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Jake

Idle Thumbs 157: Molymoto

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The invasion mechanic is no longer tied to being human or hollowed (at least as far as I can tell), so I spent a lot of the game human, because the zombie model is quite off putting. I got invaded a lot less in general. I did also have an easier time than 1, but that felt mostly because of knowing the systems from the get go and starting as a cleric which felt like an easy option (I didn't know this at the time). The cleric can get the heal miracle quite early and it mitigates the lack of an estus flask. On top of that the weapon the cleric starts with is one of the best one-handed strength weapons in terms of damage scaling. I quite enjoyed the game, pretty much on the same level as 1.

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Clerics also get lightning, which is pretty much the king of PvE.  My first character was a Fth/Str hybrid and it was a ton of fun. I did not realize how much harder some bosses are when you can't sling lightning bolts like Zeus though.   

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It's definitely an animation that conveys, "I am a lord and this is your smackdown.  Bow down before me and appreciate your smiting."
 
 

Do they still have the insanely detailed character creation.

 

If it didn't take me so long to get a character rolling, I would role play way more different characters.  

 

The only one I've done so far is Donatello (not able to be seen in this picture is that his armor actually has a turtle shell on the back):

post-33601-0-30642100-1399587271_thumb.jpg

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an I just ask, did you chaps encode this week's episode with a new/different codec?

I usually download and play your mp3's through Audacious, and on this occasion, it's lost the time-code... bloody annoying when it comes to scrolling the timeline (read, can't).

 

They're always mp3, so I'm not sure why that'd be happening.

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Re:Totoro skeletons

 

Some recommended reading.

 

A preview:

tumblr_lkbtbcWQ831qagto5o1_500.jpg

 

Damn you for posting this first. As a rebuttal, I'd like to quickly state that this isn't true, and that Studio Ghibli has publicly come out and denied such theory:

 

“No need to be alarmed. There is absolutely no truth or configuration that Totoros are the Gods of Death or that Mei is dead in My neighbor Totoro.”

 

Source: http://www.tofugu.com/2013/08/15/conspiracy-theory-totoro/ (the last paragraph. It's a translation from their japanese website)

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Hans Christian Anderson died after falling out of his bed (!!) and liver cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_Andersen#Death Clearly the most important discussion in the episode.

 

Christ! Guess I better be careful around beds.

 

 

For some reason, Nels' voice sounded higher pitched here than it does on Terminal7.

Maybe it's just recording on a different mic? Not sure what we use for Term7, but it's pretty unlikely it's the same as the ones here in the Thumbs office. Or maybe it was just pure excitement that tossed things up an octave.

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Y'know I really would be interested in seeing the guys' reactions to 999 and VLR, being with Telltale and all.

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Y'know I really would be interested in seeing the guys' reactions to 999 and VLR, being with Telltale and all.

 

I'm actually curious about this too. I've been wanting to play both of those games, and I feel like a Thumbs discussion would be the thing to finally push me to play them.

 

Side note: an amalgam of Molyneaux and Miyamoto would be either my favourite game developer of all time or never finish anything.

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The Japanese game scene is currently dominated by mobile games, chasing the success that Clash of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons have had over there. These games are as memorable and impactful as mobile games from the West, which is to say, not at all; hence, we don't see them over here. Some notable Japanese titles are still being developed, but most of the development effort in that country has been taken away from console games. And the PC has never been as much of a gaming platform there as it has here, let alone in other Asian countries.

 

Independent Japanese game developers have been active for several years, but aren't actively encouraged as they are here in North America. Some folks have been trying to change that, including a few Westerners. A few years ago, James Mielke (formerly of 1UP.com) put together a yearly event called BitSummit, intended to highlight and encourage smaller Japanese game developers. The folks at localization house 8-4 have been working with notable Japanese game developers to encourage more presentations at GDC. And companies like 8-4 and Playism have also been working with smaller Japanese game developers to manage their crowdfunding campaigns so that they can develop new games using international funding while keeping in touch with their worldwide fanbase to an extent that would otherwise be impossible.

 

So, this stuff is still going on. Smaller companies making games that can be appreciated worldwide is a big challenge, but even in Japan there are still groups of passionate developers that are willing to take it on. It's a challenge that faces Campo Santo as well, honestly; and at some point in the future I'd love to hear you guys talk about your own approach to that challenge. Is it important to you that Firewatch find some degree of an audience in countries outside the United States; and if so, what are some steps that you've considered taking in that direction as part of designing the game?

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So Epic Games is continuing their openness. So they made their roadmap public, as said in the podcast: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/sharing-the-unreal-engine-4-roadmap

And today they announced that they are going to make a new Unreal Tournament which will be partially community driven in development (still lead by Epic): https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/the-future-of-unreal-tournament-begins-today

These developments are really weird. UT-next will be "open source" for all UE4 subscribers. It will be gratis to play. And offer a marketplace for devs to sell maps, mods, etc.?

So, instead of making a full UE4 game, you can create and sell a UT-next mod.

OK, so it isn't just me. This IS weird... right? 

 

I get the impression they want to reassert the primacy of UE in the minds of fresh young game designers; time was, you wanted a job you learned UE (usually because you went to a "games school" and they told you to work with UE). I think the kids are more independently minded these days and weary of game schools (or maybe the game schools are getting better) and are gravitating towards things like Unity and Game Maker. This might make UE a more enticing tool to learn, and will likely be transferable to larger studios (assuming it catches on, and assuming people want to work at larger studios). 

 

Also, having a Unity-ish asset marketplace and a Steam-ish games marketplace AND maybe a Dota 2 / TF2 style in game (UT-Next) marketplace is probably appealing to management. 

 

I don't know why my knee-jerk reaction feels negative. This is probably going to be cool. 

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It absolutely seems like they're just trying to get a bunch of indies and modders using UE again, yeah. It's super, super unexpected and weird.

Honestly, and i think i might actually trust the Unreal community more than Epic to make a good UT sequel. I have no faith in Epic without Cliff Bleszinski. (UT3 was baaad.)

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I'm not overly skeptical about UE4 pivoting hard towards indies - it feels like exactly the kind of thing you do if you're priced to extract money from large developers, then that market starts to collapse just as a competitor that's offering their product for free starts to grab mindshare. There's a long history of this in computing, of formerly expensive software being forced into a price drop because their competitors have made their star product a commodity.

 

tl;dr capitalism at work

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Yeah, Epic's sudden indie friendliness seems like a turnaround (and is), but makes some sense. Once it became obvious they should do that then they seem like the kind of people who will go all-in on a thing;
"We're gonna be the market leader in indie-friendly. We'll be the most extreme at whatever we do."

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While I've nothing to contribute regarding Totoro skeletons or the intricacies of DS2, I can at least attest to the fact that remix0r is, indeed, spelled with a zero. :)

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They're always mp3, so I'm not sure why that'd be happening.

 

Yeah, the metadata between episodes appears to be [approximately] consistent - might just be a limitation of Audacious when interpreting the various tags contained therein.

Ta anyway.

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If Sean is curious about the history of vaccines beyond what can be found on Wikipedia, he should check out either Artenstein's Vaccines: A Biography, which is a collection of articles about the development of the different vaccines for various modern diseases, or Allen's Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, which is a popular history with a much bigger axe to grind but greater readability too. A more serious scholarly alternative to the latter is History of Vaccine Development, edited by Plotkin, but I haven't read it personally and the cover looks dry as dirt, so read at your own risk.

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One thing Epic is probably responding to is how most of the big publishers are fixing up their own engines:

EA -- Frostbite

Ubisoft -- Snowdrop

Square Enix -- Luminous

Capcom -- Panta Rei

Konami -- FOX

etc.

 

They gotta target the increasing number of new developers who can't afford to build their own engines. I'm also interested in how Crytek is trying to do the same thing.

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It absolutely seems like they're just trying to get a bunch of indies and modders using UE again, yeah. It's super, super unexpected and weird.

Honestly, and i think i might actually trust the Unreal community more than Epic to make a good UT sequel. I have no faith in Epic without Cliff Bleszinski. (UT3 was baaad.)

 

I thought UT3 was really good. Nothing's ever going to recapture UT '99 or the first time you played Bombing Run, but it was a good game. It just never generated a good enough audience.

 

Even years later, I played so many weird UT mods and mutators. That mod community is something this generation never had. I am excited, more UT please.

 

What a good intro.

 

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Another great episode.  I could talk for days on Demon's to Dark to Dark II Souls games.

 

Headline generator: "Is 'Project BEAST' the meets-meets-meets of Souls games?"

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I thought UT3 was really good. Nothing's ever going to recapture UT '99 or the first time you played Bombing Run, but it was a good game. It just never generated a good enough audience.

I thought the changes to Onslaught in UT3 completely ruined it, and i didn't like the maps or the feel of the game as much as UT2k4. (Which is my personal favorite in the series, but i'd also take the original UT over UT3.)

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