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Jake

Idle Thumbs 89: The Ship Economy

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Idle Thumbs 89:

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The Ship Economy

Your jet ski lies outside, beached and on fire. Cassowarys peck at the glass door, firmly latched. In one hand, C4; the other, a detonator. As your eyes adjust, before you can make out the faces of the patrons and tellers turning your way, you realize you're already speaking. "Give me all your gift codes to The Ship and nobody has to get hurt."

Games and Hardware Platforms Discussed: Steam Box, The Ship, Dota 2, Far Cry 3, Borderlands 2, Perspective, Zombies Run!

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i think the only actual unique or different thing about borderlands 2 is the weird stats the weapons have, but they even get all to similar after a while, everything else about it i have played thousands of times, and basically it is just a death match with loot and filler space

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I also tend to stay away from graphical mods with a single exception: the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The complete mods for SoC and CoP added some allowed me to be pulled further into believing I was walking around the Zone.

Also, congratulations of finishing the trail of tears! I've had a few friends expressing that they cried upon finishing the Walking Dead. I'd hand you the award myself, except I didn't have the fliff handy to buy my way into having dinner with you fine gentlemen.

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I totally get where Sean is coming from in regards to some of the writing in Borderlands 2. I think it's a matter of the narrative serving cross purposes with the game. The meta narrative of a Borderlands game (like a Diablo or Torchlight) is to get all the loot. And that happened to be the explicit narrative of the first Borderlands (which is what made the ending so disappointing).

But in B2, they've added more layers: rescuing a town, killing a villain, being a video game hero essentially. So there's a good amount of writing in the game that vilifies Jack, in order to build you up to fight him. And that stuff feels rather superflous to the meat and potatoes of the game, which is shooting guys and picking up the shiny stuff that they drop. And it feels especially off tone when it dives into the more sadistic things he does (like the audio logs where whats-her-name gets shot).

Where the writing does shine is in random NPC barks and most of the incidental stuff like mission briefings. There's a ton of clever writing here that doesn't attempt to sell the urgency of the overarching narrative, but instead relishes in the actual playing of the game. When nomads groan "don't scavenge my stuff!" in their dying breaths or when maniacs scream "I smell delicious!" as they burn alive, it kind of plays perfectly against the oddball tone of the game and the degree to which you're really supposed to take it seriously. There's also a ton of great 4th wall breaking like claptrap giving you ridiculous unattainable quests and in one of the DLCs the character being like "Well, I did all this work, built an empire to get to this goal that you're going to achieve in a few hours, but I'm not bitter" Which makes the over-serious Jack plot feel even more out of place.

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I think there's a ton of personalty in the writing of the game and Anthony Burch has done a really good job in that; for certain. And overall, I'm really impressed with the VO quality and reading of his writing throughout. I'm always just really confused about what to be feeling at any particular moment while playing (and that might just be me being sensitive to the macabre aspects of the experience).

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Really interesting points about Triple A development being a vertical-shaped industry. The games industry is fascinating to me, because in a lot of ways its rise and fall mirrors what is currently happening in the publishing and film industry, only at an exponentially higher rate and without the benefit of cultural legacy that has helped keep movies and books afloat. There was an article written a few years ago (link here for those who are interested) that was about the slow decline of the mainstream film industry and I think a lot of the points are relevant to what is happening with games (namely that as games/movies become more financially expensive to create, developers/studios will be less likely to take any creative risks for fear of lost profits).

Oddly enough, I think games as a medium is more likely to survive this kind of vertical integration than books or movies, because good games don't necessarily need the big studios to be successful, whereas it would be a little bit more financially difficult to distribute a book/movie without the support of a studio or publisher.

Anyway, great podcast, glad to have everyone back after the break!

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According to this episode, I'm the only human ever to not own The Ship :(

Oh don't worry, I don't own it either.

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I think there's a ton of personalty in the writing of the game and Anthony Burch has done a really good job in that; for certain. And overall, I'm really impressed with the VO quality and reading of his writing throughout. I'm always just really confused about what to be feeling at any particular moment while playing (and that might just be me being sensitive to the macabre aspects of the experience).

yeah it has personality in the VO but when you are shooting people in the face to get loot and XP it all seems irrelevant, except for a few small funny moments (lame party with claptrap) i mainly just followed markers to kill people then turned in the mission, who the mission was for and why didn't matter, because most of the time all i heard was screams and all i saw was blood.

and i spent most of the time with the NPC's just punching them in the face and getting a slight reaction of a head nod, maybe if guards arrested me or something i wouldn't have spent most of the time punching them in the face, but because nothing you did would effect them that is what i would do

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Shooting people in the face is 99% of this game, true. It's a testament to Burch that he managed to squeeze into the remaining 1% far more personality than any other AAA shooter to come out this year by a long shot.

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I'm glad everybody is as bored with shooting faces as I am. I got Spec Ops tonight. My interest in its attempt to convey an overt message is extremely tempered by the drudgery of the combat. The problem may be heightened by my playing with a mouse. The combat loop is 1) look for face, 2) click face.

Maybe you are correct in your assessment that the noteworthy achievements among mainstream games are made less effective by a lack of genre variety. More than anything I find shooting humans to be a distasteful use of my time.

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I think I discussed this on the forums before with regards to Torchlight 2 (or maybe I just meant to discuss it...) but the kill & loot formula of action RPGs (Borderlands included) just doesn't do anything for me anymore. I also really enjoyed Diablo when that came out, my line of thinking was that it was like Nethack, but action-y. But over time, that breaks down. A game like Nethack or any of the other famous roguelikes work because of all the consequences, risks, and obstacles that occur. With ARPGs its all the highs without any of the lows, which results in a flat experience. When the game taps into that gambling addict portion of your brain you don't really notice it that much, or if you do you don't care. But if it doesn't get it hooks into you that way you're just not going to feel anything about the game.

I had a good time playing Borderlands 1, but when I think back on it it was just because I was playing online co-op with friends, and we would just be talking about other random things, I don't really recall the gameplay experience at all, it was just this sort of thing going on in the background of hanging out. I remember the few times I played single player it just felt really dull.

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The Dota 2 art guidance you guys mentioned during towards the end is really, really great. Cannot recommend it enough if you're interested in how Valve designs their characters and artwork.

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Shooting people in the face is 99% of this game, true. It's a testament to Burch that he managed to squeeze into the remaining 1% far more personality than any other AAA shooter to come out this year by a long shot.

but in the crazy world it is set the personality is crazy, if borderlands 2 was a film it would be super mario bros

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You should use the tracking app to see what routes you take while using zombie run and see if it's becomes random or over time do you use the same few routes over and over again.

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Just used this week's sponsor- Hover.com- to register a site and I'm going to go ahead and second all the positive things that were said about it on the episode.

If anyone has suggestions for a good hosting site, I'd like to hear those.

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I'm always just really confused about what to be feeling at any particular moment while playing (and that might just be me being sensitive to the macabre aspects of the experience).

The tone of the world in Borderlands is sort of the end result of the 'kill it and take its stuff' game, which I think is part of what builds this weird uncomfortable feeling that led to me not wanting to play it much. There are shards of amazing technology but everyone lives in these were shacks assembled out of garbage, and no one gives a fuck about anyone else, they're just trying to get more stuff for themselves, which is also what you are trying to do when you murder all these other human beings. It's weirdly honest, in a way, about the end result of the 'kill things take stuff' mentality, and it ends up feeling really gross in a way they almost certainly didn't intend. (for me, at least)

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Just used this week's sponsor- Hover.com- to register a site and I'm going to go ahead and second all the positive things that were said about it on the episode.

If anyone has suggestions for a good hosting site, I'd like to hear those.

I HOPE THE SITE YOU ACTUALLY USED WAS HOVER.COM/WIZARD

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Just used this week's sponsor- Hover.com- to register a site and I'm going to go ahead and second all the positive things that were said about it on the episode.

If anyone has suggestions for a good hosting site, I'd like to hear those.

(This is not an official sponsorship or anything)

Thumbs is hosted with linode, who I highly recommend if you need a VPS (dedicated server that's actually a virtual machine). There's a referral link that probably gives Thumbs a little credit if you use it, but I have no idea how much: http://www.linode.com/?r=8be5080918c4c13daab541bdb3eb4c75133cfe07

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You should hire me at Telltale. I'll tear off my roots and move to the US in a heartbeat. Every two months or so I'll have one of these nice ideas for your game, it'll totally be worth paying me a full salary :P

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