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Idle Thumbs 238: From Earth to Pluto

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Idle Thumbs 238:

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From Earth to Pluto

Now that the mobile companion apps to our favorite hardcore economic simulators and open world roleplaying games have sucked all the time out of our lives, we take a deep dip into the Idle Thumbs mailbag.

Games Discussed: Anno 2205, Anno 2205: Asteroid Miner, Fallout 4, Fallout Shelter, Agricola (iOS), TouchTone, Noby Noby Boy, Grand Theft Auto (the first one)

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When Chris is talking about the Anno companion app 5 minutes in, every time he uses the word "Energy" I forget that energy is an in-game resource and just think he sounds like a deluded work-slave maximizing the potential of the actual energy in his body.

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So surreal hearing of Noby, Noby Boy! I was relistening to the first few episodes on the site and so much looping of franchises in the episodes I thought we'd all fallen into a gaming Mobius (:D look up the TNG Mobius ref if you have time)

Given the fallout [3 vs 4], tomb raider [legend then vs xboneXclusive now] & a host of other things even the prophecy of the 2016 "godfather" game (possibly firewatch but TBC) its a weird and wacky time... games!

\o/

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Unreal Tournament Demo lived really long. I ran a bunch of Unreal Tournament servers in 2000 up to the point UT2003 came out. One of them was a demo server which was seriously active up to the point we shut it down. People playing nothing but the 5 maps it included for years.

(It was not possible to mod the demo without messing with it, the allowed content is hardcoded)

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The Quake and UT demos made really sure that nearly everyone who played on a PC at the time played them. Every magazine demo disc had them. Even vs bots it was plenty fun.

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Pluto was dubbed a "dwarf planet" in 2006, right as I was starting graduate school, just in time for me to answer five billion questions about the decision for despondent schoolchildren at planetarium shows. Noby Noby Boy, as mentioned, came out a few years later.

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I would be willing to wager something significant that the next Elder Scrolls game will not have full voice acting. The difference between full voice acting for a wife and a husband vs all the permutations possible along the spectrum of every Elder Scrolls race is pretty big. The only way I could see it happening is if you managed to shoehorn all the voices into the 5 or 6 total like Saints Row 3rd had.

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Back when I was 13 I played soo much of the Wolfenstein 3D demo I finally said I am going to buy the full version. So I mailed in my money ($20-$30 I think) and got the disks shipped to me. I played through Episode 2 of the game and then my friend brought over the Doom shareware demo disk. I never played Wofenstein again.

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I would be willing to wager something significant that the next Elder Scrolls game will not have full voice acting. The difference between full voice acting for a wife and a husband vs all the permutations possible along the spectrum of every Elder Scrolls race is pretty big. The only way I could see it happening is if you managed to shoehorn all the voices into the 5 or 6 total like Saints Row 3rd had.

I wonder if there ever will be another Elder Scrolls game what with Elder Scrolls Online. I also eagerly await another Warcraft RTS but doubt that will be coming anytime soon either

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I wonder if there ever will be another Elder Scrolls game what with Elder Scrolls Online. I also eagerly await another Warcraft RTS but doubt that will be coming anytime soon either

Oh god.. Everytime Blizzard puts out a new trailer for WoW I keep wishing it ends with a "WarCraft IV" logo and keep getting disappointed.. :sad:

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I would be willing to wager something significant that the next Elder Scrolls game will not have full voice acting. The difference between full voice acting for a wife and a husband vs all the permutations possible along the spectrum of every Elder Scrolls race is pretty big. The only way I could see it happening is if you managed to shoehorn all the voices into the 5 or 6 total like Saints Row 3rd had.

Dragon Age: Inquisition managed to pull this off with just two voices for each gender, but I guess since you can't play as a lizard person or a talking cat or whatever in Dragon Age they basically just needed to cover the two main accents your character might plausibly have had.

 

Anyway, I'm tremendously pleased that 2015 really was the year of the PS3 all along.

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It was interesting listening to people who have created and are currently creating conversation systems talking about the conversation systems in other games.

 

I treated Mass Effect conversation like a rhythm game, forcing myself to respond quickly and make the conversation sound like a conversation.

 

This was possible because Mass Effect was mostly just small talk—a wrong sentence wouldn't drastically change the course of your game.  Compare that to Pillars of Eternity with about 6 wildly different options for each turning point in a quest.  I took my time with those!

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Haha, in the conversation about waiting on Fallout 4 to load, all I could think of was Metal Gear Solid 4's install screens, which were weird but wonderful.  It's just Solid Snake smoking and looking grumpy for like 10 minutes, with the old video game health warnings that would usually be in small print at the beginning of a game manual.

 

 

Edited to Add: MGS4 also had a choice about how much you wanted to install, you could either do a full install, or you could just do a partial install and at like 4 other points in the game it would ask you to install more stuff if you didn't want to wait any longer than necessary to start playing. 

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The discussion about the videos that played during the long Fallout 4 install reminded me of the original PC Crimson Skies game.  It had a pretty long install for the time, but while it was going it also streamed CD audio.  It was like an old 1940s radio serial, setting up the adventures of Nathan Zachary.  Very well done and a lot of fun.

 

Some years later I got nostalgic and wanted to play again, but also wanted to hear that installation adventure.  CD-ROM drive technology had advanced so much, though, that the install took seconds and I only got a line or two of dialog.

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The discussion about the videos that played during the long Fallout 4 install reminded me of the original PC Crimson Skies game.  It had a pretty long install for the time, but while it was going it also streamed CD audio.  It was like an old 1940s radio serial, setting up the adventures of Nathan Zachary.  Very well done and a lot of fun.

 

Some years later I got nostalgic and wanted to play again, but also wanted to hear that installation adventure.  CD-ROM drive technology had advanced so much, though, that the install took seconds and I only got a line or two of dialog.

 

Excellent reminder!  Luckily someone put it on YouTube:

 

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Haha, in the conversation about waiting on Fallout 4 to load, all I could think of was Metal Gear Solid 4's install screens, which were weird but wonderful.  It's just Solid Snake smoking and looking grumpy for like 10 minutes, with the old video game health warnings that would usually be in small print at the beginning of a game manual.

 

 

Edited to Add: MGS4 also had a choice about how much you wanted to install, you could either do a full install, or you could just do a partial install and at like 4 other points in the game it would ask you to install more stuff if you didn't want to wait any longer than necessary to start playing. 

 

 

 

 

The best install screens still belong to old Westwood RTS games. The worst part of the "C&C: First 10 Years" collection is that it's just a normal windows install.

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Wings of Liberty had install screens that showed "the story so far", which was good since the last game that came out for that series was over 10 years prior. Then for the expansions they started doing that streaming/background downloading thing that Chris mentioned in the episode, which is funky and doesn't always work as well as I want it to. They sounded very enthusiastic about this feature though! I don't think streaming games will be viable for at least another 10 years or so. Internet infrastructure in most places still seem not to be able to adequately handle it.

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Edited to Add: MGS4 also had a choice about how much you wanted to install, you could either do a full install, or you could just do a partial install and at like 4 other points in the game it would ask you to install more stuff if you didn't want to wait any longer than necessary to start playing. 

I loved those install screens. A weird detail to note is that the full install option came later in a patch. When it was new, there was no avoiding the between-act smoke breaks!

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Wings of Liberty had install screens that showed "the story so far", which was good since the last game that came out for that series was over 10 years prior. Then for the expansions they started doing that streaming/background downloading thing that Chris mentioned in the episode, which is funky and doesn't always work as well as I want it to. They sounded very enthusiastic about this feature though! I don't think streaming games will be viable for at least another 10 years or so. Internet infrastructure in most places still seem not to be able to adequately handle it.

 

That's curious. What was funky about it for you? I've been using it for years for WoW, SC2, Diablo, and now HOTS/Overwatch. It's been basically amazing. Double especially when you get the urge to reinstall world of warcraft, and you can play with 3-4 gigs downloaded and it really does stream in like current consoles trick you into thinking.

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I treated Mass Effect conversation like a rhythm game, forcing myself to respond quickly and make the conversation sound like a conversation.

 

This was possible because Mass Effect was mostly just small talk—a wrong sentence wouldn't drastically change the course of your game.

There were big decisions but they tended to be pretty obvious when they came up. Mass Effect was also very clever in how they set up the dialogue wheel in that the right side always moves the plot forward, the left side always adds exposition, the top is always paragon and the bottom is always renegade. This set up a lot of context that knowing the full dialogue lines removed, but it was still easy to get caught flat-footed by either the vehemence or subject of a particular response. Still clever, though.

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In Mass Effect 3, it was nearly impossible to predict how Renegade Shepard was going to react based on what you selected.  It's the only one I ever finished on Renegade, so maybe they were all that way.  At first it bugged me how wildly different her reactions to things were, but I eventually came to decide that it was the best way to characterize her.  She was obviously suffering from PTSD, had a billion reasons to be paranoid, had died and been reborn.   Being a completely stable personality would be the least likely outcome after all that. 

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I want to throw out the Worms 2 demo concerning old PC demos. It had like 1 or 2 levels and many missing items and no possible customization, but the online vs. mode was completely intact and it had tons of players starting games at any time of day. I didn't ever buy Worms 2 and finally caved in by the time Worms Armageddon came out.

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It's kind of weird to talk about how amazing the demo for quake 3 was when up until I think like Quake 2 Id's business model was basically to give away an entire campaign of 8 or 9 levels and then sell two more like it. In that context it's pretty conservative.

What with episodic games making a resurgence I'm surprised that that model hasn't resurfaced. Was the idea of making the first episode free and charging for the rest of the season discussed at Telltale? It seems like if anything it would be more effective with the more story-focused titles, since rather than selling more of the same thing you'd be selling the conclusion to the story once people are hooked. Then again, I don't know if it was ever an especially good business model, even if it was commonplace for a while.

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Glad that many of the minor annoyances in Fallout 4 are being modded out, even if it's unsurprising (it's a Bethesda game! Mods everywhere!)

 

The dialog and compass mods mentioned in the podcast are great. This mod (and several others) let you put armor over your sequin dress (I was also annoyed that you couldn't do that by default). The only thing I really want now that I can't find a mod for is reducing the stupid amount of gore, especially in VATS. Unless I'm wrong and there's already a way to do it? I'm not holding my breath

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