Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #139: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Rainbow Six Siege, The Witness”
Last time I proposed to talk about what Skyrim does well. It’s a long list and one I’ll relish exploring–but I’m going to have to put it off a little longer. I can’t talk about what’s done right until I get at the core of what’s done wrong, and I think the things detractors usually blame–various mechanical evolutions, paradigm shifts, or just plain they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to RPG sacred cow absences–aren’t really at fault. Nothing Skyrim does wrong had to be done wrong, even every major element of the design was kept intact.
It’s clear Bethesda built Skyrim around a clearly visualized model player: somebody who wants to enter a fantasy world, casually browse content without running up against impediments, frustrations, or a need to master additional playstyles, and then get back to real life without worrying about forgetting some important detail or systems mastery that would impede a return days or weeks later. Pleasing this model player meant several obvious sacrifices: the loss of stats, the drive toward making questlines similar and similarly approachable, the trimming away of little mechanics that added texture (and friction) to previous titles. But each of these sacrifices, while necessarily resented by grognards, has a purpose. They all contribute meaningfully to creating an experience that is well designed and exuberantly approachable and that is straightforward to slip in and out of at will, however long the player is away.
The real misfortune of Skyrim isn’t what mechanics the team sacrificed to a purpose; it’s what finesse was lost without purpose. Their weakness is not in creating gameplay but in creating meaningful and appropriate context.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 17: Bullies and Heart”
Six stupid, ridiculous, nitpicking, barely-coherent years of game “analysis“ and puns. Six years of baffling software bugs, dialog trees, and jokes about Reginald Cuftbert. Six years of turning games I love into Games I Never Want To Play Again by way of over-exposure. Six years of Josh acing difficult fights through skill or exploits only to die two minutes later to a mook that’s not even intended to be a serious danger to the player. Six years of Josh’s Rube Goldberg pile of barely-working technology that made the whole thing possible.
Link (YouTube) |
Today is the sixth anniversary of the day we posted the very first episode of Spoiler Warning. That was so long ago that we didn’t even post it to YouTube, because YouTube wasn’t yet the universal choice for such thingsWe used Viddler. It didn’t work out for them..
It’s customary to play a single episode of something unusual or off-beat for these anniversary specials. This year we’re playing… is this an FMV game? It is. It’s an FMV detective game made in 2015. Even worse, everyone around me basically falls in love with it right away, so it’s my job to play bad cop for this one.
The show has a Patreon now, by the way. That goes to Josh, who edits every episode, and also maintains the technology chain that makes the whole thing go.
I am celebrating today’s anniversary by observing a completely different anniversary. As of last Sunday, the missus and I have been married for 19 years. So we’re going away for a couple of days without the kids. The last time we did that was PAX 2013. I’ve been moving through time for 44 years. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. But it’s always moving a little faster than what seems reasonable to me. Anyway. I’ll be gone for a couple of days. Please don’t burn down the blog while I’m gone.
Thanks for watching. And if you play Contradiction, let me know how it turns out. I really want to know who killed that hat.
As with Mass Effect 2, I’m going to be referring to the writers as if they were a single individual. In reality, each game was written by a team of people that shared some difficult-to-quantify overlap with the other teams. So yes, I realize that “The Mass Effect 3 Writer” isn’t actually a single person, but for convenience that’s how I’ll refer to them.
This is for the sake of my own sanity. The question of “Why?” lurks behind every plot hole, every retcon, and every implausible character beat. What happened to Mass Effect? Why did the story change so radically? Part of me wants to put up a bulletin board of photographs and newspaper clippings, forming lines between them with bits of yarn, obsessively toiling over this puzzle until I can crack the case and figure out Who Killed Mass Effect.
But that’s a fool’s errand. We don’t know what was said in the writer’s room. We don’t know what kind of pressures the writing team was put under, or what sort of ideas were imposed on them from the outside. We could just as easily end up cursing the name of an overworked writer who, in reality, did the best they could with the time and material given to them and who might even agree with a lot of this analysis.
Moreover, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done. It doesn’t matter who broke this story, or why. In the end, you can’t “take back” Mass Effect because not even the authors themselves have the power to do that. For good or for ill, this is the story we got. The point of this series isn’t to identify the guilty or single them out to be the focus of the widespread nerdrage that surrounds this franchise. The point is to put all the nagging issues to rest, simply by identifying and acknowledging them. We can’t fix the problems, but we can catalog them, and that brings a sort of calming sense of order to the madness and offers a grudging kind of closure. This is about moving on by way of clearing up all the questions that might be preventing us from doing so. I don’t know about you, but when this series is over I will be well and truly out of things to say about Mass Effect.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 32: No Take-Backs”
The stadium is one big mossy Blood Bowl ball, and at long last, after many abuses and grim spectacles, it’s been punctured. It drains slowly in the moonlight. All that action–all that potential for action–vanishing into the night. But there’s still one bug hiding under that vast deflated canopy, and as I enter the subterranean locker room, there’s two.
“Perv,” I say. “Everybody’s gone home.”
“This is home.”
“That’s a bit maudlin, don’t you…” Then I notice the battered Morg n’ Thorg patterned sleeping bag. “Oh. That explains a lot.”
“I’m a long way from Potatoeville, coach.”
He scoots an inch down the bench. That’s more accommodation than I’d expected–I sit down.
“It’s never going to get any better,” he says, “is it.”
Should I tell him? Hell, why not. I’d been planning to wait until he was in a more stable frame of mind, but just look at the little bastard. He’s stable, alright–he’s sunk to the nadir like a big fat cannonball and I wouldn’t task ten men and an elephant to budge him. Not without the right leverage.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Time CH16: Split End”
For the record: The description I gave for how deep learning works is pretty sloppy. So don’t read that and think you know what deep learning is. It’s actually way more complex than I made it sound. You’ve got to understand something really well before you can translate it into plain language, and I am pretty far from an expert in this stuff. The article still works (because my points aren’t based on HOW deep learning works, only on the expense and effectiveness of it) it’s just that I want to make clear that my explanation is a gross over-simplification.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #138: Pony Island, Dragon’s Dogma”
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
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.
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
T w e n t y S i d e d
