Jar Time w/ Jeff: It's Time, It's Time, It's Jar Time - 03/01/2012

Jeff have you played Dragon Age 2? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon in talking mess about it?

My ipad 2 browser has bee crashing like crazy as well. Something to do with iOS5 I think.

gold...anass...
goldAnaas...
Goldeanas,,,,,,,
gold'nas
idon....i don't know what....

@DexterKid said:

Jeff have you played Dragon Age 2? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon in talking mess about it?

I pre-ordered it, then played it. The mess talking is deserved. Biggest disappointment of my 2011 in games.

I got the Double Brad once. Oh, college years.

@thebigJ_A said:

Didn't he just say his house phone doesn't ring?

That was the Bat Phone; not to be mistaken with his normal LAN line. :|

@piderman said:

Maybe if companies stopped releasing games 3 days late in Europe, we wouldn't need to make the announcements 3 days early to offset it ;)

Well said.

@Scotto said:

@DexterKid said:

Jeff have you played Dragon Age 2? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon in talking mess about it?

I pre-ordered it, then played it. The mess talking is deserved. Biggest disappointment of my 2011 in games.

I also played it. And I don't think it is deserved.

So where do we go from here? Cause obviously one of us is wrong here, right?

jeff do you think this show could be put up in the podcasts section too so that I can download it? would be cool to listen to it on the move

@Ethan_Raiden said:

jeff do you think this show could be put up in the podcasts section too so that I can download it? would be cool to listen to it on the move

i'd like that too, but i think it would be too easy for non-premium members to get a copy of an mp3.

@DexterKid said:

@Scotto said:

@DexterKid said:

Jeff have you played Dragon Age 2? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon in talking mess about it?

I pre-ordered it, then played it. The mess talking is deserved. Biggest disappointment of my 2011 in games.

I also played it. And I don't think it is deserved.

So where do we go from here? Cause obviously one of us is wrong here, right?

I actually torrented it, couldn't even finish it, I was completely disgusted at that game. Repeat the same animations 8billion times within the first 5 mins of the game, fight in arena instance-like areas. God awful story. Trash voice acting. Shits all over the soul of DA1. I could go on.

If you liked the game that's fine, I have NO idea how you did, but it's not a bandwagon when it's true. That game was trash, I'm just thankful I didn't pay for it, I would have been even more upset.

@Xeirus said:

@DexterKid said:

@Scotto said:

@DexterKid said:

Jeff have you played Dragon Age 2? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon in talking mess about it?

I pre-ordered it, then played it. The mess talking is deserved. Biggest disappointment of my 2011 in games.

I also played it. And I don't think it is deserved.

So where do we go from here? Cause obviously one of us is wrong here, right?

I actually torrented it, couldn't even finish it, I was completely disgusted at that game. Repeat the same animations 8billion times within the first 5 mins of the game, fight in arena instance-like areas. God awful story. Trash voice acting. Shits all over the soul of DA1. I could go on.

If you liked the game that's fine, I have NO idea how you did, but it's not a bandwagon when it's true. That game was trash, I'm just thankful I didn't pay for it, I would have been even more upset.

Oh so it's true, is it? Oh well I've embarrassed myself, thanks for letting me know.

I think the anger from pissy guys came more from the fact that a person (a lady, no less) who openly said she didn't like gameplay is making games. And people were already mad at bioware from going from a developer that made amazing gameplay with great story to a developer that still do great stories, I'm told, but crappy gameplay. I think the story about whats-her-name kind of kicked people in the shin and triggered an overblown reaction.

I'll agree with her with Mass Effect though, cause I couldn't do more than 5 hours of ME2 because the gameplay was just not my cup of tea at all.

I knew I wouldn't be sorry that I became a premium member!

I have to disagree with the skip combat button. It removes a sense of accomplishment. Gamers are a competitive bunch, and we like to brag about actually completing games. It would be meaningless to say that you've played a game to completion if you could skip through it like it was a connection of choose-your-own-adventure YouTube videos.

That may not seem like much to some, but it's a mere one factor in the paradigm of why many gamers don't like this idea. But let someone try it and see what happens. I remain skeptical of it's success in helping the gaming industry.

@Megasoum: Nice profile picture. And friend, the Habs will rise to greatness again. We must believe...

I don't like that GB tend to spoil games. The classic argument you hear is "If you care about it you would have played it by now." but a lot of people don't buy games at launch. To assume that people have the time and money to buy a game on launch and finish it in a week is very elitist. Take LA Noire for example. I got the Complete Edition and that game out in November. Cathrine was talked to death so when it came out in EU there wasn't much I didn't already know about it.

At this point many games are even spoiled before launch by people who get it early or by leaks and such. Al though that is fairly easy to avoid since I don't visit sites that would post such leaks.

The only solution I can think of is to stop reasing and listening to podcasts, but I can't stop listening and reading about games though since then I would have no idea what was coming out and what was good.

I find myself enjoying obscure games a lot more because of this though. Like for example the Yakuza-series isn't talked to death since it's not that big outside Japan so I can play those games years after release and have no idea what so ever what to expect.

I love Jeff's opinion about the Mass Effect 3 topic. I personally love the fact they included the multiple options to play through the game in different ways. I'm personally going to play through the "normal" way (like ME1 and 2) but I love that this may possibly bring in more people to this series, like some of my best friends that love gaming but never got into Mass Effect because of the rpg elements, they can now experience the great bits of Mass Effect without that.

@Paul_Is_Drunk: Then you must hate difficulty settings.

I think the problem with gameplay in games with good story is that 9/10 times the gameplay means combat and it's a seperate thing from the story/dialoge part of the game. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Persona etc all mix up the story with combat. Why does it even have to be in there?

I don't want them to take away the gameplay though or making it into just "press X at this point to continue". I want gameplay that is integrated into the story and dialoge. It's hard to give an example since no game has really managed to do it.

If you take Persona as an example, there has to be something else you could do than having dungeon raids. Maybe the gameplay can be that you have to cook food for Nanako, pick flowers for the girl you like in school, fix Yosuke's bike or whatever. Something that is integrated into the story and still has gameplay (it can't be just push L1 and R1 to fix the bike or whatever). And depending on how you do it affects the story so that a bad meal for Nanako is going to change the mood for that evening or whatever. There should be plnety there if you start thinking about it but most companies don't. they just make the gameplay be combat, because that's how video games have always been like. Ever since the first games most games have been about shooting things. I've got nothing against combat in games, but why do you have to shoehorn it into every game?

So instead of having a skip combat option, why not make RPG's without combat? The moments I remember in Dragon Age are not the moments where I slay a dragon, it's the funny dialoge a character has and such things. However I don't want it to become just a choose your own adventure type of thing where all you can do is choose a dialoge option and the story moves on.

What other panel do you guys think Brad'll be on?

@SaturdayNightSpecials said:

What he's saying about the new Gamespot writers being more "flowery" definitely seems to hold true there today. They write their reviews like highbrow criticism, not like purchasing advice, but ultimately they don't really say anything more profound about the game than a Giant Bomb review does.

The decks are particularly bad. I always cringe at how many polysyllabic adjectives they try to cram into one sentence. "Killer storytelling and creative demon slaying make the haunting Alan Wake one for the books." Like give me a break.

Brad Shoemaker: "At the same time, it feels like Japan embracing what Japan does best, tying together strong art design, passionate storytelling, and a decades-long tradition of high-flying action starring larger-than-life mythical figures."

Ryan Davis: "The substance of the game's profundity is wide open to debate, but it's never too overbearing about it, and there's something to be said for trying to divine the creator's intent from the thousands of swirling, flat-shaded cubes currently undulating across your screen."

Alex Navarro: "With its cubic art style and cheerful obliteration of the world around you, all at the whim of a gigantic, self-obsessed royal dandy, nothing about Katamari Damacy screams "mass audience appeal.""

These took about two minutes to find. Couldn't find one for Jeff, oddly.

I actually think the defence of 'gameplay as optional' is what's short-sighted here.  It would be fine in a vacuum to take that rule and apply it, and it's not a problem that it's optional to the player; it becomes a problem once the designer is seeing it as optional.  It cheapens the artform. Our gameplay is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it. Our narrative is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it.  I think it's wrong to assume that the player (/viewer) acting as their own designer will result in that player having a better experience. Players don't necessarily know best, they just think they do. Designers should be confident enough in their own expertise to say "No, I'm the artist here and this is how you should experience my creation".
 
I think the real problem here is that games (of the type we're talking about) already too often feel like they are two seperate experiences in the same box - one passive and one interactive.  What the industry should concern themselves with is how to better integrate those two aspects so that they come together better as a single experience.  It shouldn't even occur to the player that they might prefer to remove a whole element from the game, because doing so should cause terminal damage to what remains.  It should be as unthinkable as deciding you'd rather watch a movie without the dialogue or a piece of music without half of the notes.
 
If you can just rip out one whole element from a game like Mass Effect wholesale, without destroying the entire experience in the process, then I don't think those game elements were integrated and supporting each other to the extent they should have been in the first place.  Game design should not be as compartmentalised as it is now, and I think that accepting that every aspect should now be skippable by the player just reinforces that compartmentalisation design philosophy and makes it even worse. 
 
I think acceptance of this will seriously limit where game design goes in the future and will prevent the artform reaching the heights it should.  Instead of designers striving to make the experience as a whole as great as it can be, you will have designers striving to make sure the seperate elements of their game are acceptable to as many different people as possible. A further extension of the tickbox mentality: narrative good enough to appeal to the narrative crowd?, gameplay good enough to appeal to the gameplay crowd? etc.  It'll actually result in those elements becoming less integrated rather than more integrated.  
 
A game cannot become more than the sum of its parts if those parts are prevented, by design, from resonating with each other.  We should be encouraging game designers to aim higher, not lower.

I wish these came out every week. Consistently the best subscriber-only content available on the site.

Also, I want the option to skip combat in games. These days I do not play games for the fighting. Games like Uncharted would be 10x better than they are if they had that option to skip combat, or at least minimize it to the smallest possible degree.

I am one of those types that play games for the story as much as anything else. My views on games have changed a lot in the past years, and I truly think it's related to the fact that I am becoming older and older each waking day. I want an entertaining experience defined by a scope of storytelling than a good way to shoot dudes in the face.

Games like Mass Effect I love dearly because of the dialogue options and the plot. In many cases, the combat neuters the game; it sure did in the first one.

We need more options going forward, and limiting the combat would go a long way in cementing the fact that there are indeed gamers out there that I want to experience things in a video game that aren't related to fighting.

@evanbower said:

@Megasoum: Nice profile picture. And friend, the Habs will rise to greatness again. We must believe...

Sigh...yeah one day! At least we'll get a good draft pick next year!

@Jimbo said:

I actually think the defence of 'gameplay as optional' is what's short-sighted here. It would be fine in a vacuum to take that rule and apply it, and it's not a problem that it's optional to the player; it becomes a problem once the designer is seeing it as optional. It cheapens the artform. Our gameplay is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it. Our narrative is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it. I think it's wrong to assume that the player (/viewer) acting as their own designer will result in that player having a better experience. Players don't necessarily know best, they just think they do. Designers should be confident enough in their own expertise to say "No, I'm the artist here and this is how you should experience my creation". I think the real problem here is that games (of the type we're talking about) already too often feel like they are two seperate experiences in the same box - one passive and one interactive. What the industry should concern themselves with is how to better integrate those two aspects so that they come together better as a single experience. It shouldn't even occur to the player that they might prefer to remove a whole element from the game, because doing so should cause terminal damage to what remains. It should be as unthinkable as deciding you'd rather watch a movie without the dialogue or a piece of music without half of the notes. If you can just rip out one whole element from a game like Mass Effect wholesale, without destroying the entire experience in the process, then I don't think those game elements were integrated and supporting each other to the extent they should have been in the first place. Game design should not be as compartmentalised as it is now, and I think that accepting that every aspect should now be skippable by the player just reinforces that compartmentalisation design philosophy and makes it even worse. I think acceptance of this will seriously limit where game design goes in the future and will prevent the artform reaching the heights it should. Instead of designers striving to make the experience as a whole as great as it can be, you will have designers striving to make sure the seperate elements of their game are acceptable to as many different people as possible. A further extentsion of the tickbox mentality: narraritve good enough to appeal to the narrative crowd?, gameplay good enough to appeal to the gameplay crowd? etc. It'll actually result in those elements becoming less integrated rather than more integrated. A game cannot become more than the sum of its parts if those parts are prevented, by design, from resonating with each other. We should be encouraging game designers to aim higher, not lower.

Said what I tried to say, but better!

/bow

If any developer is sitting there trying to figure out how that can give players a way to skip their gameplay then I think that should be a realization that their gameplay probably isn't very good.

Love these videos.

Give me all that internet!!!

@chilibean_3 said:

If any developer is sitting there trying to figure out how that can give players a way to skip their gameplay then I think that should be a realization that their gameplay probably isn't very good.

That...and at that point, why not just release it on dvd/bluray? If you are in the video game industry to make a movie, you are in the wrong industry!

Thanks Jeff.

@Megasoum said:

@chilibean_3 said:

If any developer is sitting there trying to figure out how that can give players a way to skip their gameplay then I think that should be a realization that their gameplay probably isn't very good.

That...and at that point, why not just release it on dvd/bluray? If you are in the video game industry to make a movie, you are in the wrong industry!

It would become a barely interactive choose-your-own video adventure! Wheeeeeeeee! Better ways to bring in outsiders that are normally intimidated or confused by controls/gameplay are more intelligent easy modes and better tutorials. Things that create a way for new players to learn and work up to more complicated ideas rather than try out the gameplay, fail and then just ignore it.

@pakattak said:

@Paul_Is_Drunk: Then you must hate difficulty settings.

If difficulty settings were the same as skipping through large parts of a game to see the story, then we would not even be having this conversation, would we?

@Jimbo said:

It cheapens the artform. Our gameplay is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it. Our narrative is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it.

Then don't support that company or buy that specific game...

Like Jeff said, who gives a shit. A shitty game will -always- be shitty. A crappy combat system will -always- be crap. Nothing would have changed. If a studio becomes lazy then they lose sales, it's not any different than making a bad game now.

Just don't buy something if you don't like it, "vote with your wallet" is the best way to put it.

Fuckin' line graphs and pie charts. Who do they think they are?

@Jimbo said:

It cheapens the artform. Our gameplay is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it. Our narrative is shitty? Doesn't matter, people can skip it.

Then don't support that company or buy that specific game...

Like Jeff said, who gives a shit. A shitty game will -always- be shitty. A crappy combat system will -always- be crap. Nothing would have changed. If a studio becomes lazy then they lose sales, it's not any different than making a bad game now.

Just don't buy something if you don't like it, "vote with your wallet" is the best way to put it.

And I like what You guys do too, Jeff! :D

OMFG, I just watched a Time Trotters episode on youtube... incredible...

Get a condens dryer dude. Just pour out the water at the end and you're done. :)

More Jar Time then you can handle.

I love not knowing about how a game is going to play out, and really, really don't understand why people hunt for info on a game before they've even played the thing.

Why would I want to know what the plot points of ME3 will turn out to be? I would miss that first timer experience of: "HOLY CRAP!" while I experience butterflies in my stomach with excitement. ME2 gave me the butterflies when I first saw the SR-2!

@Tennmuerti said:

The thing about the option of skipping combat is that it does actually affect people that do not choose to use it.

How so?

Because by incorporating such an option to skip combat is by default affecting how those designing the game think about combat/story structure. By having such an option there they are either already going in with a mindset to keep the two seperate or at the very least making sure that they can seperate the 2 easily.

Think about how ME2-3 is structured. No exploration, get to mission start, go through linear mission combat, at the end story (sometimes a few bits of story in the middle). It's incredibly simplistic and is what gives some people the feeling that the game is more of a linear shooter. Not arguing wheather or not it's a bad thing here. I know ME2 did not have said option but it would fit in perfectly well.

Compare this to say the way ME1 was designed, landing on planets, huge amounts of exploration, it would be much harder for them to have a "skip combat" option as combat frequantly happens in an open way by itself while exploring rather then in preset controlled corridors. Or say the way DA:O is, where combat is weaved much more tighly into the narative. Plenty of combat scenarios become iconic narative moments, the stand against the constant stream of zombie hordes to protect a village with the defenders you helped organised, the fight against the final boss. What if you skipped those moments? You would actually loose a lot fo the narative and it's punch.

In order for the "skip combat" option to be available in those games they would actually have to be changed in the way they were designed at a fundamental level in order to create a much more clear cut seperationbetween combat/story. Some of yours and mine most beloved games are made in such ways where designers masterfully mesh the two aspects together. Hell it does not even have to be directly story, think of God of war and how it would have to be changed if the designers had to come up with a way to seperate it's story moments from it's combat moments.

So what's the point of all this i'm rambling about above?

The point is that the inclusion of such an option is either only possible in games that already have a clearer seperation of the 2 concepts or provisions have to be made for it. Therefore yes inclusion of "skip combat" does actually affect people who do not even have to use it. It affects what kind of game is available to them.

Personaly I would rather games go in the direction of masterfully meshing story and combat (or any gameplay for that matter) together rather then segregating the two. Is it selfish to want gaming to cater to my interests? Most assuredly. But that does not make it invalid for me to care, we all want games to be more of what we want after all.

PS: (just in case some people get this ridiculous notion of me saying: "such option makes developers go, durrrrr we now have to make our game different", this is not what i'm saying at all and you would have completely missed the point)

i give this essay a 3/4.

@Jimbo said:

The English language can be used to express an infinitely more nuanced message than simply buying or not buying something.

Seriously?

....maybe you should take Jeff's advice, you're not writing an essay, you don't need to be trying to impress people.

In other words, you're trying too hard.

What's the time stamp on the ME3 talking so I can skip it?

Fuck yes, PAX East confirmed. I don't know if they've gone every year, but I sure as hell am glad they're going this year since it's my first time going!

I will admit to being a little worried hearing about the "action mode" in Mass Effect (though I didn't get pissy and shout about it, this is not what we should be fighting Bioware over). But yea, I'm now definitely on board for it being an option in a lot of the games I play.

I think about Persona 3 where you keep your level in a New Game+ (partially missing from Persona 4), meaning that you can steamroll and practically avoid combat entirely every time you replay it so you can get to all the good story and social link bits. I wouldn't complain for such an option to be available from the start. We forget that there are a lot of people who want to get into gaming but are not down for some of the grind and tedium that so many of us are used to.

( Edit: Reading more into this, the fact that you can so easily remove combat from a videogame without hurting it's narrative is a bit bothersome now that I think about it. It would be like removing combat from Dark Souls or Shadow of the Colossus, those stories are so heavily entwined into the combat experience that removing them would remove the story too. But different games have different goals to set out. Blending gameplay and story is something so awesome when it works, but it's not always that simple or even necessary. Context is everything)

Again though, the backlash is more about it being a Bioware thing. They have set such a precedent that we can never believe that they do anything for the right reasons anymore, it's more about what it symbolized rather than what it actually was.

I'm at the point where I don't care about them anymore though. Baldur's Gate II was my most favorite game of all time, and modern Bioware just isn't that anymore. I do get pissy and yell at EA all the time for what they do with Bioware (and Maxis, and everyone else), but there's really nothing that can be done that will bring them back to the good 'ole days. I'm not buying ME3, but it's definitely not because of "action mode".

"Vote with your wallet."
"Seriously?" 
"You're trying too hard."

Frazzled Jeff is so fun to watch. I can really relate to his 'clutter getting out of control' problem.

Also: I think it's hillarious that he still can't find his Twilight Princess disc. That debacle was months ago!

lol

Would love to see all your neo geo carts Jeff.

@Jimbo said:

@Xeirus said:

"Vote with your wallet."
"Seriously?"
"You're trying too hard."

Are you going for a Full House on tired internet cliches? Do you have anything worthwhile and/or relevant to add to this discussion at all? Don't expect another response if your next post is as completely pointless as your last two efforts.

Irony at its finest, I'm done with you now.

...There's a group of people who don't live and breathe video games?