Ninety-Three

Well the world does completely reset. You can get up to some world-altering shenanigans, and while your next captain has a narrative tie to the previous one, everything other than your inheritance will be wiped clean. It would be interesting to have a game where those sorts of things persisted, but in this game a lot of what that would mean is just locking out a bunch of quests because they've already been played through previously.

There's a little circle of light in each port, pull your ship into that circle and press E to dock. You can see the circle in London's dock as you pull out of it for the first time. This means that you have to find the specific port location to dock, you can't just pull up at any random spot on an island and go ashore.

So I finally ended a 30+ hour campaign (all of which occured over just a few days) by sailing NORTH and wow, maybe I was just in the right mood to finish, but the ending felt amazing. It helps that I played Echo Bazaar, and NORTH was always one my primary obsessions. I think I'll stop playing for a bit, not because I've seen all the content, but just to let the ending sit. Semi-tangent: I love the cohesiveness of the lore in Echo Bazaar and Sunless Sea. In a lot of games, it feels like there is not more lore than is shown to the audience, the universe only exists to the extent that it had to be put on screen in front of the players. For instance, I'd bet money that Valve doesn't have a much better idea of who the G-Man is than we do (not that that's an inherently bad approach to storytelling, the G-Man is great). With Failbetter though, I get the constant feeling that they have a ten thousand page lore bible somewhere, in which resides the answer to every question raised by the setting, and I love that.

Sunless Sea, a game about boats.

It's not the normal spirit of this thread, but it seems on-topic, so I'd like to give a pedantic shout-out to Gormongous for this sentence: Thank you Gormongous for being literally the only person I have ever observed using that word correctly (outside of examples illustrating how to use it correctly, anyway). Seriously, I was genuinely elated when I saw that sentence.

That part is working as intended, it's just really badly explained. You don't keep 50% of your stats, rather you keep 50% of your permanent stat increases. If your captain started with 25 hearts and 50 Iron, equipped an officer with +6 iron and +3 hearts, spent secrets to level up Hearts by 10 and Iron by 10, and had a random event that gave them Iron +2, you would get 50% of +10 hearts, and 50% of +12 iron, for 5 and 6 respectively. Eesh, I didn't know about that. All the dead ends I ran into were slightly more reasonable. I'd click on an event that takes me to another event where I can't back out, and I'm forced to make a Veils check, with only 29 Veils, so I fail and get some sort of bad end for the quest. It feels a lot more fair than the Haunted Doctor sounds.

There are some quests that you can definitely mess up by doing The Wrong Thing, and on the one hand it's a bummer to have happen, but I've been enjoying the knowledge that I can mess up, the feeling of consequences is good. Some of the quests also have hidden depths, where you'll only get a particular shiny, or make progress if you take a specific path you have no way of knowing in advance. It's neat to stumble into these things, but it's really aggravating to be unable to experience content you're trying to experience because you didn't luck into the right solution. All I want is to do stuff with the Dawn Machine, why won't you let me, game? Minor spoiler (specifics redacted) for the Curator's colours quest: Sphinxstone and Clay Men are both quests (Sphinxstone will actually lead to some plot if you do it enough, and clay men... sometimes do things), as opposed to just buying some cargo from a shop because you think it'll be profitable to run, which I think is the intended distinction.I think the game is trying to push you to do quests and experience content, rather than grinding for cash. That also fits in with the Port Reports, which can mostly cover your travel expenses if you go to a lot of places before returning home. Once you've got a lot mapped, I think you can net profit by pursuing the Admiralty's requested ports. Note: Turns out if you hang on to two of the item you get from visiting the Admiralty's requested port, you can combine those items together into a better one you'll want to turn in instead. You have to click on it in your hold, which I never thought to do. If you really have your heart set on grinding, there's an island that's suited to sitting in harbour earning tons of echoes per "Events await you", but I'd advise against it because it's really not necessary and feels kinda cheaty. My first two captains died quickly, my third retired early, and my fourth's been exploring the Unterzee for dozens of hours now, without any financial woes, and the only thing I got in carryover was a nice 1500 echo gun. I've discovered a blog run by someone who seems to know everything about the game (both lore and mechanics), so if you're confused or curious about a particular thing, send an ask here and they'll answer.

If you proxy to cc.com you can get it along with some other Comedy Network stuff ad-free (at least while running adblock, I've no idea what happens if you turn that off). I found the fat episode really weird. In the same minute, he oscillated between making fat jokes and saying "The way we treat fat people, that's not right." He's clearly decided that while some things society does to fat people are bad, making jokes at their expense is just fine. It looked especially bad that earlier in the program he was reduced to regretful laughter, calling his football joke "horrible". I can't figure out the worldview he has that makes that okay, it can't just be "It's just jokes people!" because I can't picture him making jokes which mock, say, gay people. Overall I feel like the show is in this weird place where it's straddling the line between being a show about issues, and being comedy. The comedy suffers when they stop making jokes because for these two minutes they've decided to be serious, and the issues suffer when they start cracking jokes in the middle of serious discussion. I think that might be why the show isn't working, at least for me. Unlike a Jon Stewart or John Oliver who have decided "We're doing comedy about news/issues", the Nightly Show doesn't seem to have a clear goal.

I've seen a few gameplay videos, but there was something I couldn't tell from them. Is time a resource in the game? That is, if you screw around accomplishing nothing on too many missions and make it to week 10 at level 1, are you going to be punished in some way (enemy difficulty scaling to time, or perhaps a "You must beat the game in X weeks" clock)?

I found out about this game recently, and I was sold on it reading the post laying out the game's rules (what a good way to promote your 4X game, incidentally). I'm not familiar with Stardock, why is their involvement bad?

To me, that was the most interesting part of the game. Eventually I had played through every branch of the game, proving to myself that there was no way to "win". I'd seen Felicia's speech about making up your own ending, and I found that to be very unsatisfying (for roughly the same reasons as Emily Short, based on my skimming of her piece). You know how at the very beginning, there's the option to call off the date? I clicked it accidentally on one of my early playthroughs, and it told me "Game over. You didn't even get a date." Once I'd explored every path, I don't remember why, perhaps by accident again, I took the option to cancel the date, and I got a surprise that felt like the "real" ending to the game, and an interesting commentary on the power-fantasy.

I think I've explained myself just about every way possible, so it's starting to look like either this is something I cannot communicate well, or I'm bothered by very different things than the rest of the people here. Either way, I'm just about ready to give up, but I'll give it one last shot to try to explain the knowledge/skill distinction. It's not that allowing for knowledge is bad, if it was I'd be complaining about learning boss patterns. The issue is disallowing skill. Imagine there was a point in the game where it spawns a blue door and a purple door. One of the doors kills you, one of them lets you through. It's always the same colour, but the only way to learn which is to go through a door. That is a situation that can be defeated with knowledge, but the way in which it discards skill is kinda bullshit. Now obviously death is an extreme example, but what if the bad door only did one damage? Still bullshit. That's how I feel when I pick up an item with a downside that I don't want. The game hit me with a bad thing which I had no opportunity to avoid. Sure I'll learn for next time and know whether or not to pick it up, but that doesn't make this time any more fair.

That was one of my complaints, and in that case the argument that you can skill your way out of it is valid. I died because I hadn't healed, but I could have avoided the death were I good enough to not take damage. My other points were about passives with negative effects (if I don't want an item's downside, but I don't know what the item is, there's no way to avoid that bad thing happening), and a bad experience with the Tower card where it spawned an undodgable configuration because I was somewhere with poor mobility, instead of in the middle of the room. If I'd known what the Tower did, I could've prepared for it and avoided taking damage, but because I used it somewhere poor (which I had no way of knowing not to do), it put me into a situation I couldn't escape with skill. I GET that the downside items have valid uses. Sometimes, I won't want them. Maybe I have none of the pieces of the combo, maybe it actively counters one of my other items, or maybe I have miserably low speed and don't need the Attractor pulling things any closer to me. There exist situations in which, because of an item's downside, I would rather not have that item. And if I don't yet know the item's downside when I pick it up, this leads to a situation where I just got hit with a penalty that I had no way to avoid. It sucks to experience, and it's an instance where an otherwise fair game does something bad to me that I can't avoid with skill.

That is absurd. If I were to do that I'd end up with no upgrades at all, and be in the zero damage place you don't like. That is just not true. If I am good enough at Isaac combat, I can beat a boss even if I'm not familiar with it. There is no skill I can be good at to avoid an item with a downside, I just have to get screwed over by it once, and from then on I'll know.

As a sweeping generalization sure, it, like all generalizations, is false. But in this specific case, would removing this specific unpleasant thing not make the game better?

But I don't want a manual of boss tells, Isaac has boss tells to be learned and I'm fine with those. With boss tells, I still have the potential to dodge an attack the first time, knowing just makes it easier. Similarly, I still have the potential to get hit by it once I know, dodging them is a matter of skill. Dodging an item whose effects I don't want is strictly a matter of "Have I encountered this item before?" Let's take a specific example. I think that Isaac would be a better game if before you picked up the Strange Attractor for the first time, it warned you "This will pull enemies towards you". Yes, that would remove the moment in the room after picking it up where you notice that that's the effect it's having, but I don't think that's a great loss. It would also remove the moment where I, and some percentage of players like me go "Wait, it does what? I don't want that, get rid of it!" I think removing that moment makes the game better, enough so to make up for the loss of the mildly interesting moment where every player discovers what the item does. Does it not make the game better to remove the unpleasantness of being stuck with an ability some people will hate? Or am I undervaluing the little moment of discovering what the Strange Attractor does? Hell, what if we didn't have the warning before pickup, but the inventory screen gave you the option to discard the Strange Attractor if you decided you didn't want it after figuring out what it did? Would -that- not make the game better? I realize a discard option has the potential to be mechanically relevant with regards to certain combos and anti-combos, which isn't the intent, so let's say you can only discard an item within three rooms of picking it up.

But the role of items in Isaac isn't the same as the role of moves in fighting games. In Nethack, if you attack a floating eye, you'll be paralyzed for a long time. The first time a player encounters the eye, they don't know any better, so they take the penalty. Every time after that, they know not to do so. It is a poorly-designed aspect of the game, and some modern builds of the game have added in a warning that prevents you from unknowingly doing it. Killing myself by activating The Emperor with low life, taking damage from The Tower, or changing my shots in a way I don't want from many items, it feels like attacking a floating eye. The game screwed me with a system I had no way to see coming, and now that it's happened once, I will always be able to avoid it in the future. It's not gaining skill at the game, it's just an arbitrary knowledge check. "Hey, do you know what this item does? No? Well now the item has messed you up, and you know." Sure it helps to know boss attack patterns to fight them, but it's not like you can never avoid an attack if you don't know the pattern, and you can always avoid an attack if you do. EDIT: To clarify, the fundamental idea of the floating eye as an unattackable monster isn't bad design, what I was referring to was enforcing the idea with a harsh punishment, rather than just telling the player. I think Nethack is just better when it warns you about floating eyes, and I feel the same way about Isaac's downside items.

I feel some of my complaint has been missed, my problem isn't that negative items exist, it's that their negatives are unavoidable until you get hit with them, and then learn to avoid them. You can't prepare for an unknown negative effect because it could be anything, and it's not reasonable to prepare for each possible bad thing the game might do to you. "Alright, before you use any unknown item, fully heal, make sure you have at least one bomb, go to a large room and stand away from the corners, turn around three times and throw salt over your shoulder..." I'm fine with the game design principle of "Sometimes this game gives you an item with a downside that you have to adopt to", my problem is with Isaac's implementation. In Isaac, it's not like you get messed up by an item every time it spawns, you get messed up by it exactly once, and from then on you remember "Oh right, I hate that item's effect, or it would be really bad with my current build, not picking it up this time." A game that forces you to take negatives and improvise is fine, but I don't feel like that's what Isaac was trying to be. Isaac only forces you to improvise once, and it happens when you're less experienced with the game, which is a poor time to force the player out of their comfort zone. Once you understand what an item does, taking on the negative becomes optional, so you only do it if you either think it's worth the item's benefit, or if you want to force yourself to improvise for fun.

As soon as the "record to youtube" feature comes in, we can do that. Or we could just start posting screenshots of our solutions in this thread! I have a couple levels I'm really proud of too, and I'd be interested to see how other people build. Go ahead and share those solutions, dibs.

<not_rhetorical>Are you saying having details spoiled for you doesn't worsen the experience?</not_rhetorical> But to answer more broadly, my issue is that out of character knowledge undermines making the choice. If you made a movie out of TWD, knowing that the consequences will be the same regardless of what he does with his arm removes some of the dramatic tension. When you play the game, there's still the movie-esque element of watching cutscenes where dramatic tension gets undermined, then there's also the game asking you to make a choice which is undermined. So basically, in games, more things get made worse by it. But it's not like I'm a fan of it in movies. When I am spoiled on a movie's plot elements, or figure them out long ahead of when the audience is supposed to, I enjoy it less than when that doesn't happen.

I find it hard to roleplay making a choice when I know the choice won't have consequences. I can't get inside a character's head when I have information that so undermines their motivations. It's sort of like the problem prequel movies have: Because you've seen the original, you know how things are going to end up, which undercuts some of the dramatic tension.

That's the normal expectation of Early Access, but: I don't even mind that they changed things and relocked the levels, the problem is that it led to me thinking I'd experienced save corruption and lost a lot of progress. All that would've been needed is a little popup the first time I looked at the changed level "Hey, we changed this level, so you'll have to re-beat it, once you do everything else you did will unlock and you won't have lost it." Why is that beyond what can be expected of them?

I agree with SuperBiasedMan, one of the things that keeps me from being harsher about Braid's narrative is the way I tell jokes. Sometimes I'll make a joke based on something very obscure or obtuse, thinking to myself "Of everyone listening, maybe one person will get this", but I still make the joke because I think it'd be really funny to the one person that gets it. For all we know, his goal with Braid's narrative was to make something that's understood by one in every ten thousand people. That might not be a good use of his time, but it's a valid artistic goal. Assuming that wasn't his goal, I also agree that he made some kind of mistake. What I find interesting is that Jonathan Blow must by now be quite aware of the fact that no one (or almost no one) "gets" Braid, but he hasn't ever tried to explain it. Occasionally he tells people that a specific idea is wrong, but I can't think of anything he's said that's trying to help people be right, and I wonder why that is. Of course, I'd been assuming this went without saying. The gameplay is great, and it's so separate from the narrative that any narrative issues don't impact it.

I played The Walking Dead a while ago, and I didn't enjoy it. My problem was that I saw through the illusion of choice the game is built around, and that sort of ruined the whole experience. What confused me was why everyone else liked it so much, including the people who seemed to understand that most of their choices didn't really matter. After hearing from someone else who understood the game's choice system, I was finally able to put my finger on it. My problem with TWD was that seeing the game's false choice made me (accurately) nihilistic. I didn't care about protecting Clem because I knew I wasn't protecting Clem, I knew none of my actions would ever make the difference between her living or dying. The worst example of this was with cutting off your arm. At that point, something had obviously gone terribly wrong with my experience of the game. So I thought I'd ask you Thumbs: Did anyone else have this problem with nihilism? If any of you started to figure out that your choices didn't really affect things, how did you avoid the sense that nothing mattered?

Well all we've seen of The Witness is screenshots, mostly of environments (I hear he's taken it to a few shows, but I don't think any footage has made its way online). However, I've been following his devblog (or perhaps I learned this from some alpha review someone did), and the game contains audiologs from a narrator figure who addresses you directly. Obviously we don't know how much of that there is, but I'd been imagining them serving a purpose much the same as the books in Braid, which comprised 90% of its narrative. Where were you getting the idea that he's less focused on narrative this time? Well the one where you have to assemble the painting wrong to jump on it to reach a star (and can't ever get the star if you complete the painting) was not exactly great. Overall, I remember disliking several of the star puzzles not because they were hard, but because it wasn't clear they were puzzles. There were several puzzles where you had to find a way to jump out of the top of the screen, without the indication that this was possible, nor would achieve anything. It felt like several of the levels required you to simply look at the level and declare "Hey, I bet if I did this, then this, then this and maybe if the jump distances are exactly right, I could get a goomba over there. Then I could jump on his head and I'd be pushed off the top of the screen for a moment. Right, let's get to it then." All of that without having any reason to want to be pushed off the top of the screen for a moment.