Idle Thumbs 160: Die Übiverse

[atte]

Wapeach -- an angry princess who never needs saving by anyone.

Wapeach! sounds like a whip... The adventurous princess Wapeach, we need another Tomb Raider reboot with her.

[Jake]

You can probably search deviantart for wapeach. I have not, but I bet you can.

[BusbyBerkeley]

You can probably search deviantart for wapeach. I have not, but I bet you can.

 

Welp. That's a thing I just did. They have Wadaisy too. Great. Thanks.

 

 

I'm being sarcastic, if you were wondering.

[Twig]

I get what you're saying now, though. Although when I imagine a game by Ubisoft (or any large company) being controversial I expect lip service, not anything anything that provokes a reaction in me like the example in question did.

That's good! Sorry I suck at words.

 

 

Welp. That's a thing I just did. They have Wadaisy too. Great. Thanks.

 

 

I'm being sarcastic, if you were wondering.

 

Because I knew it was a terrible idea, I Googled Wayoshi... and got... not many yoshis. Mostly... My Little Pony? What?

[Professor Video Games]

Oh this is fun.

 

Watoad has a voice that isn't grating and he is actually helpful.

 

Wabowser is the democratically elected and widely loved ruler of the wakoopas (who are also totally nice). Also he's a huge women's rights advocate.

[Henroid]

Wapeach -- an angry princess who never needs saving by anyone.

What about the angry princess who nobody bothers to save, no matter what rescue plots she tries to arrange?

[Reyturner]

Welp. That's a thing I just did. They have Wadaisy too. Great. Thanks.

I'm being sarcastic, if you were wondering.

boy, that Google image search gets darker and darker the further you scroll o.O

Also, that dumb face the Google car is making is totally the face a secretly sentient car would make to avoid having its budding personality wiped.

[BusbyBerkeley]

boy, that Google image search gets darker and darker the further you scroll o.O

Also, that dumb face the Google car is making is totally the face a secretly sentient car would make to avoid having its budding personality wiped.

 

[N1njaSquirrel]

[Nappi]

I love the horrified expression of the Google Self-Driving Car's face. I hope someone installs a "How am I driving?!" bumper sticker on all of them.

 

[SuperBiasedMan]

"How am I driving?!"

 

"With no human control."

[tegan]

Because I knew it was a terrible idea, I Googled Wayoshi... and got... not many yoshis. Mostly... My Little Pony? What?

Fun game: Google Image Search any book, comic, movie, TV show, etc. and see how many results you get before you run into a pony version. Whoops, I wrote "fun" when I meant "terrifying."

 

Wapeach -- an angry princess who never needs saving by anyone.

I thought that was Daisy.

[Berzee]

Tch_Dogs...

[Zeusthecat]

Tch_Dogs...

 

Is that a Cesar Millan simulator?

[Spenny]

Speaking of cars and games with dogs in the title and driving like a maniac in open worlds, Sleeping Dogs is really great at getting you to drive without colliding into things, they time you how long you go without colliding and rank you against your friends. 

[Matoyak]

So... am I the only person who remembers that at the end of the first bit of footage we were shown of Watch_Dogs (at the same E3 as the orginal Trailer) that they blew up a car, pulled out some kind of submachinegun, and shot a whole bunch of people from behind cover? Then had a cutscene where the main character stood over a guy who was bleeding on the pavement, talked all big and bad, then shot him as he was begging for his life? This was E3 2012, and both of the following videos released on the same day...and if I'm remembering correctly, I believe the gameplay one was actually first at their press conference, (a memory supported by wikipedia, as the official trailer was only "released that same day" according to it):
http://youtu.be/1U8KsQPIrY0
and

I'm really confused at to where people got the idea this would be anything other than an open-world crime game with some hacker flavor. People only seem to remember the first, which is a cool video...but for example, Homefront had a similarly stylistic trailer.

 

Not defending the game, haven't played it. Likely won't, isn't my cup o' tea. But when the very first gameplay demo shows you blow shit up and shoot guys to death with a machinegun...why, uh...why would you think it wouldn't be that? Did everyone get selective amnesia about that latter third of the gameplay demo?

[Jutranjo]

Speaking of cars and games with dogs in the title and driving like a maniac in open worlds, Sleeping Dogs is really great at getting you to drive without colliding into things, they time you how long you go without colliding and rank you against your friends. 

 

Sleeping no underscore Dogs also had incentives for not running people over. To get a perfect score you also had to not touch anything while driving or break any street lamps or even little puny fences and traffic cones. To get street cred you had to at the same time fuck up people by sticking them into air conditioning units.

 

The game still has/had the same problem, you can be a fucking psycho in between missions. There's not much point to it though. And guns are harder to find.

 

Is Assassins Creed the only series that had "don't kill civilians" as a limit when you wander around? Every town had 9 guards for every civilian though.

[Bjorn]

Not defending the game, haven't played it. Likely won't, isn't my cup o' tea. But when the very first gameplay demo shows you blow shit up and shoot guys to death with a machinegun...why, uh...why would you think it wouldn't be that? Did everyone get selective amnesia about that latter third of the gameplay demo?

 

I never watched any of the original Swatch_Dogs stuff, just basically gleaned things from gaming blogs and general gaming chatter.  I certainly had the impression that it was going to have a focus that was farther afield than your typical open world action game. 

 

Now that's not necessarily Ubisofts fault, but there are reasons that the impression of the game developed as it did for people who were just paying attention casually to it.  And this is a thing that happens.  Like when Brutal Legend was released and people were SHOCKED! to find out that it had RTS elements.  Shocked and pissed that their funny action game suddenly had this RTS thing shoehorned into it.  If you paid attention in the slightest to the early stuff on it, or read any interviews with Schafer, that was clearly one of the goals and features of the product from super early on.  But lots of people missed out on that info anyways. 

[Architecture]

Is Assassins Creed the only series that had "don't kill civilians" as a limit when you wander around? Every town had 9 guards for every civilian though.

Bethesda-developed games don't prevent you from murdering the innocent, but it certainly is disincentivized.

[Badfinger]

I enjoyed this episode.

 

I wish I got more out of Mad Men chat. It's just another show on the pile that's too long to list that one day I might watch. I still enjoy you guys expounding on it.

[Jutranjo]

Bethesda-developed games don't prevent you from murdering the innocent, but it certainly is disincentivized.

 

Morrowind had some benefits from finding out what NPC didn't have any quests in a given town and then killing them so you could use their house as storage.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Bethesda-developed games don't prevent you from murdering the innocent, but it certainly is disincentivized.

 

As someone who played through Fallout New Vegas wiping out any settlement I came across, the disincentives aren't that powerful unless you really like the actual questing.

I think the main downside was the realisation that I couldn't ever use power armor because I needed to do one of two specific quests but I had already killed the people that would let me do the relevant quests. Aside from that, I got way more loot and fun out of my self directed mission to destroy everyone. Because the quests I'd be set were more basic monotonous and less challenging than figuring out a strategy to take down every single person in a town.

 

(technically that wasn't a Bethesda game, but from what I've seen I don't think the disincentives vary a lot)

 

I should say, I didn't set out intending to kill everyone I met, but when I was in the starting town I was stealing everything I could find, but carefully. When no-one could see, but then random townspeople attacked me and called me a thief anyway. So I fought back, killed the townspeople. Turns out this made all of them attack me, so I killed them all. Gathered the loot and moved on to the next town. When I got there the talking and quests were already boring me, and a voice at the back of my head said "It was pretty easy to kill them all off last time..." so, thus continued the rampage. I recommend trying it, I think it makes for a better story.

 

Both it and Sleeping Dogs definitely try to push the player in one way, but the problem is they want to let everything be viable, so they don't want to actively punish the player for things going wrong. I was particularly disappointed that at the end of Sleeping Dogs

 

it doesn't matter one bit how shitty a cop you were, how many people you killed in revenge and how much blood is on your hands. Everyone is horrified that your boss killed the mobster that's kind of a nice guy and you liked and that he sparked conflict between the triads in order to make them fight and lose numbers. Your character has been literally ruthless in his bloodlust, other triad members often act surprised about how aggressive your character is when you win fights and you gun down hordes of people. But at the end is your handler that did things for selfish reasons people hate, and your protagonist who selflessly cared about people in the end is a good guy no matter what.

 

I feel Dishonoured is a bit of a better example in that the world has serious consequences for you depending on the total killcount, but I didn't play enough of it to get a good idea whether the intended drawbacks worked out or not as proper disincentives. Just on paper though, I think the idea that your actions are worsening the world (and use this to inhibit gameplay so the player feels the drawback) is a better way to look at it than just that you get bonus points for not killing everyone.

[Stuart]

 

Beautiful.

[Laxan]

All this Waluigi love. Let's not forget whose year it's been.

 

[Justin Leego]

Year of Dishonored Luigi