Akalabeth

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Posts posted by Akalabeth

  2. Posted

    This format is enjoyable, just so long as it's not all the time- maybe one in every four episodes.  I would rather have more content than wait for people to say all get on the same page with a particular game for a show.

     

    Also, thanks for the reference- made me look up that Rimworld article:

    https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rimworld-code-analysis

     

    Interesting read- I think the code has been changed since the article, but not before the predictable backlash against the female journalist.

  4. Posted

    On 4/24/2022 at 4:56 AM, RexBellator said:

     

    I know I'm a little behind the times for this particular podcast but I only recently listened to it. This podcast drove me crazy because Rob Zacny, whom I have a lot of respect for, just comes off as totally contrarian and arbitrary. The person who posted the information about MOO3 was absolutely correct in that, by Zacny's logic, this game basically checked off just about every bullet point he complained about (bugs and terrible UI notwithstanding).

     

    Nevertheless, what drove me nuts about this podcast in particular is that he knocks Space 4x for things that all 4x have in common, and some complaints like tech improvements only offering a +1 only really apply to a small subset of space 4x (like GalCiv 1 and 2). However even GalCiv 2 employed a rock-paper-scissor approach to weapons/defenses so even if techs incremented them by +1 there was still nuance there that he's overlooking.

     

    I wonder if Zacny ever revisited this topic because IMHO he didn't treat this subject with the respect it deserved, at the least, he should have had another guest that acted as a counterpoint for his arguments.

     

    4X games do come up in later podcasts along with some of Rob's opinions.  I found the episode entertaining myself, mostly because I enjoy hearing people angry about stuff.

    I don't know if this podcast addresses it but I've heard that MOO3 was such a failure because a critical piece of the game was dropped/not completed, specifically some AI governors or somesuch that would help run the empire. Never played the game myself.

  5. Posted

    One point of note, I think the idea of the Mandalorian being a grey character who always does good but still gets by is-  kinda off the mark.  (Warning, some spoilers) Maybe that's the intent of the show, but- I think it largely fails, mainly for one incident in the first season where Mando's ship was getting striped for parts by Jawas and Mando whipped out his rifle and proceeded to kill about a dozen of them.  And in the end, when the situation was reconciled, there was no harsh feelings.  Similarly- there's another episode from season 2 where a passenger is carrying precious cargo, and another character is basically destroying that cargo on the way, and the show makes it all out to be a joke- the passenger never gets mad, and in the end the cargo seems as plentiful as it was at the beginning.  Basically you can't take the shows seriously because at certain points it just blatantly disregards life and that disregard is not meant to judge the offending character whatsoever.  The characters do bad but there are no consequences. Instead it's supposed to be a big joke or a laugh.  It's very inconsistent and bizarre in that way.

     

     

    As for ethics in video games.  Triggering topic it seems given some of the replies.  The whole point of a game, ANY game, is to give the player interesting choices.  Making those choices ethical is simply another way to infuse interest into the choice. It's valid and worthy of discussion.  And even if ethics are not factored into the choice at all, it should still factor into that game.  Why? Because if the intent of a given game is to create a believable and interesting world then real world concepts like ethics and morality should factor in the design.  If a designer wants their world to be believable, they can make the non-player agents in the game react along ethical lines where appropriate.  This has been around even in the very earliest 4X games. When you wipe out a civilization, everyone hates you.  Even when you conquer too much of the world or become too big, everyone starts to hate you, which factors into ethics like greed and so on.  There's also that herbalist from Ultima IV who is blind and you can cheat her by underpaying her, but if you do then later in the game when you ask her for help she'll tell you you're a thief and to get out- that's ethics in games as far back as 1985.

    I will agree also that the most interesting part of a 4X game in my experience is the conquest.  And more recent games, like civilization which focus on all other sorts of gameplay are less interesting to me as a result of it.  I don't want to sit around watching things get built, I want to explore and send expeditions.  I think also a failing of a game like Civilization is that it's not really about civilization, it's about regime. And when the regime falls, the civilization disappears- while in history we've seen many countries which were conquered and then reborn years or centuries later.  The spirit of the people in a given area survives.

  6. Posted

    I've really enjoyed these episodes with Bret.  Very cool to get an academic perspective on some historical aspects of these games and the different definitions or categories of empire, states and so on.

     

    Would be cool to have an episode with him based on the fall of empires, with a look towards how different empires have broken apart (not just rome).  Though- maybe that's too tangential to video games since I'm not sure how well the fall of empires is really modeled in video games.

  10. Posted

    I don't know if anyone told Rob Zacny but regarding mission ranks for Valkyria Chronicles - the rank is ENTIRELY based upon how long it takes you to finish the mission.  If you play the game careful, trying to preserve your soldiers, you will never get S rank. If instead you take fast movers, and just bum rush the objective- S rank.

     

    It's one of the reasons I felt sour on the game after I finished it.  Vehicles, Scouts and Engineers are king in that game and taking anything else feels like a waste of time because you're not rewarded for it.

  13. Posted

    On 3/11/2020 at 9:35 PM, Tdoggs said:

    I went back to listen to this old episode and it looks like it was taken down.

     

    i have gotten into a big warhammer two mood lately.  I wanted to hear what you originally thought about it. 


    The episode seems to work for me.  Both listening from the website and downloading the MP3.

    3MA content seems to have a slowed down quite a bit lately though-

  16. Posted

    On 10/16/2019 at 3:22 PM, Roke said:

    I wanted to love X-Wing Alliance back in the day, and I think it does get good, but a lot of the campaign was dreadful. Doing all the missions for your family flying around in a newer version of a Correllian Freighter felt like flying around in a bathtub. It gets good once you join the Rebellion, but it was such a slog getting there. Skirmish mode was awesome though and I even played online a few times.


    I don't remember the player ship being that bad in XWA.  You just need to switch constantly between manual and auto-targeting. Maybe lacked for variety.  Too bad it never got the sequel that was suggested by the cliff-hangar ending.

    Oh and the Death Star Run was a big pain. Remember being stuck on that quite a long time. 

     

    On 10/14/2019 at 6:17 PM, chanman said:

    Between Jagged Alliance 2, Alpha Centauri, Close Combat 3 (released New Year's Eve 1998, so...) and with shoutouts to X-wing Alliance and Homeworld, I've not only spent more hours playing games from this year than any other, but I could probably give up new games and just continue playing these games for many more years (assuming they continue working on newer OS'. JA2 has been finicky and hates alt-tabbing)

     

    Does JA2 start any differently than the first one?  I tried to get into JA1 a couple of times but going into battle with nothing but pistols and running out of ammunition was not exhilarating.

  17. Posted

    10 hours ago, ilitarist said:

     

    This is connected to what they've said about devs worrying about what they could do, not what they should do. They've talked about complexity here, but it's also about size of the map in Heroes game or amount of lore in your typical modern game. IIRC Morrowind had 12 Mb of text on release. It's the same amount of text as in the King James Bible. 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger - praised for its story and characters - is 4 Mb including graphics and music (those ROMs might have some sort of compression but you get the idea). Ultima 7, a humongous RPG, is 20 Mb. In that case voice acting may work as a positive constraint. Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 are good recent examples. Many people didn't like PoE1 cause it had tons of exposition, visiting a new location means reading walls of text. PoE2 has most of its dialogue voice acted and it's noticeably much better paced.

     

    You also gotta wonder how many people are willing to tell you their life story at the drop of a hat.  That's another thing about Ultima IV, you could talk to everyone but most wouldn't have much to say and some even would tell you to buzz off and break off the conversation. There needs to be a balance.  In Morrowind, the NPCs literally felt like computer terminals that would spew out information on a given subject.

     

    Though personally I wonder if I simply didn't care to read a lot from games after a certain age.  I remember reading every tech description in Civilization 1 but by the time Civ 2 came around, I had zero interest in reading the tech descriptions.  I don't know if it was the aesthetic, or the content, or just a change.  But well after that I did play games like Baldurs Gate that required some reading but not a huge amount.  Thing about BG1 also is that the city itself felt too big, and it was annoying to move around.  So ultimately the problem for me might just be a sense of my time being wasted, or at least time being spent on activities that aren't worth the investment.

     

     

  18. Posted

    Not sure why publishers get all of the blame for closing a company, but said company gets zero blame for selling to the publisher in the first place.

    Also would need to disagree about the voice acting.  While I enjoyed playing earlier games like Ultima IV where they had some reading, when you get into a Morrowind the text is so large and so generic from npc to npc that the world just feels lifeless.  Would rather have more limited voice acting of an Oblivion or an Arx Fatalis over the huge text count of other games. 

     

     

    For 1999 I would have to rank Freespace 2 first. X-Wing Alliance was a good time also, though not as good as Tie Fighter it did still have some great stuff going for it.  Homeworld was also jaw droppingly amazing and HW and FS2 are two gaming experiences I will never forget.  

  19. Posted

    I think this guy's talk about QA is pretty relatable in that playing games that are knock-offs of other games really illustrates some of the things that makes the superior game superior.  On Console I played all of the Gears of War games but afterwards played other games like Inversion, Binary Domain and Quantum Theory-  and while those latter three games had some good stuff in them, some things they were missing like Gears of War's reload mechanic really drove home how great that mechanic is because in the other games as your guy reloads you're just sitting there doing nothing at all for a second whereas in Gears you can stay engaged and gain a buff. 

  22. Posted

    8 hours ago, Brian Rubin said:

    Fantastic episode, loved all the TIE Fighter love! Still one of the best game of its type.

     

    I wanted to mention a game that came out between Wing Commander 3 and TIE Fighter called Star Crusader which, in some ways, is better than both of them. An amazing story, a branching campaign that ultimately turns into two different campaigns, and a variety of mission design few other games have. It's worth playing for its story and its insane cutscenes:

     

    Never heard of Star Crusader but another space flight sim from the era is Renegade Legion: Battle for Jacob's Star.  I've yet to play it as I'm not savvy with dosbox, but from reviews I've heard it's okay if not up to the standards of Xwing & WC (It's actually from 1995 so should probably better mentioned in the subsequent poodcast)

     

    240667-renegade-battle-for-jacob-s-star-

  24. Posted

    Huge fan of all the X-Wing games (except XvT) but one thing I only realized much later is that it wasn't even Lucasarts who made the games but rather Totally Games, developers of other titles like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaft.  Have to say my opinion of Lucasarts dropped after knowing that.  The other game I played that they actually developed was Dark Forces, which to me was so reliant on recycling things from the movies that it ended up falling pretty flat.  Literally all the enemies in dark forces (except the Dark Troopers themselves) are just anything they could take from the movies, whereas the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games added so many new craft, many of which have since become canon.  Lucasarts is supposed to have a great pedigree in adventure games but I've yet to delve into any of those titles.  

     

    I've tried several times to get into Master of Magic but find it very difficult with the graphics and interface.  Though I can still easily slide into a game of Master of Orion 1 with no qualms whatsoever. 

    Jagged Alliance 1 is another game I simply can't get into, I don't understand why paid mercenaries don't have proper guns at the start and I need to acquire these through the missions themselves.  I understand that it's for the progression but thematically it's bonkers. 

  25. Posted

    On 2/26/2019 at 9:40 PM, ilitarist said:

    RTS games are also about the development of your assets, map control, cooperation, and tactics. And that's what Lords Management players get. Many players play RTS without much multitasking, just moving around a single army, and many do not like to concern themselves with expanding. Those things in RTS are inherently and intentionally broken as you're usually hampered by UI that prevents you from doing it effectively. In other words, you can sort of have a perfect play in turn-based strategy or real-time with pause something, but in RTS it's unavoidable to have compromises. You will always have situations where UI and your focus do not allow to play perfectly even if you have a total understanding of the situation and what should be done.

     

    Lords Managements expand on things that feel right in RTS and cuts the things that are inherently imperfect.

     

    Map Control, Co-operation and Tactics can apply to pretty much any team-based multiplayer game.  Those aren't useful comparisons.

     

    Development of Assets? Do you actually "develop" assets in RTS games,? You build assets yes.  And together those assets collectively can be a different form, but if I want to upgrade a Space Marine how many options do I really have?  And how free am I to create assets as I wish or do those assets have pre-requisites to be built? Do I need a barracks before I can build a garage? 

     

     

    And in terms of the core gameplay concept, an RTS game is not about asset management, it's about Economy.   Build an economy through asset creation, expand an economy through exploration and map control, win through destruction of the enemy economy.  There is no economy in your traditional Lords Management.  In a game like Dota 2 there's passive gold collection but the collection of additional gold and XP requires resource collection either from NPC mobs or enemy players.  Being efficient in gathering resources is dependent on map cycling, which is more akin to cycling through a multiplayer FPS map collecting power-ups than it is collecting lumber and stone from static resource points. 

    So yeah I still maintain that drawing a line of comparison between Lords Managements and RTS is an erroneous one.  Is it just because DOTA started as a WC3 mod? But WC3 is not a traditional RTS from the outset, with its heavy focus on heroes.  

     

    I think part of it is that people correlate the decline of the RTS with the rise of the Lords Management, and figure there must be some causality, but did the RTS genre ever have the same number of players as the mainstream Lords Managements?  I kind of doubt it.