Fuck yes I wondered why xpantherx's youtube had gone quiet. As a person who pretty much watches 95% of the content put out on GiantBomb, I still happily laugh (tear?) my way though xpantherx's content also...
That's true Brad, and if you say there are more reveals about what's complete and what isn't, I'm looking forward to finding them!
Things that sort of annoy me also (though I'm sure I'm not 100% there on it yet) is like the 'window tree' diorama that Jeff found in the QL that you commented on (from the outside). This appears to do nothing at this early point. I also think I can guess what the 'Pompeii' stone statues are inkling towards (with their shadows etc), but we'll just have to wait and see. I wonder what a fluid day/night cycle would do to this game...
I've played about 4-5 hours of The Witness, vs about 40 in Talos and DLC (to completion, all stars, no guide).
So I'm probably jumping the gun a little bit here, especially as I refuse to use a guide.
With all that I've said above though, if The Witness had a permanent run speed, and time skip I think I would be a lot more comfortable with it.
Regardless it is still an amazing game for people who like puzzles a la me, and yes worth every dollar. I feel that there is more work (value??) in this game than Talos for example, which is a weird thing about perception vs reality (hello @beastcast!)
If for nothing else, people should check out The Witness as the artwork in this game is absolutely stellar. It's sort of TF2 mashed with Proteus, with a pastel/watercolour, hand-drawn touch to boot.
This article at Gamasutra is slightly telling why this may be so: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DeannaVanBuren/20151012/254238/Architecture_in_Video_Games_Designing_for_Impact.php
The observation that this game makes you think about it while you aren't playing is proving absolutely true for me at the moment, I can't help but want to get people to play this game.
And I suppose the point could be made that the lack of interactivity, and pure 'mouse-pointer' driven gameplay makes this game accessible to the unwashed masses more so than ever, which can only be a good thing. Perhaps however this rubs a little harshly on the 'experienced' gamer such as ourselves, (like Jeff noted in the QL) as a lack of jump or walking off ledges only seems to annoy me at the least, where the other FPS puzzlers you can jump around at speed with wiley gay abandon.
Also, I left the Portals off my puzzle games for architects list! Yikes.
- Fast forward in Talos (which is a god send!) There's not even a run-lock function in the Witness (ARGGGGHHH!)
- Ambient music and all around more atmosphere in Talos, not much in The Witness, and it seems even really shallow in the philosophy department. Talos definitely had more stuff going on, more to interact with etc.
- Talos has tracking of stats/progress (apart from the The Witness' black monolith tyre stacks). This is sort of unforgiveable for The Witness to have nothing. I need a bit more of a reason to chase down the remaining things in The Witness, as I don't know where they roughly are, at all.
- No indication you've solved a 'landscape line' before in The Witness as with above.
- Drawing and looking for lines with dots on the end isn't as fun and dynamic as figuring out the mechanics in Talos, which are more solidly grounded in the 'world' scale.
- The Witness gets awfully close to requiring you to manually write something down even though there's no 'in-world' reason why the game shouldn't do it for you. I ABSOLUTELY HATE when games do this. Talk about labour. Unlike Drew, Brad and even Dan - a game forcing me to write something down is a chore, not a trigger to euphoria. Fez is slightly different (though not much!).
- The above is made only worse by the shit slow travel speed, lack of jump/running off ledges (which is sort-of understandable for reasons), and lack of music/philosphy/atmosphere while searching carefully (laboriously slowly) in The Witness' world.
Aside from that, The Witness' world is amazing, the puzzles are nice and the graphics are ace. But it's still no Talos for me.
Maybe as I'm an architect dealing with perspective to draw/see somewthing is a sort of cheap parlour trick and I tire of it faster than most people??
I present a quick list of the best puzzle games for Architects:
Antichamber, Talos Principle, The Witness, Portal, Fez, Naissance, Portal 2.
I watched the Arise stuff on Netflix recently.. I thought it was pretty good? At least for the great action scenes and animation..
/shrug
Consensus among GitS fans tends to be that Arise is hot garbage. It's largely divorced from the original creators of the series and it shows in the poorer quality of the animation and writing. It also shamelessly rehashes moments from SAC and the original movie, for whatever reason.
Also, the excellent HL2 mod NEOTOKYO° continues to be the best Ghost in the Shell game.
I'm always a little saddened that no one remembers Dystopia, which made Neotokyo look like a kiddie pool by comparison. Unfortunately, the devs went on to make a mediocre 3rd person dueling game instead of a retail version of their original mod.
Arise was... weird.
Needlessly aesthetically adjusted (Why?? to suit a younger, fresh crowd??) Much simpler (and let's face it,.. more stupid) than SAC ever was.
Why did they rehash scenes from SAC and the movie?? At the time when I watched I was like wtf... are they meant to be actually showing the exact same event, or is this a way too obvious (and therefore pointless) throwback to those moments for some strange reason??? The cardinal sin here is that they actually re-did the same things from the prior series/movie, and the animation/direction was actually worse! Just like GitS 2.0!
What were they thinking? Are they that dense that they couldn't write a much more ominous/interesting lead in, to the start of the movie? Yowsers there were some big mis-steps in Arise.
Barely any interesting philosphy, the music wasn't up to scratch, voice cast was adjusted too much... etc. Why didn't they go back even further to the start of Cyberbrainism etc?
It was almost more of a weird hybrid of the manga/movie than has already been made - calling Aramaki ape-face and the like, etc.
If people thought SAC and the movies were nonsensical (which, let's be honest is somewhat true - and perhaps partially down to the translation) then don't watch Arise as myself - a self-confessed GitS fanboy, found most of it really, really stupid.
We really didn't need to know where Borma, Paz and the others actually came from, and it was way too neat a telling of their quick recruitment to Section 9.
If a better writer had a chance to work with these broad ideas for Arise, (The reboot/back storey for Section 9 and the team), say like Kenji Kamiyama, it could have been quite phenomenal.
Unfortunately it looks like some new controlling direction for the GitS franchise has greenlit some money-making ideas in the last year or three without actually properly respecting what makes GitS so worthwhile for the rabid fan base. Hence Arise and hence this middling game.
There are some great background fodder elements to utilise in a game set in the neo-Tokyo world of GitS and it WOULD NOT have to star the Major or Batou etc. Someone clever could make something amazing with it, and it wouldn't have to be AAA either.
Hacking, possession, trans-humanism, shooting, stealth, identity, oversight, defense vs offense military, pmc's, future-combat, robots, what is a soul, etc, etc, etc... Think of what the SOMA guys (Frictional) could do in a world like that...
The lack of GitS knowledge is astounding but hilarious... and... understandable!
Also GitS 2.0 is complete garbage. Stick to the original people!
Also:
A Stand Alone Complex can be compared to the emergentcopycat behavior that often occurs after incidents such as serial murders or terrorist attacks. An incident catches the public's attention and certain types of people "get on the bandwagon", so to speak. It is particularly apparent when the incident appears to be the result of well-known political or religious beliefs, but it can also occur in response to intense media attention. For example, a mere fire, no matter the number of deaths, is just a garden variety tragedy. However, if the right kind of people begin to believe it was arson, caused by deliberate action, the threat that more arsons will be committed increases dramatically.
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action. There may be real people who are labeled as the originator, but in reality, no one started the original behavior. And in Stand Alone Complex, the facade just has to exist in the minds of the public. In other words, a potential copycat just has to believe the copied behavior happened from an originator - when it really did not. The result is an epidemic of copied behavior having a net effect of purpose. One could say that the Stand Alone Complex is mass hysteria over nothing - yet causing an overall change in social structure.
This is not unlike the concepts of memes (refer to the conversation between the major and the Puppet Master in the manga) and second-order simulacra. It also has ties to social theory, as illustrated in the work of Frederic Jameson and Masachi Osawa. TheSlender Man phenomenon, in which the fictitious concept of a supernatural murderer went viral and has allegedly inspired real attacks, may be seen as an example of the Stand Alone Complex.
It has been posited that the choice by the writers of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex to use J.D. Salinger's short story "The Laughing Man" as a key element in the story was itself an example of second-order simulacra; the use of a story that could already be considered an example of second-order simulacra, by its popularity overshadowing the popularity of its original, The Man Who Laughs. This creates yet another example of the concept, by banking on the popularity of the show, the character, and the emblem used to represent The Laughing Man, supplanting the story as the Laughing Man by popularity alone.
In the series itself, it usually refers to events surrounding the Laughing Man case, and to some extent, the teamwork observed in Public Security Section 9. It is presented as an emergent phenomenon catalyzed by parallelization of the human psyche through the cyberbrain networks.[2] A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar; the result is an exponential increase in the potential for copycat behavior that forms a Stand Alone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is uncertain.
In Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, the Stand Alone Complex theory is expanded to political action. The main antagonist of the series, Goda, attempts to spark a revolution by what he terms "data manipulation" to create the prerequisite conditions for a Stand Alone Complex. By manipulating the fear and frustration of the repressed Chinese refugees in Japanese society, as well as creating false information which is then "leaked" to the police and Public Security Section 9, a terrorist organization calling itself "The Individual Eleven" emerges. However, with each terrorist incident, including an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister, it becomes clear that nothing connects the incidents together besides a logo, which had been "leaked" by Goda. In other words, "The Individual Eleven" is an organization constructed by a Stand Alone Complex - a group of self-interested individuals who have no connection or ties to each other but who unconsciously and collectively act towards the common purpose of revolution. Goda notes that there is a tendency within a Stand Alone Complex for the masses to unconsciously project their inadequacies and common desires onto a leader. In the first Stand Alone Complex series, this was the Laughing Man, and in Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, this figure is unconsciously realized in the form of Hideo Kuze.
So someone should look up the ssteam survey specs and find out how many % of people actually own a pc that hits those specs. Their market is tiny, and the cost is huge. Good luck VR, you're going to need it!
I kinda wished they would just sell a version without the xbox controller and chop 60 off the price. I have 3 xbox one controllers and even that is too much.
I'm sure they'll offer a non-bundled version, though I doubt it'll drop $60 off the price. The $599 price is preparing people for everything they'll need to enjoy its content (assuming they have the computer to support it.)
Don't worry, when the remote hand set things are out (a year's time??) they'll be bundled up without the controller for the same low, low price of $599 USD. I'm calling it now. Only makes sense. Let the early adopters pay the fresh minty smell tax. We'll catch up in a year or two, also when computers might be able to pump out the graphics, and also while software might be beyond cockpit simulators...
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