Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 424

Dragon Age Inquisition, Far Cry 4, Home Bases, Your Emails and More!

This week Shawn, Julian and Karla talk a whole lot of Dragon Age Inquisition and game homes!

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
00.01.56 Dragon Age: Inquisition
00.40.11 Far Cry 4
00.44.19 This week's topic: home bases!
00.58.23 Your emails!

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Show credits

Music credits: 

A Beautiful Life - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 43:37

XXV - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 57:51

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Comments

I was wondering how they'd do the save game migration from last gen to current gen for Dragon Age. I get the feeling they'll do that for Mass Effect.

submitted for Australian listeners:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/0yRazkO.jpg)

Who would have known Certis was a fan?

troubleshot wrote:

submitted for Australian listeners:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/0yRazkO.jpg)

Who would have known Certis was a fan?

You bewdy! I'd almost consider replaying DA2 to render that scone in the character creator.

Hawkie would be all over the romance options too.

Some other good home bases:
The ship in KOTOR
The pub in Dishonored
Majula in Dark Souls II
The Bastion of...Bastion
Skyrim homes. I know they are often "places to dump your stuff," but I was very attached to mine and had personal stories related to each one.
Mario's house in Super Mario RPG

Dragon Age ... overdose.... gggaaagghhhhh....

must... talk... about... other... games.... *gasp*

I was always a big fan of the little apartment you get in Fallout 3.

I think one of the problems I had getting into New Vegas was the little motel room you get never felt like home, even after I filled the bathtub with Godzilla toys.

I enjoyed Certis' chiding of rabbit to get out of the Hinterlands.

For me, the game graduated from "OK" to "awesome" once I did the same.

I was nudged in that direction by:

Spoiler:

The freakin dragon that fried me before I even noticed it

danopian wrote:

Skyrim homes. I know they are often "places to dump your stuff," but I was very attached to mine and had personal stories related to each one.

That first house in Whiterun especially felt like home. All the other houses I got in that game, they all felt like hotels or something compared to that first house.

danopian wrote:

Some other good home bases:
The ship in KOTOR
The pub in Dishonored
Majula in Dark Souls II
The Bastion of...Bastion
Skyrim homes. I know they are often "places to dump your stuff," but I was very attached to mine and had personal stories related to each one.
Mario's house in Super Mario RPG

I mentioned the UNATCO HQ from Deus Ex on Twitter. It starts off as your typical home base where you get assignments, talk to folks, and get supplies (you even have your own office), but like a lot in the game, suddenly your perception of everything gets turned upsidedown.

Yeah, definitely the Ebon Hawk from KOTOR and KOTOR II. For some reason, I get really attached to ships with a "working" interior. The Normandy, the Ebon Hawk, the ship from Skies of Arcadia, even the various carriers in Wing Commander. Is this just me, or is this something more specific to a small, mobile base that encourages gamer nesting?

NWN2 is a game with a lot of ups and downs, but one of the very best things about the game is when you get your hands on Crossroads Keep. It's not just a home base, since getting it in shape is the objective for that section of the game. In some ways it's a predecessor to Inquisition's base, although with more focus on actually managing the thing instead of the map.

Home is where the heart is. However the games we play capture our hearts and take them to a specific place, is how we view and feel about those homes. Home can be a place of refuge. It can be a place for family. It can be a life project or a source of pride.

I, too, think that home bases can be tedious in asking you to go around the place more than once a little too often. It's like meeting someone and having to go through introductions all the time. We don't go through life this way. Most of the time, we "cut" from one place to another by mentally going elsewhere while our bodies automatically go through the task of taking us from point A to point B. We're "managing our real life inventory" or having an interesting conversation in the car while our bodies autopilot from the house to the grocery.

A constructed place can be wonderful. It's nice to go to a new place in your home the first time and experience every step. It brings a sense of wonder. The next several thousand times you manage those steps, you're actually cutting straight to the task you're anticipating and already in that headspace.

A game can simulate that experiential reality by actually cutting to the merchant or other point of interest in the home base without requiring you to manually go there. Perhaps it can autopilot, giving you a chance to craft or arrange your inventory, but I think a stronger way to go is a variety of short cutscenes depicting your short walk without the 45 seconds of actually walking.

Eventually, even that goes away and the character of that specific place must henceforward be established firmly by background icons and characteristic architecture in the cinematic shot.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the castle from Suikoden 2 in their home base talk. I loved the fact that people you recruit in the world would come and be real additions to your base. You brought life to a lifeless place by recruiting the 108 stars. It was amazing.

Does it make me a bad person that, when Certis recited all the different Hawke names, the first name I though of was Mike?

Am I secretly 12 years old?

The name I thought of was "Stringfellow." I am now very obviously much more than 12 years old.

LarryC wrote:

The name I thought of was "Stringfellow." I am now very obviously much more than 12 years old.

And considering his brother was named "St. John," I've always figured their parents secretly wanted their kids to get teased.

So wait, the podcast brought up a question for me about the Dragon Age Keep. I haven't been following development, since I haven't gotten around to playing the first two yet. I'm about to fix that soon, though.

So I'd thought that the Keep was mainly a way to move gameplay data between consoles, and that PC save files would transfer over automagically just like they have with Mass Effect. But it looks like they don't? So if I play through both games on PC, I'll still have to go through and set all the decisions correctly in the Keep before I start Inquisition? Tell me that the Keep at least reads the save files and sets things accordingly. I don't relish the idea of having to do a bunch of tinkering when Mass Effect handled it smoothly.

The keep works based on achievement data attached to a given character, not save games. It's pretty accurate and not a big deal to tweak things.

But I don't wanna! /whine

It's good that it does at least some of the tweaking for you, but it still feels like a step backwards from the Mass Effect system that was nearly seamless.

Problem is changes between DA iterations are way bigger than those between ME iterations.

I couldn't get the Keep to pick up my DA2 history so I redid it manually. The Origins and Awakenings histories were pretty much perfect.

12 hours or so into the game though it doesn't yet feel like there's much impact.

Critical Distance also coincidentally had homes as their topic in Blogs of the Round Table:
http://www.critical-distance.com/201...

For me, it was Star Wars Galaxies that gave me the strongest sense of home. The persistent housing in the world really made me feel like I was putting down roots somewhere. Also, the campsites that you could construct in the wild felt like setting up home. If I remember correctly, I think the larger campsites had a radius around them to prevent hostile spawns, which added to the feeling of a safe haven.

Felix Threepaper wrote:

I enjoyed Certis' chiding of rabbit to get out of the Hinterlands.

For me, the game graduated from "OK" to "awesome" once I did the same.

I was nudged in that direction by:

Spoiler:

The freakin dragon that fried me before I even noticed it

It was that and a couple tougher areas that got me to leave the Hinterlands ... only to go back to the base and upgrade my kit, though. Now I'm back in the Hinterlands.

LarryC wrote:

Home is where the heart is. However the games we play capture our hearts and take them to a specific place, is how we view and feel about those homes. Home can be a place of refuge. It can be a place for family. It can be a life project or a source of pride.

I, too, think that home bases can be tedious in asking you to go around the place more than once a little too often. It's like meeting someone and having to go through introductions all the time. We don't go through life this way. Most of the time, we "cut" from one place to another by mentally going elsewhere while our bodies automatically go through the task of taking us from point A to point B. We're "managing our real life inventory" or having an interesting conversation in the car while our bodies autopilot from the house to the grocery.

A constructed place can be wonderful. It's nice to go to a new place in your home the first time and experience every step. It brings a sense of wonder. The next several thousand times you manage those steps, you're actually cutting straight to the task you're anticipating and already in that headspace.

A game can simulate that experiential reality by actually cutting to the merchant or other point of interest in the home base without requiring you to manually go there. Perhaps it can autopilot, giving you a chance to craft or arrange your inventory, but I think a stronger way to go is a variety of short cutscenes depicting your short walk without the 45 seconds of actually walking.

Eventually, even that goes away and the character of that specific place must henceforward be established firmly by background icons and characteristic architecture in the cinematic shot.

This kind of reminds me of the concept of the "non-place," which I think is pretty out of style among academics, but is still a pretty neat idea to me.

Going to write a comment on this page. Here we go.

I think Fallout 3 needs to be mentioned more, thanks for mentioning it already doubtingthomas396. I was shouting it into my mp3 player while listening. You even get a choice of homes, if you wipe out the first town, you can set up shop in Tenpenny Tower.

I know I had at least one locker stuffed with really weird things. And a robot butler. A local 'come drink our (super radioactive) holy magic water" cult kept leaving notes on my door.