Gormongous

Excellent discussion on an excellent game, guys. I especially liked Rob talking about the unpredictability of the game's scripted events and Troy bringing up how that unpredictability is managed in King of Dragon Pass. I think the crucial difference between the two, which makes The Banner Saga a bit more of a "guess what the developer is thinking" design, is that the different choices always have the same outcome in The Banner Saga, while random chance plays a huge role in King of Dragon Pass, since a "correct" answer can still fail and an "incorrect" answer sometimes succeeds. I think a lot of where The Banner Saga falls down is where it imitates King of Dragon Pass, but not enough or in the wrong way. That's my problem with renown as currency especially, which is covered in the thread on the Idle Forums proper. Also, the turn order thing bothered me at first, but I soon discovered that the concept of "maiming" is an important and totally hidden part of the combat. On the higher levels of play, the decision of whether to reduce an enemy to a single hitpoint to clog their turn order or to kill them outright for the willpower and shock bonus is perhaps the most important decision to be made in the tactical battle. It may not seem entirely thematic, but "cleanup" goes a lot faster if you work on reducing the fighting effectiveness of the enemy as a whole, rather than kill off each individual enemy in sequence. Also also, Danielle needs to review Total War: Rome II by the time that CA puts out its next inevitable DLC. More rage, more disappointment!

Don't you understand, you must suffer for as long as necessary so that the opposing team can experience their high to the fullest? Think of the service you're providing them! I'm mostly not serious, of course.

Paradox has announced that their next "expansion" DLC will double the map size to add India. I'm as thrilled as the next person, although I was hoping that Doomdark's talk about the remaining DLC being more intimate RP-focused affairs would actually have some effect. Also, I distinctly remember one of the devs saying a couple years ago when Crusader Kings II launched that they'd never expand the map east, because the system and design requirements would be too great. Oh well, we'll see, right?

Yeah, those are my thoughts, too. The low-magic feel of Tolkien's world is completely lost on a gaming industry that craves spectacle, so they set out to generalize it in a way that makes it any other fantasy setting except for the names. I don't see the point of paying for a license in order to disregard it like that trailer does.

I broke down and downloaded the new anime of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I'm tired of not understanding the memes. Anyone actually seen it?

Go on. Is it worth your time? I read the whole Bas-Lag trilogy, but only Perdido Street Station really did anything much for me, although I've had gradually increasing appreciation for The Scar and even Iron Council. One out of three wasn't good enough for me to keep reading Miéville.

I thought the exact same thing! It seems like, when the news is current, you have to listen to the news and digest the opinions, but when you already know the outcome of the Tony Hawk franchise or Bungie leaving Microsoft, you can just focus on the personalities or even the voices.

Actually, my guess was when Sean found out Chris had played Amnesia: The Dark Descent by himself. But yours sounds more familiar.

Yeah, it's always killed me that one of my favorite anime, Trigun, ran out their mid-season budget on episode 16, which should have been a spectacular apocalyptic showdown but looks like a direct-to-video OVA from the 80s.

I wonder, is there a way to detect fountain camping and set some sort of timer that forces the winning side to end the goddamn game? Honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to be convinced that there should never be any surrender option in games like DOTA 2. All the arguments sound too much like what I've heard for twenty-five years justifying player-unfriendly design choices and behavior in strategy games and wargames. When a new genre's on the rise, people are willing to put up with bad interfaces, poor tutorials, and obtuse gameplay, but that position's not secure forever. Like, I don't know... Has one of those amazing turnaround games you guys talked about ever been the same game where a whiny baby spends the whole time begging the rest of the team to give up? They seem mutually exclusive to me.

Yeah, I was honestly hoping when Sean stated his desire to play Crusader Kings II that he'd stream it. Not that I'd know, because I had to unsubscribe after several late-night alerts about Spelunky streams woke me up.

Just go to the anime thread. It'll provide a nice change from me, Twig, and Codicier gushing over KILL la KILL every goddamn week.

Well, that makes me feel better. I still like it as a formal set of bookends, encapsulating this guy that history's passing by.

The Kotaku article has a couple of sententious commenters reminding everyone that this is how trademarks have to be defended, but I really don't understand King's gameplan here. Just in the realm of video games, the word "saga" has been used by a Square franchise since 1989 and, while "candy" doesn't have a similar counterpart, there's still Candy Land, not to mention the million clothing brands that King claims are impeding a trademark that didn't exist until a few months ago. What's next, they initiate legal action against Crush soda? So really, what's the outcome they expect? At best, they force Stoic to change their game's name, possibly preventing a few lost dollars on their various mobile platforms, in exchange for poisoning the goodwill of anyone who reads gaming news and doesn't have a heart that runs on crude oil and crushed sea shells? Is that really the cost-benefit analysis they ran? Someone smarter please help me out.

Congrats, Twig! Dallas isn't so bad. Above all, it's cheap, though you'll definitely need a car. Still, it didn't fuck me up too much growing up there!

Well, if there's one thing for which the internet is good, it's nitpicking over facts. Wikipedia represents the best of that. But still (and sadly) you're probably better picking up a couple books on the topic from your library if you're looking for any sort of depth. And that's not to mention the weird nationalism that's all over any article pertaining to the Balkans and other fractious regions.

I think the complaint of the article, which I can't corroborate not having played Prison Architect for long but find intuitively true, is that the discomfort in such games comes from choosing what's easy or what's effective over what's right. It's possible to be a good person in Papers Please and to talk everyone out of firing nukes in DEFCON, but in Prison Architect there's apparently no way to stop inmates from behaving like wild animals or to keep playing without using them as slave labor. I personally find it a little disappointing, if so. "Be a brutal warden or make it by the skin of your teeth" is one thing, "be a brutal warden or you don't get to play" is another.

At least in my own field, Wikipedia is not often wrong, per se, but it's not a good source for two reasons: i) its rules for notability predispose it towards older obsolete scholarship that is widely available, and ii) its web-based nature predisposes it towards sources that are freely accessible online. Therefore, if you're lucky, you're getting the hottest research from 1964 on the marquisate of Montferrat, but if you're unlucky, you're reading the 1911 Britannica or Catholic Encyclopedia entry that's the only thing out of copyright. Even in my professional work, I use Wikipedia for names, dates, and places, but I would never take as given any sort of thesis I found there.

I just beat the PC version of King of Dragon Pass, one of my favorite games both as a gamer and as a historian. So much of this game just works. The events behave with a different logic than what the modern mind us accustomed to, so to succeed at the game, you have to roleplay in a way that approximates quite closely a mix of proto-Germanic and American Indian cultural values. It's really cool, eight or ten hours in, to find your thanes squabbling over spoils and know for sure that the right response is to confiscate all the loot in order to make them see their pettiness. It's not just, but it is right, you know? Plus I think the religious aspect is better handled than most games. You listen to prophecies and honor the gods. I started out ignoring both and that makes for an impossible game. Of course, there's some odd missteps, which is to be expected from a fifteen-year-old title like this. The "short" game of uniting neighboring clans into a tribe is airtight, with a dozen needs pulling you different ways every season. Do you raid, do you invite more farmers into your clan, do you pray for the gods to heal the sick? It's razor-thin sometimes and there's nothing like having an action you took for short-term political gain ruin your tribe. Quick tip, don't piss off the lizardmen. But the "long" game, which is actually becoming king of Dragon Pass, gets a bit linear and humdrum by the very end. Heroquests becoming increasingly important in order to unlock the next step of the event chain, but they also give your clan magic and your elders wisdom, which are the two rarest "resources" when you start. By the time you're poised to make your bid to be chosen king, everyone on your council of elders is probably be "excellent" or higher at their specialty, which has a knock-on effect of making your clan insanely rich in cattle and pretty much everything else. When you're getting goods every year worth five hundred head of cattle, the game's hard choices, which are initially and usually a decision between ten and twenty cattle's worth of goods, become trivial. I actually had to wrack my brain to figure out how to spend all my wealth. Going from clan to clan buying up all their ancestral treasures wasn't putting a dent in it, so I built every single temple too, but that just made the snowball bigger. I suppose that there are occasions where elders die on heroquests and opportunities to mess up or restart the final game-ending event chain that would make the game challenging, but I'm not sure I really want the challenge of having my king-elect die suddenly, which would just mean twenty more years of crazy wealth and dominance while I wait for a new one to be groomed. Still, even with the long endgame, it's a remarkably different and thematic experience that flatly doesn't exist anywhere else, except in pale shadows like The Banner Saga's overworld management. It's $5.99 on GOG (the developers have weird ideas about digital distribution and have fought any sort of wider rerelease beyond iOS) but worth every penny. I promise someday I'll stop talking about this game, too. EDIT: But not today. I was going to write something more about my favorite moment in the game was having a compromise candidate, chosen by the other clans to oust my clan's elder from the tribe's chieftainship, start a civil war through her incompetence, not to mention my subsequent switching back and forth as I tried to decide whether I would look worse supporting a bad king or joining a revolt so soon after losing the chieftainship, before discovering that both sides felt I had championed their cause to the best of my ability. But really, my favorite moment was having to expand my farmland in order to feed my massive population of fifteen hundred souls, then discovering my herd of two thousand cattle were starving for lack of pasturage, and wracking my brain for a good five minutes before realizing that I'd have to go to raid in order to take land from another clan. That was something I'd never done before in the game. Sure, I'd raided to steal cattle or take prisoners or uphold honor, but never to expand my territory... you know, the principal reason wars have been fought for the last who knows how many centuries. Okay, now I'm done.

I think the dilemma was making the text unreadable, since you would be a cat? There are two obvious options, of course: either put a blur filter over all the text, or replace it with "meow" for each word.

I guess I just see it as a defensive thing, to keep the enemy from being wiped out by snipers upon discovery, so it feels wrong for it to be used offensively like it so often is, in combination with the AI's regular turn. I know it's not a design problem that's easily overcome, though.

I've picked this game up again after getting the expansion over the holidays. It's as good as I remember it, but I still have one complaint about the combat system and that's the AI's free move upon being spotted. There are two big flaws, I think: first, that the free move is not always triggered immediately and sometimes results in the AI getting it after fire's been exchanged, and second, if you stumble upon the enemy near the end of your turn, you almost always get flanked, as the AI uses its total of three moves (one free, two standard) to get behind your guy and crit him, often with no regard for its own safety. I've seen my friend, who's learning the game right now, lose about a dozen guys to this combo, while I try to tell him that, if he spots an alien without being able to kill it, he should pull back. I feel like that's a fine lesson, but it would be even more effective if the aliens couldn't advance towards a guy during the free move. Anyway, it's only because the rest of the game is so good that this one design misstep bothers me.

When I read it a few weeks ago, I felt that Rohrer made some good points about trends and values, but ultimately his argument was predicated on a need for Steam sales not to be the future of selling games online. So yeah, I totally agree.

Yeah... An editor is something I'd like to see, because a lot of bigger games especially need someone telling them what doesn't work, but more than any other medium, such a job would exist only to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars of work in the name of a better "artistic experience". I don't think there's anyone who would like the person working that job, except the fans (and not even all of them, considering the "more is more" attitude that still pervades a lot of comment communities).