{"id":50118,"date":"2020-06-08T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T10:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50118"},"modified":"2020-06-08T07:10:59","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T11:10:59","slug":"diecast-304-the-take-two-backstab-obduction-spacex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50118","title":{"rendered":"Diecast #304: The Take Two Backstab, Obduction, SpaceX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br clear='all'><audio controls><source src='\/diecast\/diecast304.ogg' type='audio\/ogg'><source src='\/diecast\/diecast304.mp3' type='audio\/mpeg'>Your browser does not support the audio element.<\/audio><div><small><a href='\/diecast\/diecast304.mp3' download='diecast304.mp3'>Direct download<\/a> (MP3)<\/small><br\/><small><a href='\/diecast\/diecast304.ogg' download='diecast304.ogg'>Direct download<\/a> (ogg Vorbis)<\/small><br\/><small><a href='?cat=287&feed=rss2'>Podcast RSS feed.<\/a><\/small><\/div><\/p>\n<p>Hosts: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peripheralarbor.com\/\">Paul<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/\">Shamus<\/a>. Episode edited by <a href=\"http:\/\/steamcommunity.com\/profiles\/76561198087035658\/\">Issac<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/diecast\/diecast304.mp3\">Diecast304<\/a><\/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\/nUnQBUNYuSk\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nUnQBUNYuSk'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Show notes:<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>00:00 Moving<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Two more weeks until moving day. Fingers crossed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>02:34 Take-Two&#8217;s nefarious backstab. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>During this segment, Paul played devil&#8217;s advocate and proposed an alternate theory for Take-Two&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2020-06-03\/kerbal-space-program-2-release-disrupted-by-corporate-strife\">egregious behavior<\/a>: What if the developers were doing a bad job and TT just wanted to get the project back on track?<\/p>\n<p>This theory is a little wobbly, since TT was trying to poach the team for <em>Kerbal Space Program 2<\/em>. If they&#8217;re doing a bad job, then why are you trying to hire them? But you could fix this by suggesting that, perhaps, the leadership of indie developer Star Theory was terrible \/ difficult to work with. So maybe TT just wanted the team under their own leadership. Allowing for the fact that this isn&#8217;t likely<span class='snote' title='1'>None of the anonymous sources at Star Theory were concerned about their leadership.<\/span>, what <strong>would<\/strong> be the appropriate course of action for Take-Two?<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s imagine that the game is way off-track, has a bunch of bad ideas that fans will probably hate<span class='snote' title='2'>We added a first-person gunfight minigame where you have to kill four waves of aliens before you can plant a flag on a new world, and at the end The Illusive Kerbal has you build a Crucible and blow up the space center to stop AI from killing all organic life.<\/span>, looks awful, and none of the core physics systems work properly. The Star Theory leadership refuses to accept any changes. Now imagine you&#8217;re the president of Take-Two, and let&#8217;s also imagine you&#8217;re basically a good person that wants to put out a decent game. What&#8217;s your move?<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Take the project away from the current developers and hand it to a new team. It will take MONTHS to hire a fresh batch of devs, and more time for those people to coalesce into a creative\u00a0 team, and more months for those new people to decipher this half-constructed game so they can get the project back on track. <strong>Result: Star Theory goes out of business, the current devs become unemployed, and the game is pushed back a year.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Cut your losses and start over with a different studio. <strong>Result: Star Theory goes out of business, the current devs become unemployed, and the game is pushed back two or three years.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Go to the developer and issue an ultimatum that they need to change course. <strong>Result: The devs call up Jason Schreier, who publishes an expos\u00e9 about how the heavy-handed publisher is &#8220;ruining&#8221; the game with strong-arm tactics by threatening to shut the project down. Nothing changes, the game continues on its misguided course, you get a bunch of bad press, and now you&#8217;re forced to pick one of the other options in this list. Also, when the game finally comes out, you&#8217;ll be blamed for the lack of quality.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Start a new studio and cut funding to Star Theory. Attempt to &#8220;quietly&#8221; offer the current rank-and-file creative people the opportunity to join the new studio. <strong>Result: Star Theory goes out of business, the current devs can join the new studio and smooth out the transition, and the game gets pushed back just a few months.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>In this scenario, I think that Take-Two&#8217;s behavior would represent the least bad of all of the available options.<\/p>\n<p><strong>12:45 Paul plays Obduction<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>25:12 SpaceX Capsule looked like low-budget movie set.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Correction: In this segment I said the teacher on the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster\">Challenger disaster<\/a> was Terry McAuliffe. I&#8217;m not sure where &#8220;Terry&#8221; came from, but it was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Christa_McAuliffe\">Christa McAuliffe<\/a>. I was 15 at the time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>35:38 Mailbag: AI Cheating<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hello Diecast,<\/p>\n<p>Your last episode&#8217;s segment on Civ VI, and some of the comments it inspired, brought to mind a related topic I have felt passionately about since first getting into strategy games as a child: AI cheating, wherein AI players get to do things like ignore fog of war, receive free resources from the ether, what have you. I hate it. It sucks. It&#8217;s also a near universal staple of the genre, as well as many others.<\/p>\n<p>There are valid reasons for this. I&#8217;m in the software field, and I fully understand why good AI is so rare and challenging to implement, as well as the game designer&#8217;s dilemma that AI that was genuinely really good probably wouldn&#8217;t be all that fun to play against either. The ubiquity of aggressively stupid AIs that cheat like hell suggests that&#8217;s the best tradeoff for designers to take, but designers don&#8217;t always make the best choices. Can you think of AIs in games, from any genres, that you found particularly memorable? Challenging, devious, at times possibly quite dastardly, but still clearly fair and playing by the rules?<\/p>\n<p>Regards,<br \/>\n-Mobius<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>49:21 Mailbag: Difficulty<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hi Shamus and Paul!<\/p>\n<p>I have been enjoying listening to the Diecast for quite a while and have recently returned to it, listening through old and new ones. Really appreciate it. In any case, question below:<\/p>\n<p>Difficulty is something that comes up with some frequency both on the Diecast and the Blog. Not really surprising considering that games tend to work by different rules, have different mechanics, pacing and so on and so forth. Now, what I had been wondering about is the question what kind of difficulty is particularly tough on you. Or rather: Are there genres that you have an easier time with than with others?<\/p>\n<p>For instance, &#8220;the mystical Quicksave key&#8221; (as Yathzee once put it) is something that makes me shrug off repeated deaths in FPS&#8217; comparatively easily and I suppose this is likely the same for many other people. With RTS&#8217; on the other hand I tend to break off campaigns early if the difficulty ramps up too quickly and I have no other reasons (story, atmosphere) to continue. And that&#8217;s in spite of being fairly competent in that genre. I also tend to have trouble with difficult RPGs that are relatively open. The old Fallouts and especially Temple of Elemental Evil are good examples. Icewind Dale II is difficult but linear. ToEE on the other hand is difficult and is fairly open in a number of ways. Thus it&#8217;s often difficult to know what the problem is, when having trouble with an encounter. ToEE is pretty much the threshold for me, with Dark Souls already being on the other side. Excessive Trial-and-Error, Third-Person-timing-based combat, long runs back to encounters, shitty port etc. all contribute to it for me.<\/p>\n<p>Tl;dr:<br \/>\nWhat kind of factors such as game mechanics, difficulty design, game length, pacing, weak story or writing, weak atmosphere, uninteresing setting etc. contribute to you personal diffulty threshold? (Especially in regards to some recently mentioned titles such as Dark Souls and Doom Eternal.)<\/p>\n<p>Greetings, WaveofKittens<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>56:02 Mailbag: Historical Preservation<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hello Shamus &#038; Paul,<\/p>\n<p>Since 2009 I have belonged to a group that has been attempting to create a free private server for the NCSoft MMO Tabula Rasa. It has been a difficult process because NCSoft continues to issue cease and desist orders for a game that was shut down 11 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think historical preservation is important for online games such as this? Why or why not?<\/p>\n<p>May all your hits be crits,<br \/>\nLeslee Beldotti<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac. Diecast304 Link (YouTube) Show notes:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diecast-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50118","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=50118"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50128,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50118\/revisions\/50128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}