Behold! A spectacle unseen on the internet: Three guys talking about videogames for an hour! Be stupefied as we unleash outlandish opinions such as “I really like a thing” and “This other thing isn’t at all to my liking”. Tell your friends!
Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Shamus.
Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #148: XCom 2, Factorio, Good Robot Launch”
If you remember from last time, Uncle Filbert blundered into the heart of the brigand stronghold and said rude things to them. Instead of gutting him, they took his handkerchief and sent him home. For some reason, I’ve agreed to help him get it back. Maybe I’m being nice to him because he’s a fellow Hobbit. Maybe I’m just an incredible idiot.
Getting to the handkerchief thieves is not easy. I have to go deep into the bandit-infested woods. I have to kill more than a few ruffians on the way.
At last I reach the ruins where they are holding Filbert’s frilly nose-blowing aid. This place is going to be a tough nut to crack…
These lot look like hardened criminals.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Lord of the Rings Online #7: Ledger Legendarium”
When I got the chance to design and run my first Dungeons and Dragons adventure, I spent more time on it than I did any twenty of my grade-school assignments that year. The document I eventually completed was a rambling ill-stapled mess, an exhaustively plotted town and desert fort and disjointed prophecy cobbled from equal parts book materials and doodles and random numbers. I’m not sure which I understood less about going in–my own setting, the principles of storytelling, or absolutely any of the game’s rules.
Things didn’t get any smoother when I ran it. As my uncle obligingly delved the dungeon I’d made, I stammered through area descriptions, second-guessed the bizarre layout, and struggled to figure out who hit (and how hard) every single time we touched the dice. Eventually the game rattled and rambled to its abrupt conclusion and boss battle–a skeleton giant (probably based on King Leoric) inexplicably standing guard outside the goblin fort. Waiting, apparently, for my uncle to come out and duel it.
Well, my uncle didn’t. He saw the massive skeleton, shut the door, and barred it. Which puzzled me–what the hell was I supposed to do about him not engaging the boss battle? That didn’t happen in Diablo. Why hadn’t I planned for this?
I wish I could say that was my genius moment of inspiration. Nope. My narration was that by the time he did open the door, much later, a sandstorm had blown the skeleton boss apart and scattered his bones. And so concluded my first-ever session.
You can do better than that.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s GMinars: Introduction”
People are playing Good Robot WHICH YOU CAN BUY NOW ON STEAM BECAUSE I’M SURE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS LINK TEN TIMES THIS WEEK ALREADY and for the most part people seem to be enjoying it. We’re getting lots of feedback, which is also good. However, the feedback is complete chaos.
I’m getting feedback and bug reports via email. And on Twitter. And on the announcement post. And in the hangout post. And on the bounty post. And on the Steam forums for the game. And then some people are contacting Arvind. It’s chaos.
This is our fault. We never gave people a fixed point of contact, so people are just defaulting to whatever is the most convenient at the moment. In our defense, Arvind has never released a game attached to a blog / personality like this one, and I’ve never released any game ever.
So for the sake of my sanity, we need to funnel all the feedback into one place. And that place is the Steam forums. That way people with similar issues can share information. That will give us a single place to go when trying to figure out which issues are the most common or pressing. Also, the Steam forums are much better for discussions that might run for weeks of back-and-forth, trial-and-error troubleshooting, since there’s no way for you to know I’ve replied to you in an old comment here on the blog.
Of course, you’re still welcome to criticize and complain here on the blog. Armchair game design is kind of what we do around here, and if I can spend the better part of a year painstakingly dumping on every facet of Mass Effect, then it would be crazy to declare my own game off-limits. If something bugs you or you just want to say how you would have done something differently, then by all means: Have at you.
But if you aren’t just making conversation and you actually want your feedback to influence the upcoming patches, then please post your feedback to the Good Robot discussion on Steam. I’m sorry if that’s not super-convenient. I’m sure many of you have never even bothered with the Steam forums. Frankly, I don’t like it over there. The spelling is bad, the grammar is worse, the color scheme is dark, and nobody ever answers my questions anyway. But it really is best way for us to respond in a coherent manner.
We have meetings twice a week, and now that the game is out a big part of that meeting is going to be going over the list of complaints, crashes, concerns, grievances, vendettas, and angry rants about how the sawblade gun is totally bullshit and why is that even in the game are you kidding me. While I read every comment on the site, the other members of the team do not.
Also – and I realize you know this already because you’re smart and articulate, but I’m saying so anyway as a formality – please make your topic titles as descriptive as possible. “Crash” is bad. “Crash when changing levels” is much more useful. “Strange bug” is bad. “Can’t fire secondary weapons on Tuesday” is better. “Game is unbalanced” is (probably) bad, while “Weapon prices are unbalanced” is much better. Be specific. Look for similar posts before posting, because one long thread where ten people report X is far more likely to catch our attention than ten single-post topics that all seem to be sort of X-ish.
Our plan is to fix the worst bugs right away. I don’t have a timetable for a patch yet. We have ten or so fixes done already, but we need to work out where we want to draw the line between “stuff that needs to be in the first patch” and “stuff that can wait”.
Thanks for your patience. The sawblade is bullshit.
When we first thought of putting hats in Good Robot, it made sense to tie in a few achievements to them. After all, people like hats and achievements â€" combining them was a surefire way to video game stardom.
As it turns out, a couple of those achievements are slightly difficult to obtain. And by slightly I mean so difficult that nobody outside of the dev team has done it yet. The achievements I'm talking about are:
We don't want these achievements stay un-achieved forever. To encourage you to go out there and get these bad boys, we're putting a bounty on them. Be warned, this challenge is not for the faint of heart.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot Achievement Bounty”
I know the last two entries distracted from the main plot of the game to talk about Cerberus. This is fitting, since Cerberus is itself a distraction from the main plot of the game.
But now it’s time to pick up where we left off:
Cerberus has invaded the Citadel, shot all the civiliansBecause otherwise how would we know they’re the bad guys? and are trying to kill the Galactic Council. Kai Leng shows up and does some ninja flips, Shepard acts like a dumbass in several consecutive cutscenes, and at the end you end up in a standoff with Kashley, having yet another argument about trust.
I know everyone wants to pounce on Kai Leng and talk about him, but let’s put him off for now, because there are a lot of other things going on in these cutscenes.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 42: A Thoughtless Coup”
My videogame came out yesterday. And if that’s not shocking enough for you, try out this factoid: It continues to be out. You could even buy it for money if you wanted.
Last week we did a hangout where Josh streamed the game. If you missed the event, here’s the archive:
Link (YouTube) |
Sorry I sound so crappy. At the time, I thought I was getting over a cold. But no. It turned out I was just in the early stages, and it was about to get ten times worse.
I really am on the mend now.
As far as I can tell, the Good Robot launch was a success. There are a few very minor bugs or annoyances that will probably be patched soon. There weren’t any serious, widespread, game-killing bugs, which is what I was worried about. The public response so far has been positive.
The only downside is our release timing. We were very careful. We spent many meeting-hoursThe longest sort of hours. trying to figure out when would be the optimal time to release the game. Our goal was to release when not a lot of other titles were coming out. Usually a new game will get a spot in the fancy rotating banner at the top of the store, and we wanted that momentary glory to last as long as possible. February was too soon. GDC happened in mid-March, so there was no point in trying to get any media attention then. A couple of major tent-pole releases were scattered around the calendar, like landmines. So we picked early April as a good opening where we might be able to make an impression among the never-ending avalanche of indie games that hit the Steam store every week.
And then Valve chose that exact week to launch the Vive, and they made the entire storefront a huge VR showroom. Not only did we not get an extended time in the spotlight, we were actually denied any place at the top of the page. No splash screen. No spotlight in the sales box. Nothing below the splash screen. We were shoved way down the page.
We did manage to briefly appear under top new sellers, but in practical terms, that’s recognition for sales we’d already generated under our own power. It’s not a great way to reach out to people who’ve never heard of the game before.
This was probably the worst possible release date this quarter, and there was no way for us to know that ahead of time. There was no way to know Valve was going to give their storefront over to VR. Releasing opposite high-end hardware sounds like a safe bet. But even if we’d broken into the Valve offices and stole their secret storefront plans, it wouldn’t have done us any good. We picked this release date two months ago and we’d made trailers and web pages and marketing and press releases, all trumpeting the April 5 release date.
I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe being on top of the Steam page wouldn’t have done anything for us. But there’s no way to know for sure, and now it’s going to eat at me forever.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
T w e n t y S i d e d
