Frenetic Pony

So this is finally coming out, and here's a great bit as to why it was delayed: http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5477236/watch-dogs-hands-on-video-interview-release-date I'm looking forward to it, a good game in summer is still rare enough. I also want to find a way to tweet the lead game designer, or someone. Imagine being able to take control of a self driving car in like a sequel, switching between internal cameras and watching the passenger(s) panic and freak out as the car drives erratically. You could even drive the cars into a bay or a lake to drown people. Could be crossposted to "Threat of Big Dog". Just imagine when the robot revolution hits watching your car purposefully kill you with no control over it.

So I take it from this thread and other sources that this game goes from "Hey it's not as bad as everyone said it was, just turn on the customizations and bam, look I'm stealing shit!" too "Ahhh.... errr. Uhhhmmm."

Thanks! I think the problem with the police chases is less that getting away at two or even three stars in the right circumstances isn't doable, it's that I want to Just Cause the shit out the place, blowing up everything on an insane rampage, but that gets me too many stars too survive for more than a minute. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Just Cause and shouldn't play it that way. I'll go and give it a try tonight. Just moved my router so my PS3 should have better connectivity anyway.

I need to try the online component. Then again I also need to replay Bioshock Infinite and actually play the DLC, play Southpark, and Titanfall comes out soon. But right now I'm in the midst of Dragonfall. So with that all said how is the mutiplayer? All the reviews had it as a disappointment when the game first came out, but I know there's been a dozen updates since then. Also damn does this game still look good! I don't tool around as much as older GTA's, between the robotic like accuracy of police snipers from helicopters while I'm driving a hundred miles an hour in a car to the constant reporting of all crimes thanks to cellphones going on a rampage just doesn't last long enough for me. Maybe the next gen version will fix that, at the very least it will look even better an maybe a mod can fix the accuracy thing.

Half Life 3 is the most revolutionary VR game ever made. It's nigh indistinguishable from reality. It's been out for a while now. For you see, you are actually playing Half Life 3 right now. This is Half Life 3. If you would like to check your steam overlay yell "Ctrl - Tab!" really loudly. If it doesn't come up please contact tech support. If you would like to start as a new character please end your current one.

Damn, a year and a half ago I was talking about "Indie" in the non traditional sense. They now have a budget bigger than some triple A title. I've honestly no idea what's going on with this game half the time other than "they've invented a perpetual money machine" and "they are now adding even more stuff" and I've bought in! I'm going to have to recover what my login and stuff even is pretty soon. So thanks for the thing Tycho, now maybe I can catch up on the whos a whatsit and the whatso dosit.

Ok, C'mon, just make it harder and I'm in. I loved the... not the specific art style, but the art direction and how connected everything felt. I really appreciated... the setting felt like a weird cross of just derivative enough to not feel entirely original, but I still appreciated a setting that tried. The morality system was horrible, yet I appreciate a game with multiple paths and endings. What I'm saying is, they acknowledged the morality system was rather broken (because it was put in at the last minute), and hopefully they can make the other stuff interesting enough as well that I'm fulling willing to give them another shot. C'mon guys you can do it!

Answer truly: Is JP LeBreton secretly alternate universe you brought to this universe ala Bioshock Infinite/Other multiverse stuff? Edit- Also, Brad Muir is alternate universe Chris Pratt. I got distracted by his disturbingly white and straight teeth, they don't even look real.

They've secretly been bought by Valve. Half Life 3 CONFIRMED.

I think the real problem with all this is that for ages now the only way a stealth game works is with a hundred guards, one in every damned room. Because the AI is bad, previously, even with the 360/Ps3, by limited hardware the only way to make anything challenging is to have an absolutely absurd number of guards. Guards that will announce loudly to no one if they spot anything at all, guards that may or may not alert every guard in the vicinity or even level, guards that barely notice that "huh, who turned out that light?" Guards that don't notice at all that the valuable object that was just there a moment ago is now gone, and gee where'd Tom go? He was patrolling back and forth same as me and I saw him like clockwork every 45 seconds, but now he's not there. These are the guards that are in every room, every hallway, ever building. The contigent of a small, braindead army used to guard any video game valuable object whatsoever. But now, well we've got 8 CPU cores, 8 gigs of RAM, and enough GPU power to render a horse. I'm sure some of that could be used for vastly improved AI, maybe where instead of there being a million idiots there could be a handful of intelligent guards that alert each other if a light goes out, notice if a thing is stolen or a door left open, and can maybe see beyond 10 feet in front of themselves.

Pro Tools is some crazy software yo. It'll take a while to learn. But I need something like it. I'm making my own "ironically funny male pop hit" ala Party Rock Anthem, Gangman Style, and Thrift Shop. I've got the lyrics. Now I need something to analyze the instrumentals for timing and beats per minute. Just listening to the stuff. It all seems rather simple and straightforward, but I'm being as analytic and scientific as possible. My hypothesis is basically that I can break down what these songs have in common in terms of instrumentals and lyrics, and then produce my own hit by following the same shared pattern. I was inspired by a recent analysis showing most hit pop songs sound pretty much the same. Oh, also the South Park episode "Faith +1" where Cartman writes weirdly sexual "christian rock" songs and gets a platinum album. Basically, if anyone can make what would be considered a masterpiece painting today by just copying what others do, why can't the same happen with pop music? There are a million artists as good as Da Vinci in the world today. I see no reason the same can't be done with music.

Two different teams, Deus Ex 4 is currently in development, on Unreal Engine 4 for next gen no less. Good to hear it might be worth picking up in a Steam sale later on, if you max out the difficulty. I'm not sure I really want to play "hidey version of Dark Souls" but I'd probably give it a shot if I was bored and it was $15.

Textures to fill up 8 gigs of ram are huge. It happens. I'd buy a bigger hard drive if you want to play ANY "next gen" game. It's not something you think about to "upgrade" to play a new game I know. But hey, a 1tb HDD is $60, not really that bad.

Eh, I used a generic optical mouse for almost a decade, but my first laser logitech mouse I replaced it with even though it wasn't broken? Well that broke within a year. "You pay for what you get" supposedly, but I've not found that to necessarily be the case with peripherals at all times. I don't know how long I've had that keyboard for my desktop I'm staring at right now, but I do know it was like $18 and the last time I bought a keyboard was from before I even got that desktop. Which would mean its at least 6 years old, it's beat to hell and dirty, and works perfectly.

Hey, I don't hate JUST video games. I've got hatred to go around, for other subjects.

Whoooooo, I was RIGHT! I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad. I just like being right. So ignore this post completely while I make an ass of myself publicly, by myself. WHOOOOOOOOOOO! Predictions confirmed, WHOOOOOOOOOO! Ok, now that I'm done being smug I can resume being disappointed. Dishonored sold well motherfuckers! So did Deus Ex 3! What exactly don't you get about the gameplay in these games?? Who knows, maybe that... LOTR but not really game will get it right. Shadow of Mordor? Whatever. Point is, they seem to understand the concept of giving you a wide ranging toolbox and open levels (it even seems openworldish) and then telling you "complete this objective however you wish". And that's awesome.

That was my point all along! But since I've thought of it, evidence for programming games taking less than other major software projects: Natural Selection 2 - 1 programmer (and they built their own engine! Probably why the game is buggy though...). Turtle Rock Studios: Evolve, rather few employees. Heck DOTA was made as a mod, by 1 guy initially! Prototype, fail faster, blah blah blah!

Err, I've been to multiple game jams... honestly it's not that hard to do for prototyping. People can and have made complicated multiplayer prototypes in just a handful of days. I can easily point to evidence, of any number of games and developers. Nidhogg did not take years to program, it took years to balance just right. Maybe I'm just explaining it wrong. Think of it this way: Ideally all things are in service of making a great experience. This includes any and all programming tasks. If you limit the scope of a project early you can know what you're programming and get it done. If you continuously change what your goals are, because you are trying to make your game more interesting or "work better", then that's going to take up more programming time, and introduce more bugs, and etc. because you just added new features. It's that all programming tasks, no matter how simple or complicated, are driven by the needs of iterative design, and the less you fiddle around with the basic design of your game the less you have to spend time programming things. I'm not saying programming is easy, I do it for fun. I'm saying it's driven by making, and changing, the game design. Which means that the game design changing and iterating continuously is the root cause of it all.

Didn't say they were "simple" just not complicated in the same way as other software projects. Other software is "how do I make this work?" All the time, with everything. In games you are often doing the exact same thing another hundred games have done. It's a well understood problem. Which, while not making dead simple, does make it easier than coding everything from scratch (or with minimal borrowed frameworks) that other projects have. If you want to get a guy running around in your game you can do that in a couple hours. If you want to get multiple guys, running around in the same world, controlled by different users over the internet, again that's a day. If you want to sync that text document with multiple users across a server with permissions... uhhhh, how do you do that? The point isn't that games aren't complex, but that uniquely to games that complexity can be a purchased thing. Gunpoint took how long it did to make not because programming was a probem, but making sure everything was fun and the user understood it and it felt good. If you are comparing what takes the most time, between solving programming problems and "making it fun", then the latter is definitely the more time consuming area for most games. Sure there's banished with all its bugs, from a one man team, who still pretty much guaranteed spent more time trying to make the game "fun" than making sure everything just functioned as intended.

So far as I understand it* *Done hobbyist programming, graphics programming, game jams, etc. etc. Never worked at a triple A developer Games usually aren't as unpredictable as other large software products. With other products you are usually, by definition, building something mostly in software that's fairly new. In games you are reusing a lot of code, I mean A LOT of code, that you've used before. So much so that game engines are a fairly unique sort of thing for any type of software. If you're building a video sharing site or something, you can't just grab "youtube kit" that knows how to cache videos in different systems and display them using html or flash and etc. etc. But for games, well that's what a game engine is. Now a game engine is an absolutely massive undertaking, for interlocking systems they're some of the most complex pieces of code on earth. But often the core isn't changed terribly much game to game* *(unless you're John Carmack and just HAVE to rebuild every 5 years). So for a triple A game like Bioshock Infinite, some of it will be custom code, some of it will be a new challenge, but it's built on Unreal Engine 3. A lot of the most basic stuff is there for you, and detailed tutorials and papers and forums and etc. are there for most every other custom problem you might want to solve. You don't have to figure out how to display sound, or load an animation file, or build a shader editor, or even a world editor. That's all there in the package. Often the iterative time comes, even more than waiting for programming, much more even, from "figuring out what's fun". You sit there and toy around with your little man that jumps, and you ask yourself how high he should jump, and how far he should jump, and how fast the jump should go... and that's fine. Any game is going to have to experiment. But the big questions, like "what's the story overall going to be? What's the goal of this section? Can the player even jump?" Those may need to be answered right away. Halo 1 went from being an RTS to an FPS before it was done. And that's great! For a much smaller team and budget that's practical, and awesome, I loved Halo 1! But for a triple A development team? No, that's not practical, that can't be done anymore. You can't go through six months and say "this isn't as good as I would hope, let's ditch it." As apparently BI did. A motto, that maybe any studio should have, is "Fail faster." In terms of gameplay, all game projects will have failures. So get those out of the way as fast as possible, before you build art, before sound, before anything, make sure your basic gameplay loop is solid and fun. This goes a hundred times as much or more, whatever the budget is, for Triple A. You can't afford to decide your game's not fun two years into development. And you can't afford to decide the story should have a major change and half the levels need to be cut and rebuilt partway through. You need to have a plan and execute on it as best as possible, with as little deviation as possible, at least if you expect to keep up your 100-200 person team for four years.

I wonder what it is that makes games so much harder to ramp up in production and budget than movies. Movies had gone from a couple hundred thousand for the Maltese Falcon in 1941 (equivalent 5 million today) to $44 million for Cleopatra in 1963 (equivalent 250 million today) in the span of twenty years. Fifty times the budget and they didn't seem hampered by confused and delayed productions anymore than they ever did. I was thinking maybe they had more time to work it out, but they didn't really. In 1994 Donkey Kong Country was the best selling game, and I can't imagine it had a budget of less than 2 million, a fiftieth of GTAV's. I was then thinking that it was because games are interlocking, changing a single thing can affect an entire 20+ hour experience. But that didn't get me that far, I mean segmentation of work for a game is pretty high. There are contractors for art and sound and even programming. Maybe it's because so many people joined the video game industry to "make video games". A lot of peoples dreams and goals in joining are to have a real, tangible affect on the project they're at. With 100+ that's not really possible. There's not the "just do the work assigned" attitude of movies while the director makes most of the real decisions. But there are people that obviously do that in games too, even with all the people going "indie" that want the former, there are still plenty of people left in the Triple A industry. The only thing I can guess at is that games aren't really "defined". When you do a movie you've got a script, you've got a thing and you are making that thing, and re-writes aren't actually that common in the middle of movies, and unless you're Pixar you never actually "film" something and you intend to throw away. Games on the other hand aren't defined. There's often no script, no "plan" to follow, at least as closely as a script and shooting schedule and etc. for a movie are followed. Even giant, monolithic design docs get re-written and re-thought and etc. right in the middle of production, and who knows how long that design doc actually takes to make eh? Still, maybe that's something that can be changed. Maybe it would be better for a 30 million+ dollar game to have a design doc, stick with that, and not deviate and re-write. Predictable production time, budget, goals, and etc.

Oh come off it. It was about class warfare being pointless because everyone does that same thing because we're all human. Suddenly now it's racist because it's fun to be righteously superior to someone else. I suppose all the Irish were thrown in there because they're black too. Blacks vs the whites eh? And what side are the Vietnamese going to be on? The blacks, obviously. Oh fuck that then, I'm definitely fighting with the blacks. Regardless of fascile racist accusations all of a sudden, I enjoyed Bioshock Infinite well enough, and miss a studio that can produce truly wonderous and beautiful settings that aren't just a rehash of classic sci-fi tropes or an extremely grey and brown modern day setting.

Ok, I'm done until this is patched. I have to enable work at a field, because it's disabled by default for... reasons I've no idea. I started a new town, planned everything out, it was all going well, stone houses for the first settlers because there's plenty of stone right near the start. A farm, and orchard, a forester... five minutes and my villagers start idling. All of them. They've got jobs, they need to build stuff. There's even resources at build sites, it's just waiting to be built. But all of them are idling, and refuse to do anything else. Maybe they caught the laziness disease. I really want to like it. I imagine I could easily like it. But there's a million little things that make it more frustrating than it should be, and hitting a bug that breaks your town five minutes in... just kind of put me off it for now.

Eeeeurgh. I can already see why this game could be great. But it's already frustrating me to no end at the beginning. I know how much I've stored of everything, but not how much I'm making, which isn't terribly useful. I also don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've got a hunting lodge, I've got hunters assigned to it. There doesn't seem to be any food coming out of it though. I've got a gathering lodge, but it's hard to tell if anyone's gathering even though a pair of gatherer's are there. I get "low food!" warnings, and I've got a pair of farmers, but the farmers aren't doing any damned thing with it at all. There's zero yield and they're never there. I suspect they're building the damnable pasture I set up... or is there a specific job for that? Because if there is then they literally aren't doing anything and my town is starving because of it. I've got the orchard and farm built. I've got farmers assigned, but everytime I try to assign a farmer to a field the (0 of 2) farmers working this field just goes up too (0 of 3) instead of, I don't know, assigning a farmer to work there. I'll come back too it after I figure out what it is I'm even supposed to be doing.