Chris

Idle Thumbs 80: Happy Dishonored Halloween

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Far Cry 2 solves this by building in NPC redundancy. All the named mercenary friendlies are interchangeable for the purposes of the story and if any one of them die, the next one will step into their role for the next mission. It would be an efficient method of handling player's ability to fuck up in the context of a more elaborate story: write it in such a way that there is a group of backup people who can fulfill a story role, then don't put them all within a grenade blast radius in situations where the desirability of their murder is ambiguous. This kind of thing requires some deft narrative-smithing, but it sounds simpler to execute than a full-on branching narrative and it can be just as compelling.

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If you do that with plot-required antagonists, you get the video game equivalent of the first season of The Wire: take one down, and another will step up to take his place.

Hm, that might have some interesting narrative hooks. Would be a bit depressing, though.

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I was totally thinking of The Wire as an example of a kind of story that this manner of character redundancy would require. Not every character in the world needs to be like that tho. Just the important ones that you can accidentally kill or fail to save in some sort of an emergent scenario or something.

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You have gained a level! You can now access World 2: The Boat.

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Liked the sports vs. esports discussion. I think it is interesting, but I'd say there are two main reasons to watch either. First and foremost is the fact that these people are so good at what they do, that it is just entertaining to see how far someone can take the game or the sport. Like how fast hockey players move the puck or watching a great back and forth in tennis compared to watching the amazing micro or macro in an e-sport.

The second one is to learn how the best play the game. I think this is more important in e-sports, because since it is younger we have less of a history of how these sports are played (people that have been playing/watching these things for 60 years like a John Madden or whatever). I know I learned a lot more watching the international than say the NHL playoffs and I love ice hockey. But in ice hockey there is nearly never something that happens where my brain explodes and I didn't even consider such a play possible. In a The international dota 2 game, that happened more than once every game. There are no school dota 2 teams (yet) with coaches and such, so if you want to learn you go with what the best do.

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Also, I don't know about any of the other service branches, but with the exception of color, the Base Guy's sweater looks like the US Navy's uniform sweater, so I didn't think it was weird or out of place at all.

Yeah. It definitely looks like a regular military sweater. I still like that they chose it over a full uniform, though.

All this Dishonored praise made me buy the game, despite not being at all interested in the setting it at first. Damn you.

Also, that Bobby Kotick story was fantastic. I can't believe Sean survived the drop.

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Just imagining the work involved making a branching narrative game to begin with, and then adding on the work of creating additional branches not only based on conversational/character choices but based on whether a character lived or died or whether you were the murderer... holy shit. The thing is, even if it was possible, how good could that story be? It would be stretched so thin that short of writing it for a decade it would end up feeling weird and unresolved. Which is actually a good argument for why the Mass Effect main story points are so unsatisfying. They had to write for dozens of paths (maybe more?) and so when they try and tie those paths into a central narrative the narrative feels far less compelling than the paths and the individual components of your particular playthrough. And there wasn't even the possibility of killing a character outside of specific points.

Deus Ex responds to the early deaths (or living) of quite a few characters--Paul, Anna, Gunther, Simons, etc. But of course what that means is basically those characters become irrelevant to the actual plot and just used for incidental scenes (or extra boss fights) after the point where they're likely to have died.

Far Cry 2 solves this by building in NPC redundancy. All the named mercenary friendlies are interchangeable for the purposes of the story and if any one of them die, the next one will step into their role for the next mission. It would be an efficient method of handling player's ability to fuck up in the context of a more elaborate story: write it in such a way that there is a group of backup people who can fulfill a story role, then don't put them all within a grenade blast radius in situations where the desirability of their murder is ambiguous. This kind of thing requires some deft narrative-smithing, but it sounds simpler to execute than a full-on branching narrative and it can be just as compelling.

There isn't really a lot of plot to Far Cry 2, though. I mean, it totally works for that game--the point is that underneath their superficial personalities all these people are sociopathic thugs and interchangeably violent power-grabbers, so they all act the same--but in most games the characters and plot would probably need to differentiate themselves more.

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RE: XCOM Central's sweater: yeah, it's just a military sweater, but it's still an interesting choice. A lot of people have never seen military sweaters (or at least can identify them as such). I actually like the other two characters (the two Doctors) in XCOM a fair amount too. They're very basic archetypes--the cautious engineer who's worried about the practical impact of all this new power, the scientist who finds mass destruction "exciting" due to the research possibilities--but they're limited enough that they never got on my nerves and I never expected more from them.

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I actually like the other two characters (the two Doctors) in XCOM a fair amount too. They're very basic archetypes--the cautious engineer who's worried about the practical impact of all this new power, the scientist who finds mass destruction "exciting" due to the research possibilities--but they're limited enough that they never got on my nerves and I never expected more from them.

Agreed. They don't really wear out their welcome, particularly since after the initial couple hours of the game they're used quite sparingly. It seems like there are two ways games end up being "well written", and in this case we can chalk another victory up to the game writing/characterisation knowing that it really isn't that great and just not thrusting itself upon us too much. That attitude also fits this game in general, as it hews close to a very basic and stereotypical perspective and plot regarding the aliens.

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The DOTA2 talk i found somewhat reflective of how i ended up as an interested observer of the competitive fighting game scene.

Initially it was just watching matches and using them as kind of a teaching tool, trying to emulate bits and pieces to improve my own play. After a point though, I feel like what happens is that knowledge kind of outpaces skill, and... With fighting games, at least, you get to that point where where you understand all the pieces, all the mechanics, but you just physically cannot execute on them. There is an actual barrier of physical ability there, breaking down the mechanics in your head isn't enough. I cannot make my hands do the things they need to do.

So i'm in this place where i still want to have that understanding rewarded, i want to see the narratives that can play out at the high end for these games, and that's kind of where the competitive stuff came in. A few hours every now and then watching an interesting livestream, as opposed to an absolutely enormous and possibly fruitless investment of time to try and get there myself.

You end up kind of mentally playing along, understanding the risks and difficulties in every action, letting your knowledge of the game decipher the story for you. A little bit living vicariously through it.

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The Kotick story was a definite return to form. Glad to have Idle Thumbs in my ears once again.

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The Overseer poisoning scene really confused me, i reloaded it about 8 times. Picking up the 'blackmail diary' after my first messy attempt i assumed there was an alternate non-lethal approach (consider this was the first mission)

I thought you could get the diary off him (pickpocket) and place it somewhere where a soldier would see it and then he'd get carted of to jail. So i kept trying to get the diary off him whilst keeping both guys alive and conscious...which is impossible, i wasted a lot of time spilling both drinks then following them down to the secret room where Mr friendly gets run through with cold steal. I finally gave up and just shot both of them in the face with sleeping darts (in slow motion of course)

It was just a case of over thinking i guess.

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You need to get the diary so you can find Emily; putting it somewhere for some random bozo to find and then hoping that they don't just assume the diary is a fake doesn't seem like the best choice because then you're SOL in terms of what to do next.

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The whole mission object to find the diary and bring it back to the pub completely slipped my mind, and so during the mission i was like hmmm whats this a 'blackmail diary' whats it for?? being an 'important mission item' i must be able to use it somewhere in this mission?? maybe i have to use it to blackmail the overseer somehow....

I'm pretty sure the item screen wasn't much help either, just stating 'Blackmail diary' :huh:

People who completely skip through the story must pick it up and be like...

funny-captions-wat-cat.gif

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Or you're like me and you know what it is for, and just completely forget to pick it up until you're back at the dropoff point, wondering where Samuel is, having not only forgot the blackmail journal but also arrived at the wrong extraction. :(

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I love the bumbling, inattentive Corvo that repeatedly emerges in stories about Dishonored. He's just got a lot on his mind right now, okay?

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Ok so I need the idle crew to help me here.. Breckon? I take back all Congrats Nicks if I can get any help. :-) Well I am stuck in Dr. Galvani's House after completing the mission for Screw Ball or whatever that thug's name is and I've gotten everything out of the house. Whenever I try and go back to the street level through either entrance my xbox completely freezes. The disk is in perfect condition. At one point before I was given this mission I entered the Galvani art house just for shits and giggles and killed a couple guards and ran out. Did that cause some glitch in the game? If so I lost a couple of missions that I completed PRETTY well which sucks. Is there anyone with any ideas about how to fix/get around this?

Thanks!

Miranda

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Mington,

Yeah. I lost every damn save file, so I have to delete them and start over. Makes me want to not play anymore.

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