Conference Call

GWJ Conference Call Episode 435

Offworld Trading Company, Darkest Dungeon, Dying Light, Battlefield Hardline, Idarb, Special Guest Soren Johnson, Designing Non-Violent Games, Your Emails and more!

This week the GWJ crew are joined by Soren Johnson to talk Offworld Trading Company and more!

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.

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Chairman_Mao's Timestamps

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Lonely Organ - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 42:44

Blown Out - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 1:01:19

Intro/Outtro Music - Ian Dorsch, Willowtree Audioworks

Comments

I fancy myself not a fan of realistically violent games. I enjoy Borderlands for its comic book approach to violence.

After a day that left me feeling terrible, I was really looking forward to being an awful person and doing awful things to other awful people in Far Cry 2. And then, replay the same mission end 5 times to keep my buddy alive...

It was a good outlet in that moment. I don't whoop and holler excitedly at the graphical bloodshed, but I felt in control and powerful after a day of feeling helpless and weak.

I'm picking up Darkest Dungeon once it's on PS4.

Not sure if I've played any games that don't involve killing. My attitude with most violent games is that I'm not out to kill people. I'm trying to stay alive by killing the people who are trying to kill me.

I really enjoyed the trading elements of World of Warcraft when I played. I had a team of characters who I was really attached to. One was out in Loch Modan so I could pick herbs most mornings, one in Ironforge to put stuff up for auction and others positioned strategically throughout the world to hunt or pick valuable natural resources. I've always fancied a game where I had a team of characters who were acquiring, crafting, delivering and selling goods.

I really enjoyed Terraria and would have been happy to have no combat in the game.

I have some perspective on Jonathan Downin and LPs in general. It's a very different thing when you're a casual observer versus the person playing. You have to manage so much more mentally as a player than a viewer, so as a viewer you can easily notice all the things the player is missing and without realizing you're doing it, feel superior to them or irritated that they are seemingly oblivious.

A great real life example where this really clicked for me was when working in a classroom with my wife. My wife's first job out of college was as an elementary music teacher. I worked as a piano accompanist for the district and was frequently in her classroom. We both had a good pedagogical background, but she would frequently make odd teaching choices in the moment or not recognize a way to answer some questions on the fly. I found that I generally could come up with a better strategy for dealing with a lot of these things.

The thing is, she was busy "keeping the zoo" and had to think of so many more things than me, who was sitting in the corner observing and able to give the entirety of my faculties to critiquing what was going on and formulating a better approach.

I think watching a capable gamer miss things or make strategic decisions different from your own is far different from handing a controller to a gaming-illiterate grand parent who proceeds to spin in a circle staring at the ground. Just be mindful that someone actually playing a game is having to focus minute-to-minute in a way that might make them miss stuff that is seemingly obvious to the casual viewer who can feel free to diver their attention to catch the small stuff.

An interesting experiment is to watch footage of your own game play. You'll be amazed by the things you see, as an observer, that you missed as a player who is focusing on small areas of the screen.

I imagine that a lot of the trash talk in Offworld Trading Company will involve talking in bad Austrian accents.

Higgledy wrote:

An interesting experiment is to watch footage of your own game play. You'll be amazed by the things you see, as an observer, that you missed as a player who is focusing on small areas of the screen.

This is very, very true. Had to do this a lot at PCG and I find it excruciating. Say what you want about other people doing knucklehead stuff when you're watching them play games, but we do dumb stuff all the time.

Yeargdribble wrote:

I have some perspective on Jonathan Downin and LPs in general

...snipping nice stuff...

I used to watch all of Jonathan's Minecraft LPs and really liked his tone and attitude. Just pleasant and enthusiastic, lacking any cynicism. Basically like he is on the show--altogether too infrequently.

(I pestered him some about doing more LPs but somehow he's got a life or something. The nerve!)

Did I miss it Cory, or did you tease that you were going to speak more on Sunless Sea and then not get around to it in the show? I was tinkering with my bike while listening, so I may be full of it. I only ask as I've been playing it and would love to hear others opinions on it.

I may be in the minority, but I feel like a game that doesn't meet the Rules Of Gaming Fairness is Peggle. Whether I complete a level or not always feels like luck to me.

Also, Alien Isolation. I haven't played it, but a lot of the reviews mention that the Alien can come out of nowhere sometimes, often resulting in replaying a significant amount of the game.

troubleshot wrote:

Did I miss it Cory, or did you tease that you were going to speak more on Sunless Sea and then not get around to it in the show? I was tinkering with my bike while listening, so I may be full of it. I only ask as I've been playing it and would love to hear others opinions on it.

Yeah, it got skipped. Now that Shawn's played it, I'm sure it'll get talked about next week.

Demiurge wrote:
troubleshot wrote:

Did I miss it Cory, or did you tease that you were going to speak more on Sunless Sea and then not get around to it in the show? I was tinkering with my bike while listening, so I may be full of it. I only ask as I've been playing it and would love to hear others opinions on it.

Yeah, it got skipped. Now that Shawn's played it, I'm sure it'll get talked about next week.

Argh. I knew we forgot something!

Certis wrote:
Demiurge wrote:
troubleshot wrote:

Did I miss it Cory, or did you tease that you were going to speak more on Sunless Sea and then not get around to it in the show? I was tinkering with my bike while listening, so I may be full of it. I only ask as I've been playing it and would love to hear others opinions on it.

Yeah, it got skipped. Now that Shawn's played it, I'm sure it'll get talked about next week.

Argh. I knew we forgot something!

Grabbing my pitchfork... or should that be zabre?

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I may be in the minority, but I feel like a game that doesn't meet the Rules Of Gaming Fairness is Peggle. Whether I complete a level or not always feels like luck to me.

Also, Alien Isolation. I haven't played it, but a lot of the reviews mention that the Alien can come out of nowhere sometimes, often resulting in replaying a significant amount of the game.

I completed Alien: Isolation on hard, and though I wouldn't say it's fair to say the alien came out of nowhere, you could say sometimes the behaviour indicators wouldn't correlate, for example, you see the alien in one spot and enter a vent and your radar and an audible cue would indicate it moving away from you, and the alien may then moments later be heard coming from the opposite side of you. It didn't happen often for me, and wasn't ever out of nowhere in y opinion, there was almost always an indication of the alien approaching unless I was being a clubs or in too much of a hurry.
The ending however, well, that's a different matter.

Two games that do not always adhere to the Rules of Gaming Fairness:
Megaman, specifically the random blocks in the floor that look exactly the same as the rest, but let you fall right through. I know there is at least on MM game that lets you fall on a pit.

Shadowrun Returns: I just recently ranted about this as that game renewed my distaste for Western RPGs. In the first combat encounter, twice, enemies spawn in in the middle of the encounter, flanking or behind your focus and within range to attack you as soon as it is there turn, and in my case, that came at the end of one action. I imagined the rest of the game would be similar and uninstalled it immediately upon barely finishing off the last person.

Just thought I'd pop in here since Dragon's Lair was one of my favourite games when I was younger. I bought multiple versions of it and managed to eventually get to the point where I could consistently beat it.

Unfortunately, I have to call out Julian on this one. Dragon's Lair does not always flash to tell you which direction to move. There are large sections of the game where trial and error (or cheat sheets!) are needed to know what to do next.

I think that many of the remakes have added more flashes, because I also remember it not flashing much back in the day.

Here's a video of someone playing an original arcade machine:

I wanna be the guy... definitely not fair.

Aristophan wrote:

I think that many of the remakes have added more flashes, because I also remember it not flashing much back in the day.

Here's a video of someone playing an original arcade machine:

The whole arcade playthrough is visible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6em...

Valmorian wrote:

The whole arcade playthrough is visible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6em...

That's the way I remembered it, from watching people play it in the arcade. There are certain scenes that give you a flash to tell you where to go/what to do, but there are just as many (if not more) scenes that give you no flashing hint, where you must learn and memorize through trial and error.

Like many arcade games, it was designed to maximize the amount of quarters each player spent in order to keep playing.

MeatMan wrote:

There are certain scenes that give you a flash to tell you where to go/what to do, but there are just as many (if not more) scenes that give you no flashing hint, where you must learn and memorize through trial and error.

There is even a couple of scenes where the flashes are deceptive and moving towards one of them triggers a death state.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Two games that do not always adhere to the Rules of Gaming Fairness:
Megaman, specifically the random blocks in the floor that look exactly the same as the rest, but let you fall right through. I know there is at least on MM game that lets you fall on a pit.

It's fair! At least in the part of Mega Man 2 that I'm thinking of: That mechanic only comes up in the Dr. Wily stage (after you've obtained all of the weapons), and Bubble Man's weapon rolls along the floor in front of you, so you can send it ahead and thereby observe where the false floors are.

...There are probably other examples of this in other MM games where it really is unfair, but MM2 was top-of-mind for me since I just had the pleasure of watching my 9-year-old play through it for the first time!

Here's a game that I think fails the fairness test: Super Mario Bros. 2 (JP), a.k.a. Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels.

On at least one of the later levels of that game, there's an invisible block positioned such that if you try and make a jump across a pit in the "usual way", you'll hit the invisible block, and rebound down to your death in the pit.

It might be arguable that a "player of infinite skill", given the knowledge of the existence of invisible blocks in general, might play in a super-paranoid fashion and on her first playthrough of the game jump around near the edge of every pit to test for potential invisible blocks being there, but such a hypothetical player might run out of time on the clock?

A similar situation actually occurs in the final world, 8-4, of the original Super Mario Bros. It's a "maze" level where entering the wrong pipe (or failing to enter a pipe at all) warps you back to an earlier point in the level. I'm not sure offhand whether the game gives you enough time on the clock to try every possible path through the level (getting sent back to earlier points many times in the process) on a single life, if you don't have at least partial knowledge of the correct path ahead of time?

Great episode as always. Nice to hear from Soren too. Darkest Dungeon is defo going onto my wish list after hearing you guys talk about it so passionately.
Shame about Joystiq hey ? My week always started on Mondays listening to the wonderful Jonathan Downin and the crew chatting nonsense and video games.
Maybe you guys could get him on the show ?

Borderlands is an MP game with a story.

Took me a while to get to this episode of the call, but:

Unfair Games: No mention of King's Quest? That game was trial and error all the way through. I think the whole notion of "fairness" in games tends to focus almost entirely on action-oriented games, because, as in the email, the question presupposes that skill is a relevant factor in playing the game. Anything that depends on a die roll or a random-number generator, though, is going to run afoul of that paradigm for "fairness."

I was going to say something about violence in games, but it started to become an article, so I'm going to save it for the writers' guild.

I played through Scribblenauts non-violently. There is the possibility to attack things to progress, but I skipped all missions where that was the only way to progress. There was one occasion where I turned a medusa to stone, and decided that it didn't count...

To me, it seems like there's so many violent games, I'm going to choose the non-violent path where possible, both on principle, and for variety. At the same time, I do love sniper rifles and making things explode.