{"id":31004,"date":"2016-03-04T01:28:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T06:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31004"},"modified":"2016-03-04T01:28:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T06:28:01","slug":"knights-of-the-old-republic-ep56-fall-to-the-light-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31004","title":{"rendered":"Knights of the Old Republic EP56: Fall to the Light Side"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zGTSdcCPKbk\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zGTSdcCPKbk'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>So here it is, the end of the longest season (by episode count) of Spoiler Warning. The previous record holder was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=azzd_74PCAY&#038;list=PLIN36m4vlapaSzgE9GYXB7ESTmhIZ8UIl\">Fallout: New Vegas<\/a>, which ended at episode 55. I know in the past we said we were going to do Fallout 4 next, but the crew is actually not eager to start another marathon game after finishing this one, so we&#8217;re going to do something short in the interim. I&#8217;ll probably announce it next week.<\/p>\n<p>I know we&#8217;ve been kind of negative for the last few episodes, but I like that we had a lot of fun in this last installment. While I&#8217;ll probably never play through KOTOR again, I still think there&#8217;s a lot to love about the game. Also, I really want to see a game that employs my concept for reconciling Malak&#8217;s verbal bravery with his acts of cowardice. Game developers have explored the &#8220;maniacal power-hungry brute&#8221; archetype pretty thoroughly by now. I have room in my heart for a game where your adversary is a schemer, but actually crumbles fairly quickly in combat (AND NOT IN A CUTSCENE) when you finally cross blades<span class='snote' title='1'>Or fists, or laser guns, or whatever.<\/span>.  <\/p>\n<p>One of the things I&#8217;ve never liked about D&#038;D as mediated by a computer: When buffs and de-buffs are both a huge part of the mechanics and yet often a dumb waste of time<span class='snote' title='2'>Extra sad panda points: When they&#8217;re inconvenient and require mucking about in complex flow-breaking spell menus.<\/span>. Buffs can be annoying if you have to constantly refresh them at the start of every fight. Debuffs are useless against mooks if they don&#8217;t pay for themselves in terms of combat rounds. I can kill this loser in four combat rounds, or I can spend a round de-buffing him so he&#8217;ll die in three. In terms of expediency, it&#8217;s faster to skip the fiddling around with the spell menu and just mash the attack button. <\/p>\n<p>But then you come to a boss fight. At last, a chance to use all your powers! Time to pull out all the stops and hit him with everything you&#8217;ve got. The de-buff will actually have a meaningful impact on the battle, and you&#8217;ll finally get a chance to put some of your more esoteric skills to use. You cast your power and&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>He makes the saving throw. And now you&#8217;ve wasted your opening move. Boo. <\/p>\n<p>Sure, you can min-max so that this is less likely to happen, but usually at the cost of making you weaker against mooks. And since you spend 90% of these games fighting mooks, that&#8217;s actually not an awesome tradeoff. And there&#8217;s no guarantee that your de-buffs will work at the end anyway. The game developer might just make the Big Bad Guy immune to them. There&#8217;s no way to be sure, and you don&#8217;t want to build an entire character to optimize your performance in the final fight, only to have the developer negate your advantages in the name of &#8220;balance&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) So here it is, the end of the longest season (by episode count) of Spoiler Warning. The previous record holder was Fallout: New Vegas, which ended at episode 55. I know in the past we said we were going to do Fallout 4 next, but the crew is actually not eager to start [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[84,513],"class_list":["post-31004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-bioware","tag-kotor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}