Link (YouTube) |
Ugh. This dialog is so bad. Josh couldn’t talk Jake into either of his two options. Now, I understand if he’s supposedly feeling conflicted and indecisive, but that’s not what the words say. If you fail a speech check, Jake simply argues like he’s made up his mind to do the opposite of whatever you just asked him to do. It’s like the dialog is so incoherent you’re sort of accidentally using reverse psychology on him.
Before I start today’s entry, I have a bit of housekeeping to take care of. When my brother Patrick read part 5 of this series he wrote to me:
[…] You also failed to tell your readers that your brother won 100 straight Blitzball games, butt-fucked the Luca Goers, and routinely won games by double digits. My personal best was a 27-0 destruction of the Al Bed Machine Fuckers.
I try to imagine what Twenty Sided would be like if Pat was running it. That would be a very different kind of website.
It’s also worth mentioning that Pat recruited Bickson, the lead jerkface of the Luca Goers. He did this just so he could bench him and make sure the guy never played Blitzball ever again. We made a pretty good team. When it came to doing the sidequests to unlock the super-weapons, he handled the Blitzball and some of the races, and I did the monster arena collection stuff. (We’ll talk more about that later.) We played through the game many times like this. The only super weapon we never got was Kimari’s, because to hell with THAT minigame.
Anyway, back to our story…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 8: Ain’t No Party Like a Summoner’s Party”
Link (YouTube) |
The problem of making smarter stealth mechanics is that it’s kind of like trying to straighten out a bit of poorly-placed wallpaper. You smooth out a bubble, and it pops up elsewhere. So you smooth that out, and now you have two bubbles. You never really get it right, but eventually you get it to the point where the flaws are small enough that you’re willing to put up with them because you’re sick of the task.
Laying aside the mechanics, the big problem for immersion is that foes don’t say the right things in response to stealthy activity. The problem becomes more pronounced when you have spoken dialog. It creates unintentional comedy when the AI barks don’t match up with our perception of reality. For example, in Skyrim you can hit a bandit with an arrow. He’ll run around looking for you furiously, then give up and go back to his patrol. Mechanically, that’s fine. The problem is that he says, “It must have been the wind” with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder.
There’s a lot to keep track of here. Let’s assume we’re trying to fix the Skyrim / Fallout 4 stealth mechanics. An AI is presented with some stimulus (something happens that ought to cause a change in behavior) and we need to work out how to handle this gracefully. Aside from the problem of having an AI navigate an arbitrary space and search for the player in an interesting way that provides challenge without obvious cheating, we need to have our AI say things that don’t make them sound like stupid Bethesda AI.
So the stimulus is presented. The AI can’t SEE the player, but something happens that indicates that the player might be active nearby. Now we have to consider:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP25: Lonely Week”
Remember how my breastplate was rudely sundered after I forget to take it into preventative maintenance for just one or two entire videogames? Well, the good news is, I found a new one. The other good news is, it seems to have been tailor made for me. The bad news:
So you know what this does? I never look up enchantments unless I’m debugging, and even then only if there’s a chance it’s relevant, but I realized I couldn’t leave this one alone. So now that I’ve found a replacement a few hours later, I’ve gone ahead and checked the wiki.
Craven Knave and Jackal: Increases the Missile skill.
Well alright then.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH20: Somebody That I Used to Know (?)”
Here is the final entry in this series. It’s a bit of a downer. Sorry. I edited it quite a bit trying to make it less depressing. But then I realized that while it’s a downer, it’s also honest, and honesty is the whole point of a postmortem. Let’s start with Arvind’s final thoughts:
I've already written about the need to promote your game in an earlier blog post. Now, it is time to discuss the result.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot Postmortem #4: Promotion”
Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus, Campster.
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #161: Death Road to Canada, FTL, Starbound”
Six years later, I’m happy to see that LOTRO is still with us. It seems like the move to a free-to-play model was a good one.
Also, how about that Leeroy Jenkins reference in the header, huh? That meme was already way past its sell-by date when I wrote this, and that was six years ago.
Ellie Cutleaf is sending me to Chetwood to attack the bandit hideout. I promised (lied) that I’d bring some friends along. I don’t actually have any friends, but I’m pretty sure I can take care of the bandits anyway. The place is also guarded by killer guard dogs. I have a bottle of poison that I collected at great painsThe pains were actually experienced by the bears and wolves I had to kill to get it and not by me, but the point stands., which Ellie tells me I’ll be able to drop into the dog’s food supply so I don’t have to fight them all.
To get to their base, I just need to go to…
Chetwood. AGAIN.
And now that I’m on the doorstep of the bandit base, I realize a fatal flaw with Ellie’s plan which we both should have realized right before coming up with a new plan and right after slapping ourselves in the forehead: The food is inside the base. I have to go in there to poison the food, but to get to the food I have to fight the dogs.
Well, the only thing worse than having a stupid and self-defeating plan is doing it halfway. Let’s make with the puppycide.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO #22: Welcome to Chetwood – Again!”
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T w e n t y S i d e d
