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How do you feel about meandering? Is this something you like to do? Are you down for a good meander now and again? If so, then this episode has been lovingly crafted with your particular needs in mind. Both our character and our conversation are rudderless. Adrift. Directionless.
This episode does provide a nice showcase for Bethesda's questing system, which the design team nicknamed, “Screw You For Trying To Play Your Character, Fanboy.”
Rock climbing, Josh. Rock climbing.
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Yes, we’re putting up a Diecast on Tuesday. Not sure if this is a permanent move or not, we’ll see. We record on Sundays. Given the transient nature of news and the fact that we’re already discussing things that have aged a few days, I figure the less time between recording and posting the better. Also: The browser-specific auto-play issue should now be fixed. Let me know if it isn’t.
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #6:
Not-PAX, IGN, and the Rocketeer”
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I admit I’m preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s just important to say things so that you can say you said them. Now I’m on record saying that EA needs someone who is an active part of gaming culture in order to make meaningful and productive decisions.
I suspect a few people will mis-read this or take my thoughts to some sort of extreme and argue that (say) Richard Garriott would make a horrible CEO of EA. Of course, I’m not suggesting they just find someone with no other qualifications other than “really enjoys playing and producing videogames”. The person also needs to be smart, well-spoken, have solid business acumen, and a concrete understanding of what’s wrong with the company. Is that asking too much? No, not for ~$1 million in take-home salary and a few million more in options and bonuses. I’m not against ludicrous executive salaries, but I am against offering ludicrous salaries to ordinary people.
My fear is that EA is just going to find another fifty-ish money-man to run the place. They’ve consistently made that same bad decision for the past decade, and doing something radically different from that would require a change in culture or powerful external forces. Yes, EA isn’t nearly living up to their potential, but they aren’t in severe enough trouble for the leadership to do something wild or unexpected. You can’t overcome that sort of organizational inertia without a good old-fashioned panic. EA is struggling enough to know they’re in trouble, but not nearly enough to take the sort of extreme corrective action they need.
As always, I would love to be proven wrong about this.
There's an episode of MST3K that covers the movie Lost Continent. The target movie features about ten thousand hours of rock climbing and nine seconds of stop-motion dinosaurs. (Horribly, this grueling bit of cinema is “generally considered to be one of the best in the 40-year-plus career of director Sam Newfield.” So that’s terrifying. What were his other films? Slow-motion footage featuring waterfalls of raw sewage?) You could tell it was almost an endurance test for the MST3K crew, and as the episode went on they would just say “rock climbing” to describe how they were feeling.
Among my gaming group we adopted this saying for times when something really boring â€" a story, movie, game, me talking â€" would go on for far too long and become a test of will. I’m also fond of saying, “From the people who brought you that last stuff, it's… more of the same!”. But only on special occasions.
I wanted to say “rock climbing” all during this episode. This really is starting to feel like rock climbing in the “Caesar Romero climbing Styrofoam rocks for an hour ten” sense of the word. The nonsense plot. Our endless bitching. The relentless brownness. Our whining. The glitches. Our bellyaching. The railroading. Our nitpicking.
So anyway. Slip on your wing-tipped climbing shoes and enjoy this punishing desecration of the Fallout name:
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Rock climbing, Josh. Rock climbing.
EDIT: Today’s amusing bit of dramatic irony appears in the original posting of this episode (drink!) where I claimed that, “If it's of any comfort, we'll have nicer things to say about the next game.” Ha. Haha. Oh, Shamus-of-2010, your optimism sickens me.
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This season reminds me of Alan Wake. It’s a game that does a lot of things right, to the point where I feel guilty for not loving it. I do wonder if it sold well enough to warrant a sequel.
The odd thing about making a sequel is that they named this game after the events of the story. Your character is dishonored. So if they made a sequel, would they have you become dishonored AGAIN? Or would the game take on a new protagonist who is dishonored. By naming the franchise this way, they’ve sort of boxed themselves in to making games about people who lose their honor and must struggle to reclaim it. It’s like calling Max Payne “Guy Who Has His Family Murdered”. Great. Now do we kill them AGAIN in the sequel?
Worse, Corvo’s dishonoring is basically the least interesting or memorable aspect of this game. Looking back, we remember the setting, the plague, the corruption, the Victorian style, and the whale oil. It would be like if they named Half-Life 2 “Dystopian Train Station”.
And of course, I strongly suspect that they would make the typical bone-headed mistake of keeping the same stupid protagonist for subsequent titles. He’s completely devoid of character, so it’s not like we get the enjoyment of seeing the return of someone interesting. But they would feel obligated to shoehorn in a bunch of exposition to explain what happened in the first game. And this would leave us with a bad case of “John MccLane syndrome”, where multiple unrelated adventures all happen to the same guy, thus transforming what was originally supposed to be a quasi-relatable character into some sort of fate-driven superhuman. Of course, you could use the Outsider to justify this, but the Outsider is such a slice of stale dry toast that I can’t bear the thought of seeing him again.
My suggestion: Same world. New city. New protagonist. Keep the Outsider, but have him appear in a completely different form, with a different personality, and a different voice. (The Outsider appears in different forms to different people.) Wipe the slate clean. If needed, we could revisit Dunwall and (say) meet adult Queen Emily, but otherwise we can just make a clean break. Keep what works, throw out what doesn’t, and don’t let yourself get mired in an ever-growing sea of lore and backstory that will repel newcomers without bringing value to returning fans.
Videogame have steadfastly refused to do this, alas. But hey, at least we’ll get to keep that awesome iconic brown-haired white dude that makes the game so distinct.
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Three people so far have messaged me complaining that the diecast podcasts are “set to autoplay” when you visit the site. Like, you show up at the blog and the podcast just starts rolling for no reason.
Obviously this isn’t happening for everyone, or else the comments would be a ragestorm of indignation. Auto-play audio is so 1997 web design. However, it’s clearly happening to SOME people. And given that most people just hit the back button when they hit autoplay media, the actual number of affected people could be be a lot higher than it seems from these three messages.
So let’s see if we can figure this out. I’ve loaded up the site on Firefox and Chrome and it works fine. However, on IE 64 bit, the idiot browser does indeed load up the page and play every damn embedded file on the site like the giant heap of poorly engineered code it is. For the record, here is the embed code I’m using:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Autoplay”
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We knew we couldn’t make it to PAX this year. Not so soon after the move. I was okay with this until yesterday, when all my media friends began tweeting witticisms about the hassles of airports, hotels, and cabs. Now I realize this thing is happening without me.
But! Apparently they’re streaming some of the events. However, they’re not streaming the Escapist panel. I’m actually still listed on the speaker list. (Spoiler Warning: I won’t be there.) I’m sad to miss out on that.
Also, we have a TON of material for the Diecast this week. The weekly email thread probably contains enough stories to fill three episodes. Now PAX will probably generate that much news again. I have no idea what we’re supposed to do with this glut of information.
Turns out the keynote speaker was Clifford Michael Bleszinski, which stuck me as being an odd choice. He’s from the brofist space marine loudmouth band of the gaming spectrum. He’s made some really important contributions to the hobby, but they happen to be things that I don’t particularly cherish or celebrate. (I still have a deep affection for Unreal and Unreal Tournament, but everything between then and now has repulsed me.) I keep hoping John Carmack will end up on stage. Then again, he already gives a keynote at Quakecon and I imagine there’s a limit on how many densely technical talks the gaming public can digest.
I have no idea how much useful information the stream will show. I might update this post more if I have anything to say, but the stream goes where the presenters dictate, and since there are usually half a dozen things going on at any given time it’s unlikely they are going to track the stuff I value.
If you’re there, I hope you’re having fun. Sorry I missed it this year.
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