Golden Calf

You all are just on the wrong side of history now. In 50 years you'll be embarrassed of how backward you were.

Man I love how legs work in this game, how your feet will rest at different heights if the ground you're standing on is uneven. It's a nice little touch, and I can't remember seeing it in a game before.

They make exceptions for particularly cool people.

My enjoyment of the AC games seems basically identical to yours. With AC3, I have 2 main problems that I think made the game actually quite bad. First, the environments you're running around in are simply not dense enough to allow for the fluid movement that I loved above all else in the previous games. And second, you end up having to do a ton of loading between your base and other areas for missions and other stuff. This made playing the game just kind of a hassle, and after my first few sessions I was too bored to start it up again. The stuff in the trees was kind of cool at first, as was the introduction of ship combat, but it wasn't enough for me to make the overall experience enjoyable.

lol I was not expecting that swing jazz in the middle of the kickstarter video

Ya, I understand it might not have bothered everybody. I don't know why, but playing through this it felt way gorier than anything I played in a long time. I don't play shooters very often, the most recent one being Bioshock Infinite, and that felt super cartoony, whereas this was going for a much more realistic feel. I don't really buy that all this stuff is effective storytelling though. I didn't come away from it with a deeper understanding of Nazis, or suffering generally (not that I necessarily should have, but still), or feel any deep engagement with the story, I just sort of think "that was gross". Which is fair enough. I don't think the team had any serious aspirations to tell a particularly moving story. But then the gore just felt extra gratuitous. Not that I think I can convince you that my experience is the right one or anything, I just wanted to express it. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I dunno, there's only so much time in the day. You have to filter things somehow, and off-putting artistic choices seem like as good a criterion as any. With SR4, Chris and Nick were initially dismissive, were told it was more interesting than the marketing would have you believe, and then tried it a bit and found they didn't like it. With Watch Dogs, I don't think there's been much evidence that it's anything more than a sort of fun open world game. If people push back against an initial impression, and you still bash something and demonstrate no willingness to engage with the other point of view, that's shitty. But I don't really think that's what's going on here, nor can I remember that happening much at all in the podcast's run.

Ok seriously what the fuck is with the snuff film cut scenes in this? I'm not a squeamish person. I have held a human brain in my hands. I have decapitated and made neuronal cultures from newborn rats. But this game glories in intense human suffering and forces you to watch a good amount of it. It's as if the cut scene department was given the instruction "make a game Ted Bundy would love." If you think I'm exaggerating skip to 2:09 in this: It was somebody's (several somebodies) job to painstakingly animate this stuff. Seriously despicable. Who thought this was a good idea?

I for one want to play rocket mailman

No fucking way lol. Is that a prep book?

I randomly talked to the map guy today on my third playthrough. He had some things to say about a murderer he thought he saw. What have I done.

I think we all can agree that there are some really tone-deaf assholes objecting to any claim of racism or insensitivity, etc. Sometimes (often, even) they seem like the majority, which is why I generally don't like commenting on stuff like this, because I don't in any way want to seem to be supporting that side. But (I think) there is a reasonable and nuanced objection to the type of reaction we saw to the box art. I completely acknowledge that the art bothered some people. But my response is: so what? Not in the "I don't care what you think" sort of way, but what are we, or Ubisoft, supposed to do about it? Should they just not make games portraying cultures beyond Montreal where offense could be taken? Should they water down their marketing materials not to be evocative of any historical conflicts that some people are sensitive about? I think it's reasonable not to want games to needlessly evoke problematic issues when they aren't using them for good ends. But often these critiques end up feeling to me like attempts to sand off the edges of everything that doesn't come from trusted, sufficiently liberal sources. Yes, Ubisoft doesn't have a stellar track record in producing nuanced/responsible stories, but does it not at least seem like they're trying to be sensitive and deal with interesting topics? In the last game, they got a lot of flack about the white savior stuff. In this game, they have corrected that. In Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, they tried to deal with slavery, abolitionism, and violent revolt, even though it was a pretty shallow examination. Though the stuff they did with , is a genuinely interesting take on public perceptions and reactions based on gender, race, and class. The Act of Killing was in no way a sensitive movie. It was a brutal quasi-reenactment of an anti-communist purge that killed 500,000 people, as told by a mostly unrepentant leader of one of the death squads. Do you think the movie would have been made better by watering it down to tell the story in a way that would be less likely to upset people? Some of the most important art to me is impactful precisely because it is so upsetting. I do not think games as a medium are improved if there can't be a story which deals with "native subjugation at the hands of an outsider". And the response to me is also: so what? Should people who find parts of games problematic just shut up? No, clearly not. Having a wide variety of perspectives is a definite benefit to the medium. I don't know, I just wish that things were allowed to be a little messier without triggering condemnation. More than anything, I wish we wouldn't judge a game by it's box art.

Has anyone seen any data on how early access games perform long-term? I have a sense, based on nothing but my own experience, that having a long early-access development cycle must hurt you in the long term. When a game is released early-access, this seems likely to cut down the number of people willing to buy it right away, because they can tell themselves that they should wait for the full version. Then, when the full version has come out, the press seems less interested in covering it - is it newsworthy when a game goes from version 0.9 to 1.0? Seems hard to justify from a press perspective. And then, even if you might have originally been interested, you will have told yourself several times during the early access cycle "not now," that by the time it has a full release, other games are out that you might be interested in, and it's that much easier to continue not buying the game. This is basically what's happening with Planetary Annihilation for me. I loved Total Annihilation, but I didn't jump on the kickstarter because I had no idea how it would turn out. Now, they've released a major update that looks good, but I sort of can't get myself excited enough to buy it. Same more or less with Rust and Day Z. Maybe the ongoing public development acts as an effective advertising campaign? Maybe the initial sales plus the sales jumps that happen after each update are enough to be more than if the game had had a regular release (hard to deal with that counterfactual). Maybe the early and continuing revenue stream ends up being worth it, even if it's less than a theoretical maximum, for devs without a publishing deal. I really have no idea, so I'd love to hear from someone who has better info on this.

oh my god

"Global Offensive which released for sale in 2012 sold over 5.5+ million copies because it had Rentable Dedicated Servers" Jesus this is a gold mine

I love how he keeps repeating both the full and abbreviated versions of DRM right next to one another.

Yep that's what I ended up doing. Fortunately I had bought two for some reason, and used the second when the first broke.

Damn Licia is hard on NG+ ..... that force wave power she has casts SO quickly and seems impossible to dodge. She's killed me more times than Ancient Dragon.

....ya I'm sad to say that looking back at the previous two threads, they read an awful lot like marketing.....

Man I hate positivity for positivity's sake. Obviously, if you are excessively nervous or downbeat in an interview setting so that you come off as an unappealing candidate, you can work on your affect through practice, or if you have a serious mental health condition, that should be addressed. But I absolutely disagree that forced positivity is anything close to a guarantor of eventual success. I had a truly miserable upbringing, for various reasons not worth going into, but it was the hatred for my circumstances and surroundings that motivated me to leave them behind and create a better life for myself. I have never been positive about my future or expected that things will work out so long as I keep the right attitude, and that has forced me to work very hard to assemble the sort of life that I want to lead. My distaste for various world views and ideologies I grew up around has pushed me to find values that I care about and find meaningful. Positivity can go hand in hand with complacency, and several of the most assiduously positive people I grew up around are stuck back in my shitty hometown in circumstances that I would be unhappy with. If positivity works for you, I am sincerely happy for you, and wish you continued success. But for others of us, being positive is just another thing we aren't doing right, or seems like an attempt to paper over things that make us unhappy. Twig, I think you might like these two interviews and the books they're about (they made me happy, anyway).

An exciting development

Wow this looks amazing. If you dock poorly can you damage your ship? I hope so.

"badass"

Glad to see they got goatse

I'd buy the Uplay mega exclusive edition if Anderson Cooper were in it.