Wow. Diecast number 291. This brings us very close to 300, which is a number of no special significance whatsoever. Still, we’ve made a lot of these dang things, haven’t we?
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #291: Satisfactory, Teardown, New World”
The Grognard: Hello everyone, and welcome to our special Baldur’s Gate III preview edition!
Achilles: Who are you talking to?
The Grognard: I sometimes talk to an imaginary talk show audience. It helps with my anxiety over all my various witty remarks going underappreciated.
Achilles:Â Good idea. I do the same thing with podcasts.
Link (YouTube) |
The Grognard: Just to catch our studio audience up, over the last several days a bunch of new information has come out about Baldur’s Gate III: a gameplay demo, the opening cinematic, and the basic premise of the story. The video above is from Fextralife’s channel, which is a good place to go for just-the-facts-ma’am information about RPGs.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Achilles and the Grognard: Special Unexpected BG3 Preview Edition”
The next person we meet on our Wasteland tour is one Loosum Hagar, Mayor of Wellspring. She’s one of the few returning characters from the original Rage in 2011. You might know her as the teenager with the wingsticks from the original:
It’s been 30 years, and she’s now mayor of the town her father founded. She’s added a bit of gunslinging to her arsenal and the wasteland has made her cynical and hard-edged. She wants to help us with Project Dagger, but this is a video game so of course there’s a catch.
Klegg Clayton is some sort of wasteland douche lord. He’s rich, creepy, self-aggrandizing, vain, insecure, and ambitious. He’s trying to oust Loosum so he can run the city himself. Also, he’s somehow managed to get his hands on the super-secret Authority super-tank required for Project Dagger. So you need to deal with him.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 6: Win Some, Loosum”
Now that I’m producing video content, I’m thinking a lot about video game footage. Previously, I just smacked the screenshot key when I wanted to save a still image for the blog. Once in a while I’d save some important cutscenes. These days I need much better video coverage of the games I… uh… cover.
I also find I need footage of games I haven’t played in a few years. What happens if I’m writing a script and I suddenly realize I need footage from a cutscene near the end of Last of Us? I’d have to play through most of the game to get that. Or what if I need some footage of Fem Shepard with Ashley Williams during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, and all of my footage is of Male Shepard? I’d actually have to play all the way through BOTH of the first two games to get that footageThe default femshep gets Kaiden in ME2, which means you’d need to import a ME1 save.. What if I want to make a video on branching endings and I want to compare all the different endings of Dishonored 2? I’m pretty sure you’d need more than three trips through the game for that!
This can kill an essay. I don’t have time in my schedule to play 60 hours of a video game just to grab 2 minutes of relevant footage.
Maybe your first suggestion is to just quietly go over to YouTube, find a raw no-commentary LP, and download that. Well… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Gaming Footage”
I’m not going to complain about my health problems, because that sort of thing is so hopelessly tedious. I’ll just note that the eye thing popped up again and put me out of commission for a few days.
So I thought it would be a good time for another post asking everyone what they’ve been playing lately.
Aside from making for good conversation, these posts are good for keeping a healthy perspective on the industry as a whole. If you only follow the industry through marketing and major gaming sites, then it will probably feel like the industry is… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (February 2020)”
Mass Effect, as we all know, is dead. It was a great while it lasted – a bona-fide full-3D, character-focused, worldbuilding-rich, fully voice-acted, and well-polished 3D AAA RPG. But then the third game had a silly ending, and then the whole “Andromeda” spinoff flopped out of the gate, and now it’s dead.
Or is it? This is a major IP. It was once a cash cow. Companies like EA aren’t in the habit of letting potential revenue just float off into the ether. More likely, the plan is to let the franchise lie fallow for a few years – let the audience’s goodwill replenish a bit, and then come back for another go. This plan might already be in motion for all we know. I figure that if they don’t put Mass Effect 4 into some kind of preproduction at some point, they’re leaving money on the table.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect is Dead, Long Live Mass Effect”
Before we go any further with this series I want to back up and talk about themes. The term “theme” has a couple of different meanings when applied to stories. It can mean an idea that the text brings up again and again, or it can mean something that the author is deliberately trying to say through the workPreferably without saying it explicitly..
We don’t need to draw a hard line between these two. For our purposes a theme can be thought of as a thesis or a message. Perhaps a zombie story tries to show us that “consumers are the real zombies” or perhaps “the survivors are the real monsters”. That’s close enough for our purposes.
George Orwell’s themes were – by design – forceful and obvious, while other stories have proven harder to pin down over the years. James Cameron’s Avatar had a theme that was blunt to the point of being vaguely insulting.
A lit major might jump in here and chastise me for playing fast and loose with the definition of theme and how it applies to fiction. That’s fine, because it doesn’t really matter in this game. Rage 2 is an action adventure power fantasy shooter, and in this realm the rules of fiction are incredibly lax. Like, just having a theme in your game puts you ahead of most shooters, even if that theme is muddled and poorly executed. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rage 2 Part 5: Theme Park”
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What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
T w e n t y S i d e d
