Link (YouTube) |
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #359:
Mailbagging is Considered Unsportsmanlike Conduct”
It’s been a long road, but I think we’ve finally reached the part of the game where Morgan can finally begin having agency within the story. Up until now, Morgan has simply been opening doors so she could open the next so she could reach the next door. While this was going on, she was gradually learning the story of Talos-1. She knew all of this stuff at one point, but the neuromod stripping robbed her of the knowledge and context to make sense of things. Now that she’s opened up the station and Alex has promised to stop opposing her, she’s basically all caught up on current events and is now in a position where she can start making informed decisions about things beyond her immediate survival.
Actually, not quite. There’s one last piece to the puzzle.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 15: Building a Better Morgan”
So let’s say you fire up some 90s style shooter built around rocket jumping and circle-strafing. Something along the lines of Doom, Quake, or Serious Sam, with a heavy metal soundtrack and copious violence. You play through the first couple of levels and everything is more or less what you’d expect from this genre. But when you get to the end of the first area, the game asks you to pick a “clan” to join:
Maybe in an RPG these would work out to be equally viable routes through the game, but in the context of a classic shooter there’s no reason for the player to pick Banker. This game doesn’t have dialog trees, trade, or money. Being a banker might sound appealing to some players in another genre, but that’s probably not what this particular audience was looking for when they chose this game.
Even if you’re an outlier and you like the idea of playing as Banker, you already know what kind of game this is. You know the mechanics do not have any systems for diplomacy or investing. You have no idea what the decision means or how it’ll impact the game going forward, but the safest, most sensible thing for you to do is pick Warrior. Whatever happens, you probably can’t go wrong if you pick the group that’s thematically and mechanically aligned with the gameplay.
This is the weird situation we find in New World, the new MMO from Amazon Game Studios.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New World Disorder”
After Morgan deals with the mess in Cargo Bay, she moves on to Life Support. Here she bumps into ex-girlfriend Mikhaila Ilyushin.
Mikhaila is currently slumped on the floor, paralyzed in her extremities. She has a rare neurological condition called Paraplexis. She’s fine as long as she gets regular medication, but with the station in disarray she’s missed her dose and is thus helpless.
People with this condition are excluded from orbital duty, but Mikhaila faked some paperwork to get around that. She began dating Morgan at one point, and eventually Morgan found out.
Morgan broke off the relationship because she was about to enter the testing program where she would be memory-wiped over and over, and you can’t really maintain a relationship while that sort of nonsense is going on. At the same time, she never gave Mikhaila a reason for the break-up, so Mikhaila sort of assumed she was being dumped because of her condition. So the entire situation was mostly awkwardness all around.
We need Mikhaila’s help right now because Alex has locked down the entire station. She has a plan to shut down the entire reactor and start it up again to clear the lockdown. I don’t know if we should be using Windows 95 troubleshooting techniques on a nuclear reactor, but Mikhaila is the expert and she seems to think it’ll work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 14: The Ex-Girlfriend”
I’m recovered from surgery, freshly infused with iron, and feeling like myself again. The weather has been ridiculously nice lately and I’m getting some exercise. If I continue to eat right and get the exercise I need, then maybe I can wring another two or three weeks out of this broken-down old body before I drop dead. All in all, things are going pretty good!
So here’s what I’ve been playing lately…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Week I Played… (October 2021)”
I find it interesting that we got two different mailbag questions, both asking roughly the same thing. Both people asked for examples of “best” writing. Nobody asked for examples of “worst”. It’s always nice to have a chance to work against the idea that I’m a negative guy who complains about everything.We can do that tomorrow, when I do the “This Week I Played” post.
I thought of more examples of good writing after the show, but I don’t want to keep amending the list forever. I’m sure if I missed anything crucial you’ll tell me about it in the comments.
Link (YouTube) |
Last time, Morgan had just launched herself into space and then snuck back on board Talos-1 through the cargo bay. Here we meet a cluster of well-armed survivors who have been gathering supplies and holding the Typhon back. This small group is really all that’s left of the command structure of the station. There are a few isolated survivors elsewhere,Like Danielle Sho, Alex, and the various people possessed by Telepaths. but the cargo bay is the only place where people are still relatively safe and organized.
These survivors aren’t stuck on the other side of a window. We don’t have a locked door between us. We meet face-to-face with these NPCs. And I hate it.
Designers of story-driven AAA games have a problem. Stories require characters. Characters generally require some degree of back-and-forth dialog. Dialog requires the ability to listen and understand. And in a practical sense, computers are terrible at that last bit.
Maybe the designer has a scene where Jimmy Sidekick tells us about the time Dr. Crazo destroyed his hometown with an army of murder-bots. When the story is over, then the player is probably having some sort of emotional reaction.Assuming the scene was written well. There are a lot of ways someone might respond to something like this. There are countless different ways you might take a conversation in response to someone revealing their trauma…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prey 2017 Part 13: Face Time”
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
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.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
T w e n t y S i d e d
