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Jake

Idle Thumbs 157: Molymoto

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I basically did what Sean said and downloaded the episode on my phone, then drove out to the middle of nowhere with no cell service to listen to it

 

...unfortunately for me that place is my job.

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Dark Souls 2 really seemed to have a greater emphasis on coop. Because of some bosses like Nels said, but also the packs of enemies they'll throw at you at once in many areas. Also, the heatlh and humanity system which was revamped, item durability being a greater factor (most weapons degrade very fast when used), and the inclusion of the Small White Sign Soapstone. The normal White Sign Soapstone allows you place a sign down on the ground to be summoned to another's game world as a phantom, and generally ends in success when you defeat the area boss or in failure when you or the host dies. When successful, you're sent back to your world with your Estus Flasks refilled, items repaired, some item and additional souls for the boss kill, and in human form with your full health pool back. When unsuccessful you're sent back in the state you left.

 

The new Small White Sign Soapstone is slightly different in it allows you to coop for a few minutes as a shade, and after an amount of time or small number of enemies are killed your duty is fulfulled and you are sent back to your world with some of the same perks as the normal stone. Your healing flasks are refilled, spell charges are restocked, items are repaired, and you're human with your hp back if hollow before (you can still be summoned as human if you place your mark, but you can only summon people into your world when human). It's a bit like coming straight off a bonfire which is what normally repairs your items and restocks your flasks and spells, only you're human again and the enemies you've killed in your world will not have been respawned. Great for short bursts of coop and getting past difficult sections on the way to the bosses, or just joining up with some people for a few minutes to get your humanity back without using a consumable (human effigy), or repairing your items or replenish your spell charges without going back to a bonfire which will respawn the entire area. When you and others use the small stone, the marks on the ground used for summoning will be smaller, and you'll know when your or their time as a shade is running out because they'll start as a bright color but slowly darken and fade when it's about to end.

 

It definitely made a difficult game much easier for me to handle. I've finished Dark Souls & Demon's Souls mostly going solo, but without the whole coop system and multiple ways of of being summoned and summoning people into my own world I'm not sure how far I would have made it in Dark Souls 2. So often I had been out in the world in a bind, with weapons about to break and flasks dried out, and a quick session of coop with the small stone is all I need to get right. Then I can turn around and summon people to help me tackle a tough boss or section. It also helps that they're back to dedicated servers and GFWL isn't getting in the way, summoning help failed so often in Dark Souls because of the P2P setup. While cooperative play is easier to do and a bigger focus this time, they still are catering to the hardcore that want to be brutalized. There's a covenant very early on (on a cliffside path near the main hub) that you can join which disables cooperative play entirely. The Company of Champions, and if no coop wasn't enough, it apparently also makes enemies harder. Take care not to hop into that one on your first go.

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I swear I didn't forget Nick this time!  It's just that the Licorice Babies I got for him weren't covered by Amazon Prime so they had to be sent in a separate package.  The Big Hunk is supposed to be for Sean based on a suggestion by Jake.  Chris' Goldfish was suggested by Argobot.  Jake gets the Nerds Rope because Jake is Jake.

 

Also I too have a chub pack of Nerds Rope at home because I ordered one with the intention of sending it to the office, then realized it would be easier and cheaper to just have them all sent from Amazon instead of repacking them and shipping them myself.

 

And I had already started thinking about how to engineer a giant Goldfish when Sean mentioned me.

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Holy crap they actually mentioned the Idle Book Club!

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So-o

 

Long-time listener, first-time blah blah blah... love the show, etcetera, etcetera

 

Can 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).

 

Regardless, ta muchly for all the lols.

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Honestly, it seems to me, and my opinion is as uninformed and intuitive as that of Chris, that many of Japanese games that actually make it to Western audiences are doubling down on culturally specific tropes for the same reason that many Western games are doubling down on near-future militarism and jingoism, namely that these appeal to their home audiences in a safe and predictable way. The large-scale games industry (for some reason, I feel really uncomfortable using the qualifier "AAA" to describe Japanese games) worldwide still seems to be really shaken up just by the prospect of the recession a few years ago popping their bubble, even though now they're really just choosing a slow death instead. I've kept an eye on several Japanese game jams recently, which are enough to convince me that the Japanese indie scene is thriving like its Western counterpart, but their output has virtually no chance of hopping the ocean and language barrier, so we end up comparing large- and small-scale Western development to just large-scale Japanese development, what of it is successful enough to get ported and translated. Of course they're going to look stagnant, even moribund, in such circumstances.

 

I also want to point out that Nintendo is also playing it incredibly safe and sticking to anime-style tropes like everyone else, it's just that their own kind of "safe" is one that we've all grown up knowing and therefore don't find as off-putting.

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I find it interesting you guys mentioned how nice and peaceful it is going out into the wilderness and being sort of disconnected from cell service and wireless communication, while I just finished listening to some debates about Canada's plans to start implementing WiFi across national parks.

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Mentions of both Adventure Time (in the LootCrate segment) and potential full names for the Goldfish mascot made me realize that Adventure Time's Finn is probably short for Finnegan.

 

Also, looking forward to Thumbs impressions of Mario Kart 8!

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DARK SOULS 2!

Enemies don't permanently despawn, you can burn an item called a bonfire ascetic at a bonfire to reset an area completely, but it has the side affect of permanently increasing that area's difficulty to a level equivalent to whatever the next playthrough for that area would be, and the effect persists in subsequent playthroughs. So on NG, an area would become equivalent to NG+ and would remain elevated by that amount, relative to the rest of the game, on further playthroughs. Additionally, with this method, you could actually gain early access to NG+ exclusive items.
 

That probably sounds confusing, and it is. It's a super weird system.

Regarding difficulty: Personally, i've been finding the game easier than the first, but i know others have been finding it dramatically more difficulty. It seems to vary from person to person based on what playstyle they're trying to bring over from the first game.

DS2 does force you to fight mobs far more frequently than DS1 would have, but the game gives you the tools you need to deal with it. It's a lot of things that would have often been ignored in the first game, weapons with wide sweeping attacks that clang in narrow corridors, or spells with huge aoe's and slow casting. In DS2, these things become very important for crowd control, and you also have more slots for active equipment in DS2, so it's easy to carry multiple weapons to deal with different situations.

The flick targeting with the lock-on system is also more important in DS2 than it was in DS1, it's valuable to get a handle on switching targets in the middle of a fight. (DS2 also presents multiple lock-on points for many of the bosses, which is a big improvement over the last game's lock-on system.)

About the ugly main characters, you actually become progressively more gross and decrepit with your increasing levels of hollowedness in DS2. Your character's features become progressively more sunken and rotten, your hair starts falling out, etc.

Some of the other cool covenants: There's one that summons a protector for you when you're invaded, and one that lets you be the summoned protector. There's one that lets you set up a bunch of traps in a specific area and forcibly pull another player exploring that area in their own world into your world state to run the gauntlet you've prepared, while there's another covenant that simply summons multiple players to go try and gank people exploring another set of locations.

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I have yet to listen to this podcast, but seeing Dark souls 2 in the list of discussed games makes me giddy with excitement.

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I'm so excited that Sean got into DkS2 :D if he finishes it I hope he goes back and tries the first one, it'd be very interesting to hear what someone thinks of it after playing the sequel first.

 

I basically did what Sean said and downloaded the episode on my phone, then drove out to the middle of nowhere with no cell service to listen to it

I like doing that during summers, it's nice to be without internet for a while. I usually save up a few weeks worth of podcasts though hehe.

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Speaking of modeling the world at the moment of instantiation, I've many a time tried to imagine what a Garden of Eden game would be like. I never really came up with any concrete ideas but it probably involves diving down waterfalls and play-wrestling some tigers. (Probably also double-jumping was a real thing before the fall of man.)

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With regards to the Japanese game dev culture stuff if people are interested It's probably worth having a listen to Tone Control 11 with Ryan Payton. Since he talks quite a lot about his time with Kojima

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Remember that whole issue when people couldn't tell Nick and Jake's voice apart? I never had that issue, but listening to this talk about Dark Souls and Nels goes on for about like 5 minutes and then Sean chimes in at the end and it scared the hell out of me, because once in it, I thought Nels was just a slightly off pitch Sean.

 

It's maybe not so much the voice, it's the delivery, the exclamations, pattern, and choice parts where they pitch or lower their voice for effect are nearly exactly the same.

 

Anyone else hear this or is it just me?

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Anyone else hear this or is it just me?

 

No, but I was freaked out by the spliced-in Nick in this episode, plus the spliced-in Sean a few episodes back talking about the store.

 

Even Sean coming back after leaving during Reader Mail threw me off!

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

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See... Phil fish was right about Japanese games.

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NO why did I click that?

 

And I was waiting for someone to mention Phil Fish's comments on the cast.  It's ridiculous, though, to depict Japan as a monolith that only creates troubled Final Fantasy games.

 

One of the best parts of freeindiegam.es was seeing the Japanese indie games—that indie games are more than just Phil Fish.

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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.

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I have yet to listen to this podcast, but seeing Dark souls 2 in the list of discussed games makes me giddy with excitement.

 

I wasn't necessarily going to listen to it today, but then I saw that and had to start it!

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