It’s just Chris and I this week. Enjoy this more subdued, less interrupt-y episode of the Diecast.
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #153: Hitman, Uncharted 4, Wasted”
I spent most of yesterday in the reeking swamp of Frogmorton. I did a couple of jobs there but was driven away by the smell and lack of work. After that I continued my general eastward push and found myself a spot by the river where I proceeded to spend the next several hours washing myself, my clothes, and my pie collection in the river. I don’t know that I’ve actually gotten the stench out, but it’s at least mild enough that I’m willing to start breathing on a regular basis again.
Once clean, I march eastward some more and find myself in the town of Budgeford, which should be named “Why the Hell Don’t We Build a Bridge”-ville.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Shamus Plays LOTRO 15: A Quagmire”
Pretty soon in my GMinar series I’ll be talking about one-shot systems, which are so indispensable to the RPG community and its survival that it’s shocking how few tabletop gamers bother with them. For those with only a passing familiarity with roleplaying, let me sum up the medium’s history in a nutshell: old-school, traditional roleplaying games were made by and for 0ld-school, traditional nerds and are mirrors of the sorts of things that get old-school traditional nerds’ gears turning. Most are built to simulate a particular setting to a satisfying, comprehensive, and tactically complex level of fidelity. These rules tend to intersect with each other all the way down; if you start making a character for one of these games while grandma’s defrosting the turkey, you might just be ready to play by dinnertime, and that character’s only going to be making use of a small portion of the rules you’ll eventually require. Plenty of people did and do make characters in these systems that are only intended to be used once, but considering the amount of work–and the amount of useless information you have to establish about a very short-lived character–it always feels lavish and inefficient.
But these days, players have a lot of options. Among the least simulationist, complex games fall what I call one-shot systems. The hallmark of a one-shot system is that it’s designed for solitary, self-contained stories that begin and end in one comfortable sitting. Ideally these games can be explained to players, set up, and run in the same amount of time it takes to explain the basics of a more complicated RPG. Such games are great for parties, for getting people into roleplaying games, and for trying new things without committing to something potentially tedious.
I’ve devised one such one-shot game called Drunkens and Flagons. The game is flashy, casual, and relatively simple; my rules explanation is about 800 words long and pretty comprehensive. Since I’m mostly going to be talking about more complicated, long-term games in my GMinar series, I thought this might serve as a useful point of comparison.
Without further ado:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Drunkens and Flagons”
Link (YouTube) |
(Sorry about the janky framerate in these episodes. We have three more coming that were recorded in the same session. But the following week we’ll have this smoothed out. I find it’s actually easier if you watch the show at 1.25 speed. For whatever reason, that makes the jagged frames less annoying.)
Preston Garvey is a disaster of a character. He’s designed to be “safe”. He’s friendly, welcoming, and inoffensive. The problem is that:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP3: Sturges? Tell Him.”
Link (YouTube) |
My take on Fallout 4: I think the voiced protagonist is the One Bad Decision from which most of the major flaws in this game originate. When my character spontaneously says things without my input or consent, the writer is kind of making a contract with me: I’m designing a specific character for you, so I’ll handle the characterization. And then they fail to follow up on that. My character’s voice is there to intrude on my internal attempts at roleplaying, but there’s not enough of it to form an interesting character with a personality and a proper arc. So the protagonist either has a shift personality as the writer and I play tug-of-war over them, or they have no personality at all.
But then the protagonist is voiced, and individual lines of dialog are often given some emotion. But I’m the one choosing these lines, and I’m doing so using vague prompts. I have no way of knowing what my character will say when I click on “Agree”, and even if I get a mod to reveal the text, I still can’t tell how the line will be delivered. The game designer is pretending to allow me to roleplay, but they haven’t given me the ability to make informed decisions. So my dialog ends up being wildly inconsistent.
In other news:
After playing through the introduction, my daughter came downstairs and said, “Dad, did you ever notice how there’s a bunch of Mr. Handy Fuel? Like, in your house at the start of the game?”
“Yes”, I said guardedly.
“So that means Codsworth needs fuel, right?”
I nodded knowingly.
“SO HOW IS HE STILL WORKING TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER?”
I sighed. “He’s not just working, but he’s been HOVERING for two hundred years. Also, he claims he’s spent the whole time taking care of your house. And yet the place is totally trashed and hasn’t felt the touch of a broom in decades.”
Esther went wide-eyed with frustration. “Just… what… are they DOING?”
I’m so proud of her.
Now that the Star Child has explained his nonsensical purpose of solving a problem by perpetrating the same problem on an even grander scale, he asks Shepard to pick a new solution from three available choices. I don’t know why. Even if we accept the idea that mass cyclic genocide is an appropriate solution to the allegedly inevitable conflict between synthetics and organics, Shepard has done nothing to suggest he’s worthy or knowledgeable enough to participate in this decision. To the Star Child, he’s just a wounded meatbag soldier that crawled in here.
Also: All of the three solutions result in Shepard’s death.
If the Star Child really believes that his solution is no longer working and that he needs a new one, and if he really believes that Shepard is the guy to make this decision, then why do the Reapers continue to press the attack? Why not stop the assault while Shepard mulls it over? Why doesn’t Shepard ask for more time, or if he can use one of his lifelines to call a friend? Arrogantly making unilateral life-and-death decisions on behalf of the galaxy is what the Reapers stand for, not Shepard.
The Star Child has no good reason to be killing organics. But if we pretend he does, then he has no reason to think that Shepard showing up should change that reasoning. But even if he did, there’s no reason to think that Shepard should be the one to decide on a new solution. But if he was, then shouldn’t he come up with a solution on his own, instead of picking from A, B, or C? But even if it makes sense for the Star Child to provide the choices, there’s no given reason to constrain the choices to these particular three thingsFor example, why can’t Shepard destroy ONLY the Reapers and not the Geth? If you’re giving Shepard all the power, then why can’t Shepard just TELL you to have all the Reapers fly into the sun without him needing to kill himself first?. But even if that made sense, there’s no reason Shepard needs to kill himself to make these choices happen. And even if that were true, there’s no reason for Shepard to believe that any of these things are true.
Sure, you can come up with your own justifications for a few of these. You can extrapolate if you want. Maybe if you glue on enough fan-fiction you can get through this scene. But this is the big reveal at the end. The writer tied the whole universe in knots to to make this moment happen, and the big reveal at the end is actually a fill-in-the-blanks homework project. The whole thing is just so nakedly arbitrary.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 50: The Final Affrontier”
Link (YouTube) |
In this episode we argued if it had been 3 or 4 years since the last time we played Fallout on the show. We were ALL wrong. We covered New Vegas FIVE YEARS AGO.
We’re playing a lot of Fallout 4 around here these days, which is giving me a first-hand look at the radically different ways people approach this game:
My son Issac (14) is not a roleplayer. He plays Fallout 4 because he likes finding legendary items, killing legendary creatures, and collecting suits of power armor. Doesn’t care to mess with mods. (His other two big games are Terraria and Borderlands 2.) He’s only ever made one character (named Issac) who is the default male character. He’s level 68 right now, which I didn’t even know was possible.
My daughter Esther (16) is a roleplayer. She gets getting mods for more customization options. She likes making characters and building houses, like she’s playing a first-person version of the sims where you sometimes need to murder the neighbors.
I continue to play as I always have: Tons of mods, permadeath, and ignore the main quest in favor of collecting comic books. I’m still playing female characters based off the same base save from 2015, since I haven’t worked up the energy to sit through the intro again.
In the episode I said the intro is “perfunctory, but not short”. It’s not long enough or in-depth enough to build a strong attachment to these characters, but it is long enough to get in the way of the fun. And even if the writing had more punch, this engine is terrible at melodrama. The stiff facial expressions. The stilted animations. The awkward pace of conversations where characters either pause too long before delivering their lines, or they talk over each other.
We’ll talk more about this as the series goes on, but this intro is pretty good at showcasing the upcoming problems with the game. I have many nice things to say about Fallout 4, but none of them are related to the main quest.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
T w e n t y S i d e d
