T w e n t y S i d e d

I love Josh’s final fight with Havelock. I like to imagine a movie version where they play the first 1.2 seconds of Duel of the Fates and then cut off abruptly. It was certainly a fitting end for this short and emotionally muted game.

As a writer, I found some of the shortcomings to be really frustrating. I mean, look…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dishonored EP21: The Fight at the End”

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.

True story: The YouTube page for the owner of this video offers a popup that says, “We detected your video may be shaky. Would you like us to stabilize it?” It’s amazing that they not only have software that can fix shakycam shots, but that they can also detect such shots and they automatically scan for them in every single video that gets uploaded.

Foolish YouTube. You can’t stabilize Josh!

The next episode will bring this season to a close.

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.

Another episode of fun mechanics, rich environments, and bland characters. To expand a bit on the question that Rutskarn posed: What do you think of games that allow you to skip or miss content?

Allow me to refine the answer I gave in the episode: We’re really talking about three different types of content:

1. Mutually exclusive paths. You can go through Route A or Route B, but you can’t see both areas in the same play-through. You can either blow up the Collector base or preserve it.
2. Optional content: We can skip this section if you don’t want to be distracted from the main mission. You can decide to help Jacob or just ignore him.
3. Hidden or obscured content that’s only accessible to the diligent, lucky, or thorough player. You can only do the mission for Conrad Verner if you find him, if he’s still alive, and if you made the right choices in the past.

If there are only one or two nuggets of optional content, then I find it slightly annoying. I don’t want to play the whole game again just to see the five minutes I missed. However, once you get enough optional content it starts to justify a second play-through. And if I am going to do a second play-through, then I want as much alternate content as I can get. So I guess my answer is that when it comes to optional content, I want “Nothing or a double helping“, as Pippin Merry says.

But that’s just my thoughts. How about you: What do you think of games that allow you to skip or miss content?

Also note how this ties in with the save-game stuff we talked about yesterday. Some people like to save, go down one path, then re-load, and take the other. This is often difficult or impossible with checkpoint saves.

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.