still. Calling it “polish” just muddies his point. His point is all the edges that stick out have been cut off. He’s saying all the interesting memorable bits that stick in your mind are missing. Blandness is worse than jank.

      “Too polished” is absolute nonsense. But a piece of art going through so many revisions, focus groups and checklists that it loses all personality? That I can agree with. (I believe that is the root of Shamus’ issue with Spiderman: NWH.) A perfect example is the first Borderlands. From all accounts that is exactly what happened with Borderlands in development. They made a game with zero personality. Except they realized it in time. So they redid the art, and injected as much personality they could into it in order to turn bland game into a unforgettable madhouse. Prey shouldn’t have been anything like Borderlands, but needed a personality injection makeover like Borderlands to make it stand out.

      Prey was like if Doom was made without the personality of Doomguy. Doom would still be the same game, with the exact same gameplay, but now missing something important that holds it together.

      Yahtzee makes basically the same point but better in one of his other videos:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91jeCd9WYLI

      1. Lino says:

        Yeah, but I definitely wouldn’t call Prey bland. The aesthetic is something we rarely get to see – art deco in space. And Lovecraftian monsters are also something we rarely ever see done properly in games. The GLOO gun is also a very unique mechanic.

        I still agree with Vladius and posit that the main reason the game did badly was because it wasn’t the traditional shooter people were expecting.

        1. Thomas says:

          I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a screenshot of Prey that makes me want to play Prey. The art deco aspect doesn’t come across well in any of the marketing.

          1. Lino says:

            Neither does the GLOO Gun, or any of the other unique aspects of the game. Really, I think in this case Bethesda really dropped the ball with the marketing…

            1. Thomas says:

              With the gloo gun perhaps that’s marketing (although I saw lots about that before the game came out), but I’m not sure the actual art style of the game comes across in screenshots, whatever the marketing tried.

              When I google Prey screenshots, they mostly look incredibly generic. Lots of grey and white, lots of corridors and open square rooms.

              You do the same with Bioshock 1 and it’s night and day. Everything is very visually distinct, lots of blues and greens, all the spaces have a lot of character.

              I assume from people’s comments the experience of playing Prey doesn’t feel like that, but the experience of looking at it does.

      2. Zekiel says:

        What made Prey memorable to me was the sense of “place”, which was stronger than any other game I’ve played. As long as you can imagine away the loading screens, Talos 1 genuinely feels like a real place. You can go anywhere, you can (eventually) go outside and see all around it and re enter somewhere else…. It’s amazing.

        But Yahtzee’s point about a prey lacking memorable hooks is a good one nonetheless. There are no emotional moments to remember like Witcher 3 or Gone Home… no silly meme-worthy lines like Skyrim…. So I can see why it doesn’t stick in the memory.

        Personally I have the same problem with Horizon Zero Dawn. Loved that game while playing it a few years back, but I frequently forget it even exists,

  6. BlueHorus says:

    So, now we have equality in godawfully-written TV shows? That’s something, I guess.

    I have to say, I gave up on the new Star Trek shows during Discovery. There was a brief moment of hope in Series 1 where it seemed like it was going to be so-bad-it’s-funny…
    (the ship’s head of security fed herself to a space monster in order to test how dangerous it was*)
    …but that dried up pretty quickly and what was left was the slapdash, sloppy writing. And now Star Trek: Picard is trying to engage in political commentary?
    Hard pass.
    The comparison to God’s Not Dead seems pretty on point: take a partisan stance on a controversial issue. Portray the other side as irredeemably awful people, make no efforts to examine the issue in depth, offer no solutions, then call it a day. Well done, your show is now a Smart Show With Things To Say, apparently.

    Somewhat predictably, the thing that irks me most is the fact they call this shit Star Trek. I know WHY they’ve called it that, of course, but it’s insulting to someone who enjoyed the original show for being…kind of the opposite of Picard.
    It’s less that Star Trek is dead and more like someone has skinned the corpse and is dancing around in it.

    *It’s actually dumber than that. But it would take to long to explain.

    1. Steve C says:

      I agree with everything that the Diecast said about Star Trek except that it is dead. I felt that “Star Trek: Below Decks” kept the spirit alive. It’s a joke version, but still a version that cares about the source. The rest is a bastardized zombie version that needs a bullet to the head. Either in its head or the audience’s to give a lobotomy.

  7. Dtec says:

    Time is something that you wish you could reverse. The things you see and the scars left on your soul, we wish we could backtrack them all into the infinite cosmos of time. Time echoes like a butterfly’s wings. When we see things that change us as the people we once were but will soon become or grow into, if we reverse the time into our lives, we have to recognize the moments that we share with each other now are priceless. And if we take those moments in time and we appreciate them and love them and truly realize that when we look up at the night sky and see the stars as they are, those stars once were different stars and we realize in here we become something new.

    1. BlueHorus says:

      Pure poetry. Someone get this person an Emmy.

      For the full effect, play this on repeat in another window.

  8. Lino says:

    Hey, Shamus. All that talk of worldbuilding, got me thinking: once you get your stamina back, have you ever considered doing a couple of posts similar to your GM Advice on culture? It doesn’t have to be as involved as your post on Tarson’s End (although I really love that post, so much so that I occasionally reread it)?

    I’ve got two reasons for asking this. One, I’m very selfish, and I love hearing you talk about worldbuilding.

    But more importantly, I think those types of posts are very share-able. Much more so than a long-form video game retrospective, for example. We could share them on the various role playing forums and subreddits as a way of igniting a discussion and exposing new people to the blog.

  9. Ander says:

    The essence of Yahtzee’s video wasn’t too much polish; it’s that it didn’t have strong character/identity of its own. When a strong identity is lacking, jank can add character. Prey, he argues, has neither unique identity nor jank to latch onto. He even, iirc, calls out the implicit moral choice system as a sell but says that “moral choice system” at the very least doesn’t sound all that special.
    Of course, people could and do latch onto gameplay, too. Yahtzee doesn’t talk about this, but it’s come up here; it doesn’t have broadly appealing gameplay.

    1. Geebs says:

      If anybody in Bethesda’s marketing department had cared enough, I’m sure they could have thrown together some viral videos showcasing the whacky hijinks possible with the Gloo gun.

      I think, instead, they were trying hard to avoid spoilers; the reveal trailers looked like a moderately dull time-loop game rather than an immersive sim. Which I greatly appreciated, since I got to experience the initial reveal as intended, but seems like an odd direction given that the twist was inevitably going to be published all over the internet within 12 hours of release.

  10. Mik says:

    With regards to worldbuilding: I like it when some stuff is just THERE, with it hardly being referenced, because to the people in the world, it is not important.

    In Morrowind, there were Dwemer ruins all over the place, and a whole history about the Dwemer being extinct, but I don’t remember any exposition: you have to go exploring to discover all that.

    On a similar note, I absolutely loved some simple quests in that game, like where you needed to get some bonemeal from a tomb. “Ok, I know the drill, dive deep into the tomb, kill the boss at the end, and get the bonemeal from him.” But no! There was a boss at the end of the tomb, but there also was an urn with some bonemeal in it, right next to the entrance! Like you might expect, if the whole world was NOT build solely to give the player something to do.

  11. tmtvl says:

    Typolice:

    I’m not sure how I lost rack of him

    Should probably be lost track instead.

  12. Chad+Miller says:

    Re: Guardians of the Galaxy –

    I’m surprised I haven’t heard anyone try to advance the “this game’s full of bugs but that’s part of its quirky charm” argument. I’ve not quite finished the game but I’m at the point where I kinda wish I’d been cataloguing all the bugs as I went along so I wouldn’t forget any of them. But just off the top of my head:

    * This is one of those games where if you fall off the level you end up respawning back on solid ground, with a little less health. In one fight, I clipped into the floor and couldn’t move. Star-Lord registered as “falling” but since aerial combat is allowed I could still keep shooting enemies anyway, but I don’t see any way I’d be able to continue after the fight. I briefly wondered if I should reset the game lest I end up with an unwinnable autosave, but eventually the game registers me as “out of the level” and respawns me back in the boss arena with some missing health.

    * At one point I walk into what looks like a giant boss arena but nothing is happening. I eventually turn on my visor to look for the quest marker and see it’s at the point where I entered the arena. I walk out and walk back in, and the boss fight I was supposed to encounter triggers. (I didn’t come into the room in some weird way, it just somehow failed to fire the first time)

    * Whatever code decides whether you’re close enough to hear a character talking started messing up about 2/3 of the way through the game. This includes during cutscenes where the game has total control over where the characters are standing. If not for subtitles the dialogue would have fallen into complete incomprehensibility because I’d be hearing less than half of what characters are saying.

    * Late in chapter 12, there’s a spot where you have to destroy a bit of floor, then drop down, then have Groot make a bridge. I destroyed the floor, dropped down, then turned around and discovered that Groot hadn’t followed me and I couldn’t get back to where I came from. I eventually decide to just jump off the level until I die of fall damage (about 4-6 jumps) and respawn on the above floor. I do the exact same thing and Groot followed me this time.

    * The game is entirely based on target lock-on but the lock-on is super janky. It’s bad enough that it actually took me until Chapter 12 to see it ever work in combat, which means I spent all the time before that not being able to use most in-combat abilities at all (even Star-Lord’s own abilities are accessed from the same screen). Hilariously, the inciting incident was one where I was expressly not trying to target an enemy; I wanted Gamora or Drax to knock down some obstacle so that I could get to the enemies, but the auto-lock on system was making me target said unreachable enemies instead. The game loves to do this in general; you’ll have an enemy healer floating right in front of your face, hit the lock button to target it, and get some irrelevant mook halfway across the arena in “low-damage range” instead.

    The story part of the game is high-quality, and there’s plenty that a surprising amount of effort/resources went into (I love that they decided Star-Lord should be named after a band, then went and created that band complete with a full-length album whose music all appears in the game) but then there’s all kinds of little stuff like how the first objective of the game is “Follow Rocket” but he won’t progress in the level until you walk ahead of him, or how the element gun always defaults to “ice” after reloading a save even if the save is an autosave where you were in combat against enemies immune to ice and you haven’t needed ice for like 3 chapters now, just all kinds of little bugs and quality-of-life fails…if people really do want games to not be polished, then this is a masterpiece.

  13. John says:

    Hey, Andrew! Good news!

    The Rocketeer has always been a man of character. He is now also a man of substance, occupied, as is only right, by various weighty and worldly affairs. However, in more leisurely times gone by he was often wont to grace us with long entries in the blog’s comments.

    In other words, If you want more Rocketeer, it’s out there. You will, unfortunately, have to go dig it up yourself.

  14. Philadelphus says:

    It’s hard to be nostalgic for discovering mods when I’m still doing it so frequently. Every time I go back to play XCOM 2 after some months away I have to spend a few hours reviewing the dozens of new mods that have released in that time and crunch the giant matrix of possible mod conflicts if I decide I want to add to or replace some of the hundreds I currently have with new ones (which might necessitate replacing others, and so on and so forth). I’ve had some pretty awesome runs as a result over the years. Then there’s Cities: Skylines, Surviving Mars, Noita (which I’ve made a few mods for myself), Invisible, Inc., the list goes on…

    1. ColeusRattus says:

      Oh, there’s more mods for games than ever before. But nowadays, we lack the seminal mods like Counter Strike, or Team Fortress, that everyone new and played. And most mods nowadays are not what we called total conversions, but rather tweaks and addons to the base game.

      Not that i am complaining baout that. Just peculiar. And free access to full on dev environments like Unreal Engine or Unity also hasn’t spawned any awesome free game that got traction in the gaming community as a whole. AT lkeast none that I know of.

      1. Philadelphus says:

        Ah, right, I get what you mean. I’ll preface this by saying that I was 1 year old in 1990, and only discovered gaming ~8–9 years later, so this is just my perspective; but I’m not sure it’s possible, any longer, to make a single game—no matter how good—that would resonate with “the gaming community as a whole”. It’s too broad a field with too many disparate tastes. A few decades ago when “all” gamers were young men and games were marketed aggressively to them it might be possible to have a genuine gaming-wide phenomenon where “everyone” knew and was playing it, but I don’t think that’s possible anymore (maybe it never truly was to begin with).

        1. Fizban says:

          I’m the same age as you, never heard of “team fortress” until TF2 was packaged in the Orange Box, and never played DotA because the toxic community kicked me for not already knowing how to play enough times I decided they were all assholes and it wasn’t worth it.

          I’d say the reason you won’t find any awesome free games that capture the zeitgeist made with Unreal or Unity, is because if you actually make a game with Unreal or Unity you can get paid for it. Custom maps and mods were free because they were made for fun and once out there it’s not like there was any way to charge for them, even if the EULAs hadn’t explicitly made it illegal to try.

          But there have been a ton of new or newly exploded genres since the days of WC3 that weren’t swallowed up by some vaccuum. The Binding of Issac on freaking flashplayer heralded the action roguelike, before Unreal or Unity were easily available. Slay the Spire popularized branching maps for roguelikes, and also ushered in a storm of deckbuilders- or at least that’s where I first saw those trends. I don’t know what the first major open world survival craft was, but Minecraft was Minecraft on Java, Rust kicked off a storm of OWSCs with PVP and was itself an ARMA mod before going standalone (a free mod IIRC), the category then iterated into PUBG and the rise of the battle royale shooter, which is in turn iterated into battle royales of other types from the obstacle course of Fall guys to literally Tetris and Mario. There’s all the X/Y/Z Simulator games, and subgenres focusing on “park management” or “road trip.” There are games like the one pronounced “kwap” where the whole point is terrible controls, including the recent Drink More Glurp.

      2. tmtvl says:

        It may also depend on which genres you’re into, I’m guessing you haven’t heard of Farnham’s Legacy; and Mindustry and Shapez.io are arguably full-game counterparts to Factorio total conversions.

  15. PPX14 says:

    PPX14 is no HK-47 or android I’m afraid, it was in fact an attempt to involve the Walther PPK into a username. Where the X came from I don’t remember. Maybe PPK14 was already taken on [insert mid-2000s social media platform].

    1. tmtvl says:

      PPK? Are you a Bond fan? As a Lupin fan I’m partial to the P38 myself (though the Sig P226 will always have a special place in my heart).

      1. PPX14 says:

        Haha yes that’s purely from Bond, I don’t know anything about guns beyond Alistair Maclean talking about Lugers and Mausers and Brens and Stens, and the occasional thing picked up from games (MP5, P90, SPAS etc.), other than the WW2 ones it almost doesn’t fully register that they’re real life weapons! In fact then at some point I realised that Bond in Dr No (in the films at least) has to give up his Beretta to use something that the “CIA swear by” which diminished it a little in my mind considering whom it was being given to! Must have forgotten the few Bond books I read years ago. And to come full circle, I just this moment looked it up, to find that the Walther is German, so it has been redeemed (a little less 51st-State-ish for Bond!)

  16. Warclam says:

    The one-metre-square garden wouldn’t necessarily preclude sieges. Besieging armies generally do not starve the defenders out, because the defenders saw that an entire army was coming and sequestered their food within the walls (and possibly burned whatever they couldn’t harvest, so the attackers can’t eat it). It’s more likely that the attackers will run out of food, if the defenders took appropriate measures; armies are hungry.

    The bigger question for the siege is, why do they want the city? Generally you lay siege to a city because you want to seize control of the farmland that the city administers. That’s what the city has that you want: the power to tax farmers.

    So in garden-world, there’s some other reason you want this city. Maybe it’s a trade hub on the mouth of a river? I dunno.

    On the topic of sieges and blogs, I heartily recommend A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry for its treatment of the history of fortifications and sieges: https://acoup.blog/tag/fortifications/

    1. John says:

      A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is indeed very good. I particularly enjoy its analysis of the military operations in the Lord of the Rings films. It’s less “But what do they eat?” and more “But how do they march?” but that’s close enough that I think that most TwentySided fans would still enjoy it.

    2. Philadelphus says:

      Depending on the city, you could potentially still win a siege by denying it access to water. (Thus making cities with guarded springs or other un-deniable sources of water even more valuable than in the real world.)

      I’m also tempted to posit armies bringing along their own food-producing mobile farms in wagons, if the acreage needed to feed a soldier drops that drastically. Even if the plants still take months to come to harvest*, that might still be worth it.

      And yeah, reading ACOUP has definitely helped me think of those two points above. :)

      *If a one square meter garden is enough to feed “people” (I forget if this was one person or a household), it has to be some combination of people needing drastically less food, the plants growing much faster (maybe they go through a full growth cycle in a fortnight rather than multiple months [though then you’d have to worry about soil depletion that much faster]), or the plants being incredibly more calorie dense than normal food.

      1. tmtvl says:

        One square meter of wheat is about enough for one loaf of bread.

  17. Lanthanide says:

    Haven’t read any of the replies so someone else might have brought up the VR stuff at the end already.

    Anyway:

    I think it’s because mods already have had a congregated audience of buyers of the base games. If you played HL or WC3, you might seek out mods to either give you more of the same gameplay, or to check out what crazy different stuff people wrestled out of the mod tools to contrast with the original gameplay.

    You’re exactly correct. It’s about the audience being there and the user-made content being easily accessible to the audience – particularly in the case of Warcraft 3 maps where it was all right there on battle.net just waiting for you to jump in. You’d see games with names like ‘tower defense’ and curiously dip in to see what it was about.

    I myself never actually played much War3 or HL online, but I did play a bit of Starcraft and dabbled with the map editor when it first came out. But I was a bit young, and also frustrated with it’s limitations. Eventually I came back to it and found the website staredit.net which was created by the english speaking mapping community, which revived my interest. I ended up making a very popular and polished revision of a popular map – Desert Strike Night Fixed.

    Briefly, it was a map where players didn’t actually control the armies directly themselves, instead they each have a base and build structures that routinely spawn different units onto the battlefield, where the AI takes over and carries out the battles for the players. It’s a multiplayer map, and so there was a bit of a paper scissors rock aspect to it – you start off with marines and then see your enemy has gone heavily into hydralisks, so you counter it by building vultures, etc. It was actually really quite sophisticated when I think about it, with many layers overall and lots of strategies, as well as a respectable level of meta that developed over time. There was a reasonably high skill ceiling, but it took away all of the fiddly controlling of units stuff that a lot of people struggled with when playing SC competitively (I never got the hang of it), so I think it was really popular for those reasons.

    Recently SC was remastered and as part of that had official support what we referred to as “EUDs” (go to staredit.net if you want to read more), but it was basically hacking the executable code of the game to do things the engine was never designed to do. If you’ve ever seen some of those ‘crazy’ korean starcraft maps, that’s how they do all that stuff, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhPdfz-IglQ

    With the remaster I came back and set about making Desert Strike Night Remastered. I ended up burnt out on the project, and in part that is because one of the things that I really wanted to do was completely change the building tech trees for the 3 races, including changing the locations of the buttons. Each race had a distinctly different ‘feel’ to it compared to the base game and each other, and the freedom of EUDs really allowed me to substantially rebalance and overhaul the gameplay. I got some playable alpha versions that were pretty cool, but upon play testing it was clear that it was just too much for fans of the earlier maps to get to grips with, and that really killed my enthusiasm (along with some other EUD bugs – I literally spent 50 hours debugging to get to the bottom of an EUD issue I had unknowingly introduced because the SC:RM support for EUDs was a sophisticated virtual machine emulation layer of how the original SC worked, and I think in earlier SC my changes would have either crashed earlier or probably done nothing at all).

    The only time that felt somewhat similar were the early years of consumer level VR in 2016/17, where small teams would experiment what was possible, and there was a small target group of owners of VR hardware that were hungry for games and curious to try out anything.

    Yip. And very interesting you should bring that up, because there is a new VR game that is going to be released this year that looks like it will be exactly that sort of sandbox game, sort of like Garry’s Mod was amongst HL2 mods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa9spJKkQdI

    Which now makes me think I want to get more involved in VR and catch this wave…

  18. Lanthanide says:

    Shamus, I just wrote a very detailed comment here with links to 2 youtube videos to support my point. It seems to have been automatically deleted as spam.

    Could you please reinstate it? I think it’s really directly relevant to this topic.

    1. Lanthanide says:

      For some reason I can’t edit my comment above. Anyway I shared my comment with friends I have on the SEN discord and they grabbed my comment text, so here it is again with the youtube links removed.

      I think it’s because mods already have had a congregated audience of buyers of the base games. If you played HL or WC3, you might seek out mods to either give you more of the same gameplay, or to check out what crazy different stuff people wrestled out of the mod tools to contrast with the original gameplay.

      You’re exactly correct. It’s about the audience being there and the user-made content being easily accessible to the audience – particularly in the case of Warcraft 3 maps where it was all right there on battle.net just waiting for you to jump in. You’d see games with names like ‘tower defense’ and curiously dip in to see what it was about.

      I myself never actually played much War3 or HL online, but I did play a bit of Starcraft and dabbled with the map editor when it first came out. But I was a bit young, and also frustrated with it’s limitations. Eventually I came back to it and found the website staredit.net which was created by the english speaking mapping community, which revived my interest. I ended up making a very popular and polished revision of a popular map – Desert Strike Night Fixed.

      Briefly, it was a map where players didn’t actually control the armies directly themselves, instead they each have a base and build structures that routinely spawn different units onto the battlefield, where the AI takes over and carries out the battles for the players. It’s a multiplayer map, and so there was a bit of a paper scissors rock aspect to it – you start off with marines and then see your enemy has gone heavily into hydralisks, so you counter it by building vultures, etc. It was actually really quite sophisticated when I think about it, with many layers overall and lots of strategies, as well as a respectable level of meta that developed over time. There was a reasonably high skill ceiling, but it took away all of the fiddly controlling of units stuff that a lot of people struggled with when playing SC competitively (I never got the hang of it), so I think it was really popular for those reasons.

      Recently SC was remastered and as part of that had official support what we referred to as “EUDs” (go to staredit.net if you want to read more), but it was basically hacking the executable code of the game to do things the engine was never designed to do. If you’ve ever seen some of those ‘crazy’ korean starcraft maps, that’s how they do all that stuff, eg: YouTube Video Titled “Amazing Korean StarCraft 1 Custom Maps”

      With the remaster I came back and set about making Desert Strike Night Remastered. I ended up burnt out on the project, and in part that is because one of the things that I really wanted to do was completely change the building tech trees for the 3 races, including changing the locations of the buttons. Each race had a distinctly different ‘feel’ to it compared to the base game and each other, and the freedom of EUDs really allowed me to substantially rebalance and overhaul the gameplay. I got some playable alpha versions that were pretty cool, but upon play testing it was clear that it was just too much for fans of the earlier maps to get to grips with, and that really killed my enthusiasm (along with some other EUD bugs – I literally spent 50 hours debugging to get to the bottom of an EUD issue I had unknowingly introduced because the SC:RM support for EUDs was a sophisticated virtual machine emulation layer of how the original SC worked, and I think in earlier SC my changes would have either crashed earlier or probably done nothing at all).

      The only time that felt somewhat similar were the early years of consumer level VR in 2016/17, where small teams would experiment what was possible, and there was a small target group of owners of VR hardware that were hungry for games and curious to try out anything.

      Yip. And very interesting you should bring that up, because there is a new VR game that is going to be released this year that looks like it will be exactly that sort of sandbox game, sort of like Garry’s Mod was amongst HL2 mods: YouTube Video Titled “VR’s Most Important Game Yet” by Thrillseeker.

      Which now makes me think I want to get more involved in VR and catch this wave…

  19. Ashen says:

    For ST:Picard analysis just watch the RLM coverage. I think this show might be what actually kills Mike – Alan Kurtzman accomplishing what even years of rampant alcoholism could not.

    Unfortunately, terrible writers are what plagues so many of these otherwise high budget shows lately. The Foundation, Wheel of Time, Witcher, the list just goes on. After Witcher S02 I googled the writers credited for every episode and in 90% of the cases it was like their second or third gig following some terrible CW show. These companies spend literally millions of dollars on each and every episode and yet they essentially hire interns to write the script.

    I shudder at the thought of what the new Amazon LOTR show is going to bring us. Shamus, you’ve got to stay strong for this one :)

    1. PPX14 says:

      Ha so these series are like AAA video games then :D

    2. BlueHorus says:

      Shamus, you’ve got to stay strong for this one :)

      Alternatively, don’t stay strong, and go into detail tearing apart the story. Some of us love those articles.
      (Plus, I want to know what happens in the show (because zeitgeist) but don’t want to pay for Amazon Prime.)

  20. evileeyore says:

    The Companion Cube Test:” Arguably Companion Cube is more useful than Garvey because you can stand on the Cube to reach high shelves.

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