Chris was at GDC this week. Mumbles couldn’t make it. This means no Spoiler Warning. It also means the Diecast is a little lighter than usual. But! We’ll have a special GDC-focused Diecast later this week. In the meantime, here is your weekly dose of NERD:
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Hosts: Rutskarn, Josh, and Shamus.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #50: Alpha Protocol, Dark Souls, LA Noire”
Before we go forward, I need to back up for a minute. In the last entry I tried to summarize the cutscene that ends the prologue, and I actually made a hash of it by leaving out several elements. Let me try again. In the cutscene we have:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thief Autopsy Part 2: Dust to Dust”
My column this week is a bit about why next-gen consoles probably aren’t going to bring us any next-gen AI. Although to be fair, it’s been a while since I heard that claim. I was hearing it quite a bit in response to the “The next-gen graphics don’t look so next-gen” comments when the consoles were first being announced.
And while I spent some time talking about strategy AI, I’m not sure how applicable that is to consoles. How often do consoles get complex, multi-layered, turn-based gameplay? They sure aren’t getting Crusader Kings or Civilization anytime soon.
This new gen is off to a strange start. Third party titles have fled Nintendo. Sony’s console is less than six months old and they’re already rolling out new stuff for it. The XBone isn’t NEARLY the disaster I anticipated. That’s is a good thing for the industry in the long run, although I wouldn’t have minded seeing the market rebuke Microsoft a little more firmly for their hubris and creepy approach to digital “rights” and privacy.
I haven’t been following the PS4 vs. Xbox narrative very closely, but every couple of weeks I seeNot that I bother reading the actual article. a headline or forum post detailing how one console is beating the other. Some things never change, I guess.
So Thief has come and gone. Based strictly on how much discussion it’s generating, I estimate that upwards of six people bought it. It’s not generating buzz the way Tomb Raider or Human Revolution did. It’s not generating controversy the way Duke Nukem Forever did. And it’s not getting public derision the way Aliens Colonial Marines did. The game is barely a month old, and the conversation is basically over already. 6.9/10. Meh. Which is a shame. This game is not nearly the train wreck that Aliens: CMJudging by reviews. I haven’t played Colonial Marines. was, and I hate to see it forgotten so soon.
So let me do my part by meticulously picking at the game and pointing out all the flaws. Partly because in the world of games it’s better to be criticized than ignored, but mostly because that’s what we do here.
The various appendages of this game simply don’t fit together. Normally I blame these kinds of problems on bad writing, but in this case I think the game suffers from a severe case of re-writing and script tampering. Examining the story feels like an archaeological dig where we try to figure out what era the disparate pieces belong to.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Thief Autopsy Part 1: Prologue”
Link (YouTube) |
Let the record show that at the eight minute mark the cast of Spoiler Warning said something that might be construed as mildly positive about Fallout 3. Not sure how that happened, but there it is.
On the subject of making the game more comical, let me point you to this video by Anthony Burch: Dying is Funny, Comedy is Easy. Burch is half of the bother-sister team that does Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’ and the guy behind the best parts of Borderlands 2. He makes the case that games with inherently silly mechanics (and Skyrim is about as silly as they come) should consider making the tone of the game match the mechanics.
I wouldn’t want all games to be comedies, but I would love it if a few more of them embraced their inner murderclown and stopped trying to be so angsty serious grimdark all the time. I have no idea what that would look like in the context of a Bethesda game (and I’m not really suggesting that Elder Scrolls should become a comedy series) but it’s an interesting thing to consider. I think I’d rather comedy than this ultra-bland boilerplate Medieval fantasy. Later in the game we get to some bits of the main quest that I do care about, and the shallow dialog and lack of roleplaying really infuriates me. Comedy would be better than that, for sure.
Link (YouTube) |
Since Chris decided to confuse everything, let me set the record straight: This is Sheogorath, this is Shinnok, this is Shub-Niggurath, and this is Cole MacGrath, who is a superhero and not a country singer. Go figure.
Chris, un-ironically: “You know what sucks about vampires?”
Link (YouTube) |
The frustrating thing about this game is that it’s interesting for all the wrong reasons. I could probably do a half dozen articles on its gameplay, disjoint story, tonal deficiencies, clever ideas, mixed level design, long dev cycle, confusing approach to canon, regrettable attempts at melodrama, unintentionally comical villain, and earnest attempt to live up to its legacy as a Thief game. This isn’t a game, it’s a crime scene. “What happened to this franchise? Who did it, and why? Will they strike again?”
But there’s no reason to write those articles, because nobody cares. Nobody is playing it. Two weeks ago my column on the game got just 12 comments, which is the equivalent of having the internet nod its head reflexively while not actually listening to me as I prattle on. The game is less than a month old, and the story is over already.
Sometimes a flawed or broken game comes out and the outraged consumers can sustain a nice round of podcasts, video rants, webcomics, blog posts, and animated .gif memes. It happened for Aliens: Colonial Marines. It happened for Duke Nukem Forever. But it’s not happening here. Nobody cares. The sales figures on this thing must be abominable.
EDIT: I looked it up on VG Charts. They don’t have PC numbers, but according to their figures Thief has sold 771,036 copies so far across all console platforms. For comparison: On the PS3 this month, it sold less than Skyrim.
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