So maybe you’re wondering why there was no content last week? I’m afraid I have bad news for you. You can either remain in suspense forever, or you can listen to me bitch about health problems. The choice is yours. Spoiler: You’ll be disappointed either way.
So let’s commence with the bellyaching… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #2: Vertigo, PlayStation 5 Reveal”
This was supposed to go up last night but I ran into a delay, sorry about that.
I write about Bioware a lot, but there are several Biowares. In fact, according to LinkedIn,You need an account to view the page unfortunately. there are eight studios. Recent development on the Mass Effect franchise has centered around two: the “main” studio in Edmonton, and the newer studio in Montreal that was assigned Mass Effect: Andromeda. (This was covered in some detail by Jason Schrier’s article about the game.)
And then there’s the Dragon Age team. Its latest entry, Dragon Age: Inquisition, was a mild-to-moderate critical disappointment. It was not, however, a notorious flop, nor did it spawn the memes of Andromeda. Furthermore, its primary weaknesses were (in my opinion) gameplay that leaned too much into MMO habits and a rushed final act, not its writing. Not that its writing was perfect, but I think it mostly lived up to the Bioware standard. There’s one specific area I want to talk about: the Dragon Age writers have been particularly adept at designing and depicting fictional religions.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hypothetical ME4: Religion”
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #304: The Take Two Backstab, Obduction, SpaceX”
In the previous entry I talked about how well this game handles the passage of time to funnel progression into historical norms. To put it more simply: The game is really good about keeping fighter jets out of the middle ages without resorting to ugly brute-force limits like, “Nobody can research flight until 1903”. The changing time scale means you can’t drift too far from what we have in the real world.
Or does it? Assuming some sort of improbably optimal starting situation, how much can we break history?
To test this, I decided to see how early in history I could get rifles. Now, I admit that getting rifles early isn’t that big of a deal in terms of power. The early firearms were things like a blunderbuss or a rifle with a bayonet . Those things had absurdly impractical reload times. Using one boiled down to something like this:
Fire one wildly inaccurate shot with very little stopping power. Even if you hit someone, you might not incapacitate them right away. They might eventually die of infection / lead poisoning, but that won’t necessarily stop them from trying to stab you to death in the next few minutes. Once your shot is spent, you’re done with this thing as a firearm. You’ll never get it reloaded before your foes close distance. So now what you have is basically a lousy spear. It’s too unbalanced to use overhand, and too heavy / expensive to throw. Just heave it at them underhand and hope they haven’t been trained to use their sword properly.
Don’t get me wrong: Early rifles are still good vs. swords. (We know this, because armies of the time didn’t switch back to swords.) They’re just not magical insta-win weapons like today’s rifles would be.
Or so I thought. Based on the discussion in last week’s thread, it’s actually way more complicated than this and opinions were all over the place with regards to the usefulness and practicality of early firearms. Most of the people in the debate seemed to know a lot more about the topic than I do, so my generally uninformed opinion isn’t worth that much.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Civilization Part 3: Rifle Race”
Like I said in my last article about this game, the assumption seems to be that the team at Colossal Order is working on a sequel. They haven’t announced the game yet but they’re putting out less content these days, so it makes sense that the team is either making a sequel or they’re all playing Doom: Eternal.
Assuming they are working on a sequel, it means that the game is still in the early stages of development. So now is a good time to offer some suggestions and constructive criticism to the developers.
Dear devs: You folks made an amazing game. According to Wikipedia, you had just 9 people on the team when you made Cities: Skylines. Making a full-scale city simulation with a team that small is a tall order. But making the BEST city simulation and beating the behemoth of EA Maxis isn’t just a tall order, it’s a…
oh. Right. I get it now.
What I’m getting at here is that I got really into this amazing game you made. It killed my productivity over the past couple of months and I basically stopped talking to people. This was hard on my family and kinda unfair to my Patrons. But look: I’m willing to forgive you for all of that. All you have to do is implement all of my ideas from this video, and we’ll call it even. Cool? Cool.
Link (YouTube) |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Skylines of the Future”
No Diecast this week. Like I said last week, we’re gearing up for a move and things are going to be a little chaotic until we get settled in the new place. However, to fill the podcast-shaped hole on Monday, here is a bunch of stuff that I would have discussed on the show. I know Paul has been playing Obduction and I’ve been looking forward to his thoughts on that, but I guess we’ll have to wait for next week.
So here are some topics I might have talked about on the show… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged”
The obnoxious white line is still there. I’m leaving it in, otherwise I’ll never learn. I’ll fix it before next time.
Now that introductions are out of the way, let’s discuss the game’s progression and some of its mechanics.
It’s common for an EVE player to follow a certain progression through the game: start in highsec (the safe section in the center of the galaxy), learn the basics of the game there, accumulate a bit of property, get bored, and move out to lowsec or nullsec (areas on the outside, more friendly to PVP) and live there. That’s more or less what I did. I didn’t venture outside highsec until I’d been playing the game for almost a year, during which time I only occasionally did any PVP.
PVP-focused EVE players sometimes say that the game’s PVE is boring, which in a way is true – but for me, that was kind of the point. Instead of “boring,” someone who genuinely enjoys the game’s PVE aspects would probably call them “relaxing.” EVE is, overall, a slower-paced game than most MMOs. First of all, its combat (which I’ll go into more detail about later) is less twitch-based than your typical hotbar MMO. Second, there are in-game professions that don’t feature combat at all, like hauling, mining, industry, and playing the market (a game unto itself in some ways).
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Other Kind of MMO: The Half-Roguelike”
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
T w e n t y S i d e d
