Twenty Sided

By Rutskarn Posted Wednesday Aug 2, 2017

 Summer Games Done Quick 2017Previous Post

EDIT: Not sure how I managed to turn comments off. Fixed!

If someone hasn’t already heard that Fallout 3‘s story stinks, they probably don’t care—and they don’t really have to,

It doesn’t matter if you can line up all the ways the game’s characters were thin, the plot didn’t make much sense, and the choices were odd and insubstantial. A fan of the game might listen, might even end up agreeing. They’ll nod, shrug, and admit that yeah, it sure wasn’t Shakespeare. Congratulations! You’ve successfully argued that the story of Fallout 3 is bad. But thought it might seem self-evident, you haven’t actually made an argument that the bad story made the game much worse to play, and that a good story would have made them like it even more. The fan is a fan for a reason. They didn’t hallucinate a better storyline than existed, they were just satisfied with the moral choices and combat and exploration and worldbuilding that they got. If they didn’t really notice or care that the economy didn’t make sense, how can you effectively argue that the game would have been more worthy if it did?

At the end of the day, the only sensible thing to do is accept the disagreement, allow people to enjoy things, and move on. And instead of doing all that, I’m rewriting Fallout 3.

Actually, mostly just the big parts. And of those big parts, as little as possible.

Art pictured is concept art from the game. As best as I can tell, all of it's the work of the late Adam Adamowicz.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part One: New Game”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

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This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 2

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Aug 1, 2017

Filed under: Column 90 comments

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Last week I gave some advice to the leaders of the videogame industry. This week I’m going to wrap things up.

3. Stop with the Perma-Crunch

The working conditions here are AWFUL. It's like the bosses are Nazis or something.

I already dedicated two entire columns to this topic last year, explaining why crunch is a bad idea and why crunch should be saved for emergency situations. The short version:

It’s been well known for years that productivity drops off sharply as hours increase. Above a certain threshold, increasing hours worked can actually DECREASE the amount of work accomplished! And that’s just regular boring office work. The effect is even more pronounced in creative fields. (Protip: Game development is a creative field.) You are making your employees miserable, un-creative, and disloyal, while generating negative press, and at the same time also fueling a high turnover rate within the industry that’s driving people out just as they’re getting good at their jobs. And after all that damage, you’re probably making games SLOWER than if you just ran a proper business. You are screwing everyone else in order to screw yourself harder.

Yes, there’s an extreme glut of would-be game developers out there. The game colleges are pumping out wave after wave of sad-sack graduates who are dragging heaps of student loan debt into the workforce. They’re enough to replenish the exodus of experienced workers. I’m only saying this because you’ve evidently figured it out already. (Otherwise, why would you be treating your workforce this way?) But the point still stands: Just because you can get away with treating people this way doesn’t mean there’s any benefit in doing so.

Do you know if it really makes business sense to rely on a work force of disgruntled, burned-out, and inexperienced creatives? Have you ever tried doing things the other way?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: Free Advice Part 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Timely Game of Thrones Griping 3: What Exactly Is This Show Doing?

By Bob Case Posted Monday Jul 31, 2017

Filed under: Game of Thrones 134 comments

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This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.

I’ve had a busy week – I’m in the middle of moving, and a friend of mine got married this weekend, so I didn’t get back into town until almost midnight last night. So this week’s review is a bit late, and will be a bit shorter than most. With that in mind, it would be good to limit its scope to the easy, specific questions, such as:

What Exactly Is This Show Doing?

I don’t mean on an existential level. I mean what is it doing on a basic plotting level. Basically, at the start of season seven, the writers had a problem: Queen Daenerys was too powerful. She had either the finest or tied for the finest infantry in the world (the Unsullied), a huge force of crack cavalry (the Dothraki), countless ships, and three full-grown dragons. Queen Cersei, by contrast, seemed to have one army of indeterminate size, led by Jaime Lannister. I say “seemed to have” because you can never quite be sure with this show, which more and more has been playing fast and loose with its balance-of-power details.

Either way, it’s a pretty lopsided matchup, so, in the interests of drama, something must be done to even the odds. In other cases I’ve been sympathetic to the challenges of adapting the page to the screen, but not here. It was the showrunners that wrote themselves into this particular corner, not GRRM, and they’ve been straining mightily against plausibility ever since to write themselves out.

Their main vehicle so far has been Euron Greyjoy. He’s built an unbeatable fleet offscreen between seasons, and has now won two major (and confusing) victories in the space of two episodes. The first rested on the idea that he could find Yara’s fleet in the middle of a dark night without them even noticing he was coming. The second rests on the idea that Euron has time-bending powers that dwarf even Littlefinger’s.

Euron is played by a Danish actor named Pilou Asbaek. He at least seems to be having fun, so there's that.

Let’s rewind to the end of episode two: Tyrion, adhering to the ancient military maxim of “just divide your forces, it’ll be fine,” sent the Unsullied to attack Casterly Rock, the Lannister stronghold of great and hitherto unmentioned strategic value. At what I presume is the same time, he sent Yara’s fleet to collect Ellaria Sand’s forces in Dorne. It was the same time, right? I mean, why wouldn’t it be?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Timely Game of Thrones Griping 3: What Exactly Is This Show Doing?”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

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Obsessive Compulsive Daydream

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 30, 2017

Filed under: Personal 63 comments

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I don’t normally watch Vlogbrothers videos. I know they’re the titans of YouTube and beloved by millions, but their topics don’t often land in my particular wheelhouse. (For me, Numberphile, Tom Scott, and Deep Sky Videos are where it’s at. And also CGP Grey when the planets align and he makes a vid.) But once in a long time the YouTube suggestion heuristic offers up a Vlogbro video that catches my eye, which was the case this past week: What OCD Is Like (for Me).

Link (YouTube)

(No, I don’t know why I’m talking about this sort of oddball mental stuff two weeks in a row. It’s not a sign of any particular trouble on my end. Probably just random chance, or the result of too much introspection.)

I don’t know anything about OCD aside from the pop-culture depictions of it, so this made for an illuminating video. OCD is, as I suspected, badly portrayed in media. I do not have OCD, although I’d like to use this as a jumping-off point for a tangentially related topic…

John Green talks about how a particular idea will stick in his mind and he won’t be able to stop worrying about it. While I haven’t experienced his particular problem of ongoing vexation, I am familiar with the idea of having an idea that sticks with you for weeks and months and kind of grows on you despite it not having any practical value. In my case it’s a completely harmless personality quirk rather than a source of stress or dysfunction. Which is nice. But it also made me wonder if this is a common thing. Does everyone have a clingy idea or scenario that won’t leave them alone?

In my case the thoughts revolve around impossible hypothetical situations like:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Obsessive Compulsive Daydream”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Nan oâ€™ War CH18: Blighty Makes Righty

By Rutskarn Posted Friday Jul 28, 2017

Filed under: Lets Play 15 comments

 Nan o' War: Inter o' MissionPrevious Post

I feel that if your game is set between 1500 and 1850, you should be able to fight Blackbeard. You might say that doesn’t make any sense at all, and that Blackbeard, while a timeless cipher, is not appropriate thematically to every gaming experience. You would be totally correct, but also just a little less cool than you were before you opened your piehole.

Because you know what? I don’t care that Blackbeard wasn’t even around in 1670. I don’t care that his crew may not have ever killed or even shot at anyone except in strict self defense. I don’t care if his historical KD ratio is “clubbed a guy with his pommel one time” against “got beheaded.” I don’t care if he probably didn’t light fuses in his beard, kill his crew to keep the others in line, or strike bargains with the Guédé loa to ensorcell his peers and bring confusion to his enemies. It’s all happening on the inner-child level. You show me a swordfight, and a Blackbeard, and a point on the graph where the lines cross, and I’ll show you a guaranteed one-half of a thumbs up. In this economy, that’s nothing to be sneezed at.

Unless I can negotiate to fight <em>two </em>Blackbeards, I'm taking this to the mattresses.

Unless I can negotiate to fight two Blackbeards, I'm taking this to the mattresses.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Nan oâ€™ War CH18: Blighty Makes Righty”

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Borderlands Part 3: Cast of Character Classes

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jul 27, 2017

Filed under: Borderlands 56 comments

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When development on Borderlands began, there was a “religious war” among the team as to whether the game would be an RPG or an FPS at heartAgain, my source for this is the Gearbox talk at GDC 2010.. Sure, this was supposed to be a fusion of the two gameplay styles, but you can imagine all the different possible games that could arise out of that simple idea. It’s not like this is the only game you could make with the elevator pitch of “FPS+RPG”.

In fact, that idea had already been done, eleven years before work began on Borderlands. System Shock came out in 1994, and it was basically a mashup of Ultima Underworld and Doom. But that was just one game out of dozens you could conceive of, and the Gearbox team needed to figure out how their particular take on this genre blend was going to work.

Our heroes. Or what passes for heroes on Pandora.

For example, you could imagine this shooter gameplay in something more Fallout-ish, where you’ve got dialog trees and stats for influencing people. You can imagine something more like KOTOR where you’ve got a morality meter and lots of binary player choice. You can imagine something more like Elder Scrolls, where the player wanders an open world, looking for dungeons and questsIt’s a good thing they never made this, since I probably would have played it until I died.. You can imagine something like Dragon Age, where the player character plays a particular role and gets caught up in a bunch of political intrigue. Or maybe something like Deus Ex or Dishonored where you could employ stealth and diplomacy to vary between lethal and nonlethal playstyles.

But in the end the “RPG” we got was more the Diablo style of RPG where the character-building stuff all feeds directly into combat. There’s no dialog wheel, no factions, and no moral choices. Every NPC gives you the exact same dialog regardless of character class and behavior.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 3: Cast of Character Classes”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jul 26, 2017

Filed under: Movies 138 comments

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Based on the reviews I see in my social media circles and favorite YouTube critics, Spider-Man: Homecoming seems to be getting a “pretty good, but not great” reception from people. I saw it this Saturday with by brother Dan. Not only did I like it, but I think it’s the best Spider-Man movie. Yes, even better than the Sam Raimi films. Yes, I realize that’s a terribly controversial opinion.

Let me explain where I’m coming from…

I probably got hooked on Spider-Man through the 1967 animated show. You know, the one with the theme song people are always referencingHomecoming actually gives it a nod at the start of the movie, featuring a drastic rearrangement of the famous theme.. Spidey’s first live-action appearanceUnless you want to count the educational bits in the Electric Company. was in the television series that debuted in 1977. I was six, and had just started school.

I remember being really frustrated with the show. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but I suppose my various child-like complaints could be summed up under the broad heading of “lack of production value”. Spidey didn’t fight anything that could remotely pass as a super villain. The eye holes in his costume looked like swim goggles crossed with horn-rimmed glasses. They didn’t really have the budget to depict his web-swinging, and the whole thing was very, very light on action.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man: Homecoming”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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OLDER POSTS



From The Archives:

3. Stop with the Perma-Crunch

What Exactly Is This Show Doing?

Why I Hated Resident Evil 4

Self-Balancing Gameplay

Spec Ops: The Line

Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect

How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry

Resident Evil 4

Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis

Spoiler Warning

Ludonarrative Dissonance

The Dumbest Cutscene