Chris

Idle Thumbs 255: Awkwardness and Harmony

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Idle Thumbs 255:

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Awkwardness and Harmony

There's something strange about the person facing you—as though their face isn't quite their own. Strange. Everything seemed fine when you were talking online about resource management games and the new Hitman. They even had some great tips to deal with your rodent infestation. But now something seems off. You confidently offer a handshake, but just then, they go in for the fist bump. Oh, God. It's all over now.

Discussed: Factorio, Diablo, Hitman (2016), Darkest Dungeon

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I've also done the mouse 'circuit' thing and I succeeded! It was similarly cartoony with someone literally sat on a chair screaming in a high pitched voice the entire time.

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There's a mistake in the discussed section of the description, it should be this:

 

Discussed: Factorio, Diablo, Hitman (2016), Chuckle Brothers, Darkest Dungeon

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Oh man continued mouse presence is a nightmare indeed. Sometime back we had one crawling in through the gap around the radiator pipe each night and snacking in the kitchen cupboards. Mind you this was a studio apartment so you could actually see it run across the carpet in the middle of the night from our bed...

 

One night it got into the plastic sleeve thingy holding the belgian waffles, and I sort of slammed the opening shut, trapping the mouse inside. Now I was in one of those quicktime events, where the mouse slowly started freaking out and making holes in the plastic, as my hand holding the huge police-style flashlight hovered over it. Eventually I smushed its face in with it. It was horrifying.

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Great show as always. I kinda expected the guy who came to Nick's apartment to fix the mouse looked like Christopher Walken from Mouse Hunt. At least it makes the story funnier in my head.

 

On Hitman I am having alot of fun playing it. The "Level" - Paris is huge - i've already put 6-8 hours in and still have tons left to do.

 

I am so happy Spaff mentioned that Hitman video. I watched the normal one and then the Chuckle Brothers one. As I grew up watching the Chuck Bros I appreciated the video alot. They really don't look that old considering. But Spaff didn't mention some of their funniest comments from the video..

 

- Telling Agent 47 to fire a woman while dressed as a painter for poor work.

- Telling Agent 47 to bleed the radiator as he passes through a corridor. 

 

Here are the Bros for people that aren't familiar.

 

chucklebody_160x220.jpg

 

Oh dear oh dear...

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On Hitman I am having alot of fun playing it. The "Level" - Paris is huge - i've already put 6-8 hours in and still have tons left to do.

 

Yeah, I have beaten it twice, but I am still not happy with my hit on the second target. I also need to explore more paths than the one I figured out. I am totally going to try and get every challenge completed.

There is a part of me that feels like they designed this game specifically for me (or my playstyle at least). I have replayed Blood Money levels so many times, trying every method. I am excited to try Paris as a mad shooter, there are a lot of guards with assault rifles so it should be a big challenge. 

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Oh god, I can’t stand mice. There’s something about the sense of unstoppable incursion they engender which fills me with anxiety. I had a problem in my kitchen a month or so ago and getting rid of them required stopping up all the possible entry points with steel wool, the liberal deployment of those old fashioned snap traps, and finally the loan of my mother’s cat for a few weeks. But they’re gone now! I think! I hope!

 

(Of course my kitchen is still full of loaded mouse traps.)

 

Anyway, I bought a copy of that Jesper Juul book. I’d actually been looking for a copy of it for a while, since I read somewhere that somebody else said it was exceptionally good, but I thought it was out of print. I shall now wait patiently for six to twelve weeks for the cheapest possible international shipping option to arrive.

 

I don’t think I ever expected to hear an explanation of the Chuckle Brothers on this podcast but I’m really glad I did.

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Hearing Nick describe singleplayer RPGs (to which I'd add 4X and grand strategy games) as board games that you bring home to learn and don't want to change once you've learned them really helped me articulate why RPGs and strategy games tend to have backlashes over even minor changes, more so than many other genres of video game. For me and for many other high-level players, I imagine, the pleasure of those games comes from knowledge and mastery of their systems, so when a developer changes a system and robs you of that knowledge and mastery, it really does feel like something's being taken from you: your time with the game and your special understanding of it.

 

I think that high-level players focused on mastery do tend to intuit fairly quickly when a developer's change weakens their game's design, because they are already familiar with the process of acquiring mastery over that particular game and its systems, but they can also react in a generally poor way even when the change strengthens the game's design, because they're inevitably comparing their current incomplete mastery with their past complete mastery, so... I don't know. I think I've just been a big fan of games the past few years where developers with an imperfect knowledge of their games' systems and dynamics have used the "silent majority," which is often the fifty percent of people who don't even get fifteen minutes into Darkest Dungeon, as an excuse to paper over reasoned feedback by respected members of the community. I'm sure it swings the other way plenty, though.

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Here's the robot video that was discussed:

 

I think they based her facial expressions on nic cage?

 

vampires-kiss.jpg

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Man, I wish Hitman had released a little earlier when Steve was on the podcast because I would have loved to have heard his reaction. Based on his twitter he seemed really enthusiastic, but it would be great to hear him go into detail about it. Oh well. I've played the game for like 6 hours, and I'm really into their approach to remixing these levels, and when I'm in the game I'm constantly exploring the environment in increasing detail because I want to figure out how I can accomplish some other set of objectives, and you can only do that by really scouring the level for all these little things.

 

 

Hearing Nick describe singleplayer RPGs (to which I'd add 4X and grand strategy games) as board games that you bring home to learn and don't want to change once you've learned them really helped me articulate why RPGs and strategy games tend to have backlashes over even minor changes, more so than many other genres of video game. For me and for many other high-level players, I imagine, the pleasure of those games comes from knowledge and mastery of their systems, so when a developer changes a system and robs you of that knowledge and mastery, it really does feel like something's being taken from you: your time with the game and your special understanding of it.

 

I think that high-level players focused on mastery do tend to intuit fairly quickly when a developer's change weakens their game's design, because they are already familiar with the process of acquiring mastery over that particular game and its systems, but they can also react in a generally poor way even when the change strengthens the game's design, because they're inevitably comparing their current incomplete mastery with their past complete mastery, so... I don't know. I think I've just been a big fan of games the past few years where developers with an imperfect knowledge of their games' systems and dynamics have used the "silent majority," which is often the fifty percent of people who don't even get fifteen minutes into Darkest Dungeon, as an excuse to paper over reasoned feedback by respected members of the community. I'm sure it swings the other way plenty, though.

 

Yeah, there definitely is a thing where sometimes a community gets upset for the wrong reason. Valve just implemented a change to DOTA where they revealed the attack range of the towers, and also the range of neutral camp spawn boxes (if you don't know don't ask), and there is a sizable portion of the community complaining about the change even though there isn't any good reason why that sort of information should be opaque to the player.

 

For a developer I guess you just need to listen to the community, and try and understand where they are coming from. Which doesn't always mean give into what they want, but ideally the developer then has room to consider the implementation from a critical perspective and try and evaluate what you're trying to accomplish, if that goal is reasonable, and if this implementation is a reasonable way to achieve that goal...

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Haven't played hitman due to not having my console with me at the moment, but I've enjoyed watching a bunch of stuff from the tutorial levels that were in the beta.

 

Interesting but small thing: though the second tutorial level looks a bit more convincingly real, it actually still takes place in the big circular pit (is it a hydroelectric dam or something?  I always forget what those things are called) that the first mission took place in, and still has an air of simulacrum to it.  I kind of enjoy it, because for the first one it's ostensibly the basic challenge course that applying assassination agents get put through, wheras the next one is a more advanced test meant for clearing agents for field duty.  So there's a sense of progression in how seriously the Agency is taking 47 during these tests.

 

Another thing I really liked was how even though the yacht and dock is the only usable area on the training course, they bothered to cover a huge amount of unused floorspace with a tarp to imply water, and draped the entire side of the big structure with a huge fake curtain emblazoned with the colors of a sunset.  It may be ramshackle, but there's a sense of pride taken in the theming of this set, and it reinforces the Agency's resources and extravagant self-image.  It's like they're trying to intimidate prospective agents with the implication of how they put all this together, how they managed to hire so many ordinary and extraordinary looking people to participate in a clearly sinister excercise, even if it is with "simulated weapons".

 

I've heard but haven't seen that there is some NPC dialogue that is meant to give the impression of an actor breaking character as they see the player doing something odd or as they react to something in the environment.

 

I really like the throwaway line from Diana when the player first uses a disguise: "You've put on his clothes?  I can't say I've seen anyone try that before.", briefly acknowledging the ridiculousness of such a specific action being one of the central conceits of gameplay in the series.  Of course it's immediately followed up with the justification "Well, people do tend to see uniforms, not faces", which does make a certain amount of sense.  Still, I doubt that on-site procurement of disguises is actually a common technique in the real-life world of assassination.

 

Regarding opportunities to kill targets being explicitly listed, I don't really have a huge problem with that, but I'd definitely turn all the in-game tracker UI off (which I've heard you can do) and only look at the list of possibilities once my own deductive skills began to exhaust themselves.  That was my approach in Absolution, which I rather liked despite the few unambiguously gross segments (all three of which involved gory NPC on NPC murder of innocents as you sneak around a level, oddly enough)

 

EDIT:  Oh, also I like that they made 47 look kind of like an actual normal secret agent movie man who happens to be bald and tattooed instead of a vampire with mr potato head angry eyebrows

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I just want to express how much I appreciated hearing Spaff attempt to describe The Chuckle Brothers to Americans.

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New Hitman is so good.  I've played the Paris level like 8 different ways by now.

 

On the more elaborate tutorial mission, it's still a half-constructed scenario setup like the boat, it's just that the fakeness of the military base is a little less obvious.  But if you look at the exteriors of the building, you can notice that it's very unfinished, because it's still just a training room that this Assassination Agency put together for your test.

 

The opportunities stuff is a little too spelled out for the player, but you have three settings for those you can modify in the game options.  "On" is the system that's set by default, where you can choose to track an opportunity and it'll just give you a bit of text specifying the next step and a HUD indicator pointing you to exactly what you have to do.  There's a "Minimal" setting that still gives you the text description for the next step but not the HUD indicator leaving it up to you to locate it.  You can also just turn them all the way off.  I would imagine you still get the conversations with the opportunities turned off, but I don't know.

 

One of the playthroughs of Paris is so good, but since the kills are the thing this game has to offer, I'll put it in spoilers:

 

One of the things you can do in the stage is pick up this detonator for a fireworks show that's been set up, which are supposed to go off at the end of the fashion show.  When you trigger the fireworks, it causes Victor, the male target, to rush towards the back and get all pissed off that his finale was ruined, while the female target upstairs goes outside for a cigarette to watch the fireworks. 

 

If you time the fireworks properly, she'll go to this one balcony above where Victor comes out, leaning over this 3rd floor balcony railing almost right on top of him and she starts to mock him.  One good hard shove later, she falls to her death, landing on Victor, who is crushed by her body.  Two targets with 1 shove.

 

The game also has these missions called Escalations which are really interesting.  They're structured as sets of 5 missions, all on the same map.  When you start the escalation, it'll give you an objective like "Kill Guy A with Weapon B while wearing Disguise C."  You do it and exit, mission over.  Now it goes to the second mission, which will ask you to do the same thing, but now you have to fetch the contents of a safe.  Each successive mission will add another target, or add another objective, or add conditions on how you play.  For example, the escalation on that Russian military base tutorial level has you killing this one guard on level 3, and there's a fairly simple way to kill this guy via an accident death.  Then you go to level 4, and it adds a condition that all bodies must be hidden within 90 seconds of your kill and cannot be seen.  Your accident death doesn't work anymore, because there's no way to hide the body after you've made him fall to his death, so you have to calcuate a new plan to integrate the new condition.

 

The episodic nature of the game seems so weird at first, but playing it, it feels somewhat natural.  If you got this released like a traditional game, you'd play each of these scenarios once and move on.  Releasing the game episodically like this encourages people to replay the same level and actually use all the options the level has available.  I totally get the structure after playing it.

 

Also, when you started to talk about "that face robot", the thing that instantly came to mind and took me like 30 seconds to realize it wasn't what you were talking about was this: https://media.giphy.com/media/jM66C09QgTon6/giphy.gif

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I believe you still hear the npc chatter with opportunities turned off.  A Hitman player who's done a lot of cool vids for the series just released a run done "Silent Assassin, Suit Only, No Knockouts, All Help Disabled".

 

 

There's a lot of subtle AI manipulation in that video to make the kill possible, it makes the game look super easy, at first glance.  Despite how things might appear, no-one actually sees either of the targets as they die.  Can't wait for more vids of this type, as well as the speedrun community once the game (or season, I guess) is fully released.

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It is kind of interesting that the final tutorial mission is the more finished looking setup which is completely at odds with the fiction of the game, but hey, why would you pay attention to those cut scenes anyway? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I'd say it's less that the final tutorial is "more set-up" than it is that the military base probably requires less from them.  I mean, it's one big building, some fences, the jet, and then office furniture.  Also, the mission being set at night helps, because it means there's a lot more dark areas that hide how incomplete it looks.  When you've done that mission a couple of different ways and have spent time scaling the building, the unfinishedness of the main building stands out a lot more.

 

The first tutorial scenario doesn't look all that unfinished aside from the boat, and that looks super unfinished because they don't have a body of water at all and because it's a daytime scenario that highlights the unfinished look.

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It still takes place in the same weird circular structure, but the fact that it's set at night with stark lighting helps hide a lot of the obvious artifice.

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I can only imagine that this is what Nick was trying to build in front of his closet.

 

post-31977-0-16723700-1459383270.gif

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