The Giant Beastcast: Episode 247

BEAST TIME!!!!!

Beastie Time.

Beast cast, will you be my valentine?

It you buy me dinner ill let you look at my feet.

I love you, Giant Beastcast <3

Weekend is here

Of all of the host,Vinny seems to miss Dan the most and it’s the cutest thing ever.

Look, I understand why they don't commit to it, but it always bums me out when they talk about Yakuza without following it up with "And we're going to bring back Beast in the East".

Mahardy is great. Mr. Provolone.

dog: This is the runs.

I'll show myself out. Hope Vinny doggo feels better.

Vinny! The time is now! Load our Last Save - Bloodborne!

Man, can't believe they downgraded MacBeatnik 1.0 to MahardyBeatnik 0.1 @ 3:37

The crocodile talk is aggressively wrong. South China? Wtf??? Hilarious.

😅😅😅😅

I think he was confusing crocodiles and alligators. Alligators are native only to the US and China. Crocodiles are found all over the world.

Anybody else notice how much of a backseat Abby has taken in the Beastcast? If I remember right on the last few casts at least, maybe I'm wrong but it does seem that way. Don't know if it's just me, but something has been seeming off with the whole team (east and west coasts) for a little while now. Could just be that I'm not as into the content they've been doing lately, but can't shake the feeling of something being off. Maybe just Dan leaving and trying to deal with it, no way to know, just a feeling I thought I'd voice.

@tonal said:

I've noticed that too.

I was glad to hear geforce now got some discussion time. Like it or not game streaming is probably the future. To Vinny and anyone else looking at the nvidia shield be aware that android does not support rumble to controllers. The one exception I've seen is the 2017 shield controller.

Cool didn't know Mike was that into Bloodbourn. lo_ Grant us EYES!

Jeff Bakalar with the Alice's Restaurant length story about plane travel

@tonal: I feel as if she is more confident than ever and simply doesn’t join in on conversations she doesn’t have much to contribute to. Also it’s important to note that just like Jan on the West team, Abby was hired for production and being in feature shows and podcasts is just a bonus thing.

Get Pilot Ted on the Beastcast!

The Beastcast is the Bestcast.

@kirkdouglas: 🎶you can get anything you want at the airport terminal 🎶

@tonal: Yup something seems off.

That haiku gave me a really good laugh, thank you for that Beastcast

mike mahardy sounds a lot like drew at times and that gives me the warm fuzzies.

It's interesting to have new words added to Mike's list like pale and tailored, pronounced like pal and talored. Is it only the "l" after a long "a" that causes it? I don't think he says tack instead of take, it seems like that would be similar.

@vinny The idea in dreams is that you take many things from other players so that you don't have to create everything from scratch. You certainly could but if someone already made a tree, there's no reason to make your own unless you want to.

Hey, comments, mayyyybe we shouldn't try to analayze the workplace dynamics of people we've never met.

Jeff's plane story and the crew's reactions made me laugh out loud multiple times!

TIL Bathroom door indicators are a radical concept in some places. Just, why?

I wish people would stop interrupting Jeff, i know it's a thing, but it's really old now.

A short feature where Vinny gets back into Bloodborne with Mahardy as his coach would be the absolute best! You can even treat it as a Vinnyvania if that helps, since it has similar trappings.

As Mike said, it's not a long game once you know what you need to do, so you don't have to worry about setting aside a lot of time for it.

As someone who doesn't enjoy competitive multiplayer (anymore. I'm old and played a lot of Quake), is CoD:MW worth buying for just the Single Player and the coop? Wondering if the coop is still buggy as hell, and if it's fun and replayable.

Been loving the Beastcast these past few weeks. Bloodborne is absolutely worth beating once and yet doesn't feel nearly as satisfying to replay as the Souls games. New game plus seems especially ill-fitting for this game both naratively and mechanically. There are alternate builds sure but very few seem as user-friendly as the straight forward strength based ones. In my first play through I leveled myself into a Bloodtinge hybrid build before realizing too late how pointless that stat is. I managed to get through the game with the Rifle Spear but I think I would've been better served min maxing like most people. The style and lore are the parts of the experience that make that game great, there are just enough design flaws that prevent it from being my favorite of From's games.

@mezmero: I ended up playing through the entire game about 3 times to get the Platinum Trophy - those chalice dungeons are the worst - and that ended up kind of screwing me ultimately. I was really on a Bloodborne high so I got the DLC but since the game scales and I had beat it a couple of times going into a NG++ or something, the DLC was nearly impossible to play. Everything was basically one shotting me, and this is just the early parts of the levels. My only option was to start the game over and get to I think 1/3 of the game again to start the DLC at a lower level.. and man after the chalice dungeons and playing it from the beginning a few times already to get all the ridiculous plot items for the "good" ending I just didn't have it in me anymore and never bothered with it.

I do think they should have some option for using a pre-built character for the DLC's.

@humanity: Never played the Chalice Dungeons myself though I've watched some of them and they don't seem worth it. I'm surprised someone with such a burning dislike of procedural generation like yourself would have even bothered. The way NG+ scales just seems so foolish when I imagine many people would be perfectly happy blasting through this cool ass story multiple times with the character they've put effort into leveling. But to your point when enemies start one-shotting you it turns this super slick horror-action RPG into a visually stunning NES game where you die in one hit. I've heard The Old Hunters is suppose to be good but I've never played DLC for a DeDarkBlourne game except for recently playing Scholar of the First Sin.

@mezmero: You are correct in that I absolutely despise procedural generation and think it's a very unfun way to artificially extend playtime. The way it worked in Bloodborne wasn't the way it typically does in run-based games like Dead Cells for instance. Here you still kept all your gear and all your progress carried over, which are my biggest hangups with games that employ procedural generation. Here the room "tiles" would just get reshuffled. And yah.. it was about as unfun as you saw. The biggest selling point of Souls type games is some of the gorgeous and haunting art design. Replace that with a handful of repeating room patterns spread over several floors with increasingly annoying modifiers and you got yourself the Chalice Dungeons - drab, boring, and mostly annoying. Having your health permanently halved while the enemies did x2 damage was awful because Bloodborne most certainly did not run at an NES framerate.

Why did I go through with it? Well I was close to a Platinum and I had never gotten one of those on a PS4 before and I think Brad was doing a feature at the time of going through the chalice dungeons so I thought hey why not me. I also heard the Old hunters DLC is great but I never managed to get very far because everything was hitting so hard.

Bloodborne is probably my favorite Souls game next to Demons.

TLDR;

Hunker down, it's gonna be a really rough start

Use all your skills of learning

Put your best foot forward by starting to do the things you really want to do. Don't make a big project, make up your mind about what you want to do, then make 1:100th of that. Want to make a farm? Well, fence posts would be a good start. Maybe a gate if you're hitting the ground running..

Motion controls are your friend, learn them. Back to point 1, hunker down, it's gonna be a rough transition.

Learn that grid!

This is not for geniuses, I'm somewhat of a moron, but someone who loves to learn. Learning it was frustrating at first, but now it's nothing but endless joy. Everytime I learn something new, I am empowered! DING, leveled up my real life skills!

LEARN THIS TOOL, you will benefit greatly. It can be used for _everything_.

I'm an enormous fan of dreams and I felt like I needed to chime in a bit with a few corrections and some guidance.

When you put down the DS4 and pick up moves or vice versa, you do get new tooltips. Not sure what happened in Vinny's case, but the game is very much made so you can swap between, something I and most people I know of do very often. Including the Media Molecules themselves.

The move controllers are the best way to use Dreams in terms of pure speed while sculpting or arranging stuff. Motion controls are your friend, the reason they irritate everyone is that we just don't use motion controls in games.. In addition to just having an instinctual hatred of them as gamers due to years of horrendously bad waggle memes and shitty games. The motion controls in Dreams, once you get used to them, are amazing. A mouse and keyboard IS NOT THE WAY to control 3d development/sculpting. You absolutely want 6 dof.. The DS4 lacks depth trackng, so it suffers there(you do get rotation and yaw and xy), but the Moves let you do all motions simultaneously.. Mice are just hilariously pathetic as an input device in most cases. The only thing it has going for it is accuracy, and that can easily be worked around with the grid in Dreams (seriously, learn that shit.)

The instinctual urge to use a mouse and keyboard is to be overcome, not given into. There is a motion controls free control scheme in Dreams now, it's BY FAR the slowest of them all. The motion controls take about a week to get fully used to and comfortable with even if you suck and have never done VR. I play a lot of VR so the moves were totally natural for me (also, they keep a charge for around 4-7 hours, I have 5 of them for reasons, so I never run out.) Pro tip: Holding the trigger half way down when moving shit gives you much more fine control. The analog trigger can be seen as a dynamic cursor acceleration adjuster. This makes motion controls super tight and easy to use once you get used to it.

The grid, learn the grid! There is also a constraints type of tool under the grid that lets you move in only one axis at a time(same way a mouse would), this one is vital for mechanical sculpting

The learning curve for this game is harsh and steep, but it is VERY MUCH doable. I'm no genius, far from it, and I learned Dreams. You can learn it too, and then you'll go "holy shit... I can make games now.... and surprisingly gorgeous art..." And then you start putting your fleeting ideas into reality in the same way you'd do when sketching something or writing something down in a notebook. Got a comic strip idea? Dreams. Want to simulate some dumb physicsy nonsense? Dreams. Want to just make a cool avatar? Dreams. Need a poster for your wall? Make it in dreams. Want to show someone some idea that you might previously have made in Sketchup or something like that? Dreams. Need to make some visual effects? Make a green background, make your effects, shazam, done. You got transparancy and everything. Dreams works for _everything_. Even music!

I am an evening or two of work away from trying out pretty much whatever I want. It's that fast once you get used to it. And VR isn't even in yet.. Once we get VR and 1:1 hand tracking, editing will become WAAAAAY faster. Like multiple times faster due to depth perception taking away any guesswork as to how deep in the scene your object is (hard to judge on 2d screens)

Here's how to view Dreams: It's harder to learn than Photoshop but easier and far quicker to learn than the guitar. You'll be fucking furious for a week or so, you'll just constantly be slapping your head into a wall getting nowhere. Welcome to dreamer hell. You should do _all_ the tutorials. You should get on youtube and search for tutorials related to what you're struggling with and you should do all stuff you do when you learn something new. All the techniques you've acquired over the years to learn stuff, use all those skills. Vinny, I know you're a huge hobbyist like myself, this is literally made for people like us! People who dabble in everything, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't give this a real stab. In the same time you've spent playing Xcom, you could have learned how to make a simple turn based game... No joke.

What OFTEN happens is people fire up dreams and expect to just start off running. That's not the case. You literally build _everything_ from scratch in this game. You can use things others have made, which is a great way to learn the basics, but all those things were also made completely from scratch by someone.

Every car on the dreamiverse is made from nothing by other people. Every mech, every plane, every character and animal and plant.. All of it made completely from nothing. Thousands and thousands of people have already learned the basics, they suffered through the early bits (you should read the forums from the beta phase when there were no tutorials on youtube.. people were DISCOURAGED...Furious even, they felt like they got screwed by the fact that Media Molecule makes it look so easy.. Well, tons of us make it look easy now, so... Learning it gets you there..) and became awesome over time. Looking at people's first creations and then the creations they are making today is one of my favorite things. In no other tool have I ever seen progress like this. People had problems making anything.. Stuff was unoptimized and just shitty looking. Fast forward a year and those same people are making games with gorgeous art styles... It's incredible really.

I ramble.... I just love this game so much and I want more people to get into it, just be ready for a rough week and then a few more pretty harsh weeks before you get to the point where it all snaps together and you go "it's... all connected, man.. Everything in here is all connected.... You..can .. connect it all to everything and... oh my god.." and then your brain just starts taking off because it can figure stuff out on its own, it connects things and builds things in your head just through knowledge. You'll see things in other games and go "I know how that works.." or you run across bugs in games and you know exactly what caused that bug... It's like learning a completely new language.

It has enrichened..enriched...my love of games in a huge way. I feel like I understand game designers and developers on a much deeper level (much like someone who is decent at music is better at judging the skill of other musicians) and I have FAR MORE RESPECT for teams that manage to make really huge projects. A whole team managing to produce a stylistically cohesive world is almost magical to me now. I have respect and understanding for things I was completely oblivious about a year ago.

Thanks for reading :)

Vinny describing his wife's driving is... horrifying. Accidents are caused by carelessness; the amount of times I've had to slow down because I've almost t-boned a car ripping out of a driveway skidding out on the pavement despite no one else being behind me or having to hear the car behind me honking like a fucking maniac and ignoring the steady stream of cars coming both ways is insane.

Drive fucking carefully. A car crash is an awful, scary, violent, horrific thing. Cutting someone off will not get you anywhere faster. Being a single car ahead won't save anyone time, and in fact exponentially increases the danger involved if you're darting out ahead. Pissing someone off on the road is the worst thing you can do.

Like.......... it's not funny. It's not a joke. Driving anywhere, at any time, for any reason, is putting lives at stake. I fucking hate that it's become some boring-ass blase activity because it is not. Being in a car and being on the road is not something to be fucked around with.

Edit: and the ensuing conversation, for real? If someone is driving like a maniac you tell them to stop, and if they don't stop, you get the hell out of that car. Complacency doesn't help anyone. Stand up for yourself. This isn't like someone cutting in line at a fast food place or someone being rude in public, this is an activity that involves your well-being. Don't stand for someone jeopardizing that.

Ahahaha. Jeff's airplane story had me really laughing. Some amazing comedic moments. You guys are incredible. I really love the Beastcast. Truly the best podcast in the known and I'd argue unknown universe.

@markemande: Yes, they always give him shit, it's just a running joke.

Just to counterpart, I've played Bloodborne through at least 15 times across 10+ characters - far more than any of the Souls games - many with wildly different play styles. I do agree with you that going NG+ beyond the first tier is not the most satisfying, as it's mostly just adds to the number of things that can one shot you. Luckily there's always co-op if I just want to do a bit of comp-stomping.

Bloodtinge is basically the Luck stat of Bloodborne. Very few things scale well with it, but the ones that do are among the most powerful in the game.

Chinese crocodiles... that is all.

Poison should be a damage over time. Burn should have extra damage on the initial hit that causes it, and then it lowers your defense/you take more damage afterwards. Because something making contact with your burned skin would be very painful.

I'm quite sure I'm in the minority but I've had about enough Mahardy on this cast for a little while...best in small doses (or at least, other formats) IMHO.

Also weapon scaling is like pretty much the opposite of "exponential". Though I suppose *everyone* misuses that word.