Steve

Oh my holy gosh in heaven it's Clint Hocking everybody! Tone Control Ep. 4

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The reasoning behind making the animals drop dead after being bumped by anything is super-interesting.

I mean that they saw people gleefully murdering animals as being a problem to be fixed. Far Cry 3 handled that ... differently.

 

Also, jeez that guy has been incredibly lucky in his career. I mean, it helps that he's obviously talented and motivated enough to actually take advantage of that luck. But man.

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So people having fun killing virtual animals is a "problem" but killing virtual people, lets make that as fun as possible. This kind of stuff bugs me to no end.

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So people having fun killing virtual animals is a "problem" but killing virtual people, lets make that as fun as possible. This kind of stuff bugs me to no end.

 

I haven't heard the part to which both of you are referring yet, but if the animals behaved as psychotically as the people do in Far Cry 2, I'd feel substantially better about killing them, although if you think that killing people in Far Cry 2 is fun, per se, then you're definitely playing a different game than me.

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This episode. It is art.

 

Also, for a second there, I legitimately thought your episode got jacked by Jake, Steve. Then I saw no wizard next to Far Cry 2 dude.  :P

 

 

Jacked by Jake. That has an odd ring to it.

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I really liked Clint's explanation of the weapon jamming, and how that helps support all the sorts of emergent game play that happens in the simulation of the game. Personally the weapon jamming never bothered me nearly as much as the weapon degradation in System Shock 2, which was really annoying and game-y in a bad way. The weapon jamming in Far Cry 2 felt way more natural.

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I really liked Clint's explanation of the weapon jamming, and how that helps support all the sorts of emergent game play that happens in the simulation of the game. Personally the weapon jamming never bothered me nearly as much as the weapon degradation in System Shock 2, which was really annoying and game-y in a bad way. The weapon jamming in Far Cry 2 felt way more natural.

 

Yeah I agree. I'm not sure what it was-- the balancing of how long it took for guns to jam, or the fact you could unjam them during combat, or the fact your ability to maintain them wasn't tied to a stat/resource, or what... but it definitely felt a lot less bad in Far Cry 2. Also maybe because it fit in with the world more: everything breaks/degrades/must be repaired in FC2 (cars, boats, buddies etc.)  so it fits. Also I guess guns feel less permanent in FC2-- if your gun jams you can just ditch it and pick up another one back at your weapon storehouse later, whereas when your upgraded shotgun in SS2 broke, you were basically screwed until you could scrounge a repair tool to fix it.

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Yeah, that's true on both counts. Weapons breaking down in an advanced sci-fi economy with massive spaceships seems a lot more implausible compared to that happening in a war-torn country in Africa. It also isn't as punishing since you can always switch out weapons the next time you get to an arms dealer location, you don't have the scarcity problem that exists in SS2.

 

Also I think another thing that causes it to work is something that Chris or Nick brought up when they were streaming a FC2 playthrough on twitch, which is that on normal difficulty no matter how chaotic and dicey a situation you find yourself in you can usually flail around enough, and end up okay most of the time so even though the game throws all these unexpected problems at you -- gun jamming, needing malaria pills, something next to you catching fire, etc. -- it's not as if that will kill you most of the time so the game isn't really punishing you.

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Yeah I agree. I'm not sure what it was-- the balancing of how long it took for guns to jam, or the fact you could unjam them during combat, or the fact your ability to maintain them wasn't tied to a stat/resource, or what... but it definitely felt a lot less bad in Far Cry 2. Also maybe because it fit in with the world more: everything breaks/degrades/must be repaired in FC2 (cars, boats, buddies etc.)  so it fits. Also I guess guns feel less permanent in FC2-- if your gun jams you can just ditch it and pick up another one back at your weapon storehouse later, whereas when your upgraded shotgun in SS2 broke, you were basically screwed until you could scrounge a repair tool to fix it.

It reminds me of playing in survival mode in minecraft. The degradation mechanics reinforce the value in items, and the most exciting moments can happen after your sword breaks and you have to improvise alternative tactics to stay alive.

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Great episode! Did like the Far Cry 2 bit, no matter how dug into the ground it is. And screw the modern opinionated in a way that is different from me view that colonialism is bad! South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US. Way better than many other neighboring areas, no matter how many people died because of it. The opinionated in a way that is different from me view is always "you can never kill people or sacrifice people because that's always bad!" As if the real world operates on the same logic of movies and tv shows, where everyone can always be saved and everything out all the time.

 

It just reminds me of the idiotic rants of senators on how torture works because they watch 24. The native americans were all good and never scalped and tortured people or took slaves or burned down random innocent villages. If you just believe you can do it everything and everyone can have a perfectly happy ending and tiny tim can get his leg back and if you don't believe in all of that at once you're evil!

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And screw the modern opinionated in a way that is different from me view that colonialism is bad! South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US. Way better than many other neighboring areas, no matter how many people died because of it.

 

I haven't listened to the cast yet, but I'm curious about your definition of colonialism. For example, you seem to be saying that South Africa is (has it) way better than the neighboring countries, majority of which were colonized at some point, because of colonialism? What is the distinction here?

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And screw the modern opinionated in a way that is different from me view that colonialism is bad! South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US. Way better than many other neighboring areas, no matter how many people died because of it.

 

I don't think that people are talking about societies built upon the genocide and replacement of native peoples by and with immigrant Europeans when they use the word "colonialism" in discourse. Those may have been colonies, but they're not colonialism. People are more talking about Cecil Rhodes, smallpox blankets, and opium dens when they use the word "colonialism." To build upon Nappi, that's why the other neighboring areas are so bad, because they only had brown people living in them and therefore had less standing in the way of total exploitation than the United States or South Africa.

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Great episode! Did like the Far Cry 2 bit, no matter how dug into the ground it is. And screw the modern opinionated in a way that is different from me view that colonialism is bad! South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US. Way better than many other neighboring areas, no matter how many people died because of it. The opinionated in a way that is different from me view is always "you can never kill people or sacrifice people because that's always bad!" As if the real world operates on the same logic of movies and tv shows, where everyone can always be saved and everything out all the time.

 

It just reminds me of the idiotic rants of senators on how torture works because they watch 24. The native americans were all good and never scalped and tortured people or took slaves or burned down random innocent villages. If you just believe you can do it everything and everyone can have a perfectly happy ending and tiny tim can get his leg back and if you don't believe in all of that at once you're evil!

 

Yeah, I'm going to respectfully disagree here. First Nations people certainly were (and are) not perfect. They are (and were) human beings, with all the faults and virtues of humanity, just like people from anywhere else. They did some things that seem pretty bad from our point of view. And in many ways, many of them were complicit in some of the processes of colonization going on from the 16th century up until the present day.

 

However, that in no way justifies the genocides perpetrated on them, nor the continued subjugation they face today. I am not super familiar with the US case, other than the big examples, but I am rather familiar with the Canadian situation and I can tell you, one hundred percent, that the Canadian government committed genocide on an entire group of people. Even getting past the French and British colonial period, going into the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of First Nations children were stolen from their parents and placed in residential schools, were they were systematically divorced from their culture. They were prevented from wearing their own clothes, beaten for speaking their own languages and sexually abused on a regular basis. The number of children who committed suicide because of this is staggering, not to mention those that died simply because of the situation. Those that survived were sent back to reserves where they were once again prevented from practicing their own culture and their own form of government, not to mention scarred from their experiences in childhood, making it difficult to make their own way as adults.

 

That is genocide. It's reprehensible. It makes me sick to think that my country did it. Were there good intentions? Certainly, from many of the people involved. People thought that they were helping these poor backwards people. Did it turn out terribly for everybody? Certainly not. There are many First Nations people who speak well of their time in the residential schools. But there are many more who died or were permanently scarred. It doesn't matter that there were good intentions. We all know what paves the road to hell. And hell it certainly was.

 

That's colonialism. It's a mindset and a practice that says "my people are better than yours, so we can take what we want and make you do what we want." It's disgusting. It's no way to live.

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...millions of First Nations children were stolen from their parents and placed in residential schools, were they were systematically divorced from their culture. They were prevented from wearing their own clothes, beaten for speaking their own languages and sexually abused on a regular basis. The number of children who committed suicide because of this is staggering, not to mention those that died simply because of the situation. Those that survived were sent back to reserves where they were once again prevented from practicing their own culture and their own form of government, not to mention scarred from their experiences in childhood, making it difficult to make their own way as adults.

 

Just wanted to highlight that part and add that the same system (with the same problems) took place in the US.  In my town, there is one of those old boarding schools, which has been transformed into a full university now.  But it operated as a boarding school all the way into the '50s or '60s. 

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The reasoning behind making the animals drop dead after being bumped by anything is super-interesting.

 

I agree.  That seems like a super-useful game design discovery.  If you want to discourage some kind of anti-social or undesirable player behavior, the best way to do it is to make it utterly boring.

 

That strikes me as more likely to be effective even than some harsh penalty. 

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I agree.  That seems like a super-useful game design discovery.  If you want to discourage some kind of anti-social or undesirable player behavior, the best way to do it is to make it utterly boring.

 

That strikes me as more likely to be effective even than some harsh penalty. 

 

Yeah I really enjoyed hearing Clint's reasoning on that, and it makes total sense. Players do things to get a reaction-- even a punishment (like the animals going berserk and trying to kill you if you shoot them or something) is a reaction, and will encourage the player. In an interactive frame, when the player takes an action and there is zero reaction, they no longer have any reason to repeat the action.

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Just for reference, I find THIS discussion far less fascinating.

 

But doesn't it make sense in a thread about Far Cry 2 that something else should naturally emerge from the conversation, leading you to somewhere you didn't expect?  In this case, an enforced native boarding school is our grenade rolling down a hill.

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