Giant Bombcast 561: The Bad Guy Likes Weather

Cast the bomb

I can't seem to download the premium podcast.

Clicking the download button just opens another window of this page.

The wing-suit in JC3 is fucking great. Best part of the game imo.

Re: RDO - You can do at least one of the missions without matchmaking, I was in a posse of 3 and started the one with the train tracks and it let us start with 3 with no matchmaking, just had 1 fewer people to catch. Haven't tried doing the same with other missions.

Honor has been a non issue for me, it's been pretty easy to keep max honor. There's also a guy who'll switch your honor for $. Not enough to do in the game though for sure and I've clipped through the floor quite a lot in free roam.

Thanks duders.

@depecheload: @hassun: Sorry for the trouble, I'll see if someone can look into this.

I bought just cause 4 on pc yesterday the gold edition and it's such a bummer compared to 3. No pistols, no c4, graphics look awful, it is so buggy, and they removed all outposts so all you do is raise chaos but you get hardly any rewards and my biggest complaint is you're always out of ammo since they give you only 12 bullets for some guns ugh. I paid almost 100 bucks for this and no sign of a patch or any community outreach. Radio silence as post after post says it won't even load for some.

No aftermath this week?

@rorie: Thanks!

Jan's stealth cuts to him reacting to something someone said are always so fucking funny.

Also can't download the premium.

Ditto

I don't care about the poop on the touchscreens. I wash my hands before I eat, like a sane person.

The issue was uploading the actual file in the CMS, it sounds like, so it's something an engineer has to look into. That's being done but I don't have a firm ETA on when the file will be up; sorry for the trouble.

How did the site break so bad with this redesign? I'm not trying to come off as a dick, this monster of a site must be hard to re-code,

Im not in the industry so I have no idea how this shit works, I dunno, I just think it's a little ironic that the crew are debating broken alpha and beta releases while core functionality like downloading the podcast without having to turn my phone to landscape or not being able to download the cast at all is a little shit..

Be good duders, If it's not an easy fix I hope you find the solution quickly.

(Smiley face to show no harm no foul)

@rorie: Working for me now.

@kblosnack: nope

Guys, you can take down a quadcopter with a kite. As long as you're okay with ruining the pizza.

The Premium bombcast should be available to download and on RSS, but let me know if you have any issues with it.

@rorie: Thanks Rorie! Sorry if my first message was snarky.

While Red Dead Online is buggy and prone to crashing I wouldn’t say there is “nothing” to do in it. There are several competitive multiplayer modes, there are public events and then there are the story missions and quests given to you by NPC’s from the main game. I think Abby had this expectation that this would be the single player in co-op mode rather than a multiplayer component, which it basically is. They just need to iron out the bugs cause you get disconnects and crashes quite often, balance the economy and unlocks, and add more interesting story missions. The skeleton is there and what I’ve played is fun, there just needs to be more of it, but it’s certainly not nothing.

OK I think this should be accurately hitting the Premium RSS feed now, but let me know if there are any issues. Sorry for the trouble!

Just to add further, I would imagine that having all the NPCs and systems of the single player in a shared multiplayer world that has to scale to handle dozens of clients may not be feasible, as it would require all those NPCs and player interactions to be synchronized. While GTA Online may feel a lot more filled-out compared to Red Dead Online's current state, it's definitely not the full experience of GTA 5 albeit with coop support. If people's appreciation of RDR2 is tied to the quantity and quality of NPC interactions, then it might be good to temper expectations of what the open world can offer (without relying on instanced Heist-style missions that are limited to a small group, of course).

Regarding young kids and VR usage, there's two issues that have been brought up since the early VR days:

One of which Abby mentioned (distance between the eyes, aka interpupillary distance, or IPD.) The issue here is that all VR headsets have an adjustable range of IPD that's supported, and if you happen to fall under the minimum supported size, it results in your eyes actually having to diverge in order for the stereo image to register. This is something that the muscles of the eyes never have to cope with doing naturally, as the furthest they should ever have to be is parallel. The IPD range of the various models of headsets differ slightly, but my recollection is that the mid-point of that range was according to population averages of adults (way back I recall Palmer specifically citing a US military personnel statistic for the mean and variance.)

The other issue is the "vergence-accommodation conflict", which is something that every current VR headset produces and every VR user is impacted by. The "convergence accommodation reflex" is the behavior that allows the brain to predict how much focus (accommodation) the lenses of eyes need based on how much they're converged. The more you cross your eyes, the closer the distance is you're expecting to focus at, the nearer the focal depth the lenses will need to reflexively focus. In VR (currently), all images are optically focused at a fixed distance of anywhere from a couple meters to infinity (depending on the optics of the model of headset). This is why VR doesn't feel like you're looking at a screen that's 2 inches from your eye. However, this also means that the only time your eyes are able to converge and focus as they naturally do, is when you're looking at a virtual depth that matches that particular focus distance.

The 'conflict' here comes from when you are looking at a virtual object that's very close, resulting in your eyeballs converging at the correct distance to form the stereo image, but the accommodation of the lenses will try to focus at that expected close distance, when in fact they need to be focusing at the much further away fixed distance to produce a clear image. As an aside, this issue would have occurred with the 3DS, (albeit with much less disparity in the conflict.) The unknown concern here with young kids is obviously the ongoing eye/brain development being impacted. Anecdotally, I've noticed that after extended use of VR day after day, week after week, that the accommodation of my eyes seems more prone to relaxing and losing focus when looking at monitor, but only temporarily.

edit: So... if you feel compelled to put your young kids in VR, measure their IPD, be sure to adjust the headset's IPD appropriately, and be mindful of how much the activity they're doing involves staring at things very close to their face for long periods. If your child has a big head, or is a hammerhead shark, then playing something like Astrobot for 15 minutes per day might not be a huge deal.

yo what's up with Vinny's lips? Are my eyes bad?

Thanks for the Bonnie spoiler.

Okay so, I haven't listened yet but like, is that a Halo in Forza Horizon? Even as someone who gives no shits about either of those franchises, if it is, it is FUCKING RAD.

Abby No Nails.

I like that they've only just noticed Thronebreaker exists, it was all over twitch for a bit and I was seeing ads everywhere for it. I thought it was a GWENT thing also.

I, like Abby, hate beans in food stuffs. All because of the texture, they seem to dry out my mouth like nothing else does.

Dan and Abby's "Who cares?" shrugs for the government or other institutions having a complete(ish) database of a population's DNA and technology recording our every(ish) conversation is why the future is broke.

The crew's memory is faulty on Just Cause 2, tethering was in that game, it wasn't a mod. Connecting the front of a car to the ground was my favourite way to take down chasing vehicles. You could only tether 2 points at a time, though.

@adamkerr: yep, ignorance and apathy in the general populace is a slow death in society. These institutions count on the masses living just comfortable enough that they don’t notice or care when these power grabs happen.

Dan's silence through the McDonnalds poop screen conversation until it was mentioned that UV light can disinfect was magical.

I'm sad Bethesda keeps throwing ammo at people to keep yelling at Fallout 76, for that I think is actually a decent video game that is being handled so poorly that the game itself is victim of Bethesda's incompetence.

If they had come out clearer to explain everything Fallout 76 is and does instead of rushing it out to the release doors and letting players figure everything on their own, the game wouldn't be so off-putting or be compared other survival games instead of being judged for what it is. It's a very bad first impression for many to say it mildly, and the people who are curious enough to stay in game to find what's new and fun gets yelled at for liking the game. -sigh-

Beshesda deserves all the heat for their handling of decisions of the game, but the popular image of the game is worst than the quality of the game itself which isn't fantastic in this current state but I feel has legs to stand and could be improved and enjoyed without trashing the premise.

Jeff wants to fly a tank and shoot from it in JC4, but the A-TEAM movie already did that. They didn’t shoot at anyone, though, they just used the cannon to direct their fall into water.

Is there a quicklook coming for Just Cause 4?

And just like that.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-12-05-epics-new-unreal-tournament-no-longer-in-development

They said it'll probably be next week.

I really like the giant bomb crew...but anytime they‘re talking about food, i kinda wish i didn‘t know about them.

All that self driving car protocol stuff was sent up in a watchdogs 2 DLC.

A little disappointed that you guys don't know CDR Thronebreaker

I'm SO glad that I canceled my pre-order for Fallout 76 just two weeks before its release. I think I dodged a bullet there.

Just because I got curious and did some googleing at work, you can indeed still buy Miku V4 software from crypton future's website w/ the English sounds for ~22000 yen.

I think their storytelling improved a lot between Just Cause 3 and 4, largely by moving the characters around a little. Since Medici is Rico's homeland, he had a personal stake in toppling that dictator, and knew several of the resistance members ahead of time, doing several goofy missions for them or occasionally getting pranked. In Just Cause 2 I don't remember a lot besides Bolo Santosi,and that's entirely because she's the one female communist faction leader. Your old mission giver, Tom Sheldon, is still in Just Cause 3. He's just not the one on the radio all the time, and thank god for that, he's YEEHAAWs were getting on my nerves. It's still as b-movie as ever, with the DLC giving you straight up jetpacks, fights against rogue AIs, floating evil fortresses and mechs. One of the guns makes a lightning strike appear like you're Enel. On top of that, movement was even better than before. It took some time to learn the wingsuit, but it took some time to learnt the parachute, too.

It's a quite good game, I just got tired of the repetetiveness. Blow 10 fortresses up, blown them all up. And they still kinda lack stakes. It's not like a Metal Gear, where you do get all the wacky stuff and also heartfelt pathos and memorable villains, even if it occasionally tries. Between that and the performance I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped.

One thing I did prefer in 2 to 3 was the variety in environments, though. There's a lot more to jungle-desert-mountains-beaches-oceans than forest-mountains-beaches.

I was thinking Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts and then Jeff said it. This is why I love the Bombcast

Thronebreaker sales were bad, because anyone who wasn't at least a bit into Multiplayer Gwent had no idea what it was and that it was coming out. The game was supposed to be a single player campaign for the multiplayer Gwent originally, but grew bigger and the development went longer partly also because the whole multiplayer beta Gwent got overhauled in the meantime.

Any other Witcher 3 fan was mostly dumbstruck on what the hell the game was.