Giant Bombcast 558: Boattle Royale

It sounds like you're making up a narrative that doesn't actually exist. Is there any recorded instance of Jeff preventing the rest of the staff from talking about Red Dead Redemption 2? In this episode, Jeff doesn't stop anyone else from talking about the game. Ben brought the game up, they discussed it for a little, and Brad changed the subject, all without any notable interjection from Jeff. It's not like the rest of the crew is champing at the bit to talk about the game.

The staff's "job" is to put on a show. Talking about a game that they appear to not be that interested in talking about isn't particularly entertaining. Moreover, this doesn't feel unusual for these types of large-scale open worlds. The staff aren't obliged to submit a report every week of everything they did in a big open world game in the weeks after its release. If you want the GB staff to talk about RDR2 more, that's fine, but claiming that the staff is too afraid to do so because Jeff might say something mean about it is absurd.

Jeff trying to say Ratchet & Clank 1 and 2 are basically the same is so wrong. Going Commando added the leveling system, the strafing camera system, and largely overhauled the way the game controlled and how you played the game.

Their job has never necessitated that they need to spend time talking about games relative to how popular they are. If it was, then you should be complaining about their lack of Fortnite content and how Ben is the only person who ever talks about it. The site has always been focused on them covering what interests them, not what they think they're obligated to cover.

Re: Hitman 2:

I'm kinda lukewarm on it, mainly due to the price of the game considering what it's offering. It very much reads to me as the season 2 DLC for Hitman 2016, while the launch promotion and bundle prices are dressing it up as if it were a major AAA re-engineered sequel. Having the AI able to 'see' through mirrors (doing some extra reflected raycasts is literally a few lines of code), UI tweaks, and some beta multiplayer modes are the sorts of baseline feature additions you would expect to roll out for free post-launch in this sort of game, so the fact that they're with Hitman 2 isn't much of a value-add that justifies the price. Had the game been called "Hitman: Season 2" and been sold for $40 rather than $60, you probably wouldn't see people needing to apologize upfront for what the game is and isn't.

Re: Destiny 2:

I'm completely new to Destiny, other than having watched the GB raid streams. I downloaded the free Destiny 2 base, binged through the campaign and hit the level cap in a few days. Pretty graphics, the core gunplay feels solid, but the world is very segmented with instances, and sparse with players and enemies. The product feels like a Diablo-like multiplayer FPS, but lacking the sure-handed refinement, and breadth and depth of character+gear progression that allows Diablo's endgame to keep people invested. In terms of development resources and attention, Diablo3 feels like 20% campaign+leveling and 80% endgame+gearing, whereas Destiny 2 feels like the inverse.

I briefly weighed buying the full-priced Forsaken expansion, but for the price it was too hard to shake the cynicism of how much of a treadmill the game is. I uninstalled, assuming I was done with it. Saw that Forsaken was 25% off, I said 'fuck it', and bought in. It took a single day of playing (albeit a lengthy one) to go from the base level 20 cap to the new level 50 cap, and now I'm back to a new endgame of acquiring better gear. Forsaken's gear system does have a few more moving parts than the base game, but it's still not on the level of an MMO or aRPG/Diablo where I could imagine being satisfied spending 1-2 months pursuing, learning and refining a particular build.

Fundamentally the combat is just a basic Halo-style arcadey FPS, so the role you play and actions you do between skills+gear or even between classes does not really vary much, and as a result the endgame experience of acquiring new gear doesn't lead to discovering new gameplay mechanics that keeps the gameplay feeling fresh.

@crashtanuki said:

Indeed. The second game was almost another genre with how much more focused it was on shooting. Maybe he's thinking from 2 onwards.

Yeah, they talk about it like it's nefarious and fucking with them, but actually it's what makes the game playable. If the pieces were truly random, it's possible but improbable that you could get nothing but S and Z pieces for 20 pieces in a row, or go 40 pieces without getting an I block. I vastly prefer the later games that have implemented the random "bag" system, despite having started on the Game Boy Tetris.

In regards to the PS1 Classic news story, I'd assume Nintendo being more outspoken against non-official emulators is why Sony had less of a problem using open source for their Classic and why Nintendo made their own emulators for their Classics. Maybe Nintendo thought if they used open source emulators, it would hurt their legal standing against 3rd party emulators and rom sites in the future.

All these 'how long do you go without washing your X ' questions baffle me. If you start to worry about a thing not being clean anymore, why not just change the towels/jeans / shirt whatever? What is this weird challenge where you try to use the same items for a long period of time and hope it's still somewhat acceptable? Is there a highscore ranking out there somewhere?

@octaslash: I’d even argue that the third one introduced some notable changes, like multiple weapon levels, online multiplayer, and vehicle stuff.

I feel Brad and others aren’t considering this with Destiny 2: Forsaken: people are tired of destiny and if they weren’t happy with the game then more of it isn’t necessarily worth their time. Destiny 2, like many other games, doesn’t respect your time and I hate how the strikes now are literally just “replay this exact same content” which is all destiny is times 1,000.

I believe Jeff is conflating Ratchet 1 to 2 with Ratchet 2 to Ratchet 3.

From 1 to 2 they added the ability to level up everything in your arsenal, they RPG-ified it which set the standard for the series until today.

From 2 to 3 they made the HUD orange instead of blue, and you could have ammo modifiers but they were really not that big of a deal. You could make them burn enemies or poison them: but it amounted to more damage and the effect being orange or green.

also Pokemon Silver is The Best.

@entireties:I feel like you've forgotten the term 'game journalist', something the guys have been for well over a decade plus. Talking about a game in the public lexicon has always come with the territory, sorry friend. As far as them not talking about a game because Jeff will argue be and party-pooper about it...I honestly don't even know what to say. This has ALWAYS been the dynamic of the crew. Jeff is a massive wet blanket on games he finds frustrating or doesn't get. Metal Gear 2 & 4. Certain games in the Final Fantasy series. There are a ton more! Whenever another staffer goes to bat for a title he loathes, he'll spend the time to tell them why it sucks. If you haven't heard/noticed that, I'm not really sure there's much to talk about here.

@knaws: Sure, but members of the crew ARE interested in it evidenced by the fact that they're still playing it, my dude. Jeff is a conversational wet blanket on games he loathes. Who wants to talk about something they like at length when their boss is just going to shit on it on a very public forum?

I very clearly remember that one, that was one of my favorite levels in that game!

@bladededge: Yeah, that is the randomizer in the guideline, although some games don't use it for every mode. Personally, I find it really wonky, because the amount of information you have about future pieces fluctuates wildly between the different parts of the bag. TGM, and especially TGM3, use methods that are less harsh, and as such feel much more random, while still being friendlier to play than actual randomness.

I think the main problem is that Destiny 1 and 2 demand a lot of dedication from the playerbase as they mention on the Bombcast. The people who are into it will love it, but for a lot of others it's kind of extreme. A lot of the bounties and "secrets" so to speaks are fairly obscure and usually require a group of people to complete, which is another hurdle in that to enjoy Destiny you need like-minded friends to roll with you on this adventure since matchmaking is still a no go for the most part. Generally most folk will not stomach dedicating several hours each day grinding or doing arbitrary tasks to stay up to date with the game so they have a chance to get at the cool stuff. And I KNOW you don't have to grind constantly, but each time new content rolls around you hit the wall you have to get past and that is the grind. Mix this in with how little the classes actually differ, since this is still just a shooter, and it's a lot of work for basically different looking gear since everything scales anyway.

@humanity: eh, I do think there is a bunch of grinding; its hard for me to put tons of time into Destiny 2 where they want to hard and soft cap you so frequently when I have Warframe and the grinds aren't nearly as bad and I can wait and come into the new content for free with loads of new stuff.

I felt that the dedication level in Destiny 1 was nowhere near as awful as Destiny 2 or Forsaken. I couldn't grind for 20+ hours after beating the campaign just to get to the story. If Bungie and the game can't respect my time, even a little, I'm out. Too many quality games to play.

@sammo21: It's definitely not for the casual person who just wants to unwind with a videogame once in a while. A "lifestyle" type of game is a really good descriptor for it since it will take up a lot of your life to get anywhere.

The XB1 user interface is completely fine. It's more intuitive and responsive than this website right now.

@chalkcharmer: GB audio levels are low for me sometimes too, so I crank the volume, and then someone yells in to their mic 8(

When they went over best selling saturn games...World Series baseball was really really good. I had World Series Baseball 98 and loved it

I mean, I know which Hitman game you’re talking about when you refer ”first time”, but my eye is still going to twitch. Just say season one, puh-lease.

Don't reuse towels without washing them. Unless you exfoliate in the shower everywhere and only pat yourself dry, again everywhere, you're leaving moist, dead skin cells on the towel. There's a reason washing machines often had their sizes described in numbers of towels, you're not supposed to just have one.

With the rise of service games backwards compatibility needs to be a thing. Imagine having to repurchase Overwatch or R6 Siege and any other game like that, imagine if your progress didn't even carry over.

There actually is very little difference between the clothing catalogues of the different towns in RDR 2. It's something I was incredibly disappointed with. Usually that's how the cosmetic progression works in these games - the stores farther away from the start have wildly different things. But nope, not here. Saint Denis had the most different things, but that's still only like 3-4 new things compared to Valentine.

There was a suburbs level in Hitman Blood Money. You could get a hidden BB gun weapon in a treehouse that you kept afterwards to use anywhere.

RDR 2 is the second time I've used an Xbox One this generation, and only like the third game I've played on console this generation because I've always been a PC gamer. I don't have access to a PS4 but I do an Xbox so I went with that. The interface truly is awful. Nothing is intuitive.

I owned an N64, it was my only console for that generation, and I never owned Super Mario 64. Ask me anything.

@humanityI: I consider myself a little more more than the average "casual" player but I found that even putting 10-12 hours+ a week into Destiny 2: Forsaken I just wasn't getting anywhere. All this cool new content opened up in the Dreaming City, allegedely, but I was 40-50 light level away from experiencing it or the raid.

They really should look to copy the WoW model of having several different tiers of raid difficulty for those who want the story and experience that then can feed that into higher difficulties if they are interested.

The more I look at Destiny releases the less I seem to trust them. I don't know if I would even invest in getting into "Destiny 3" upon release unless they announce they are on a new engine, using new tools, and are approaching this series, from the ground up, differently.

Yeah, "games journalist" a thing the GB crew has referred to themselves as a lot. Come on, now.

Regardless, this is the same crew that fights with each other like petty children (I mean this is a fun way) come GOTY. There is a 0% chance Jeff is holding people back and honestly it's a shitty thing for you to imply.

Brad "Two Towel" Shoemaker

Rwby isn't anime.

Thanks.