GWJ Conference Call Episode 565

Tacoma, Pyre, Battle Brothers, Path of Exiles, The Long Dark: Wintermute, Dehumanizing NPCs, Your Emails and More!

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This week Sean Sands, Shawn, Amanda and Rob Zacny talk dehumanizing NPCs and much 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.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Die Anyway (Game Edit) - BigBot Audio Drop - SGX - http://sgxmusic.com/ - 50:01

Coactive (Hollidayrain's 2011 Remix) - BigBot Audio Drop - SGX - http://sgxmusic.com/ -1:03:46

Comments

00:03:42 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
00:08:23 Tacoma
00:16:44 Battle Brothers
00:27:41 The Long Dark
00:38:22 Path of Exile
00:44:16 Kingdoms and Castles
00:47:39 Pyre
00:50:02 Dehumanizing NPCs
01:03:46 Your Emails

Great episode, always good to have Rob on!

One quick thing though: Battle Brothers came up in the Tropes thread and I think people might want to know that there are some issues there. The Dev's have zero interest adding female or minority characters to the game and have some flimsy justifications for this. Additionally, I've heard that a lot of the under the surface politics in the game is questionable at best. The description for refugees, for example, labels them as people who are "too cowardly to fight for their homeland." The basic description of the game sounds great, but in case this matters to anyone I thought it might be good to put it out there.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Great episode, always good to have Rob on!

One quick thing though: Battle Brothers came up in the Tropes thread and I think people might want to know that there are some issues there. The Dev's have zero interest adding female or minority characters to the game and have some flimsy justifications for this. Additionally, I've heard that a lot of the under the surface politics in the game is questionable at best. The description for refugees, for example, labels them as people who are "too cowardly to fight for their homeland." The basic description of the game sounds great, but in case this matters to anyone I thought it might be good to put it out there.

Zacny actually talked a bit more about those in yesterday's Waypoint 'cast as well.

More puppies, less Nazis.

Also, the topic of the week kind of felt like they were having a discussion about the android hosts in Westworld and how the guests treat them.

In relation to the discussion on Dread and games of its ilk with mechanics that tie in well with the atmosphere, check out a game called Ten Candles - http://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles/

It has a great mechanic whereby you darken candles and burn elements of your character as the story progresses. I ran a game with my group last weekend and it went over very well. Something so different to a traditional RPG.

Being as how the lid of that can of worms is ajar I'd like to peep in for a second.

My impression with Nazism is that the upper echelons of the the German war machine and the political party were true Nazi's. The foot soldiers would have regarded themselves as the German army. We tend to call all German soldiers Nazis which I don't think is accurate.

Also, the impression of German military superiority has been around long before WW2 games. Looking at it dispassionately, there is some truth to those impressions, especially early in the war.

I'm reading an amazing book about the history of tank development, through the eyes of the men who drove and fought in them, at the moment and by all accounts the Germans were secretly training with combinations of tanks, infantry and anti-tank guns long before WW2 started (their tactics, ironically, based on a British book about the potential roll of tanks in future warfare that we were studiously ignoring.) At the start of the war the German army pushed through Poland, through France and forced the Entire English expeditionary force into retreat (spoilers for Dunkirk.) First hand accounts of the British coming into conflict with the Germans at that time was that, even when you caught them by surprise, the German army were incredibly quick to re-orientate to a new threat and bring their diverse fire power to bare.

What's the name of the game that was mentioned first in connection with the "Dehumanizing NPCs" topic?

Something about an escape from a Metropolis-like dystopia (as in Fritz Lang, not Superman)?

Papageno wrote:

What's the name of the game that was mentioned first in connection with the "Dehumanizing NPCs" topic?

Something about an escape from a Metropolis-like dystopia (as in Fritz Lang, not Superman)?

Black The Fall

Blackstep wrote:

In relation to the discussion on Dread and games of its ilk with mechanics that tie in well with the atmosphere, check out a game called Ten Candles - http://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles/

It has a great mechanic whereby you darken candles and burn elements of your character as the story progresses. I ran a game with my group last weekend and it went over very well. Something so different to a traditional RPG.

I recently played this with some Chicago Goodjers, and I can confirm the goodness.

One of the better (all things being relative) single game communities I've encountered is the Eve Online community. The new player sections especially are very welcoming, the only time things get hostile is when some know it all comes in and gets prescriptive about 'the right way to play.'

Of course, one of the reasons they want to welcome people into the game is so that they can murder them, but it's not personal.*

*Well, that and a lot of low end players help drive the economy, so the game benefits from a high population.

One point I would make on the comment about BF1 is DICE is in part to blame for what you see. They took away the great admin system for servers and implemented their own system. It still doesn't offer features that were available with the old system. I don't know if admins have even gained the ability to kick yet which is why you are seeing the community you are compared to the old game. BF1 lost 100k players since launch on PC.

The game that took the longest from me playing it the first time, and beating was Dragon Warrior 2. I played it sometime in the late 80's early 90's on rental, but never finished it. Got somewhere past Moonbrooke. I finally finished it in 2013. That's roughly 23 years between start and end. Though, that wasn't on the same save file. Another that took almost as long was Space Quest 5. Somewhere in 1993, until 2014. King's Quest 3 was about the same amount of time.

The longest I've gone on a single save file is about 10 years, from 1998ish until 2010ish, with Breath of Fire 3.