Flynn

Absolutely. A ban on all crowdfunding still seems silly but it is at least consistent. Singling out Patreon is awful.

The non-ironic use of investment really is aggravating.

This is what I hear in this debate: "I like this game." "Hey everyone, don't trust that person. I know for a fact they payed for this game with their own money!" And I only think, that makes me more likely to believe the initial statement.

Crate and Crowbar does get into development a bit, as Tom Francis (Gunpoint dev) is on it and some of the others on the show also dabble. And there quite often have long conversations about design.

Crate and Crowbar has fast become my second favorite gaming podcast. Idle Thumbs is a rollercoaster, C&C is a meandering hike where everyone takes as long as they need to get lost in the weeds. They also play a ton of things I have just never heard of but find myself loving. http://crateandcrowbar.com/

To offer a couterpoint: I played 2 or 3 games of Dota 2 a month, starting from zero, for more than year. I wasn't getting the game on the same level as people who were way into it, but I got a lot out of the experience from day 1 nonetheless. Even just trying all the heroes is interesting. This one breaks into more than one hero. This one can teleport anywhere. This one can copy other players spells. It was delightful discovering that stuff and if you try out new ones in a human vs easy-bot games everyone is chill and doesn't care if you have no idea how they work.

Yeah you can toggle DOF on or off, that's just a minor aspect of it. That's just a default value chosen by the person who wrote the thing that updates the config values. The default has already been toned down since that RPS article too.

It's great! I forgot how rich and interesting the economy in this game is.

Soren noted that 7 wonders is positive sum. I think it's also important that you can't direct your power to a specific player -- you always just apply it to your two neighbors. Glory to Rome is another good example. In Glory to Rome you can steal other peoples cards and even destroy buildings and steal clients with military power. It's absolutely devasting. But you can't direct your combat power in any particular place. The way the 'pool' of actions is essentially managed by the players, other people can coordinate to keep an incredibly strong military action starved without going military themselves. It also takes a few combo builds to be the most devasting in that game, which will reveal the strategy in time usually). So even though everyone in our group has played Glory to Rome many times now we find the games become increasingly diverse rather than increasingly militaristic. I should note this is the Kickstarter version with a ton of extra cards that might also play into this.

Can kids officially get into E3 now?

Yeah don't need to check the ironman box if you play that way naturally. The key distinction to me is whether you allow yourself the potential to lose the game. Is XCOM like Chess or Civilization -- you play for awhile, maybe a long while in Civ, and then *somebody* wins but it might not be you. Sometimes you don't make it to Alpha Centauri first. If you play that way with occasional reload because of misclicks or bad UI that's the essential core of what you get from ironman. Some people avoid ironman because they don't want to 'waste' 10 hours by losing the game -- which if you think of XCOM as a strategy game like Chess or Civ is a bit strange. If you view XCOM as a narrative game though that makes sense. I myself *am* big baby and I *need* that checkbox. I started XCOM without it and and simply could not resist a few loads when I hit a string of ridiculously bad luck. With the checkbox on I found myself much more engaged and even the easy battles were exhilarating. If you think you might be like me and have moments of weakness I still recommend starting with ironman and lowering the difficulty to even out the lack of reloading. You can recover from even full squad wipes in XCOM on normal and easy, and I even full squad wiped on classic and ended with a win. It made for an incredible experience actually I was forced to attempt the alien base long before I considered myself ready for it in a desperate attempt to keep panic from losing me the game. The whole mission was a nailbiter with just two soldiers surviving, but finally giving me breathing room to rebuild after.

The No Man's Sky devs were on Giant Bomb discussion at E3 and they did try to explain what the heck you actually do in the game. Also Palmer Luckey asking them questions since he was hanging around. Rad: http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/giant-bomb-live-e3-2014-day-1/2300-9056/

Ironman is the only way to play in my opinion. XCOM with ironman is a strategy game, you might win, you might lose. XCOM with loading is a series of missions where the difficulty levels determines how much reloading you will have to do to clear them all. Even for first timers I'd recomend ironman, just set the difficulty down a notch. Since this thread bumped I'll mention what I've been trying lately, an XCOM mod called Long War. Practically the only non-trivial XCOM mod out since modding XCOM is such a nightmare in practical terms: http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/88/? It makes so many changes I won't even attempt to summarize. Vastly more than Enemy Within for example. If you do try it be sure and apply 'hotfix' for alien research speed in beta 9a. If you don't make that change you'll be playing on a difficulty level higher than impossible when you select normal and you'll probably think the mod is absurdly difficult. It's pretty buggy at the moment so I wouldn't commit to a full run or anything until it's a little more mature but I had a lot of run just playing through a few missions with the changes.

Anyone else tried the forest? I thought I'd wait after Nick's impressions but Sean Elliot makes the AI sound fascinating: https://twitter.com/shawnelliott

I skimmed the Slate article: Is this actually true in YA fiction? The only one I've read recently is the Hunger Games. I didn't particularly like the series but I wouldn't characterize the ending in that way -- it was a pretty damn hollow victory. The protoganist executes the leader of the 'rebels' and the world is hardly improved over the old guard.

The feature that's pushing me over the line is the multiplayer is basically Spy Party!

Apology may be too strong a word but it's certainly them embracing it. It's clearly a niche hardware piece for a console which is itself a niche. Even at a markup they can't expect to sell very many.

Stuttering on PC is fixable with the tweak mentioned here: http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/page/blog/_/features/port-reports/pc-report-watch-dogs-r144

This hardware represents Nintendo's apology to the Smash community. The controller was announced in the same video as an official Smash Brothers tournament at E3. A tournament featuring the players and casters that Nintendo has at best ignored, and at worst been openly hostile to, for more than a decade. It was just year that Nintendo tried to prevent the largest fighting game tournament, Evo, from having Smash brothers (which at the time represented Smash coming back from obscurity). It's not wireless because wireless controllers are never used at tournaments due to interference and latency. This controller makes little sense to the wider market but that's why it represents such a strong token to a formerly spurned community. I'm truly impressed Nintendo honestly. The people appreciate this are going to really really really appreciate it. BTW if you haven't seen the Smash documentary it's well worth watching. Made on a shoestring budget by one guy it still manages to make you feel the ups and downs of a subculture you were probably never aware of:

Tried Wolfenstein and... I dunno. I'm forced to make dark and gritty moral 'choice' to save one person or another but it just came off as some random thing thrown in there to be make things grittier. Next I get to interactively torture a Nazi with a chainsaw. And the gore is wow. It's like what people have never played or seen a video game before *imagine* games are like based solely on news pundits talking video game violence. I was surprised to see so so much love out there for it. For me it just crosses the threshold where I feel gross playing it. I've heard the worldbuilding later on is better (I do love the Nazi versions of pop songs) but the overall tone of the game is so weird. Sometimes your main character is dark and somber and sometimes he seems like Duke Nukem. I think I prefer the blandness of Watch Dogs. The goofy vehicle physics means the rampant civilian murder more resembles a Wile E Coyote cartoon than anything intentional by either the players or designers. And I'm intrigue by the invading another player's game and pretending to be an NPC.

So they are still creating new TF2 items with gameplay effects that can be hard to get? I know there were some when they first started with items, but I didn't realize they were still adding them. That game must have so many loadouts by now. Both dota and cs:go are competetive games where you couldn't really introduce stuff like that. Although even in LoL, certainly a competitive game, players only have access to their purchased heroes during the draft phase which is certainly going to change the way matches play out.

I find Valve's free-to-play position in the market so strange. On the one hand they use so many of the same obnoxious mechanisms that the worst f2p games use - like having your 'loot' be a chest you can't actually open without buying a key, and you have to spend the money up front to essentially get a single pull from a slot machine. And they shove the in game purchase stuff in your face all the time. But. BUT! Nothing you can buy has any mechanical effect on the gameplay. This is so such an outlier to the rest of the market. I still feel a little uncomfortable about buying anything in Dota because it so closely resembles so many games that I find totally repugnant for using similar mechanisms that do directly play into gameplay. (the Compendium being a nice exception here)

At the very least if you buy Dragon Age now, you almost certainly get all the DLC. If you buy ME3 now for 10 dollars you'd still have to separately purchase at full price each DLC pack so tons of players likely never play with them.

It drives me nuts in Mass Effect games. Adding DLC into the middle of a game, sold after the game launches, that's so directly related to the main narrative of the trilogy.... ME3 is much better with Javik and with the later DLC, the whole story holds together more, the ending doesn't seem quite as random, etc. At least the Citadel DLC as clearly written as a coda rather than something meant to be played in the course of the main game.

I have not played Eve but a friend a mine is in deep and so we often chat about it. One game decision decision that I'm not sure I like is the ability to so readily jump over intermediary space (cynos, bridges) seems to render a lot of strategic stuff not particularly relevant. Oh you have a small fast fleet? Well all the big alliances have cynos chains and can just dump ships anywhere they want so speed doesn't matter, so the loss of mobility in capital ships doesn't come into play much. The area control aspect of Eve becomes really weird, because it's like every place is connected to every place (an exaggeration but still). Your most powerful war assets can be almost anywhere at once! Typically both sides of a conflict could escalate and jump in more and more ships if they wanted (well having enough awake players at a certain time is certainly a logistics weakness that can be exploited). With power so mobile, this leads to the entire galaxy becoming one or two super allliances. Great article explaining the problem (though not sure about the solution): http://marlonasky.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/cancers-of-eve-online-teleportation/