sclpls

But it's XCOM, not X-COM. So it all makes sense.

We might see another minor patch before the TI. We've got the MarsTV DOTA 2 League thing going on right now, and if Team Secret take that as convincingly as they have taken their other LAN tournaments I suspect we'll see some other Team Secret focused nerfs.

Pretty annoying! Although I would love to live in a world where it took things at least 2 hours before they became annoying. We'd all be a lot less irritated.

Finally caught up with reading this thread. I think most of what I would have said has already been said by various people! I will share this grantland article about FWWM, which I thought was very good: http://grantland.com/features/twenty-things-david-lynch-fire-walk-its-20th-anniversary/

I have to say, if any team was gonna fuck up all my European qualifier predictions, I'm glad Na'Vi is the team to do it.

This is how I feel about the game as well. I think it does a lot of things really well, but I couldn't get into the game at all. I thought the music for the game was super heavy handed with how it wanted the player to feel, and that always rubs me the wrong way and makes me feel like the writers haven't really earned the moment they are aiming for (movies are more guilty of this in general, but you see it pop up in games from time to time).

Thanks for the response LostInTheMovies! Just to clarify, the Cooper doppleganger has cloudy eyes in the room with Bob, but not in the hallway (see the shots that utilityfrog posted). That's one of those many wonderful moments in that sequence where one moment things are one way, and then the next some other way. Thanks for the link to the Nochimson essay, I'll give it a read when I have a chance!

All over the map I'd say.

I'm not sure if you've had a chance to listen to the podcast or not, but I don't think there's any actual disagreement here, and maybe I just stated things poorly in my post. Sean explicitly stated that he wasn't trying to tell people what to do. Part of what I found so frustrating about that debate was it was presented in such strong either/or terms, and so I ended up tuning a lot of it out. As I said, I think if you want to make a game that might only reach 15 people, that's great! But if people want to reach a larger audience that doesn't just make them the new version of the AAA companies as some people on the alt gaming side sometimes presented things. The main takeaway I got from what Sean was saying was that games are not movies. As long as someone isn't blind and/or deaf, you can watch any movie in the world from start to finish. The same cannot be said about games. As a result, questions of accessibility require a little more care when it comes to games.

I liked the point Sean was making about game accessibility. There was some debate on twitter and game design blogs a couple of months ago that came down to this "alt games" vs. "indie games" ideological divide. I didn't fully comprehend the debate at the time, but Sean's point feels like a very cogent defense of the "indie game" camp. It is difficult enough to get people to check out a game like 30 Flights of Loving that I feel really moves the needle forward in terms of game possibility space. So I think keeping things accessible and fun makes a lot of sense. I get the "alt games" argument that reaching the biggest possible audience doesn't need to be a goal for developers, and that's completely valid, but I also feel like a lot of creative people have a desire to make things that feel culturally meaningful, and that's pretty human, and if so accessibility should absolutely be a goal. To expand on one thing Danielle was talking about with the Witcher, one thing that I think works really well in that game is so far every single quest or mission you go on is in service of providing more detail to that world, which is not something you see in a lot of open world game designs where at a certain point the game just has you go on a bunch of fetch quests and collect 150 widgets. So I feel like the game can get away with throwing kind of goofy, left-field stuff at the player and still retain a very grounded feel just because the developers really put in the work into building the world out via the game systems.

Oh, one other final stray observation. I find it super interesting the way Bob's lines are delivered. Most people seem to be speaking backwards, but there are a couple of speaking lines without that effect. Bob's delivery sounds almost as if it is somewhere in between the two. No idea if that's intentional or not!

Got kind of behind with the podcast for various boring reasons, but I finally got caught up. Jake - my wife and I recently played the Puzzle Agent games. Any chance you could talk about the influence of Twin Peaks on the writing for that game in one of the Q&A podcast episodes? When this podcast started I made a proclamation that I thought Season 2 was actually better, and I was struct by how much stuff happened in the final episode that I had mistakenly thought was parsed out at earlier points in the season. I guess I just really like the final episode! This is kind of an aside, but I love the bank explosion. The glasses on the tree and the money raining down is just such a funny visual image to me. I like that Lynch is more interested in seeking out novel visual expressions than in narrative cohesiveness. I'm a big fan of that Werner Herzog quote about how, "We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones." David Lynch's work is an important antidote in that sense (and I love the movie My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? that both directors collaborated on, you get both their eccentricities bundled up in one film). I think my interpretation of the black lodge/red room sequence of events is somewhat against the grain. I agree with Chris' comment early in the podcast that David Lynch's approach to the story is almost sort of anti-lore. When Cooper enters the Black Lodge, he enters a space that is divine/mad, and therefore beyond the limits of human comprehension, and the way events play out involve images that are rich with symbols, but they are symbols that resist interpretation, and therefore it is really difficult to talk about what actually is happening! But here are a couple of stray observations: -Jake points out that there is a reveal that the waiter and the giant are one and the same. There's even a line of dialog saying as such! I haven't seen the actual script, which perhaps makes this point more explicitly, but I think it is worth appreciating that in the presentation in the show the situation is slightly ambiguous. At one point you see the waiter, and then it cuts to the cup of coffee, and then there is the giant standing by the dwarf. Does the line about being one and the same refer to the giant and the waiter, or does it refer to the giant and the dwarf? Is it all 3? Does it even matter? This sort of playfulness repeatedly happens with most of the characters in the red room/black lodge. -A lot of people get hung up on the doppleganger thing, but I'm not even sure if that's a real thing. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but when the doppleganger for Cooper appears, you have one Cooper run off into the hallway, and then the other Cooper follows him, and neither of them have the clouded eyes that we see with the other dopplegangers. To me that's Lynch's way of signaling to the audience to not read too much into this stuff. -I think there is also probably a pretty good psychoanalytic interpretation you could make with the shifting characters/dopplegangers being a sort of reflection of the way desire shifts from one object to the next. That's kind of above my pay grade in terms of trying to lay it out, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it is there to make. Consequently I don't see the ending as Cooper being possessed by Bob, or that a doppleganger emerged and the "real" Cooper is still trapped in the Lodge. I see it as Cooper has this experience where this world of duality like good and evil that grounds his character is confronted by a more confusing reality where that duality appears to not exist because two objects and people can be one and the same, and this experience shatters him. On the other hand, Jake seemed to hint at some stuff from Fire Walk With Me fleshing out the doppleganger concept more, and I don't have any recollection of that, so I look forward to reevaluating all of this stuff!

I don't think it's a difficulty level thing as I'm playing on the same difficulty level.

I'm not really sure how the types of missions are generated. I've always had one of those as an option, so I guess you've been unlucky. When you do see them definitely take them right away, I feel like having additional agents is the most cost effective (because it's free!) way to increase your power by a long shot!

You basically pick a mission that is a detention facility to get the extra agents.

Gwent is great! It's basically a modded version of the actual card game Condottiere published by Fantasy Flight. I definitely spent a good chunk of yesterday just wandering around the map aimlessly trying to find characters that I could challenge.

the problem is even if the whiners are a minority, if they are the most vocal part of a fanbase the developers are going to have a problem on their hands because that can spill out onto social media, and eventually the press and then it becomes part of the narrative about a game even if it is inaccurate. Like, I understand your point that this sort of issue could be mitigated, but if you're a developer why would you do that as opposed to simply avoid taking that risk? From a developer's point of view I don't see any reason to prioritize openness over basic risk management.

Spent a bit of yesterday with some friends in mumble watching a couple of the matches going on. It was surprisingly fun.

I prefer first person, but I wouldn't call it a strong preference the way people can have a strong aversion to first person perspective games.

Speaking of trade secrets, Shawn Elliott appeared on Patrick Klepick's podcast about a month ago I think, and there was definitely a moment where he realized he couldn't talk about a particular aspect of Bioshock Infinite's production without violating some NDA. And I have to wonder how enforceable some of those nondisclosure clauses actually are. They seem so potentially broad in scope and cover stuff that isn't obviously directly tied to meaningful economic interests. So I suspect that in a lot of instances if a dispute were to actually show up in court a judge would throw a lot of these clauses out, but lax labor law enforcement being what it is companies can get away with these clauses knowing that the simple potential of a lawsuit is enough to keep employees and former employees in line.

I think it is telling that syntheticgerbil's example of crazy fans in the movie sphere is for a Marvel action film. To me that suggests a good chance that it is basically the same subset of nerds getting incensed about stuff that no adult should be getting incensed about. Movies have the benefit of not being completely subsumed in nerd/geek culture. Despite the leaps and strides made, games haven't really managed to extricate themselves from that space.

One thing that was a real bummer about listening to this episode was all the NetHack bashing. I've been playing that game nearly my whole life, and I've had so many amazing experiences that I've just never seen attempted in any other game. But maybe that's why I'm way more into the "roguelikelikes" or whatever you want to call them over the updated versions of the traditional roguelike. Games like Spelunky look back at the classic games lovingly, and try and figure out ways to use a lot of these mechanics in novel ways, whereas the attitude of the contemporary traditional roguelikes is one where I guess the idea is there was a serious problem with the old roguelikes that need to be fixed.

That Kanye West game thing is wild. It makes me think about how all these crazy fans for shows like Lost that come up with really implausible scenarios and are reviled by the rest of a show's audience. If you get them to play games though, then one of them eventually figures it out and they get to be a hero and Kotaku writes about them. All because game designers actually indulge in the implausible, and we get to think this sort of thing is neat instead of totally stupid, and it works since game playthroughs can be different from one another.

Dr. Wookie, definitely intentional, I caught that bit too! So relieved I finally found a blacksmith, my weapons and armor were in such rough shape.

Oh, what's the new Michael Brough game?