{"id":37829,"date":"2017-03-29T17:16:23","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T21:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37829"},"modified":"2017-03-29T17:16:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T21:16:23","slug":"andromeda-hangout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37829","title":{"rendered":"Andromeda Hangout"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"?p=37523\">A couple of weeks ago<\/a> Josh and I got together with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ninja-blues.com\/\">Jarenth<\/a> to stream Mass Effect: Andromeda. Here is the archived video:<\/p>\n<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\/VspBiq1inw8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VspBiq1inw8'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have the game yet, so I don&#8217;t have anything to add to what was said during the stream. I know people are curious if I&#8217;m going to cover Andromeda, so let&#8217;s talk about what I&#8217;ve written and what I&#8217;m planning to write&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->As I mentioned <a href=\"?p=37765\">on the Diecast<\/a>, I&#8217;ve got three more months of Batman posts<span class='snote' title='1'>These are done and scheduled to post. If I drop dead now, this blog will continue to post Batmans until June.<\/span>. I&#8217;ve just finished about five additional months of Borderlands<span class='snote' title='2'>This isn&#8217;t &#8220;done&#8221;. The words are written, but I still need to proof, edit, add links, add screenshots, etc. So about half the work is done.<\/span>. That means I&#8217;ve got enough words written to take us into November or December, assuming I stick to my Thursday posting schedule. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also got part of a series on Fallout 4 that&#8217;s been on the back burner for about half a year. I should probably finish that. I&#8217;m struggling with it because the problems with Fallout 4 are pretty well-documented and I don&#8217;t want to pointlessly repeat stuff that was said last year. If I&#8217;m going to talk about the game I want to have <em>something<\/em> fresh to say. I have a few novel takes, but I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s enough to justify long-form analysis. I should probably play some Fallout 4 and see if that shakes any more thoughts loose. Also I&#8217;m not sure if the world still cares. Fallout 4 seems to have vanished from the conversation a lot faster than Skyrim, and maybe it&#8217;s not worth exhuming the corpse of Fallout 4 to continue shouting at it.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to do a series on Witcher 3, but I don&#8217;t think I can make it work. I really hated Witcher 1 and quit at some point in the first act. I got a little further in the Witcher 2, but I got bored and quit long before the end. I <strong>love<\/strong> Witcher 3. I <strong>really<\/strong> don&#8217;t care to revisit either of the first two games, but there&#8217;s no way I can tackle Witcher 3 without getting nitpicked to death by &#8220;Well Shamus, if you played Witcher 2 then you would realize that&#8230;&#8221; It&#8217;s the old, &#8220;I know more about this so your opinion is automatically invalid&#8221; defense. I just went through that with <a href=\"?p=36902\">Dark Souls<\/a> and I&#8217;m not in a hurry to do that dance again. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also toying with the idea of covering GTA V. It&#8217;s not terribly popular on this site, but it&#8217;s this monumentally big deal in gaming culture at large. That might make for an interesting conversation. The downside is that once in a while GTA V likes to sneak over to the culture war and chuck a brick through the window before running off and pretending like it has no idea why you&#8217;re upset. I&#8217;m not sure if that would spill over onto my site if I tried to cover the game. The game actually pushes some of my buttons<span class='snote' title='3'>The torture scene is something about which I Have Opinions.<\/span> and it would be very hard to do my normal analysis without my own politics slipping in.<\/p>\n<p>Getting back to the topic at hand:<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m kind of conflicted about Andromeda. If the franchise is going to try to tell another overarching story then I should probably wait until the tale is told in full, so I can analyze the whole. But if the games are each self-contained then I might as well cover them one at a time. On the other hand, I should probably wait until we cover the game on Spoiler Warning before I write about it. Otherwise all of my commentary will be, &#8220;Like I said on my blog&#8230;&#8221; and there&#8217;s only so many times you can say that without getting punched in the face.<\/p>\n<p>I will say this:<\/p>\n<p>I really dislike that so much of the Andromeda conversation is dominated by &#8220;Facial animations LOL!&#8221; (And to be fair, we did our share of that on this stream.) It seems like there are more fundamental problems with the game than lack of graphical polish, and I&#8217;m worried the next game will work hard to fix the animations without addressing any of the deeper issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago Josh and I got together with Jarenth to stream Mass Effect: Andromeda. Here is the archived video: Link (YouTube) I don&#8217;t have the game yet, so I don&#8217;t have anything to add to what was said during the stream. I know people are curious if I&#8217;m going to cover Andromeda, [&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":[],"class_list":["post-37829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37829","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=37829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}