Idle Thumbs 236: Twenty-Year-Old Weird House

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 236:

Twenty-Year-Old Weird House

This house survived three wars, countless natural disasters, and the end of civilization as we know it. If these walls could talk, the stories they could tell might change your life. Unfortunately for these walls, they'd look pretty great lining my settlement's new basketball court. Sorry, walls, Fallout 4 is here.

Games Discussed: Fallout 4, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Anno 2205: Asteroid Miner, World of Warships

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[Patrick R]

The idea of another party of travelers in an RPG being the boss is actually just Gary in Pokemon.

[Cordeos]

There is a perk that sets up trade routes between settlements so each one shares resources with all the others. So you can eventually dump junk in one workbench and use it at another.

 

I have actually found VATs to be useless with my current character build so I have been FPSing it up. Shooting feels a lot nicer.

 

When I was getting a work Visa for Korea I had to get a federal background check done then get it stamped by the state department in person. There are services that take your paperwork there and then mail it to you. Similarly to get a tourist Visa for Vietnam I paid a company to fill out paperwork so the visa would be at the airport when I got there.

RE: ugly characters in FO4:

[Scylo]

Somewhat related to the exploitative free to play conversation - I have a relative that used to have a poker machine addiction, and now they don't play poker machines often and just play a lot of bad free to play games. I find myself constantly worrying that one addiction has just been replaced by the other, and that's now the reason they're always struggling to pay bills. I don't mind free to play stuff, I guess, but some of that stuff really does feel like it's designed to prey upon people like that, and it's pretty gross to me.

[sclpls]

I think Idle Thumbs probably articulated exactly what it is that I dislike about Bethesda RPGs (even though they weren't discussed as a criticism). The whole spectacle of a Bethesda RPG comes down to creating an enormous world with an even more enormous amount of objects. It is, without question, an impressive technical achievement. And it was the sort of achievement I was really into back when games like Shenmue 2 and GTA 3 were being released. However at this point in time that sort of technical goal isn't really something I'm looking for or want in games, especially when it comes at the expense of a lot of other qualities like camera angles, or an interesting story, etc.

[sclpls]

Also the anti-robot news segment made me think about how all these companies in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are described as tech companies just because they use software or whatever, but the current business strategy for the new breed of successful companies (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) involves a minimal amount of technical capacity or whatever, but does involve maximally exploiting weak labor conditions in the U.S. A big discrepancy between a company's marketing image and what it actually does is nothing new, but I always find the popularity of these services a bit depressing considering that the success of them is based entirely on taking advantage of how easy it is under U.S. law to classify someone as an "independent contractor" rather than an "employee", with all the loss of rights & benefits such a shift entails.

[dacustodions]

Was that 'Fallout 4 is like Skyrim with guns' joke from Jake a super far-reaching reference to episode 4 where they joke about fallout 3 being like 'Oblivion with guns'? Because that would be both hilarious and good.

[jeremywc]

Also the anti-robot news segment made me think about how all these companies in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are described as tech companies just because they use software or whatever, but the current business strategy for the new breed of successful companies (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) involves a minimal amount of technical capacity or whatever, but does involve maximally exploiting weak labor conditions in the U.S. A big discrepancy between a company's marketing image and what it actually does is nothing new, but I always find the popularity of these services a bit depressing considering that the success of them is based entirely on taking advantage of how easy it is under U.S. law to classify someone as an "independent contractor" rather than an "employee", with all the loss of rights & benefits such a shift entails.

 

They're totally exploiting people, but I don't know if I agree on that it "involves a minimal amount of technical capacity or whatever." There's a lot of impressive, if super creepy, infrastructure they've put together to manage all their resources in real-time. Especially Uber.

 

Sorry for the Internet Forum Guy post.

[Jake]

Was that 'Fallout 4 is like Skyrim with guns' joke from Jake a super far-reaching reference to episode 4 where they joke about fallout 3 being like 'Oblivion with guns'? Because that would be both hilarious and good.

That was just a thing that people all over the internet kept saying about Fallout 3. It seems like it comes from the same folks who kept saying "the Wii is two gamecubes duct taped together" over and over because it made them feel good to say. So I was calling that back more than a specific reference to episode 4, but we are the same people now that we were then... :\

[bakelite]

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R games with their insanely ambitious AI are basically what you're describing at around 1:03.

[chummer]

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R games with their insanely ambitious AI are basically what you're describing at around 1:03.

 

[unimural]

That was just a thing that people all over the internet kept saying about Fallout 3. It seems like it comes from the same folks who kept saying "the Wii is two gamecubes duct taped together" over and over because it made them feel good to say. So I was calling that back more than a specific reference to episode 4, but we are the same people now that we were then... :\

To be fair, Bethesda themselves used the "Oblivion with guns" as the elevator pitch marketing line. A digression: I first encountered this phenomenon when the movie Speed was described as "Die Hard on a bus". Which is wondeful.

Also, as someone who recently has been systematically listening to the original run of Idle Thumbs podcast, I can say with high degree of certainty that you are not the same people now. The lineage is clear, certainly, but the emphasis is rather different.

[Jutranjo]

I can say with high degree of certainty that you are not the same people now. The lineage is clear, certainly, but the emphasis is rather different.

 

Yeah, Jake got replaced with Robo-Jake in 2014  

 

RIP flesh Jake

[Merus]

That was just a thing that people all over the internet kept saying about Fallout 3. It seems like it comes from the same folks who kept saying "the Wii is two gamecubes duct taped together" over and over because it made them feel good to say. So I was calling that back more than a specific reference to episode 4, but we are the same people now that we were then... :\

 

My housemate is pulling apart a Super Nintendo, and it turns out the Super Nintendo controller is two NES controllers. Nintendo are experts at reuse - after all, the cheapest chip is the one you've already got the supply line set up for - so I think Nintendo would have been smart to get two GameCube chips. They've got the tools, they've got the manufacturing, the architecture was much smarter than, say, the PS2's, and the only hazard is dismissive sniffing from people who don't have to decide how to ship a hundred million consoles. Wasn't that the SpyParty guy who said that? Is he even capable of shipping?

 

Anyway that's what I think about reductionism.

[Cleinhun]

Didn't the phrase "skyrim with guns" appear in an actual trailer for far cry 3?

[Hermie]

On the subject of Rich-2-Rich hidden marketing: I love picking up and leafing through the absolutely real, ostensibly non-ironically-named Monocle Magazine. If you ever want to know which hotel bar is the hottest in Dubai, hit me up.

The idea of another party of travelers in an RPG being the boss is actually just Gary in Pokemon.

I had the same thought. Also, it sounds hard to do in a computer RPG, but I've wanted to do something like this in a D&D campaign for a while.

[rincewitch]

The discussion of how to make sure that there's still a completable critical path in open world games made me think of something J.E. Sawyer for Obsidian posted on Something Awful about quest design in Fallout: New Vegas:

 

Characters could get out one dialogue (if they were behind a door or immediately after a transition), but no one could be marked as immortal (other than kids) and designers had to design their quests assuming that players killed every NPC as soon as they were able to pull a trigger.

 

The way the goon he was replying to (Reveilled) described it has always kind of stuck with me-- "the game had to be possible to complete, even if you had a infinite ammo, always-on flamethrower sticking out of your chest."

 

Anyway, I believe that philosophy was one of the reasons the character Yes Man existed-- because he's a robot who can just transfer to a new chassis every time you kill him, you still have at least one main quest path open without having to mark the other main faction NPCs (Caesar, House, etc.) as essential/unkillable.

 

And I guess, further afield from open the Big Open World Game but still in the realm of RPG critical path design, all of this also kind of made me think of Undertale, where the critical path you're on is actually defined by how much havoc you've wrought and how many NPCs you've massacred (you monster).

[Gamebeast23456]

Does someone have that Oblivion monstrosity or do I need to dig it up?

[Cordeos]

Does someone have that Oblivion monstrosity or do I need to dig it up?

https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/664967756987559936

[SuperBiasedMan]

Anyway, I believe that philosophy was one of the reasons the character Yes Man existed-- because he's a robot who can just transfer to a new chassis every time you kill him, you still have at least one main quest path open without having to mark the other main faction NPCs (Caesar, House, etc.) as essential/unkillable.

 

Can confirm, I went through FO:NV just wiping out whole towns/factions. I didn't find the story engaging at all but liked exploring and accidentally set up a macabre compulsive quest of clearing all people along the way. That lead to basically no-one being alive on the strip, and all of the Legion's settlement were wiped out. So the only being I could interact with was Yes Man.

 

Though they kept one in their back pocket by having another character revealed then who I... promptly killed without even listening to his speech thing. That said I would have found it more interesting if the game had just faded out when I finished off all the NPCs and that in itself defined my ending where it was even more of a wasteland than before.

[elmuerte]

It looks like I'm doing this again (now in Fallout 4):

 

[Cordeos]

It looks like I'm doing this again (now in Fallout 4):

 

Me with fusion cores

[elmuerte]

I now have 3 power armors and I haven't used any of them besides the initial mission.

[Roswell47]

The idea that npc's picking upp stuff that you drop does exist in the Stalker games. They'll pick up and equip weapons that are better than the stuff they already have.

[your name here]

http://i.imgur.com/8MLo3c3.gifv