Giant Bombcast 01-24-2012

Wednesday morning and the bombcast \m/

my favorite moment from this week's show

My Dark Brotherhood quest worked fine. I used my bow while sneaking, no problem.

Patrick, Brad's right. You chose to become leader of everything. That's not the game's fault.

You aren't supposed to make one character and do everything with it. You can, sure, but then you get issues like you describe. And you'd be like level 70 by the end! Where's the fun in that, you're expected to be done with a character by 50ish.

You make a character, then do the things that guy would do. It's an RPG, after all, and not a linear one. My mage did the College and the main quest. My stealthy archer did Thieve's and DB. My warrior did Companions and the civil war. You can mix those up however you choose, and there's more than enough side stuff that each character can tons of quests without having to repeat anything. Each of my characters felt right by the time I was done with them.

You can't complain that you felt silly having beat all the questlines and becoming champion of them all when you chose to beat all the questlines. It begs the question.

@thebigJ_A: dude no, how hard is it really to say "do you want to be the leader? No? alright then, you are my second in command" or whatever.

I really can't handle looking at that picture of Steven Tyler for more than a couple of seconds.

second favorite moment

It's Tuueessddaay!

can u guys please stop doing megaspoilers of skyrim

Hell of Star Trek talk in this one. Loving it.

The miner lady kill is no glitch. I was the thane of the city she was in, dawnstar I believe, and I got no bounty. I told her I was going to kill her so she attacked me. This activated my companion and all the city gaurds to fight and kill her. She died without me having to lift a finger.

The guys never seem to have enough time for emails nowadays which is unfortunate. I'd prefer if they scrap them entirely and just have a special all emails podcast at the end of the month. This means five podcasts instead of four every month.

Is there any talk about ME3 or TOR this episode? I'm going to be listening in a situation I can't scrub ahead so advance warning would be nice.

@smcn: Nope. They don't talk about either.

The guys never seem to have enough time for emails nowadays which is unfortunate. I'd prefer if they scrap them entirely and just have a special all emails podcast at the end of the month. This means five podcasts instead of four every month.

@Masha2932 said:

The guys never seem to have enough time for emails nowadays which is unfortunate. I'd prefer if they scrap them entirely and just have a special all emails podcast at the end of the month. This means five podcasts instead of four every month.

I think it sucks. Like i may be in the minority, but i think "what games have you been playing" goes on for way too long, and as time goes by it gets longer and longer, used be an hour at most, now it's usually nearly 2 hours.

Then again i think the formula of the podcast needs livening up. E-mails at the start of the show was awesome. E-mail button was awesome (GG button questionable, but Jeff hating it is funny)

And most importantly the Marks Dice System. Bring back the dice! loved the dice.

Edit: then again, maybe they don't get many e-mails anymore and perhaps even then a lot of them are bad I don't know...

Yes! More electronic mail, please.

You forgot the "New!" icon on the 'Podcast' tab.. :P

guys if your gonna glitch to level up just use the dam  Oghma's Infinium  glitch and max out your  skills all at once.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/thecore_review.html

It's a shame Vinny's never going to finish Dark Souls.

@thebigJ_A said:

Patrick, Brad's right. You chose to become leader of everything. That's not the game's fault.

You aren't supposed to make one character and do everything with it. You can, sure, but then you get issues like you describe. And you'd be like level 70 by the end! Where's the fun in that, you're expected to be done with a character by 50ish.

You make a character, then do the things that guy would do. It's an RPG, after all, and not a linear one. My mage did the College and the main quest. My stealthy archer did Thieve's and DB. My warrior did Companions and the civil war. You can mix those up however you choose, and there's more than enough side stuff that each character can tons of quests without having to repeat anything. Each of my characters felt right by the time I was done with them.

You can't complain that you felt silly having beat all the questlines and becoming champion of them all when you chose to beat all the questlines. It begs the question.

Yes, it is. It's the games fault you can become the leader of everything with one character with zero consequences. You're talking about arbitrarily limiting yourself because the game is poorly designed. Which I'm already doing a lot of. They very easily could have kept you from becoming the leader of everything. Morrowind did it. But Bethesda can no longer do competent game design.

The character you murder in Dawnstar isn't bugged, I killed her without attracting attention and that was without getting her to attack me.

@Potter9156 said:

Yes, it is. It's the games fault you can become the leader of everything with one character with zero consequences. You're talking about arbitrarily limiting yourself because the game is poorly designed. Which I'm already doing a lot of. They very easily could have kept you from becoming the leader of everything. Morrowind did it. But Bethesda can no longer do competent game design.

Why play worlds 2 - 7 in Super Mario Bros. 3 when you could warp whistle straight to 8? There's no consequence for it, so the player can't be blamed for regretting the missed experiences in-between.

That might be a weird analogy, but I don't think it's altogether unfair. Most games, video or otherwise, give you ample opportunity to negatively effect your experience. I don't think it's so hard to identify what displeases you and choose not to play a certain way. Old PC games had a CHEAT tab in plain sight, proudly displayed at the top of the screen next to OPTIONS.

But we're talking about Skyrim here. An open-world sandbox of a game with an emphasis on roleplaying. This game is all about choosing how you want to play. Some folks want to become the leader of everything and potentially do everything in one run, so why limit them? If you don't think it makes sense for your character, the simple answer is "don't do it". You know, roleplaying and all.

It's like deciding to play a pacifist but then complaining that you're given the opportunity to kill everything. Why are you expecting the game to acknowledge that you're a pacifist? It just can't do your roleplaying for you.

But if you're someone who's more concerned with completion... well, good thing it lets you do everything, huh?

That said, it would be great if some crazy, chaotic scenario was unlocked by you becoming king of the guilds. However... then it really is asking for you to go down all the lines. As it stands, they're giving you 0 incentive to do it all. But it's there if it strikes your fancy. That's what open worlds are all about.

@Potter9156 said:

@thebigJ_A said:

Patrick, Brad's right. You chose to become leader of everything. That's not the game's fault.

You aren't supposed to make one character and do everything with it. You can, sure, but then you get issues like you describe. And you'd be like level 70 by the end! Where's the fun in that, you're expected to be done with a character by 50ish.

You make a character, then do the things that guy would do. It's an RPG, after all, and not a linear one. My mage did the College and the main quest. My stealthy archer did Thieve's and DB. My warrior did Companions and the civil war. You can mix those up however you choose, and there's more than enough side stuff that each character can tons of quests without having to repeat anything. Each of my characters felt right by the time I was done with them.

You can't complain that you felt silly having beat all the questlines and becoming champion of them all when you chose to beat all the questlines. It begs the question.

Yes, it is. It's the games fault you can become the leader of everything with one character with zero consequences. You're talking about arbitrarily limiting yourself because the game is poorly designed. Which I'm already doing a lot of. They very easily could have kept you from becoming the leader of everything. Morrowind did it. But Bethesda can no longer do competent game design.

Eh, people would bitch that they can't, now they're bitching that they can. Ya can't win here.

AAHA!!! I KNEW BRAD MUIR WAS THERE FOR A QUICK LOOK IN DECEMBER.

That is one ugly podcast pic!

the thumbnail is steven tyler after he chipped his tooth, and is strangely reminiscent of the Faces of Meth anti-drug campaign

I hated Armageddon. It was just 2 and a half hours of stupid and/or annoying characters doing stupid and/or annoying things.

Turns out only half paying attention will get you far in space.

@Superkenon said:

@Potter9156 said:

Yes, it is. It's the games fault you can become the leader of everything with one character with zero consequences. You're talking about arbitrarily limiting yourself because the game is poorly designed. Which I'm already doing a lot of. They very easily could have kept you from becoming the leader of everything. Morrowind did it. But Bethesda can no longer do competent game design.

But we're talking about Skyrim here. An open-world sandbox of a game with an emphasis on roleplaying. This game is all about choosing how you want to play. Some folks want to become the leader of everything and potentially do everything in one run, so why limit them? If you don't think it makes sense for your character, the simple answer is "don't do it". You know, roleplaying and all.

You bring up some good points, but I feel this is a lazy excuse for lazy game design. Games, especially RPGs, need rules and consequences for breaking or challenging those rules. It helps create a believable and fun world to role-play in. If I can join and become leader of every guild, believability is lost and immersion is killed. Massive Dark Brotherhood spoilers,

The problem is, every guild exists in a vacuum. Noble guilds don't care about the TG or DB, criminals and assassin scum have no quarrel with the noble guilds. They simply don't exist to each other. Being a thief and joining the Fighters Guild caused problems in Morrowind. You couldn't be the leader of both. It makes the world more believable. Believability is everything in an RPG.

But you need the playing games to beat them, gotta do errythang and get them cheevos crowd to buy your game.

I had the same problem as Patrick with that Dark Brotherhood quest.

I ended up casting Fury on her from a distance and she flipped out, attacking everyone around her. The guards outside killed her within a few seconds. No bounty or crime,

One of the guards said "You were the one who cast that spell, weren't you" which made me surprised, but he just walked past like whatever.

@Potter9156: I'm not disagreeing with your points, but I don't want your RPG. I don't want Morrowind again. I couldn't care less about achievements, but I don't want to have to play Skyrim 5 times to experience all of it's main content.

In the Elder Scrolls games, the Thieves Guild leader and Dark Brotherhood leaders are usually secret anyway, so it's not like the rest of the world knows about their personal existence anyway.

It's up to player self-restraint to not become the leader of every guild. I have different characters for the Companions & Bard's College, another for Thieves' Guild & Dark Brotherhood, and another for the Mage College. The Mage College was my Empire run, and my Companion/Bard was my Stormcloak run.

That's the thing, though. I'm choosing to play this way. If someone wants to experience everything (except both sides of the Empire/Stormcloaks) in one playthrough, it's up for them to decide that. Having your options be limited because other people can't roleplay beyond what the game spoon-feeds them is unnecessarily punishing the players that don't have that problem.

On a different note, hearing them butcher the lore was painful, but in the back of my mind I knew they wouldn't be the type of people to figure it all out. I would have though Vinny would have a better grasp, but na ja. I can only imagine how many more lore-heavy RPGs that guy has played than me.

Brad's point about the lack of R2 and L2 buttons on the Vita (in reference to using it to play PS3 games remotely) is slightly mitigated by the fact you could use the back to simulate the buttons. However, it might have to emulate them as a digital functionality which probably wouldn't work with a lot of games.

@Potter9156 said:

The problem is, every guild exists in a vacuum. Noble guilds don't care about the TG or DB, criminals and assassin scum have no quarrel with the noble guilds. They simply don't exist to each other. Being a thief and joining the Fighters Guild caused problems in Morrowind. You couldn't be the leader of both. It makes the world more believable. Believability is everything in an RPG.

But you need the playing games to beat them, gotta do errythang and get them cheevos crowd to buy your game.

Yeah, you can bet that there'd be more complaints yet from the other side if, God forbid, they had to make a new character to see all the content.

All in all I agree with you, I guess it just doesn't turn me off as much. The problem's only as glaring as it is because the rest of the world is so well developed and feels so alive and rich with history, that these sort of discrepancies stick out like a sore thumb. I'd definitely prefer the game to acknowledge your actions in this regard more, or even prevent running willy-nilly over the world so, but I'd feel weird complaining about something that's remedied as easily as me deciding "you know what, my dude just won't join two completely opposite guilds. That'd be weird".

As it is, I haven't joined any of the guilds since it turns out my character isn't the sort of guy who's willing to bind himself to a faction. I should have planned ahead better, heh.

I wish Patrick would let people talk.

Have to admit that the choice in skyrim to pick one guild to be leader of & the rest to just be a member of is a great idea. Hope something like that gets to the next one or kingdoms of amalur. Have to go to star trek online now to find that awesome sounding holodeck mission as most of the foundry stuff i've avoided.

Hey Jeff, Ryan, Patrick, Vinny, and Brad. . .um, I love the podcast, but can you please NOT SPOIL SKYRIM? Or at least put a disclaimer if you're going to; this isn't EGM (or 1up Yours) with Shane, and I really don't like the whole 'let's talk around it until we blurt out important parts of the story' thing.

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Am I the only 1 that is getting terrible download speeds ?

Fuck you, spaceman!

@Bruce: The game has been out for almost three months now... As far as I can recall, it seems like they generally only wait a couple of months at most before they give up on trying to avoid spoilers in games they're talking about.

So ... not being from the US and not being into cannabis ... is the name "4 of 20" Jeff mentioned a reference to this?

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

Well all know that Speculative Fiction is just one of the many subsections of Invictus Fictionus.

Tommy Lee Jones always takes charge during critical situations. He's the perfect leader. He IS the volcano.

Jeff's complaining about now not having enough time for a game like you used to when you were younger or whatever?(TOR anyone?) Patrick saying they played for 'fun' not like other people or what? These excuses get really crazy.

@selbie said:

@gladspooky said:

Yo Ryan, science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy.

Where on earth did you pull that one from? Sci-fi and fantasy both fall under the category of Speculative Fiction.

No, they don't. Speculative fiction is also just another term for what "fantasy" actually means. It doesn't mean "elves, everything's ye olde, and there's magic."