Dishonored 2, Tyranny, STEEP Open Beta, Planet Coaster, Google Earth VR, Overwatch Updates, Creating a Sense of Wonder, Your Emails and More!
This week Sean Sands and Julian talk about playing in an evil world in video games. Can't imagine why ...
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Dishonored 2
Tyranny
STEEP
GWJ Roller Coaster Thread
Google Earth VR
Shawn's Dishonored 2 Wallpapers
Thread of The Week:
Book Recommendations? - SallyNasty
Music credits:
Melt - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 43:59
Blown Out - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 1:03:01
Comments
00:02:19 Dishonored 2
00:07:50 Steep
00:21:03 Google Earth VR
00:22:25 Planet Coaster
00:28:26 Tyranny
00:33:31 Microsoft Surface Book
00:36:34 Playstation 4 Pro
00:38:17 Overwatch
00:41:10 Titanfall 2
00:43:59 Creating a Sense of Wonder
01:03:01 Your Emails
Case of great minds thinking alike; my wife and I discussed transcendent games in our podcast this week too.
All right, I'm done with the shameless self promotion.
Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.
I'm A Steam Curator!
My awe-inspiring moment that came to mind was the first time I came out of frameshift/hyperdrive in Elite Dangerous into the orbit of a sun. The sense of scale is incredible and the music swelled at just the right time, very memorable.
In regards to video game landscapes that made me stop and appreciate them, I think any Naughty Dog game has an abundance of these moments. They are masters of framing shots just right, so as you get to the top of a climbing section you are rewarded with some amazing vistas. Uncharted 4 in particular had several of these which I just sat there taking it all in
Elite Dangerous was the first thing that came to my mind as well. Jumping into a system with a giant star, looking at the galaxy from within a nebula, getting too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or touring around the Sol system to see the sights, this game is full of scale and beauty. I've heard it's much better in VR, too, but I haven't seen that for myself.
Skyrim had some beautiful landscapes, too, although after a while it felt a little "small" because of how quickly you can get around.
Un bon mot ne prouve rien (A witty saying proves nothing). - Voltaire
+1 to Hrdina on Skyrim -- not just the exteriors, but the awesome interiors: a cave opening out to an underground forest with a waterfall, or a surveying huge network of bridges in a catacomb. The Special Edition is giving me these moments all over again.
I was trying to think of when games create a non-visual sense of wonder, and for me it's usually the discovery of some cool facet of the mechanics: realising you can drop supply crates on people's heads in MGS: V, Blink through a guard and behind him in Dishonored, reverse pickpocketing in Fallout 3
Defunk'd Bloggue
Bluesky: @lancecalhoon.bsky.social
I'll never forget the moment I exited the starting dungeon in Oblivion for the first time.
The game starts with a dungeon crawl similar to most RPGs "back in the day" (e.g. Stonekeep or Legend of Grimrock), so I assumed that Oblivion was just more endless corridors but with better graphics.
However, when I finally got outside my jaw dropped. The early morning sun had just crested the mountains, two enormous moons hung in the sky, and a white ruined temple stood beside a lake of crystal water.
I must have paused for several minutes, just swinging the mouse in all directions drinking it all in. Never had I seen such a beautiful landscape in a computer game. Those moments are hard to beat.
ERROR: No coffee detected. User halted.
Those Dishonored 2 environments are gooooergeous, but what about the character design? I love the gameplay, but I couldn't force myself to do all the DLC from the original game, because I found all the people so repulsive.
When people have lied to themselves for that long, the truth feels like an attack.
—from Frostbitten by trichy
A few of the vistas in Journey definitely caused me to just stop and drink it in for a moment, but the first thing that came to mind when the topic was starting to be discussed was the Solitary Island section of FF6. That one wasn't so much a pause in awe as a slow burn to realization because it broke so many rules of what video games were and what they could do back then.
The unexpected contrast really drew me in to the story in a way that no amount of bombastic battles and summons ever could. I still love it. And thinking about it now makes me wonder if a modern game attempting a similar story path would make you play through this section, despite the change of pace, or if they'd make it a cut-scene or QTE.
Pokemon Go: 2564 2051 2640
I want Amanda's evil laugh as a ringtone.
Also, re: Dishonored low chaos actions, the same thing was true in the original Dishonored. I seem to recall some of the low chaos solutions to things being really, really bad. It's been a while, but I have this fuzzy memory of breaking into a party of these sisters or something, and in high chaos you just kill to get what you need, but in low chaos you turn one of the sisters over to someone to be their slave or something. It was very creepy (and not in a good way).
When people have lied to themselves for that long, the truth feels like an attack.
—from Frostbitten by trichy
That laugh reminded me of the first time people at work heard me make a dark-humor joke. It was like I shattered their worldview. One person went so far as to say they thought I was "very innocent."
I replied that I'm a very nice person, right up to the moment when I'm not.
I generally eschew what the game thinks is "right" and follow my own conscience.
For example, in Dishonored there was no way in heck I was letting the brother of the scientist walk out of there. Not after listening to his backstory. Nope. You had your chance at redemption, and you blew it.
Also, every time I play Fallout 3 I kill Roy Philips outright.
It would be nice if, as Allen said, that game writers could think of a way of being evil without twirling mustaches and drowning kittens. I think it's a failure of imagination. The writers can see why the paragon character does the paragon stuff, but they can't seem to come up with plausible motivations for villains. Evil people don't think of themselves as evil. The most evil people who ever walked the earth genuinely believed they were doing what they were doing for the good of everyone.
I'd play that game: The one where the good and evil path felt equally justified to the main character. If you're going to make someone kill a bunch of people, make that villain do it because the rationalization is that it's better to kill a few hundred/thousand/million people for the good of the rest of the people who won't be killed. Make the tyrant want to take over the world because the tyrant truly believes they are the only person who truly understands what's broken and how to fix it, rather than power for its own sake. That would be interesting, at least. I don't see anyone doing it, though.
Jonman Wrote:
Yes, you can cancel Darksiders, but only by using your Sony Golds. Which, while pretty good, aren't a patch on Zelda.
I'm A Steam Curator!
I fully approve of that policy.
I normally tend toward the goody-goody side of things when I get into an RPG. However, there are times when I'll vary from that.
For instance, in my current game of Stellaris, I am playing a fanatic collectivist empire. I went to war with an empire run by a fanatic individualist, xenophobic species. I won the war and took two planets from them. The populations of those two worlds were not altogether happy with my benevolent leadership, and continued to make that plain. I finally had enough of it and decided to release the two planets as vassals to my empire. To repay their kindnesses to us, and to try to prevent any future aggressions from them, I destroyed every single production building on those two worlds before I left, including farms. I can rationalize that as crippling a potential future adversary before pulling out, but we all know it was at least partly for spite.
Ironically enough, one of the two now considers themselves to be a loyal vassal (they are pacifist xenophiles for some reason), so I feel a little guilty.
As far as games requiring a more personal evil attitude, Tyranny looks very interesting to me, but I honestly don't think I could play it effectively.
Un bon mot ne prouve rien (A witty saying proves nothing). - Voltaire
Not many of these moments stay with me, but I'll never forget the first boss fight in God of War, against the Hydra. In just the first level of the game, I was already facing off against the biggest boss monster I'd ever seen in any video game I'd played before. That sense of scale and power was something that few games ever represented well, and by putting it at the very beginning, told you that you were in for a brand new kind of experience.
"You've got to go on without me. I'm stuck for the next 2 turns."