Gormongous

Maybe it's just a matter of taste then, because I'm watching a friend replay XCOM and I'm really struck by all the po-faced drama and hand-wringing about morality and the alien menace. Remember when you build your first genetics lab and you're told that there are hidden dangers to becoming too much like the enemy? What? I love the game, but ugh. I'm coming to the opinion that the fiction of XCOM is really and truly awful, except when it intersects with actual gameplay decisions, so I find it much more extraneous than in The Banner Saga. Also, this might be just me, but when I'm playing a single-player game next to a friend, I'm instantly 100% less tolerant of any text block longer than a couple sentences. Anyone else get like that?

Yeah, lore works in some games for me but not in others. I'm just not sure I agree with (my completely unfair caricature of) Chris and Sean's opinion that this game keeps shoving irrelevant lore in your face and doesn't just let you get to the tactical battles. The "overworld" bits, in addition to being important mood- and world-building, drastically affect the circumstances under which the battles occur, as well as helping you prepare for future battles. It feels really wrong to take one part of a dual-structure game and declare it the "real" game just because it grabs you more from the start.

The big difference, in my mind, is that the King of Dragon Pass interface always has the seven elders of your council along the bottom. Any time a decision comes up, if you click on one of those elders' portraits, they'll highlight the choice they think is best and give a little blurb on why. Their advice is often biased if not flat-out wrong, but it helps you as the player get an idea of the decision space as well as both expectations and outcomes. I wish more games with tough decisions, especially tough decisions with no right answer, had ways to ask for advice that didn't involve just physically walking your character over to them and initiating an obviously bespoke dialogue tree. I agree with you (agreeing with me) on all counts. I think that having a discrete set of decisions with optimal choices is more suited to a smaller game that can be replayed quickly and repeatedly, like FTL. It may not look it from the outset, but The Banner Saga is long, up to eight or ten hours, so there shouldn't be as much of a design premium on optimal choices, since without the ability to replay easily they would just come off as the "gotcha" moments that Bjorn mentions. Big games get a lot more mileage out of obfuscated decision-making with the player. It's pretty much my only meta-level complaint about Crusader Kings II, that so many of the events and decisions have only one good answer, so once you've played long enough to see them all, there's no mystery, just mastery, and the game's less for it. And yeah, I thought the writing was good, too. It was thematic but not overdone. I don't know why the Thumbs called it lore, as if it's something extraneous and indulgent thrown in, when everything that's discussed has direct bearing on the plot, except maybe for the godstones you can choose not to visit.

Now that I've actually listened to the first part of the podcast, I do have a comment about The Banner Saga. Chris and Sean talked like the heavily front-loaded lore and story decisions were missteps by the developers, since they drag down the pace and overwhelm the player, but I'm almost sure they're intentional, because they're the part of the game that bears the most resemblance to King of Dragon Pass, which the devs named as a big inspiration during their Kickstarter. In King of Dragon Pass, you're given an excess of information with every single decision, to the point that it's almost impossible to process, with the intended consequence that you can't play it like FTL, where you're presented with an obvious and well-flagged decision point that has a guaranteed optimal response for your given situation, and instead have to default to a more instinctual style of role-playing. Clyde or someone who's played multiple times can speak to this better, but after beating the game once, I'm mostly sure that there's not supposed to be an optimal or even positive outcome to coming across a farmer with cattle that could feed your clan. Something bad's going to go down, so you just have to go with what you can stomach as both player and character. That's King of Dragon Pass to me, where you do what you know is technically the right thing, but it blows up in your face anyway because of a sacrifice you missed four years ago or even just random chance, who knows. Now, all that said, I do agree that there's a bit of a clash between the two parts of the game, although after the first dozen I found the battles an interesting but ultimately tedious distraction from the story, which I was really there to see. I assume the renown currency was supposed to tie the tactical battles and the story together, but there is an optimal decision there with how to spend said currency, which undermines everything in the previous paragraph about intentionally obfuscated decision-making and role-playing. I can't help but feel that people who like the RP side should keep playing King of Dragon Pass and people who like the tactical battles should play The Banner Saga: Factions instead. Did the two halves form a complete whole for anyone else? EDIT: Yeah, listening to more of the conversation, maybe I'm just not sure that the minimalism Christ and Sean seem to crave was the actual design goal of Stoic here, considering that they are making a lushly illustrated game depicting a multi-episode Norse saga, which are just a lot of words. Right or wrong, of course.

No, not really. Are you thinking of the episode where Jake started to say something, then stopped and said it was stupid?

When it comes to the problems I have with EU4, my equally unsophisticated opinion is that there's no meaningful way to interact with the game save through conquest — since the diplomatic and economic only really change the conditions under which said conquest does or does not occur — and yet every patch serves to make conquest a more boring and more frustrating process, presumably out of some duty towards historicity. It really just feels as though Paradox isn't quite aware that there's nothing to do in EU4 except expand endlessly, but a time always comes by the eighteenth century where I have half the world's trade under my thumb, manufactories in every province, and maxed out tech, yet literally nothing left to spend my mountains of gold on except going over the land and sea forcelimits. I hold out a sincere hope that the "Wealth of Nations" DLC will add a deeper economic game and the prospect of financial rather than military control, but considering the incredible mess that "Conquest of Paradise" has proven to be, I should probably just keep my hat on and my mouth shut.

No, that's fair. My gut says that sometimes it takes one's laundry being dragged out in public to see how dirty it is, but it does make any contrition a bit more suspect. Regardless, the fact that these apologies are seen as necessary, even if obligatory, is a good place for the culture to be. Ugh, I don't know. This whole thing still has my stomach all sour.

Generally speaking, I only mistrust an apology if it seeks only to excuse the one making the apology from blame or otherwise tries to redirect the discussion away from the need for an apology. While Mattingly goes on for a bit more than I'm comfortable about his own hard circumstances, which are regrettable but ultimately irrelevant, he does explicitly call out his own behavior and explain why he believes it to be wrong, so I don't see any reason to impugn his apology. I wish he hadn't said the things he said in the first place, but hopefully this is the first step towards fixing himself and what he's done.

Maybe it's just because I'm poor as dirt, but receiving an expensive gift as a way of celebrating my achievements and popularity is about as far from trolling as I can imagine.

I read the inline comments and with one exception was really proud of Kotaku, especially the response to micro-aggressions (a great turn of phrase that I just learned a couple months ago). It got me overconfident, so I tried to read the whole section. One minute in, I was reading the typical "This is one incident where one black woman would not give up her seat on one bus, so systemic racism has nothing to do with it" comment. Goddammit. I hate when I get so weary reading such comments. It makes me feel like a bad feminist.

I agree that a simple Renaissance-style Dutch masters' portrait of Nick would both be straightforward and utterly suited to the man.

In my experience, the people who think that flash drives are obsolete are the same people who think you can get good internet everywhere and that Google never has account issues. In other words, naive idiots.

I haven't touched it since 1.3, but according to Paradox's forums, 1.4 and the associated DLC are a mess. Except for the random map generator, nothing works as advertised... not the new "Western Europe" trade node, not the new colonial system, not the new protectorate system. Their new changes to Overextension and Warscore have made both even less comprehensible, to the point where you can go to war over an objective that's impossible to achieve and can improve some nations' opinion of you via the unjustified annexation of territory. Judging from a couple lines in their developer diaries, most of Paradox's testing and balancing is coming from intra-office LAN matches between the developers. Not only does this seem to make them blind to basic bugs and oversights (like the Netherlands, one of the biggest trading powers of the era, not being able to reach the Western Europe trade node), but it also seems to be skewing their vision of the game's design in not the best ways. I really can't recommend picking up the game when its basic mechanics change wildly once a month with every new patch. If there were a way to revert to 1.1, before Johan started designing EU4 to stump DDRJake, I would, in a hot second.

That's completely fair, about early access, but for me this is not about an incomplete game being called incomplete, it is about an incomplete design philosophy being called incomplete. The game could be just a "rioting animals in boxes" simulator right now for all I care, but when they're dealing with something as fraught as the prison-industrial complex, which they themselves have acknowledged, every answer to Pedercini's critiques should be "We plan to address that and here's how" or "We don't plan to address that and here's why." They can bunt with a few "We hadn't thought of that," but the very concept of a "prison architect" game should demand substantial forethought and responsibility, especially considering that some of Pedercini's critiques come out of ten seconds of googling "prison system". In short, I felt there was way too much "We're just making a game, does it really matter" and "We're just making a game, we'll make our own rules" for me to be comfortable, although as Clyde pointed out I can't tell them apart and one of the guys might be more dismissive than the other. I really don't know how much further I can argue that feeling, so it might just have to be a half-empty or half-full thing.

We have always been Congrats Nick.

I lost a lot of potential friends my freshman year of college asking everyone from Kansas City if everything was up to date there.

I could probably use without fighting a boss battle in most games. I remember six or seven years ago playing the first FEAR and the first Bioshock, thinking, "That's great. We've gotten past ending games with huge bullet sponges that scream the game's themes at us in explicit terms while we kill them." And then Bioshock had an actual boss after you killed the boss. I never miss boss fights when a game doesn't have them, but nine times out of ten I wish I could skip them when they do appear.

Yeah, but none of those is "Popular trans-media franchise plus popular game design paradigm". Parodic as they are, all your other examples are just video games that are part of video games franchises, not part of the multi-billion-dollar exploitation of a dead man's works. The combination of AAA game and Tolkien is enough to trip most people's cynicism meters, that's all. It's a perfectly valid position. Also, I'm not sure what the developers are thinking, since they claimed in response to accusations of code theft that any similarity to Assassin's Creed "definitely wasn't something [they] were consciously going for."

I like that there exist in the world people who like and are willing to stand up for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I also love Farscape, but like SAM said, it's a different kind of love.

I guess I'm troubled by this a bit more than you. I play a lot of Paradox games and where their simulations invariably fall down the most is when they design a system using the received knowledge of the medieval or early modern period, as opposed to designing the system using an actual historical framework. The "decadence" model for Islamic dynasties in Crusader Kings II is a great example of a "gameplay first" system that's based on a flawed understanding of history and is consequently incongruous to the point of being unfun. Generally speaking, I think that a simulation-driven game built on something like the "prison myth" mentioned by Introversion is going to fail in some way, simply because a myth like that is an impressionistic agglomeration of hearsay and assumptions, rather than a sensical and consistent set of systems. If you reject the game as a deconstruction of that agglomeration, the only other choice is to alter the systems based on the hearsay and assumptions until it all works together, in which case you're putting in as much effort as if you'd spent a couple months just reading sociological and anthropological scholarship on the prison system in order to form your own framework. It just kills me to hear Delay and Morris say that they have no idea what the condition of UK prisons are, let alone how much it costs to keep someone in prison.

Maybe I'm just awful, but did anyone else find this video a bit disappointing? Their responses were all i) "We hadn't thought of that," ii) "We're still working on that," or iii) "It's just a game, we won't do that." Some of Pedercini's best feedback fell under the third category, especially the political systems he noted were missing. In reference to drug laws and corruption, one of the devs said, "That's dark, too dark for our game," in a game about the mass incarceration and exploitation of millions. It really makes me feel like these guys didn't know anything about prisons before making this game and are still mostly uninterested in knowing anything about prisons.

I kinda just want to be able to say that a goofy trailer looks goofy to me. Is that negative or positive or what?

I don't think I'm Steam friends with anyone but SAM. How do we plan to organize this?

Can I join if someone else doesn't show? Monaco has been one of those games I've loved but never played as much as I wanted.