GWJ Conference Call Episode 407

Divinity: Original Sin Finished, Elite: Dangerous Beta, Freedom Planet, Walking Dead Season 2, Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas , Are Games a Little Broken a Little Better?, Your Emails and More!

Join Shawn, Elysium, Julian, Allen and Rob Zacny as they debate whether or not games are a bit better when they're a little broken.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind. You can even send a 30 second audio question or comment (MP3 format please) if you're so inclined.

Chairman_Mao's Timestamps

00.03.40 Wolfenstein (it's excellent, get it!)
00.04.08 Divinity: Original Sin
00.08.16 Elite Dangerous Beta
00.12.01 Freedom Planet
00.14.02 Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 4
00.16.06 Wayward Manor
00.22.55 Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas
00.30.01 Europa Universalis 4
00.32.31 The joy of sticks and HOTAS
00.41.15 This week's topic: Are games a little bit better when they're broken?!
01.03.37 Your emails!

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Show credits

Sponsors: 
Music credits: 

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Comments

I had a bunch of friends who for months spent their days locked in private Halo 2 arenas looking for glitches. They'd be jumping up onto the ceiling of the worlds. Weird.
I'll forgive a great game for glitching, but the one thing that will test my limits is a game that crashes losing hours of gameplay.
My flightstick was used every day for years with X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, but recently is buried in a box next to a bunch of Fighting Fantasy novels.
The space-sim renaissance that is coming is really exciting, and I can't wait to get the stick back out.
Now, how do you perform a perfect barrel-roll again ?

Now that I've played the beta I wanted to update a bit on Elite. It's exciting and pretty fun to explore right now, but definitely a beta in every sense of the term. If you're not into vanishing space stations, weird docking glitches and lots of stuff that plain doesn't work yet, you may want to hold off a bit.

I like this idea of completing games through watching videos. That's a quick way to pile independence!

In my humble opinion Tenchu Z > Assassins Creed.

Good episode, welcome back Shaun! Quick question... what was the music between segments this time? Is that more Willowtree stuff? I really enjoyed it.

To the question: "Are Games a Little Broken a Little Better?"

I will answer with a quote from Fraser... yes Fraser.

"Niles: It was an exquisite meal, marred only by the lack of even one outstanding cognac on their carte à digestif.
Frasier: Yes, but think of it this way Niles... What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal?... An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.
Niles: Ah... quite right. To impossible standards. [They clink glasses.]"

I used to have a really low tolerance of jank and glitches in games but, these days, I'll put up with some rough edges for a great game. The core of the experience needs to be functional though. Poor or unresponsive controls, deliberate or not, are a deal breaker for me. I'd also rather not have weird visual glitches. I'm playing a game to be in the game world and glitches pull me out of the experience and I'm not someone who finds them inherently entertaining (except maybe that one with the boat in AC: Black Flag.)

It may be that, as was touched on in the podcast, games that are pushing the boundaries and doing something new and interesting are going to have some problems. Possibly the flaws aren't what make the game great, instead they are just a side effect of the kind of innovation required to deliver something special.

pinkdino99 wrote:

Now, how do you perform a perfect barrel-roll again ?

Tap Z (L on modern conrollers) or R twice. Duh!
IMAGE(http://pad3.whstatic.com/images/thumb/8/8c/Do-a-Barrel-Roll-in-Star-Fox-64-Step-1Bullet1.jpg/670px-Do-a-Barrel-Roll-in-Star-Fox-64-Step-1Bullet1.jpg)

Just reminded me of best glitch ever....

Zoso1701 wrote:

I like this idea of completing games through watching videos. That's a quick way to pile independence!

I've definitely pulled that maneuver, both to finish something I'm not interested in and to see endings I didn't choose.

I never played the original Deus X, but isn't that (based on descriptions I have read) a game that succeeded for its "broken" nature (something about poor pathing, detection, and AI in general).

As for an ARPG option there is Marvel Heros 2015, it does a decent enough job with the whole loot pinata concept.

22:30 "karmic payback for that ______ video"
bound?
I couldn't hear.

Oh 90s music. Once I saw a commercial for a megacollection of 90s/00s rock music ON CD's!
I almost got it, kinda wish I had.

Now I have to look for it. No, it wasn't Buzz Ballads, too small to be a collection, much less a megacollection.

120 songs about right.
Maybe it was Buzz Box.

Sean's issues with hard counters in Hearthstone sound similar to some of the frustrations I had with Solforge prior to the first big expansion. I'm not sure if there's something else going on with the gameplay in Hearthstone, but it sounds like there's too small a card pool so you're locked into needing specific cards to counter-act certain strategies. Hopefully once they add a big expansion to the game that facet will improve the experience.

If not, well... you've got plenty of other options out there if you want to whet your appetite for CCGs without needing to dedicate shelf-space (or money) to the hobby.

The talk about Elite Dangerous was very intriguing.
Loved that game when I was still a teen.
The description of the mission where you had to keep your energy signature low so you could sneak up on enemies in an asteroid belt made me drool. But hearing about OculusRift DK2 support in Elite and the immersion factor of the VR kit made me cum soooo hard!
I had to order the Elite Beta immediately.
Can not wait to get my DK2 kit... ordered it a while back. Since I heard the excellent podcast I keep refreshing the order page multiple times a day.

Elite Dangerous on DK2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyf...

Some of my favorite all-time games are buggy messes. The glitchy-ness of a game can be due to goal overreach by developers because they want to push the boundaries and do interesting things - (edit, just like Higgledy mentions above).

Example: When Daggerfall came out, it had a lot of bugs because of the scale and scope of world they were trying to create was so massive they couldn't tighten down everything perfectly. Then comes Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim each with more polish, but one could argue, less and less charm with certain things removed (spears, skills, simplified magic, etc. You've heard 'em all). Another example are the old Troika games like Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum. They are not playing it safe like, say, making another Baldur's gate clone. The Troika guys really wanted to create the pen and paper experience in game form. It's tough, and they ultimately paid for it. But Temple is one of my cult favorites.

Perhaps they mean quarter as in

a : a division or district of a town or city
b : the inhabitants of such a quarter
9
a : an assigned station or post
shoptroll wrote:

Sean's issues with hard counters in Hearthstone sound similar to some of the frustrations I had with Solforge prior to the first big expansion. I'm not sure if there's something else going on with the gameplay in Hearthstone, but it sounds like there's too small a card pool so you're locked into needing specific cards to counter-act certain strategies. Hopefully once they add a big expansion to the game that facet will improve the experience.

If not, well... you've got plenty of other options out there if you want to whet your appetite for CCGs without needing to dedicate shelf-space (or money) to the hobby.

Yeah, thinking back to all the games I've played, the one mechanic I'm never a fan of is hard counters.

The biggest turn-off to me in the Pokemon games always comes down to "oh, it's the Grass gym? Well, I've got 1 Fire type, and he's 5 levels below the gym grunts. I don't even need to sweat this".

My take on system optimization always seems to be figuring out the best kit for ALL situations, so I never have to make constant changes to my loadout. And nothing irks me off more than getting 2/3rds through a game and finding out my chosen play style just doesn't work at the end game :/

BooBeeBooBeeBumBum wrote:

Another example are the old Troika games like Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum. They are not playing it safe like, say, making another Baldur's gate clone. The Troika guys really wanted to create the pen and paper experience in game form. It's tough, and they ultimately paid for it. But Temple is one of my cult favorites.

One of the things that can convince me to get an old game is a community patch like the Circle of Eight mod for ToEE or Wesp's mod for Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

The existence of such a thing tells me that the game grabbed enough people seriously enough to put real work into fixing it. And also means that I don't have to experience the full extent of the original bugs.

Hi everyone.
Im Levererarn but you can call me Lev. Now that we have that out of the way I just want to congratulate on an awesome podcast and I hope to be part of this forum for a long time.

I want to chime in on Divinity. I have been playing for 17 hours and only managed to go west out of town so far. I think my party is ready to venture north but I suddenly have a very tough time to pick up the game again. As fun as I had it feels almost like a hurdle to get back in the routine of it all after almost 10 days AFK. Anybody feeling the same way?

In this day of games being polished and focus grouped to the point of anonymity I do have a soft spot for games that have a few rough edges, whether they are slightly buggy systems where a developer's reach exceeded their grasp, or design choices that are unconventional.

Mass Effect was a game that in many ways fitted the first description. There were a lot of ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck, many of which were cut for the sequels. The most reviled, although maybe my favourite, were the Mako and exploring planets. They were great ideas that needed a bit of polish to make work. Instead they were completely abandoned. The inventory was a mess, but instead of being fixed it was dropped.

The Witcher fits the second description. While it launched a buggy mess, by the time I got to it with the Enhanced Edition most of the bugs were gone. But while most modern games are front loaded with the interesting encounters and story and go downhill in the last third CDProjeck Red decided it would be smart to put the really great parts of the game behind an interminable investigation quest in the second chapter. By the time you have gone back n forth what felt like 5000 times through city and swamp most players have given up hope and moved on. Those of us who waded through the mire were rewarded with a great pay off, Chapter 4 was even surprisingly poignant.

So yeah, I like a game that's slightly broken.

RolandofGilead wrote:

Perhaps they mean quarter as in

a : a division or district of a town or city
b : the inhabitants of such a quarter
9
a : an assigned station or post

Yeah, this is how the raid was split up in WoW. They're thematic areas, not 25% of the raid.

Football Manager 2007 had a bug that makes that version my favourite in the series.

As the game moves through the years, new young players (newgens) are created to come up through the youth ranks and replace players retiring. Normally the good and great players come from the countries you would expect them to come from with the calibre and quantity of players decreasing as you go down the food chain. Brazil, Spain, and Germany will have a lot of really good young players generated while soccer backwaters like Canada will rarely have any decent players generated.

The bug in FM07 caused newgen nationality and origin to be based, at least in part, on the scouting knowledge of a human player. You can send your scouts all over the globe but for obvious reasons you normally wouldn't send your scouts to Canada or Mongolia to unearth talent to purchase.

Being an abnormal Canadian soccer fan I usually end up scouting Canada in particular to sign any remotely decent player so they can take advantage of the good coaches and facilities at the club I manage. The bug meant that more and more Canadian newgens were created (and they were great soccer!). The national team, which I also managed, reaped the rewards and were actually decent. Not Soccer Power decent, but "team that can do some damage."

In the end, it led to what's probably my greatest gaming accomplishment: managing Canada to a loss on penalties to Argentina in the 2034 World Cup final.

Stellar podcast, as always, gents.

Put me in the "hate the jank" column. I can appreciate what is being attempted sometimes, but if it is too "broken" for me, I'm out.

The best example is The Witcher. I quit because of the combat, and never looked back. I loved the world, loved the story, but I just couldn't carry on. It almost kept me away from the The Witcher 2. I read the wiki to get caught up on the story and gave it a go. Thankfully, I was not disappointed by the sequel.

I've thought a bit more about Destiny.

I played the beta and I do know what people mean by saying it's almost too polished but Bungie have always had the same philosophy as Blizzard when it comes to finishing games. They make sure everything works properly and test the thing endlessly until they are sure it's fun. They deserve absolutely tons of credit for doing that.

To the emailer looking for loot:
Marvel Heroes was apparently made by some Diablo dude

Dragon's Crown has loot but it's only at the end of the level, but you can have nine bags/preset equipment loadouts (you have to get to the end game, but once there the dungeons are randomized)

--
cause it wasn't clear: excellent use of Vertical Horizon lyrics!

For those playing the Elite beta, what are you using for a controller? I loved Elite back in the day with my flightstick, but I don't own one and haven't used one in years.