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It took me a second to realize you were talking about Pandora, and not SMAC! I was about to blow up in explosive fury.

Oh man, that reminds me of another strategy game with a terrific end game: Imperialism 2. The game naturally evolves such that WWI essentially breaks out at the end of the game. It's brilliant how that happens casually via the mechanics of the game rather than by some sort of scripted trigger.

I actually disagree with the people citing Half-Life 2 as a good example of a good end game. Half Life 2's end game is preferable to the more common situation where the developers decide to create a difficulty spike, but I didn't find the ending of Half-Life 2 memorable at all, certainly not compared to other sections of the game. To me the key quality to a good end game is switching up the dynamics of the game. The end game should feel different from the early and mid points of the game. One of the great flaws of Bioshock Infinite is it completely lacked dynamism, and the gameplay felt identical in the early, mid, and late game. You can contrast that with Gone Home where the early game is partly about trying to figure out what the game is about, and the end game is about actively wanting to discover the narrative resolution. I also think a better example than the end game of Half Life 2 is the end game for episode 2 of HL 2. Even though I found it to be the most challenging part of that episode, it was also the most fun I had, and that was because it was a unique challenge. Sometimes switching up the dynamics doesn't work. The end game of Civ feels different from the early and mid game, but not for the better (although I personally find the end game of Civ 5 with both expansions to work pretty well). So sometimes you can design something dynamically lousy, but I think if you create something that forces to player to pivot how she is playing the game, you're on the right track. My example in the discussion about end games for strategy games is Sid Meier's Railroads! In the early to mid game you're focused on the building up your economic engine. In the late game you're more focused on the stock game to buy out your competitors. When to shift from that early to late strategy is a strategically interesting decision, and the gameplay remains enjoyable throughout.

Sid Meier's Railroads! I think it's end game is way more interesting than the early game. But yeah, there are a ton of strategy games with bad end games. On the other hand, I'd argue that most games, strategy or otherwise, tend to have bad end games. It's just a really difficult design problem.

That's a fair point. Any simulation type game is going to lose its allure once you hit the point where your base is sort of running itself. If the game isn't pushing back against the player in enough compelling ways you'll simply lose interest. Like, I'm still waiting for Spacebase to have enough features where it will start to feel like an interesting game because right now when I try it out after getting that early game setup sorted out it doesn't feel like there's much of a reason to do much else.

I like Adrienne Rich's stuff from the 70's a lot, and 21 Love Poems is one of those works I find myself constantly returning to. In Spanish, Roberto Bolano's poetry is excellent, and there is a bilingual edition that is decent. I can't read Villon in medieval French unfortunately, but I really dig Villon tonally, there is this plainspoken quality that was kind of radical for his time and place, and it speaks to an aesthetic I enjoy in rap music.

Come si dice in italiano: pronto controllo

Yeah the Dark Mod is great! The AI behavior doesn't quite sit right with me, but that's not such a big deal because it isn't like the AI behavior in the original game was anything particularly sophisticated...

Hopefully this doesn't come off sounding in the wrong spirit, but I've definitely been interested in seeing a prototype not pan out. That didn't happen last year and all the prototypes seemed pretty cool to me! But we don't get to witness failure very much even though that sort of thing (while it doesn't feel good at the time) is like super valuable.

Also, boss fights. Blegh.

I have no idea what Ken Levine has in mind because as he's currently formulated things everything is still quite vague. However the idea of a replayable narrative is maybe not that valuable a thing. It is possible that part of what makes something worth replaying is a sort of absence of narrative. If we simply consider the word itself, "replayable", what becomes clear is that what someone wants is to repeat a mode of play, not necessarily have a new narrative experience. The games that we do associate with a sort of endless replayability are the same games that don't have much narrative content -- strategy games, roguelikes, etc. I just finished playing the Novelist. It took me about three hours to play. If I wanted to I'm sure I could play through it a few more times to get different story outcomes, but I'm not sure that' would be worthwhile. By playing the game once I get to own the narrative I experienced. If I start playing it over and over then I get to experience some different outcomes, but that also means that I lose the singularity of that experience, which cheapens it a bit. The singularity of a narrative is important. What makes a narrative worth revisiting is getting older, picking up on nuances that you couldn't appreciate when you were younger and didn't know as much. If you want people to replay narrative games, the key is to write better, more meaningful narratives. Replayable narratives is one of those things that sounds great on paper, but is potentially more problematic upon scrutiny.

The RPS review was positive with some caveats, but I have to say those caveats are going to be really important for a lot of people. What I loved about the Thief trilogy wasn't so much that they were stealth games, but that they were immersive sims, and it sounds like that quality has been totally drained from this new game with context-sensitive commands, severely prescribing how you use your toolkit, and other sorts of contrivances. Personally I would advise everyone to just pick up the original trilogy from GOG. I think all those games still hold up really well (even the third one which a lot of people dismissed when it was released but really had the best story of the three games).

This discussion has gotten quite amorphous.

The Yawhg will be appearing on Steam very soon, just FYI

Nice work voxn!

You're gonna hate the news that enrollment in clown colleges in the U.S. has been greatly affected by global political and economic forces.

This probably makes me a horrible person, but given the ruthless turn Take 2's corporate culture has taken the thing I hate the most about the situation is thinking what happens if the next game from Firaxis isn't wildly successful? Because I don't want to live in a world where that studio isn't making strategy games!

Right on Sean!

If you want a tutorial that deals with GML I would recommend Derek Yu's tutorial: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3251.0 Some caveats: 1. it's a little dated at this point, so some aspects of GM are slightly different, but it all basically works the same. 2. He moves pretty quickly so if you're completely new it might make sense to run through a couple of the tutorials GM comes with. But I basically did this tutorial, and since then I've felt comfortable enough to work and experiment on my own, and when I run into the issue just look it up in the manual.

Dear Leader is going to be amazing.

FYI to all the people like me that found out about Silent Storm from listening to this episode: that game is 75% off on Steam right now.

I know Braid was a really successful game, and was in many ways a catalyst for indie game culture or whatever, but I never checked it out, or really followed Blow at all so this was all basically completely new information for me. I'm glad it was a long episode though! One of the things that I've come to appreciate since I moved to San Francisco is that when you run into an older dude who has grown up in California you should listen to him talk because he probably has a lot of really interesting stuff to say. On that count, Blow did not disappoint!

I want Clint Hocking to form a new studio and hire all these people.

2K Marin and Irrational gone... so intense. Hope all those people can land on their feet, but with that number of people it seems daunting. At least there will probably be some amazing new indie studios to come out of this.

Bad Fandangolf 2