Due to some recent changes, it’s harder than ever to get the whole crew together for our weekly recording sessions. Our various job situations are changing, making it harder for us to find windows of mutual availability. I don’t know what this means, long-term. We’ll do what we can.
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Hosts: Josh, Chris, and Shamus.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #48: Chex Quest, Garden Warfare”
Which is worse: To get an in-name-only remake that – while perhaps good – has nothing you liked about the original, or to get a remake that’s horribly flawed but retains glimpses of the original brilliance? Honesty, I still don’t know. These kinds of choices aren’t fun to make.
This new Thief reboot is clearly the latter. It’s deeply flawed, but occasionally good.
I have no idea what Square Enix is going to make of this. Given the complete hodgepodge of features in this game, it’s pretty clear the team didn’t know what kind of game they wanted to make. Was this supposed to be a power fantasy, like Dishonored? Or was it intended to be a slow-paced stealth game? Was the team even thinking about this distinction, or were they too preoccupied with the story?
And if the devs don’t know what they wanted, then I imagine the publisher knows even less.
Alas.
NOTE: This post is a little less thought-out than my usual programming posts. This was written pretty much on the fly as I was experimenting with stuff and not after I’d reflected on it. I’m not even sure it will make sense. Give it a try.
Today we’re going to be talking about Threes!, an iOS game. I haven’t played that version, but I’ve played this web-based clone. For the purposes of this discussion, you should probably go play the game, get addicted for a few days (everyone does) and then come back here once the mania passes. It will be easier to follow the discussion that way.
After doing that, you might want to read this article from Touch Arcade that talks about how someone who wrote an AI to play the game, which revealed some interesting things about the mechanics.
If you don’t have that kind of time, then here’s a basic run-down of the gameplay:
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You play using the arrow keys. Tiles will attempt to move in the given direction. If a blue slides into a red (or vice-versa) they merge to form a 3. From there it follows a simple pattern of matching like with like. 3+3=6. 6+6=12. 12+12=24. 24+24=48. And so on. The trick is that every time you move, a new tile is added to the board. If I shift the pieces up, then a new tile slides in on the bottom row. The game ends when the board fills up such that no more moves are possible.
So your apparent objective is to keep merging tiles to make ever-larger numbers. But the actual challenge is to simply merge tiles faster than they appear to keep the board from filling in. If you play a couple of times, you’ll probably get a score of a few hundred.
You normally expect your scores to go up as you play a game. Over time, your skill improves and you’re able to do better. Except, that’s not quite how things went for me. Sure, I repeatedly broke my high score, eventually playing a game all the way to about 7,500It’s been reported that scores in excess of 21,000 are possible.. But mixed in there were still a lot of 150-point games. When that kind of thing happened I always assumed that I had stopped paying attention. But this kept happening, no matter how hard I “tried”. Some games dead-ended early and some went a long way, and my results didn’t seem to line up with how much effort I was putting in.
This makes me think that the game has a huge element of luck. I wanted to play around with this idea, so I decided to make my own version of the game so I could explore the mechanics.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experimenting with Threes!”
Link (YouTube) |
Professor Rutskarn’s TES 101: Dragonborn in the Dragon USA
The conceit of a hero imbued with mystical dragon powers may seem, to the layman, like something Bethesda pulled out of their asses one week after people stopped buying horse armor DLC. Facts are, Dragonborn are deeply and inextricably interwoven with the mythos and history of the Elder Scrolls setting. The term was used as early as Morrowind, explored in greater significance throughout Oblivion, ultimately became the core narrative element and selling point of Skyrim, and we still have no idea what the hell they are.
Or do we? No. We don't. Not in any practical or satisfactory sense. Let's start from the beginning.
So there's Akatosh. Akatosh is the founder and head of the Super Afterschool Gods Club, and he is a dragon, because of course he is. Akatosh created dragons in his own image. One of these dragonsâ€"possibly the firstâ€"was a super powerful one who came to be called Alduin, who eats souls, tried to conquer the world, ended up killing thousands of people, and ultimately plans to destroy all of creation. So thanks for that one, Akatosh.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Skyrim EP15: Unfit for Duty”
Link (YouTube) |
Rutskarn alluded to this strip from DM of the Rings. Been a while since the ol’ webcomic came up in conversation.
I couldn’t remember which strip had the joke he was talking about, but I did remember it had the phrase “beautiful symbiosis”. I typed the phrase into Google, told it to look on my site, and Google came back with the goods. That’s magical. All the dialog is an image. I never bothered to put the dialog in the alt image text (or somewhere nearby) so that search engines could find it. So how did Google know the phrase appeared in in that comic? My best guess is that Google came up with the result based on people quoting it elsewhere? Maybe? I don’t know.
So this episode is a great example of railroading gone wrong. Personally I’d rather have the freedom to break the game than constantly find myself bumping into ad-hoc rules designed to “protect” me from breaking the quest. But just to play Devil’s Advocate: Do most players want this freedom? I’m honestly curious.
Link (YouTube) |
There’s usually a tradeoff in player agency. The more freedom you have, the less detailed the story. Minecraft offers freedom to go anywhere, kill anything, build whatever you want, but has no story”Maybe go kill the Ender Dragon if you want” does NOT count as a story in this discussion.. Tomb Raider has lots of story, characters, and dialog, but almost no freedom. Quests like the Bard’s College or the Mage’s College have this strange thing where you kind of have the worst of both worlds. The story is mostly generic “go to X, and kill Y or retrieve Z”. But then the mechanics are set up to keep you from breaking these boring and uninteresting quests. A majority of the NPC’s are invulnerable, the dialog is perfunctory, the story is bare-bones, and there’s usually no overarching theme or idea. It’s just a series of stuff to do.
If the quests are going to be this railroad-y, then we ought to get some rich characterization or thematic depthThis is not to suggest I’d actually trust Bethesda with a job like that.. Or if the story is going to be this barebones, then we should let the player break it. Heck, make the quests procedural. I understand that Bethesda wants to keep players from breaking quests by killing annoying / important people, but this is a sledgehammer approach. A better solution would be to only give plot armor to people involved with the two main quests. (The war and the dragons.) Who cares if the player breaks the questline for the Mages College? They’re certainly not at risk for missing out on anything particularly riveting.
And maybe – hear me out here – maybe the player wouldn’t be so keen to murder NPCs if the game didn’t go out of its way to make them so intolerable. Maven Blackbriar’s dialog can only be explained by saying that she knows she’s invincibleAnd enjoys being stabbed anyway..
Can you actually rescue Uncle Rogvir? Based on Josh’s shenanigans, it sort of looks possible. Although, maybe if you saved him the townspeople would still talk about the event as if he died.
The more I think about it, the more I can’t escape the notion that most of the problems with this new Thief come from the overbearing focus on the story. The linear levels. The lack of a “jump” button. The removal of rope arrows as a general-purpose tool. The crescendo music when you knock a dude out. It’s all an effort to keep the player constrained and make them behave as “cinematic” as possible.
It’s one thing to waste money on features that nobody wants. (The requisite multiplayer deathmatch we get in so many games comes to mind.) But it’s another thing to waste TONS of money on something that requires you to replace beloved actors AND remove key gameplay elements.
And to rub salt in the wound, the story is broken, disjointed, thematically confused, and needlessly cluttered.
It’s heartbreaking. And the real shame is that the money-men will probably learn all the wrong lessons from this. Instead of realizing they’re not in the movie business, they’ll probably figure the audience just doesn’t want “old school” stealth games.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
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