Lork

Let me be the 200th person to say thank you so much to Doug for recommending Downcast. I had all but given up on the idea of subscribing to podcasts on my iPhone after getting fed up with Podcaster's bullshit. It still boggles my mind that there's no easy way to get podcasts onto the most advanced incarnation of the device that podcasts were named after without using a third party solution.

I'm still not entirely sure what you're getting at. When I talk about characters overextending themselves, I don't mean they literally overextend on a swing and trip or something, I mean they choose an attack that takes a long time to wind up or which takes a while to recover from, thereby exposing themselves to a counterattack. Both of the bosses before you get to the blacksmith are of the "Massive, hulking beast with similarly massive club" variety, which means lots of slow, lumbering movements and clumsy, exaggerated swings, so could that be it?

If you think taking advantage of recovery animations is "gaming the animation system", you must not play very many action games. Waiting for the right time to attack and punishing your opponent when they overextend themselves is literally the foundation of good melee combat in pretty much every game that features it. Taking advantage of pathfinding mishaps is definitely possible sometimes, although it's by no means the only way to deal with those enemies. From handled the voice acting themselves, which is why it's oddly precise and has that sort of poetic quality to it, but also features some hilarious turns of phrase. Namco Bandai did the menus and text, which is why it's the worst translation I've seen in a AAA game in a decade.

I am the hypothetical person you talked about on the podcast in regards to my opinion on Diablo 1 and 2, except I was much younger at the time. Diablo 1 is the only game in the series that actually pulls off a tangible sense of atmosphere or a consistent tone. By the time the sequel came around, it seems like they stopped putting any effort into things like that in favour of making a gothic horror themed slot machine. Diablo 3 is just another step in that direction. I'm mostly OK with that, though. Bursting pinatas and collecting prizes is what Diablo has always really been about anyway.

Is anyone else playing this? I'm actually pretty surprised not to see a thread on it here already. Given this game's indie background, adventure game sensibilities and off beat sense of humour, I figured you guys would be all over it already. I bought this after being intrigued by a thread for it on Something Awful, and it turned out to be one of my favourite games in a while. The creator describes it as "..like a mashup of Zelda: Link to the Past and Ultima VI." Having never played an Ultima game other than Underworld, myself, I would describe it as "The best Zelda game since Majora's Mask". The graphical style is... primitive, but I don't think it detracts from the game at all. If anything, I'd say it matches the game's goofy-but-sincere tone perfectly. The trailer can probably explain what the game is going for better than I can:

So the answer is that you all bought it... You just didn't get around to playing it. Well, I suppose that's better than nothing.

Cool, thanks.

Could I have it? It seems interesting, but I don't know about paying that much for such a limited game.

So is anyone still playing this on softcore and working their way through inferno? I did normal-hell with a friend, but he won't play inferno because he sucks. I sent an invite to everyone who posted before me in the multiplayer networking thread, but it seems like most people didn't reply, either because they're not playing anymore or because they declined my invite (?).

Which is still present in 7, and could be turned off if you really hated it that much.

That would be a cause for concern if it was the case, but at least according to Blizzard there have been no documented cases of Diablo 3 accounts with authenticators being hacked. There has also been malware that managed to beat authenticators for previous games by keylogging the code and using it to log in within seconds of the user typing it. A demonstration of this so-called session id hack being used to gain access to someone's account without the use of their password would be solid proof. I don't really know what else would count as evidence, but so far it has just been people on the internet saying that they are absolutely sure that the problem was not on their end so it must be Blizzard's fault, and so on, which means nothing. I'm not sure what anecdotal evidence for there not being a security flaw would be either because that's asking to prove a negative.

There are rumors all over the internet, but so far I've seen no actual evidence that it's anything more than the usual keylogging/phishing attacks scaled up for the popularity and money making potential of Diablo 3.

You'd be surprised by how much of a difference just a few points of DPS on a weapon can make due to the way damage is calculated. It's further compounded by the fact that I've dedicated two of my active skills to buffing my damage by 27%, which just gets better and better the higher your damage was in the first place, as you can imagine. Now that I think of it, I should go all in with Glass Cannon and make it even more ridiculous. The gems are plain old squares, by the way. Radiant squares are way out of my price range. No worries. Is there an Idle Thumbs mumble server, or are you guys just running a personal one?

It's both better and worse than you think. The only things I bought from the auction house were the weapon and a few gems. The gems had actually just become available from my jewlcrafter when I started playing with you... for way too much money, mind you. So the only thing separating me from an AH-less character provided they are willing to waste a ton of money on jewlcrafting at this point is the weapon. Now, if just the weapon made that much of a difference, I can barely imagine what a full set of AH gear would do, and it'll probably stay that way until I beat hell, lest the game become too boring. I hope this doesn't mean you guys consider my character too broken to play with in the future. You could say the exact same thing about the trade economy in Diablo 2, except it's a million times worse because of hacking and duping.

I wouldn't bother chasing after magic find until you're level 60, at this point. Not when there's better equipment than you're likely to ever find naturally on sale for pennies in the auction house. For good or for ill, the existence of the auction house is probably the biggest change to the formula from Diablo 2; even more so than the skill system.

The easiest solution to difficulty spikes if you just can't or won't get someone to help you is the auction house. Buying a good weapon or a few square/radiant gems (which are absurdly affordable) will make all the difference in the world. I'll have to completely disagree with you about the boss fights though. I even have fond memories of cheesing Duriel with a friend using the exact method you described, but I don't consider town portal exploits to be part of the core gameplay, so have no problem with them removing my ability to use them. It's not like in Deus Ex 3 where 90% of your skillset is suddenly useless and you're forced into gameplay that the game isn't even designed to support. It's almost the opposite in my eyes: they're distilling the experience, so there's nothing between you and the boss but your skills as a player, your character's loadout, and your gear, which is what Diablo is all about. I guess it sucks if you hit a wall and can't progress, but the solution isn't to keep banging your head against it or try to exploit the game like you could in previous Diablos, it's to improve your strategy, your gear, or your character, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Also is anyone else amused by the fact that the current subject of controversy in the Diablo 3 community is 55Wizard ON?

Lork#1356 I don't know why Idle Thumbs wasn't the first thing I thought of when I got Diablo 3. It seems so obvious in retrospect.

Thanks. I wish I could get ahold of a physical copy, but this is still pretty great.

Does anybody still have the pdf of this? I'm dying to see what could've possibly left Tim Schaefer so scandalized, but the link is dead.

I think it's a matter of there being a certain threshold of quality beyond which it really doesn't matter what's better than what. Is the story in Starcraft 2 better than the one in Gears of War? Maybe, but they're both so bad that I can't bring myself to care at all about either, so the differences between them are largely academic.

Kind of a lame joke, but if you're not sure what I'm getting at there, I'll try to clarify. Ken Levine, or any proponent of Bioshock really, will make a big deal about "player expression", or the idea that if given a wide array of options and gameplay mechanics, the unique way in which you utilize them can be seen as a way of expressing yourself. I say that's all fine and good, but as a player, if I use the mechanics of a game to express something interesting, the game had better respond in a similarly interesting manner. Otherwise I'm just amusing myself at my own antics, in which case the game seems kind of superfluous. Bioshock wants you to express yourself, but all it ever has to say in response is "Everything works equally, so go ahead and do whatever you want. I don't care." Oh, and there might be something in there about masturbation, too. Whatever.

I have to take issue with this idea that Bioshock is somehow more "demanding" or inaccessible for not responding appropriately to the amount of effort the player puts in to it, and that it should be celebrated for it. From where I stand, that just looks like a cheap way to rationalize a lack of gameplay depth. Bioshock definitely has a lot of breadth, in that it gives the player a wide variety of tools with which to tackle any given situation, but it offers no particular reason to use most of them over any others; a condition that is commonly known as shallow gameplay. Even in Far Cry 2, if I figure out some clever way to complete an objective without setting foot in the enemy base protecting it, I'm at least rewarded by not having to enter that base. Contrast that with Bioshock, where putting all the time and effort into a complex "creative" plan actually leaves me with less resources than I would have if I had gone with one of the ever present simpler solutions. I get that I'm supposed to put something of myself into the game, but with that comes the expectation that the game will respond in kind. Otherwise I'm just playing with myself, and I don't need a video game to do that. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation; not when I've played games that manage to do both just fine.

Yeah, I know this thread is over a month old. I've been busy, but I still think this is worth talking about. What I was getting at in my earlier post is that rather than focusing on technicalities like whether an event was intended or not, it's more useful to talk about the reason people bring up stories about emergent gameplay, which is that they're good stories in the first place. If we examine what makes those stories interesting, we can create a context by which to judge, and hopefully come to a better understanding of the elements that make them up. For example, using a puddle of oil to set a splicer on fire in Bioshock seems mechanically identical to any good emergent event, but it's not interesting. Why is that? I think it's because, while there are certainly a lot of independent systems interacting with each other in complex ways to produce a logical result, each individual element seems single minded the point of banality to me. I can't think of any purpose for the puddles of oil other than to set splicers on fire, so I can't bring myself to care when it inevitably happens. It lacks that crucial element of surprise that you'll find in any good story. This is definitely a less scientific approach than people typically use to talk about gameplay, but I think game design could benefit a lot by being viewed from a more liberal angle sometimes.

I think the most useful definition of emergent gameplay is that it's what happens when game mechanics conspire to create a coherent, entertaining narrative. The kind that you can relate to your friends, or perhaps to The Idle Thumbs Podcast . Trying to draw a distinction based on whether the events were intended or not just ends up being arbitrary; if an unintended mechanic interacts with an intended one, does that exclude it from being emergent? Apparently it does, if that rhino story doesn't count. But then, it's not possible to completely avoid brushing up against anything intended by the game designers, so you have to draw the line somewhere. I think what's really important in all these stories is that something interesting emerged from gameplay. (See what I did there? No? OK. )

I was initially very confused by this news, but that was mostly because I got it from various other forums and news sites, which all conveniently left out the part about it being only for one IP. Really, I think the biggest difference this makes to people like us is that we'll see Bungie's next game on multiple platforms. Possibly even the PC, which would make me very happy.