GWJ Conference Call Episode 560

Zelda: BotW Master Trials, PUBG, Cat Goes Fishing, The Surge, Arizona Sunshine, Backward Compatibility, Achievements, Cross Play, Your Emails and More!

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This week Shawn, Julian, Allen and Cory talk achievements, backward compatibility 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.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Blown Out - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 37:10

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

Comments

00:01:28 PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
00:09:44 Cat Goes Fishing
00:15:49 Clock Simulator
00:16:26 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
00:21:30 Arizona Sunshine (VR)
00:27:46 The Surge
00:35:08 Awesome Games Done Quick
00:37:10 Topic Buffet
00:57:57 Your Emails

At this point I appreciate backwards compatibility as a form of preservation. I doubt that a lot of those games will be played, even by me, but knowing that they're still available is comforting. Unfortunately, I still expect some of my favorites to be forgotten (such as Project Sylpheed on Xbox 360, which will never, ever be backwards compatible in an official capacity).

In terms of achievements, waaaaay back when they were newer and I was still hating on Sony as a member of Wii60.com (never has someone been ashamed of so much dumb sh*t in such a boring life), I had an idea for a website/app that would take your achievements and use them to calculate a "character", where your class, skills and weaponry would be determined by what kinds of achievements you got and what genres the games you played were, and where your gamerscore acted as your "experience points". So you'd have maybe a level 7 street fighter if you had a bunch of fighting and brawler games, or a level 9 explorer if the majority of your achievements focused on finding collectibles or reaching certain locations.

I had a buddy that was willing to help out, but neither one of us were able to afford the time to curate a list of achievements and categories, map out how the database would work, figure out precisely how the Xbox.com API worked for all those signature apps that dropped your gamerscore into a forum post, or how much artwork would be necessary, especially in the event that users would want more customization than what the system automatically put together.

In some ways I'm sad it never happened, but in others... I mean, what would it have been now?

Hey, look at that! I'm a tastemaker!

In terms of games going away and literally no one being able to play them ever, I think the only real example we have is City of Heroes. That's a game with you no matter how much you want it, you just can't play it. And if I had to guess, I think it's probably sitting in storage on some shelf, and In some move or whatever, it will eventually get trashed. And then be lost forever.

I'm also so amazed by the LucasArts remastered games. What I really want is Indy 4 remastered ( which in my head canon is the real Indy 4).

All the Clock Simulator gifts were just a silly reference to Clockwork House's tendency to "clock" (have strong opinions that typically aren't in line with the popular opinion). Everybody should be able to clock.

Wait....does the Game Pope have the power to excommunicate the Game King?

jrralls wrote:

In terms of games going away and literally no one being able to play them ever, I think the only real example we have is City of Heroes. That's a game with you no matter how much you want it, you just can't play it. And if I had to guess, I think it's probably sitting in storage on some shelf, and In some move or whatever, it will eventually get trashed. And then be lost forever.

Would No One Lives Forever qualify? It had been in progress by Night Dive (of System Shock and others Steam releases), but ultimately they couldn't get anyone to show that they actually legally owned the rights, and instead had to abandon their attempts at rerelease due to that tangled mess. Of course there are probably less than legal means for those not owning a disk. But that's kind of the thing, are we talking unplayable as in there is literally no way to play, or unplayable as in there is no legal means of acquiring a working copy unless you have the legacy system? Because as time goes by the number of disks and functional systems will degrade, and so a game may become largely lost that way.

But MMO's definitely are candidates. Star Wars Galaxies would be another.

----------------

Lots of other interesting things, but because I split the podcast between my morning run and commute and I have apparently a goldfish memory, I can't remember what I thought about most. But I do remember achievements and sticking to a game!

Achievements only interest me if they highlight some alternate play style, some fun subversion or alternate take on the mechanics. Something that points out some goofy thing that I might not have considered before. Setting my general antipathy for the GTA series aside, I think that Rockstar does a good job of this kind of thing. The 'do a wheelie for X distance' or 'fly a helicopter under all bridges' were fun challenges. Brothers has a few achievements for some hidden or out of the way scenes that were well worth seeking out, the whale watching one in particular I might have missed otherwise.

As for completing games? This is something foremost on my mind lately. I just finished Witcher 3. This was the sole game I played for a 6 month stretch, from the start of the Winter sale to the Summer sale. It took me almost exactly 100 hours, which was my sum total gaming time for those 6 months, excepting asynch board games on my phone, which are 5-10 minutes a day total. For those of you keeping score at home that is an average of 4 hours a week. That's all I get, and to get it even that high basically required me to get up at 5 am so I'd have a solid hour between my morning run and when I left for work. And there was more than a few days where I skipped the run even. Ok, not that many, and mostly the last two weeks of the game because I wanted to be done before the sale.

I don't regret that time, but definitely towards the end I just wanted to be done. I wanted to see how my story played out, but I wanted to get back to my strategy games. Attila Total War and EU IV (1/4 of a MegaSands) were calling my name, you see. And yet I kept finding myself doing the little distractions. Pursuing sidequests, especially major ones, is one thing. Those were generally well done and worth the time. Skipping the Cerys and Hjalmar quest line just would not have felt right. But I also played and finished the Gwent quest lines. And here's the thing, I don't think Gwent is very good. For a RPG minigame? Sure, it's got more depth than most. But they've expanded it into its own full fledged standalone game. But objectively it's a design that has a lot of problems with balance.

Yet I would find that many, of my very limited mornings, I would spend nearly 20 or 30 minutes chasing one of the quests, collecting the Ciri, Geralt, and Mysterious Elf cards. I even beat the High Stakes Tournament quest by winning the tournament (though it take more than one try due to some stupidly bad draw luck). All for a game that, if it were a board game, I'd find totally mediocre. As someone who plays a ton of board games, this doesn't make sense really. Like the person who wrote in about collecting flowers (pro tip: the white Artenia flowers? Get all of those, ignore most of the rest once you have a few. Buy what else you need from the two vendors in Novigrad) I found myself spending more time doing this thing in the game that, ultimately, wasn't as satisfying as the actual story. But dangle some piece of rare loot, like a one of a kind card, and I'll probably chase it if it isn't super obscure and annoying like the Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Spear.

But in the end I did finish. I did enjoy my time with it. I did also have the problem that it was hard to maintain momentum at times. Especially during the February-March time, right when Velen was getting long in the tooth, I bought a house and my wife and I had our second kid. Very little time then, and I nearly lost the thread before making it to Skellige. Which is the biggest risk to a game when you have as little time as me. It's not losing interest, it's losing time to play for a few weeks. After 2-3 weeks away in a narrative heavy game it can be really hard to get going again, especially if you left off in a portion of the game that is already dragging.

Emulation of older system seems like it should be simple, since that old hardware is so slow - but it isn't. Here's a really good article about why not:

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect-hardware-snes-emulation-requires-a-3ghz-cpu/

I think backwards compatibility is going to be a non-issue going forward. Certis was right about the architecture being the driving factor.

Xbox was the first(?) one to make a console based on x86 architecture, which made it relatively trivial to port to and from PC. They recognized this benefit and so kept the 360 to Xbox One and One X all within the x86 framework, so porting between them should take a fairly small effort going forward - no emulation required.

Sony, on the other hand, went with the more powerful CELL architecture - which works very differently than x86. Developers struggled to figure out how to optimize it, or simply refused to learn it and so kept their games within the x86 world of PC and Xbox. Sony could have gone with a better version of CELL for the PS4 - which would have made backwards-compatibility possible with the PS3 - but they probably caved to developer pressure and switched to x86. They knew porting from PS3 to PS4 would be a significant effort because of the totally different architectures, which is why they bought Gaikai and OnLive streaming emulation tech that became PS Now. I don't know how popular that is, but if they ever decided to bundle it into PlayStation Plus - even if they only gave you 10 hours free per month - it might eliminate most calls for backwards compatibility.

Oh, and about achievements. I don't generally care about trophies in single-player story games. I do enjoy them in other genres like sports or arcade games. They let me know if I am progressing my skills in the game. Also, I have used PlayStation's level system to decide if I am going to accept someone's friend request.

CraigM wrote:

Would No One Lives Forever qualify?

I don't think so for the simple reason that you can buy a perfectly legal copy of NOLF for$4-$14 depending upon that days bidding and what format you want to play it on;
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fro...

To me that means it's trivially easy for anyone who really wants to play NOLF to play it but that is not remotely true for City of Heroes.

CoH is completely unplayable by any gamer anywhere, no matter what retro-systems they have, no matter what they are willing to bid on ebay, no matter if they care about pirating the game or not. It's just not available, anywhere, anyhow.

I think that's a fundamental difference from "Not likely to ever be on any of the major online gaming marketplaces." Not least of which because it's possible, and I've even go so far as to say PROBABLE, that City of Heroes is only on a few hard drives (maybe only one) burred in some investor's attic and that in 5, or 10, or even 20 years that investor will move or sell or something and the copy(ies) will get lost or the hard drive will be damaged, or something, at which point City of Heores will be lost to entropy for all time.

NOFL by contrast will be easily available on whatever the 2037 equivalent of abandon-ware is.

jrralls wrote:

To me that means it's trivially easy for anyone who really wants to play NOLF to play it but that is not remotely true for City of Heroes.

Then it's clear we use slightly different meanings, which is fine. From my perspective I see it as a game that is not available for modern hardware, and arguably NOLF isn't easily playable on modern PCs. Having never played it myself, I lack the ability to directly test how easy the PC version is to run today. I'm actually a bit surprised at those prices. I had been led to believe that it was a fair bit pricier!

Because I see a game that requires a legacy system. Sure some of us kept our old game consoles, in fact I do still have my PS2 explicitly for several old games. But a large number of people don't. So if you don't have a working PS2, and the number of people who do will naturally decrease over time, then it becomes harder to say a game is 'playable'. So as time goes by the price of entry for these games increases. To me a game that is excessively costly to play has little practical difference from one that is technically incapable of being played. Julian made a great example of Steel Battalion. The fact it uses such a specialized controller makes playing that a very difficult proposition. Simply having the game and system isn't enough. You also need a working controller.

But whether someone uses your limited unable to even load the program, or my more broad not available to play unless you have legacy hardware, the fact remains that the number will increase over time. Obviously any MMOs that are shut down qualify. But not just MMOs face this specific death. Anything with always on functionality could face that when those servers shut down. Are there games that used a DRM system like GFWL that can no longer be played at all? I don't know off hand, but I imagine there probably are. What is the state of the always on requirement for Sim City 2014 and Diablo 3? Are those still limited? If so those could face that final death some day.

I don't know how to get around that either. Some things can be kept alive, emulation means that even games that require no longer available legacy hardware can be kept alive, though of dubious legality in some cases. But as systems increase in complexity will that always be true? Do we care enough about those old games to make sure it is? And if it is online only, or remote server type games, then there may be no preventing their loss.

CraigM wrote:
jrralls wrote:

To me that means it's trivially easy for anyone who really wants to play NOLF to play it but that is not remotely true for City of Heroes.

Then it's clear we use slightly different meanings, which is fine.

Yea, we definitely have different definitions on that.

> arguably NOLF isn't easily playable on modern PCs.

That’s arguable, as I’d totally argue that it looks pretty easy. Doing some googling, I’d say less than five minutes of fiddling before I got to work and I don’t consider myself any sort of tech genius. Is it plug-and-play? No. Can you get it to run on a modern PC without any special software? Yep (for Game of the Year edition, will need a patch for non-GOY editions, but I don’t consider patches to be that special, Day One Patches are a thing for brand new games today after all,).

> Because I see a game that requires a legacy system.

Again, I don’t see that as a big impediment. You can buy a working PS2 AND a copy of NOLF for the PS2 for less than $60, ie less than the cost one a (singular) new game:
https://www.ebay.com/b/NTSC-U-C-US-C...

If you’re not willing to pay the price of ONE new game to buy a whole system AND the game you wish to play, then I don’t view that as being “unplayable.” I think of that as, “I don’t want to spend the same amount of money on an old game as I would on a new game,” which is fine but is vastly different than “unplayable.”

> So as time goes by the price of entry for these games increases.

Not much, I’d bet. You can buy a fully working NES or a fully functional Atari for less than $100 today, and those systems are 30 or 40 years old. I’d be VERY VERY surprised if you couldn’t pick up a PS2 in 2037 for less than 1/3rd of the price of whatever new console exists (if any do) in 2037. They made over 100 million of the suckers after all, the demand for them is unlikely to cause a price hike that makes them prohibitively expensive for at least a (human, not hardware) generation, maybe two or three.

> To me a game that is excessively costly to play has little practical difference from one that is technically incapable of being played.

If the game costs less to play than the current generation of games I don’t see that as excessively costly.

> Julian made a great example of Steel Battalion.

Steel Battalion cost $200 new in 2002. Inflation adjusted that’s $271 dollars today. I could buy a working controller/game set on Amazon for $370 and be playing in two days, maybe three. Does that make it hard to play? Yep! Sure does. But “37% more expensive than when it was new” is not THAT huge of a price increase.

> Anything with always on functionality could face that when those servers shut down.

Eh... legally you're right but I've seen too many fan sites or pirate versions over the years that get around that with not much difficulty. The record, so far, seems to be that as long as the source code, something that can be run, is "out there" that someone somewhere will hack it enough to play. I'm fairly confident that this record will continue and such games will remain "playable" insofar as in that if you don't mind the (at best) dubious legality of the above for abandon ware you can play it.

The issue, where games will truly be "lost" in the same sense that these films are lost;
http://mentalfloss.com/article/26045...
will be when the source code, the playable part of a game, isn't "out there" in any sense, like in City of Heroes. The record, with examples of movies like the above, is that eventually someone just doesn't care, or doesn't realize, what they have and it gets destroyed and then it's really gone forever.

I wanna say thank you for pronouncing my handle correctly. So many people pronounce it "revo-kater."

Thank you guys for your advice. I don't really have a lot of time to put into gaming these days, which is why I'll average 2-4 hours of a game a week, and it's not that I have the means to keep buying new games either. I actually built up the collection I have by waiting for extremely steep sales, and most of the games are old classics, with only the key new "blockbuster" games that I really want. Until I got this new job my rule was I never bought a game if it wasn't at least 75% off. Until Breath of the Wild (which I played on the WiiU at my old work, as I didn't even have the console), I hadn't bought a game for full price since the original KotOR games. Even with this new job I still wait for price drops and 50% off sales.

I guess that doesn't really matter. Again, thanks for the advice. I guess I'll just try to find more time to play the games I really wanna finish.

ChrisRevocateur wrote:

I guess I'll just try to find more time to play the games I really wanna finish.

I will echo the sentiment I think we all share. There are too many games and not enough time.

As I've gotten older, I've talked to others and learned that it's ok to stop games. If something doesn't grab me, within the first few hours, we live in a world of soooo many good games, it's not bad to move on. It's IMPOSSIBLE to play everything. Recently I tried Danganronpa on Steam on a recommendation then quit half-way through. Moved on to a "Tales" game. No regrets. (WTF is the appeal of Danganronpa? Maybe it didn't age well? I don't know. I'd love to know why people like it).

Personal opinion: if you play one game this year, make it Zelda BotW.

Cory, I thought I heard you mention that Rocket League required less precision than an FPS because of its preferred control method (controller). I personally think the precision and timing to do some of those aerials goes above and beyond anything I have seen in an FPS. I'm astonished at some of things high level players are able to accomplish in that game. Angling the ball in the air like that isn't like hitting a head shot from 300 meters away, its like ricocheting a bullet off the wall and getting an eyeshot! By nature driving/flying games excel with analog control methods but aren't less precise because of them. Another example would be Dirty Rally. Or to take it to a different genre, it would be equivalent to saying that fighting games require less precision than FPS games because they use joystick controllers.

The reason Rocket League works cross platform isn't because of precision, it's because almost everyone uses the same control method (IMO).

I apologize in advance if it wasn't you who said that. I was in the middle of my run and couldn't rewind!

Spoiler:

Maybe I'm just biased because I play a ton of Rocket League and struggle to get out of Silver. At the same time I can put 10-20 hours into any FPS and usually fair pretty well on PC or console.

Edit: To elaborate a little more the main reason FPS games are easier on a PC is because, by nature of the control method, your characters reaction time can be almost instantaneous. It's not limited by the "weightiness" of analog control schemes. You point at a pixel on the screen and that is where your gun is pointing. However that same control method doesn't translate well to driving / flying where you have to account for physics and weight.

Dag nabbit! Double post.

ChrisRevocateur wrote:

I wanna say thank you for pronouncing my handle correctly. So many people pronounce it "revo-kater."

Thank you guys for your advice. I don't really have a lot of time to put into gaming these days, which is why I'll average 2-4 hours of a game a week, and it's not that I have the means to keep buying new games either. I actually built up the collection I have by waiting for extremely steep sales, and most of the games are old classics, with only the key new "blockbuster" games that I really want. Until I got this new job my rule was I never bought a game if it wasn't at least 75% off. Until Breath of the Wild (which I played on the WiiU at my old work, as I didn't even have the console), I hadn't bought a game for full price since the original KotOR games. Even with this new job I still wait for price drops and 50% off sales.

I guess that doesn't really matter. Again, thanks for the advice. I guess I'll just try to find more time to play the games I really wanna finish.

A man after my own heart

I'm definitely someone who waits for sales most of the time. My parents, who grew up during the war, over did it with the frugality training. When my brain knows a thing is £50 now but in three months time it will be £25 it's next to impossible for me to say, "Sod it. I'll get it now anyway."

It's also good practice to deny yourself gratification now and then. I watched a programme recently and a man said, 'The heart of all wisdom is frugality' (or something like that.)

In recent times I've realised that buying a game isn't always the right thing, even if it's dirt cheap. It isn't necessarily the money you want to look. You need to consider how much you really want the game and if you will ever have the time to play it. May be leave more games on the shelf. Also, get to know the games you really love as opposed to the types of games you will kind of enjoy playing or want to enjoy but actually, in practice, don't (for me that's platformers.) Only buy games your really excited about. You will end up with a smaller stack of games you are genuinely excited to play rather than being overwhelmed by a ton of games you feel obliged to play.

With your existing pile maybe separate them into "In my heart I know I'm never going to play this game," "I sort of want to play this," and "Looks amazing. Definitely play," piles and consider getting rid of the first pile at least.

With finishing games, one thing you can do is accept natural hiatuses in games. Leave them alone for a bit then come back and see if you have renewed enthusiasm. I loved Assassin's Creed: Black Flag to bits but I got to a stage, half way through, where I'd run out of steam and any desire to play on. I left the game alone for three or more months and then, when I picked it up again, I was back excited and motivated to play to the end.

Nolf is quite easily available through .... abandonware channels (see my posts in other threads recently...rps's john walker had an article about it's ridiculous release deadlock the other day (with links to the fan-updated , still technically not quite legal, versions which can be downloaded and played on anything up to Windows 10 at higher resolutions).

I'm playing it this weekend actually and the download version works great, with a few niggles (some of the graphics like the black border around the sniper scope zoom were never meant to work in widescreen) but it's perfectly playable.

That said, I have two each of the boxed versions of nolf and nolf2 handy at all times in case of emergencies, so I feel like it's no big deal for me to grab a convenient digital version guilt free (something I would only do because there's probably never going to be a legit digital copy of either game available. Ymmv.