We’re watching the Bethesda press conference!
EDIT: A done: Fallout 4 DLC looked good. Dishonored 2 looks good. Prey looks interesting. Elder Scrolls Online still exists for some reason.
See you tomorrow for Xbox, PC gaming, and Playstation streams.
Josh, Jarenth, Ross, and I are going to be livesteaming / commentating / heckling the EA press conference. What we expect: EA is going to shove their balls in our face for most of the show with Madden / FIFA, but then they’ll end with Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Let’s see what happens!
EDIT: As expected, most of the show was dedicated to stuff outside our area of interest. We learned basically nothing about Mass Effect, we saw a lot of sports games, and there was one really gorgeous “indie” game that excited us. We’ll be back at 7pm west coast time for the Bethesda show.
It’s very late in the day. I’m in the town of Budgeford, where Odovacar Bolger is trying to entice me into dealing with a Black Rider problem he’s having. Apparently his farmhands spotted a rider prowling around his lands last night.
Odovacar explains, “Yes. See, I’ve been thinking of selling this property to Lotho Sackville-Baggins. And now that Black Riders are showing up I’m even more keen to move. But I’d like you to check it out for me.”
I look uneasily over to where he said the rider appeared, “I’ll bet you would. Look, you’ve got the wrong girl. If you have a musical problem, I can help. Need a poem? I’m here for you. Robbers? Bears? Spiders? I can solve those too, although I’ll complain about it. But Black Riders are way out of my league. If you want help, you should ask…”, I trail off for a second, “You know, I don’t even know who you’d ask about this. Elves I guess? But then you’d have an Elf problem, and they’re almost as bad.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO 16: Unbearable”
Link (YouTube) |
* Women may also participate, but for thematic reasons they should do so while wearing a fake mustache, beard, or top hat. Note that women are not encouraged to participate, because literally nobody is encouraged to participate, because this is less a “game”, as is it a very stupid, time-consuming, and expensive way to kill yourself.
Take a drink whenever:
Please don’t play this game. We’re trying to grow our audience and we’ve heard that killing you with binge drinking is apparently counter-productive to that goal? Turns out that if we hadn’t killed all those people during the Fallout 3 season we’d be more popular than Pewdiepie by now.
ALSO: Josh and I (and maybe some other guests, we’re still hammering out the details) will be streaming E3, which begins this Sunday. The schedule is here. Sunday has both E3 and Bethesda events, which begin at 1PM pacific time USA. Like always, this is meant to be loose and casual. If you’re looking for hard-hitting coverage and news, we’re probably not the best people to follow. If you want to hang out and see live, unfiltered reactions to things, then I’ll see you there.
Link (YouTube) |
The standoff with Trudy is a perfect example of how this game initially seems like it’s trying to be a Fallout-style RPG. You get several dialog checks. The events seem to hint that you’ve stumbled into the middle of a story. If you’re familiar with Bethesda or (better yet) BioWare games, then you’ll probably imagine there’s all sorts of details you’re missing out on.
But once you play through it, you realize it was all a facade. Your dialog checks don’t really matter. Trudy offers you 100 caps to help out, but if you just roll in and gun down Wolfgang without talking to anyone she’ll give you 100 caps anyway. There are a bunch of little cul-de-sac dialog options, but most of them just change which pair of people you gun down and how many caps you get for doing so. Trudy doesn’t have a story to tell. Her son Patrick doesn’t even get a proper dialog. You don’t learn the history between these two groups and it’s not used to characterize your fish-out-of-water protagonist or establish the setting around you.
The moment Wolfgang is dead, the story is over. For the rest of the game, Trudy opens every conversation like Wolfgang just died a few minutes ago. Patrick huddles in the corner recovering from Jet addiction, forever.
This game is cotton candy. It might look big and substantial, but the moment you try to bite down on anything it just vanishes. This game is often pretending to have something to say. Synths! Technology! Freedom! For my first few hours with the game, I always assumed I was picking the wrong dialog choices, and that there was something deeper or more interesting just around the corner or on the road less traveled. But the moment you play through a conversation twice, the spell is broken. Not only is the other road just as shallow as the first, it usually leads to the exact same place for the exact same reward.
Oh, I can choose to murder a shopkeeper and her son, or some thug. What a profound moral dilemma. Thanks Bethesda.
What’s worse, this choice is completely a no-brainer. Wolfgang offers an unknown quantity of money. Trudy offers a clear 100. Trudy runs a general goods shop and even sells a couple of rare / unique items, and Wolfgang just sells chems. Much of this game involves liquidating large piles of loot, a process which is throttled by your access to shopkeepers who all have valuable goods and cash. And Trudy is the only reliable and convenient shopkeeper for the first several hours of the gameThe other shop is Carla, but she roams around and isn’t always near a fast-travel point.. There is no reason, in-character or out of character, to side with Wolfgang unless you’re just trying to play your alignment as Chaotic Stupid.
EDIT: Should this be titled, “SHAUN!”? I dunno. Whatever. Close enough.
Final Fantasy X came out on Steam this year. I hadn’t played it in a decade. I wasn’t sure if the game was as good as I remembered, or if I was suffering from long-term nostalgia distortion. I changed careers in the last decade, moving from programming to writing about videogames. (And also still programming.) The indie revolution happened. Today I spend more time playing more games, and more time pondering them after the fact. As a result, probably half of the games I’ve played in my life, I’ve played in the last decade.
Naturally I wondered: If I revisited FFX, would I see it differently? It’s possible my initial perception of Final Fantasy X is hopelessly warped, or simply out of sync with my tastes and standards as they exist in 2016. The only way to know for sure was to play it. So I did.
I discovered that the good parts were better than I remembered and the bad parts were worse. My initial take on the game was basically correct, but now I think I’m better at drilling down and figuring out why the various parts did or didn’t work.
I’ll do my best to explain things to those who haven’t played the game, but this series is primarily aimed at people who are already familiar with the material. Obviously I’m going to be spoiling everything.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy X Part 1: Favorite Fantasy”
Link (YouTube) |
It seems like everyone has a different story about how the Deathclaw encounter went wrong because the game designer expected the player to read their mind (or the script?) and know what they were supposed to do to make the scene work. Everyone has it turn kind of shitty and underwhelming in a different way. I imagine it worked best on people like me, who watched the E3 demo and knew what they were “supposed” to do. It’s an awful, contrived, muddled scene that somehow manages to be both hand-hold-y and vague.
I think Rutskarn is right, in that the next most obvious thing to shave off the experience to make it more “mainstream” is to get rid of carry weights. I’ve heard a lot of players express an interest in exactly this. They assume their goal is to pick an area clean. But you can’t carry everything at once. So you fill yourself to capacity, fast-travel to your base, store all the items, fast-travel back, and repeat. If you’re playing this way then clearly the fast-travel is just a bunch of useless loading screens and busywork.
But getting rid of carry weights would lead to a slippery slope of “streamlining”:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP4: First Deathclaw in Space”
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
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.
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
T w e n t y S i d e d
