Ninety-Three

I just remembered I never watched all of Death Note. I quit when because it felt like a good place to end, and I couldn't imagine how it would continue from there without doing something pretty stupid (also I had been told in vague non-spoilery terms that it does something pretty stupid). Is it still worth watching after that, and would continuing to watch undermine the sense of a satisfying ending I got from stopping where I did?

That is an interesting way of handling status effects Jutranjo. I am arbitrarily declaring that status effects count as damage types, because I want to share a neat example. So most MMOs (and plenty of RPGs) have some kind of stun abilities that allow you to temporarily prevent an enemy from attacking. They also have powerful bosses who it would be ridiculously powerful to stun, so they handle it in one of two ways. Either everything above minion rank is immune to stuns, or all player stuns last two seconds and take four minutes to recharge, so that players will never be able to get much stunning in on a boss. City of Heroes had a really good solution to this problem: stun protection. Each enemy had stun protection number, and they would only be stunned if the amount of all stun effects currently on them exceeded that number. Things were generally tuned such that minions required one stun, minibosses required two stuns, and elite bosses required a bunch of stuns. Let's say my character has two stun abilities, which each last ten seconds. I use my first stun on a miniboss, the effect goes onto him, but he is not stunned because of his stun protection. Two seconds later, I use my second stun on the miniboss. His stun protection is overcome, and now he's stunned. Eight seconds later, my first stun effect expires, and he only has one stun effect left on him, so he comes unstunned. They applied the system to a wide variety of debilitating status effects: Stun, Immobilize, Sleep, Confuse, etc. It sometimes led to some silly effects, like being able to organize dozens of people with stun abilities to stunlock Hamidon, the giant megaboss of the game's one 50-100 player raid. He was supposed to be unstunnable, so the developers had just set his stun protection to 99, figuring no one would even achieve that.

I quit Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows. It has you play through the same levels as the main campaign, but as Plague Knight. Plague is a super cool character with neat abilities, and the recycled levels were clearly not designed for Plague's ranged attacks and quadruple-plus-flutter jump. Everything that was precisely calibrated to be interesting for Shovel Knight is wonky (and generally way easier) for Plague. Also I played three levels and when I booted it up today it apparently hadn't saved my last level's worth of progress, so fuck that.

Remember a year or so ago when the owner of a basketball team said some racist things, and when recordings of his private conversation got out he was fined millions of dollars and banned from the league? We can all get behind the sentiment of "screw that racist jerk", but it seems weird to punish someone's professional/business life for a private conversation, and I'm frightened of the precedent it sets to fire people for saying unpopular things that are unrelated to their job. I think it might have been discussed in this thread ages ago, but we can see it affecting regular people in things like the Justine Sacco incident where someone made a racist joke on their personal Twitter, it blew up by the power of social media, and she got fired from her job. The company publicly stated when firing her "There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally. We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core." It seems a bit two-faced for the company to execute the maximum possible condemnation of her (public firing) while claiming to hope she's not condemned wholesale.

The problem is games journalism largely is facile and banal. The overwhelming majority of it consists of either parroting developer press releases/leaks, or "Is this worth my money?" consumer-guide reviews (serious question: do consumer guides count as journalism?). Almost everything they do takes the form of "Step 1:Get a thing from the developers, Step 2: Write about it." They don't get to assert their position because developers have all the power in that system.

Once again you are making significant assumptions about what I'm doing. I was responding to this post from Deadpan, which I quoted in my original post: I was posing a question for the purpose of understanding what he had said and getting some elaboration upon it.

Based on their coverage, obviously Kotaku didn't think something was terribly wrong. I am making the assumption that had the leaker thought that, they would have communicated it to Kotaku, who would have in turn published it. I'm not saying it necessarily is, I'm establishing a detail that some may consider significant (since I've seen some discussion in this thread suggesting "It's more acceptable to leak if bad things are going on). You're projecting an awful lot of your assumptions onto me. I made no statements regarding who was at fault or what was correct, all I did was present a hypothetical series of events and ask a question based on it. To repeat, in the above hypothetical, can you defend a system that says the artist has no claim on the script, and would you condemn their choices?

You can complete a mission that lasts into the fourth day (on hour 71 you can start a 12-hour vault heist for instance), but once you go to the mission select screen at hour >= 72, it will force you to undertake the Final Mission, which has some unique predefined objectives.

Speaking from experience with several MMOs, the approach isn't as perfect as you're imagining. Generally one class or spec is the best, and some specs are terrible. Once the data/community forms a consensus on that, the over-performing things are nerfed, and the under-performers buffed. Rinse and repeat, with each cycle lowering the variance in power-by-class.

I was phrasing for brevity, and an NDA was assumed. Let's try again, as impartial as can be. Imagine a situation where the company hires an artist to join their company and create some 3D models for them. They make the artist sign an NDA regarding the game. The artist, of their own volition, checks the internal company wiki and pulls down the game's script. They leak it to Kotaku for reasons that we the non-psychic public cannot know, but those reasons are not "Something is Terribly Wrong and the public Needs To Know!" Kotaku publishes it for reasons that we the non-psychic public cannot know, but they also do not think "Something is Terribly Wrong and the public Needs To Know!". Can you defend a system that says the artist has no claim on the script, and would you condemn their choices? This is not an insane hypothetical, it is a potentially accurate description of the Fallout 4 leak. The only speculation is on the specific nature of the leaker's job.

There are marketing people whose job is to figure this out, if it were optimal to release information as soon as possible, that's what companies would do. Leaking information may generate positive buzz, but it would have generated more buzz to release the information much closer to the launch date of the game. Leaking information isn't helping the company, it's robbing them of the difference between a controlled release and a leak. Imagine a situation where the company hires an artist to create some 3D models for them. The artist checks the internal company wiki and pulls down the game's script because it's available to them, they leak it to Kotaku for the lulz, and Kotaku publishes it for the pageviews. Can you defend a system that says the artist has no claim on the script, and would you condemn their choices?

Why? Because the inside source is almost certainly violating an NDA or other similar agreement, and it's kind of sketchy for Kotaku to enable a leaker who wants to broadcast information in contravention of an NDA?

It's a weird situation where no one's really in the wrong. Kotaku has no obligation to hold back on leaked information they obtain, and Bethesda has no obligation to send preview materials to people who do stuff they don't like. Socially, it was a jerk move to not comment on the cutoff, but they were within their rights to make the business move of cutting Kotaku off.

That system, combined with Pokemon's experience formula, ruins Pokemon for me. Fighting something way under your level doesn't reduce the experience gain, so you're incentivized to pour all your experience into one Pokemon, teach it four different elemental moves so that it's usually super effective (and almost always so against enemies with the move types it's weak to), and then roll through winning initiative and one or two-shotting everything. There may be a lot of mechanical depth, but the optimal strategy removes it all.

You're a monster.

It's important to note that these leaks weren't "in the wild", both cases appear to be about individuals privately contacting Kotaku. Bethesda/Ubisoft's strategy here is about intimidation. They're not trying to threaten Kotaku, instead they've made an example of Kotaku and are using it to threaten other news outlets: "Don't report on our leaks, or you get cut off". Given that Kotaku seem to have been the only outlet to report on those stories, the tactic seems pretty effective. There must be at least a few leaks we never heard of because the outlet that got them didn't publish for fear of getting cut off. Jeez, games journalism is a mess.

It's funny you should say that, because XCOM (2012) has a variety of minor damage types (poison, strangulation, melee) that you can become resistant or immune to, and X-COM (1994) tags everything with damage types (stun, laser, plasma, explosive, etc) which enemies have varying resistances to.

Archive characters? Those have been around for a while (though in the scale of II's development, they're relatively recent).

They don't show up as hackable once they've been looted, but they're still an unhacked object (the end of level screen will show the safe as unhacked, unless they actually did change it in the DLC), therefore Ram can dump to them. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Haven't played with DLC yet, but Dr. Xu and Nika are easily my favorites. Xu's disable is used almost exclusively on safes (occasionally on droids), and it will save so much power compared to any other power-focused character (Internationale, Prism, etc). It also bypasses daemons which is fantastic. Nika has two things going for her. First, two attacks per turn + bonus AP for attacking, + the implant that gives even more bonus AP for attacking, means that she can spend 30 AP in one turn (don't forget to zap already downed guards for bonus AP), and it's as great as that sounds. Second, two attacks per turn and a volt disruptor lets you down so many more guards than any other team. Normally you want to avoid aggroing too many guards because a starting team with two neural disruptors has a very limited rate of disabling, but Nika bypasses that issue entirely. For hacking I like to start with Mercenary (it's the only starting hack that isn't totally obsolete by the lategame) and either Fusion or Dynamo. RIP old, super-overpowered Fusion. I prefer Ram to Hunter for dealing with daemons, there are so many objects I never hack that Ram is reliably more efficient (if you Xu open a safe, the safe still counts as a hackable that Ram might dump to). Other than that I like Lockpick 2, Parasite 2, Hammer, and Ping. My most important items are armour-piercing weapons and armour-piercing augments for Nika (always keep cash available for them), after that I like holographic terrain and tier 2 or 3 cloaking devices. The power-producing augment is always nice, after that none of the common items are especially memorable.

I tried POTD in the main game, found it easy (but I didn't play very far, got bored with the combat and quit). The trick is to go to the inn and build a party of custom NPCs instead of those stupid suboptimal companions the game tries to foist off on you. Warning: POTD is not very interesting, enemies have so much health that you will quickly run out of per day and per encounter powers. You end up just trading basic attacks with the enemy (plus whatever your chanters are doing) and hoping your stats are good enough to win.

Haven't read that, but given how Fallout behaves, your read is probably correct. The writers on the modern Fallouts generally act as though it hasn't been 200 years. If it had, then everything but the most thoroughly hidden, thoroughly locked, and thoroughly defended locations would have been stripped bare, and any old world item should have turned to either pure rot, or pure rust, depending on its composition. They have all these cars lying around that will explode when a stray shot hits them during a gunfight, are you telling me that in the past two centuries there have been few enough gunfights in these areas that most of these explosive barrels haven't been exploded by now? Modern Fallout is built upon layer after layer of "Shut up, don't think about it." Well there's your problem. Fallout is much more concerned with putting neat stuff onscreen (be it a campy 50s car, or a sweet robot) than it is with making any sense. That sounds negative but it's really not, I like Fallout, and I appreciate that they don't waste time trying to narratively justify their gameplay-first worldbuilding decisions.

In Fallout, the transistor wasn't invented until shortly before the 2077 apocalypse (How do robots work then? Don't think about it too much), so a lot of those things didn't exist. The culture of pre-war Fallout isn't given a ton of detail, like the question of how transistorless robots work, I don't think you're supposed to think about it too much because it's just there to produce a fun campy game-world.

I tried the Plague Knight DLC (after having to re-beat the final boss to unlock it for some reason). I've only played through level 1 + King Knight, but, eesh, I'm not into it. Plague's inertia feels bad. Just running around, he feels like he's always on an ice level (I get really nervous around the edges of pits) and his air-control is really bizarre. I've probably bomb-blasted myself into pits a dozen times now, and I still don't know why some of my jumps do exactly what I want, and some I might as well take my hands off the keyboard for all the game does with my input. But worse, the DLC is basically "Play through all the same levels again except as Plague Knight" and from the very first Black Knight fight onward, you can really feel how all the encounters were balanced for melee-focused, low-mobility Shovel Knight instead of Plague. So many enemy types (including bosses) are utterly trivial when you have a spammable ranged attack.

I played about 2 hours of it and gave up. It was neat, but it lacked something, the kind of hook that made me excited about restarting after a loss. The problem I had with it is that unlike a lot of games, it didn't feel like you made a distinct, correctable mistake when you died, which kills the "this time I'll do it better!" feeling.