Jake

Idle Thumbs 260: Charge Guy, Tree Guy, Ice Guy, Bendy Guy

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Speaking of weed, did you find the weed room in Hitman yet?

 

 

Hell yeah I did. Sadly too late for the recording of this podcast.

 

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Also purchased HITMAN based on this cast. Holy cow did you sell it well.

 

In retrospect, it seems that the more straightforward previous level will be a good setup for the crazy hugeness of the current level.

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I can't play hitman right now since I don't have my xbox at the moment and my pc is a baby, so I'm enjoying living vicariously thru the cast's description of it.

 

I always thought there were 6 levels planned, not 4 or 7, but I might be wrong.

 

The progression of these levels is very interesting to me, because it feels like not only does the release schedule mean the players naturally assess each level in more detail and learn from it, but the developers do too.  Going from the wonderful weird training missions that approximate the scale of scenarios from old hitman games, to a much larger scale version of that single-location idea, and then to a large but complex fragmented environment that interacts and flows in more sweeping ways.

 

Marrakesh is the next location, and from what I've heard about it adds to the sense of progression, set in a more openly hostile and harrowing urban environment.

 

interested to see what the back half of this "season" is like.

 

Oh, and as far as I've seen, each episode actually has a name for its main mission.  Paris was titled "Showstopper", and Sapienza was "The World of Tomorrow".  I actually like learning about the goofy targets and whatever story connects them, and this mini-series like presentation and structure seems like it'll add something to that aspect for me when I finally end up playing it.

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To be fair, there's nothing about the game that necessitates an internet connection. It's a reasonable complaint, especially if you experienced trouble with the servers.

 

It's fair enough, but if you don't want the online-enabled features you can play offline, right? You just can't switch your current in-progress save between offline and online. If the game were online only it'd be a totally reasonable complaint.

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Just registered so that I could say that I bought the brisk walking simulator HITMAN™ because of your recent discussions on it. Having loads of fun with it so far! 

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I realized the Thumbs may have missed the silliest ad campaign for Hitman.

 

My guess is Gary will be the target in the USA level?

 

There are a bunch of these videos

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Yeah, I'm totally going to buy Hitman™ because of you guys talking about it!

 

As I was listening to the episode I was thinking how much more effective the chat was at making me interested in the game than any of the marketing material for the game has been. Some which has been rather bad.

Last week Chris talked about multiplayer/co-op anxiety, and people responded to it this week, mostly by focusing on the relatively seamless nature of multiplayer in Dark Souls. Naturally I can't speak for Chris, but at least my multiplayer anxiety hasn't got a lot to do with the mechanics, but with my mindset. And while I have a whole set of rationalisations about it, it fundamentally just boils down to me having a cognitive bias against multiplayer in what I've categorized as a fundamentally single player experience.

 

I can play a pure multiplayer game, because from the outset the goal is to play a game with other people. Usually the game also should have a certain immediacy and time pressure to it. Rounds help a lot. As do set maps. We are all there to play a match and that's that.

 

I could never play a game like Dark Souls with random strangers. I am always very slow, when it comes to ARPGs, or basically any games where there's any world to explore. I take my time, and I don't care that much about being the most efficient about killing things. I'm also a bit too compulsive about finding the hidden items, and always check under the staircase. But a big draw is exploring the world at my own pace. Any kind of multiplayer is a distressing disruption. In co-op I feel a huge pressure to not slow down the game and ruin it for others, and I end up feeling I miss everything. Conversely, if I don't hurry along, the co-op guy/girl will run ahead, kill everything, trigger everything, skip all the lore dumps, kind of ruining the experience for me. I can't adjust my mindset on the fly, and I don't even really want to.

 

Even Diablo 3 was pretty terrible for me. Eventually (a while after reaching torment -difficult) I had played the game enough that the world was familiar, and there wasn't really anything left to explore. It became an abstract set of stuff that I probably should have considered to be from the start. The desert thing has first area with the alternating mountain-crater thingies with special events in the middle, a chokepoint bridge, an open area before the village with the ambush in the cellar, a second open area with a couple of dungeons, the final village with two sections and the butterfly boss lady. All the enemies are familiar and playing the game is reflexive. The game world became a set a Quake 3 maps. I could finally play the game as a straight up mouse click driven slot machine. And yeah, it's a pretty smooth multiplayer experience these day. However, I kind of suspect that I'm still biased against it, because at that point I should switch my mindset from exploring the world to just enjoying the mechanics. And at least with the case of Diablo 3 I wasn't really able to enjoy the game much after I had reached a level of familiarity with it. Which is not a knock on Diablo 3. It's an impressive game, and I played it a whole whole bunch.

 

Co-op/multiplayer with friends is a very different proposition, but even then I prefer games that don't have strong narrative or world exploration elements.

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It's fair enough, but if you don't want the online-enabled features you can play offline, right? You just can't switch your current in-progress save between offline and online. If the game were online only it'd be a totally reasonable complaint.

 

Looking into it more, it seems like you can play the core levels offline, but none of the progression or other challenge modes are available offline, even if you have previously played online and downloaded all that stuff? Kind of crappy, but not nearly as bad as the impression I got from the negative reviews.

 

tl,dr: Steam reviewers are hyperbolic!

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I could never play a game like Dark Souls with random strangers. I am always very slow, when it comes to ARPGs, or basically any games where there's any world to explore. I take my time, and I don't care that much about being the most efficient about killing things. I'm also a bit too compulsive about finding the hidden items, and always check under the staircase. But a big draw is exploring the world at my own pace. Any kind of multiplayer is a distressing disruption. In co-op I feel a huge pressure to not slow down the game and ruin it for others, and I end up feeling I miss everything. Conversely, if I don't hurry along, the co-op guy/girl will run ahead, kill everything, trigger everything, skip all the lore dumps, kind of ruining the experience for me. I can't adjust my mindset on the fly, and I don't even really want to.

 

For what it's worth, I think Dark Souls actually handles this pretty well - you can go through an area on your own & at your own pace, find items, etc., and then pull in another player if you get stuck on the boss. Typically by the time that happens you've already explored pretty thoroughly and you're retreading old ground & old enemies.

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Looking into it more, it seems like you can play the core levels offline, but none of the progression or other challenge modes are available offline, even if you have previously played online and downloaded all that stuff? Kind of crappy, but not nearly as bad as the impression I got from the negative reviews.

 

tl,dr: Steam reviewers are hyperbolic!

 

The Steam community review/forum area for most games are not a great place.

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The Steam community review/forum area for most games are not a great place.

 

Yeah, when Reddit users look down on the Steam forums for being uninformed, reactionary loudmouths, we've got a bad situation on our hands...

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...

 

Yeah, I can relate to this. There's definitely an anxiety I have about multiplayer "intruding" into what I have already internalized as a single-player experience that is more fundamental than the specifics of its implementation in any particular game.

 

That's not to say I shouldn't try and get over it! 

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Yeah, I can relate to this. There's definitely an anxiety I have about multiplayer "intruding" into what I have already internalized as a single-player experience that is more fundamental than the specifics of its implementation in any particular game.

 

That's not to say I shouldn't try and get over it! 

 

I'm similar, but what helped me to get over it is simply that the Dark Souls community is overwhelmingly patient and gracious. I can't tell you how many people I've had carefully walk me through a level, pointing out secret areas and letting me take the lead whenever possible, or how many I've had show me how to dodge the boss' specific moves and then hung back to let me beat on it. It's peer-to-peer tutorialization, oftentimes. Hence, it's unfortunate that a lot of players, maybe even the majority, try to avoid summoning friendly co-op phantoms (the white and gold signs) out of an interest (internally or externally imparted) in preserving the game's purity of experience. It means that the only way that those people experience the multiplayer is by violent, unwelcome invasions from seasoned (and often troll-like) players, which understandably turns them off from further experimentation.

 

Part of the magic of Dark Souls is playing this isolating, stressful game and then realizing, through messages, bloodstains, and phantoms, that you're not alone, that hundreds of other people are experiencing the exact same thing as you and that you all can help each other out, if you're willing to ask for that help. You're lonely, but not alone, the way I put it.

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I've had a looooot of fun just helping people beat bosses in Bloodborne after I beat them myself. It's a good time. I personally try to avoid co-op when beating a boss just because I enjoy the challenge, but I loved helping people afterward.

 

That said I did need help the first time I fought Artorias in Dark Souls 1. (The second time he was such a joke I wondered why I needed help the first time!) I'm not a big fan of PvP, though, personally. Although I have enjoyed helping fend off invaders to other people's worlds when trying to help them.

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Yeah I've only really interacted with the multiplayer in Dark Souls to get help with bosses. The rest felt kind of pointless to me because I will always eventually parse out levels, but there are always 2 or 3 bosses in these games that I don't want to take the time on my own to figure out.

 

I did do a fair amount of PvP in Demon's Souls, but I dunno, it didn't feel particularly satisfying to me because the objective of kill this other person somewhere in the level never felt that interesting.

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Did the theme change slightly over the last couple of episodes? I could swear that the harmonizing on "video games" is different now

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Did the theme change slightly over the last couple of episodes? I could swear that the harmonizing on "video games" is different now

Perhaps...

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