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This was a good episode but the question of sexism was side-stepped a little with that whole 'returning of the game because of the protagonist's gender' story. I think Steve was hinting at it by repeating the phrase "that's weird", but Craig wasn't biting and then the conversation moved on. It's a shame, because NOLF is this weird, forgotten beacon of early 2000s gaming in which the gender problem in games was solved so wonderfully. I don't think Craig saw his feminist lead character as anything but an interesting story and a way to add depth to a character, and not as a meta-textual critique of video game narratives and audience expectations.

 

I liked this episode a whole lot, and I hadn't played much of NOLF. Good job, Steve.

 

Also, I didn't like F.E.A.R., but this enhanced my appreciation a lot.

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Oh, and it was a good point Craig raised about the difference between first and third person. It's incredibly alien to me that a person would return a game because they didn't feel like roleplaying as a female. The thought didn't even cross my mind when I played it. All I thought was: «this is so cool, this is so funny!» I loved the inventive spy weapons dressed up as lipstick and handbags.

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I don't know if this has been brought up in other episodes but could you possibly work on getting the recordings to be louder? I have my phone (Nexus 4 4.3 DogCatcher app) on speaker, full blast, and still need to hold it pretty close to my ear to hear everything. Just a small complaint, and it could just be my particular setup, but it hasn't been an issue with the other idle podcasts.

I really love these podcasts though. Do keep them coming :-)

 

I'll try and make sure eps 5 forward are louder, and tighter stereo. 4 (Clint) is already uploaded but I have yet to upload future ones so I'll see what I can do.

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I 100% disagree with Steve and Craig about knocked out enemies waking back up. If I knock a guy out and the game treats it like the guy is dead, it takes me out of the experience so much. It's not a dealbreaker (I still love Dishonored) but I hate it nonetheless. I feel like it cheapens the decision to go non-lethal and removes the emotional weight from killing somebody. If killing guys and knocking them out are treated the same mechanically, then the player who is deciding to kill people is doing it just for fun and its much easier for the nonlethal player to take the moral high ground, because the consequences are so few. By contrast, when unconscious enemies wake back up, it means that there is a significant cost to not killing them outright, which is much more interesting in terms of gameplay and themes. Think about it in real-world terms: if superspy Kate Archer could knock people out and know for certain that they would no longer pose a problem to her, then killing them would just make her a sociopath, wouldn't it?

 

What I'll say is that I believe the requirement here is to make it more difficult/costly/skillful to knock out the enemy in the first place. Basically put the challenge and strategy before engaging the enemy instead of after. I think I mentioned this on the cast, but something like knockout darts being very rare, or sneaking up on an enemy to choke them out being difficult, or the actual knockout action taking a long time and leaving you vulnerable, etc., makes the initial investment in going non-lethal the tradeoff, instead of "I have to kind of ambiently remember that that guy will wake up at some later date and screw me over."

 

Knockouts are permanent in Thief for instance. Their example is pretty much ideal imho.

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I guess it just depends on the focus of your game. I haven't played Thief, but Dishonored is a game about approaching a difficult situation and finding an interesting way through it. I suppose in that case, as you say, it makes sense to front load the non-lethal trade-off.

 

I guess I just wish that there were more games that focused on the aftermath of situation. Something like a game where you're faced with Dishonored-like scenarios, but the emphasis is placed on how you remove yourself from a situation, rather than how you infiltrate. In that case, I think having enemy's wake up would make total sense.

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Having enemies wake up after you knock them out strikes me as problematic for two different reasons.

 

One is a issue of credulousness, a person that gets knocked out would stay knocked out for the length of time that your typical stealth mission goes on for. If guards start waking up five minutes later I feel like that would feel more game-y (my opinion, anyway).

 

Another more serious problem is you would have to reconfigure the entire economy of resources in these games. Typically you have really limited resources in these games (in the original Thief you could only acquire items in between missions, for example), and guards that return to their routes could make what is an already challenging and difficult game potentially produce unwinnable scenarios.

 

As you say, there are probably some cool escape scenarios that could involve reviving guards, but I think it would have to be in a game that has substantively very different game mechanics from the stealth games that do exist. Dishonored is probably the closest along these lines where some of the powers are constantly reusable after a certain amount of time... if that system were pushed further I could see that working.

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I like the idea of guards who's knockout state isn't the same as death, but if you're using it to model some kind of behavior, it's hard to imagine a situation where a guard might wake up from a knockout and just return to his patrol or post. I bet you could make a neat game where your knockout put a 10 minute counter on until the whole level went into high alert/hunt mode, forcing the guards to move around. 

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As you say, there are probably some cool escape scenarios that could involve reviving guards, but I think it would have to be in a game that has substantively very different game mechanics from the stealth games that do exist. Dishonored is probably the closest along these lines where some of the powers are constantly reusable after a certain amount of time... if that system were pushed further I could see that working.

 

Yeah, I'm not saying "make the guards wake up in Dishonored and it would be better!" Of course these games are designed with the idea that knockouts and death are essentially the same thing. I'm just saying that I think there is an interesting design space to be explored there and I wish that more developers would try it out.

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In Eldritch when you kill monsters they will respawn if you loot their corpses. While I didn't find that to be an especially interesting mechanic in Eldritch, I could see something like that totally being interesting in a different context. Like, what if desecrating corpses meant you would later be haunted by ghosts?

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Really loving Tone Control, so far. I don't think i have a whole lot to add to the conversation here, i just want to say that, as a big fan of Monolith's games, it was a huge treat hearing the stories shared in the podcast.

Well, i can add one thing.

I always felt like there was a bit of a weird narrative subversion happening in FEAR. The way it sets you up as the silent protagonist with no identity or personality, but then starts pulling you deep into the convoluted threads of the of the story? I mean, the way silent protagonists are usually used to let the player fill the gaps, which instantly makes you assume, specifically on your part, the role of an outsider to the story. When FEAR subverts that, the way FEAR subverts that, i always thought it was kind of cool. (Even if it was, apparently, possibly accidental.)

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I'm so glad Steve brought up Paxton Fettel's death scene in FEAR, and we heard a bit about how it came to be. That is one of my favorite scenes in a game ever. It's so sublte and so satisfying - when does any game, or movie even, come down to one simple bullet eliminating the main bad guy? So cool. 

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I'm so glad Steve brought up Paxton Fettel's death scene in FEAR, and we heard a bit about how it came to be. That is one of my favorite scenes in a game ever. It's so sublte and so satisfying - when does any game, or movie even, come down to one simple bullet eliminating the main bad guy? So cool. 

 

I've always thought this, too. In the space of a few years, both FEAR and Bioshock suggested to me that the FPS had moved beyond the boss fight (well, except it hadn't, because both games had actual boss fights after their cool, subversive "boss fights"). I'll never forget firing frantically at Fettel the moment I got back control of my character and watching him slump over. For a second, I thought I'd broke the game and that I'd be dumped into the skybox with an error message at any moment.

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