Quick Look: GBNYCQLS:FTL:AE

OMGWTFBBQLOL

@draxyle said:

You don't get the new ship on a fresh save (which is what they had on the Brad Quick Look). You get the Lanius ship that Alex was using by unlocking 4 ships (which Brad had not done on the PC version).

I'm watching this one first Alex. After all, I didn't see Brad or Drew win any Royal Rumbles.

Yeah, his biggest problems were selling the Ion Bomb (which would have been fantastic with the rest of his weapon setup, plus his missile stockpile), and only hitting 2 rooms with the halberd beam when given layouts with an opportunity to hit 4 or 5.

Obviously it would have been better to time his beam shots with the rest of his weapon systems as well, but it's understandable to just leave Autofire on when you're trying to make an entertaining video.

Oh huh, I kinda figured they just handed over one ship just to give me a taste of the new content. That's good to know.

"Never trust a slug." -A.N. 2014

@draxyle said:

Yeah, I think it's kind of a weird way to do it, especially because it does take quite a few hours to unlock new ships for someone who just got the game. But for someone who just got the game, I might suggest they play without the AE content for a few hours, since there are a lot of systems to learn as is.

awesome show

NAVARRO GALAXY ORDER

The Wolf mentoring Scoops in FTL new daily feature. GO! GO! GO!

The Mighty Space Wolf lives!

Captain Navarro is taking control of this galaxy. One scrap of a ship at a time!

Videos have two components, audio and visual. If the visual looks like crap, who cares about stuttering and it not being 60fps?

Here's a comparison of the two Quicklooks:

I love Drew and Vinny but the Giantbomb one looks like someone smeared diarrhea all over it compared to Alex's Quicklook.

Wow the video is super clean! Great job Alex. Love the Brad and Drew QL but it's way more satisfying watching someone a little more familiar with the game play it. GBNYCQL Crew 4 Life son!

So, the other day I started a crusader character in Diablo 3: ROS. Set it to Hardcore, because I'm a man. After finishing the story mode, I was on to adventure mode.

After a couple of hours of that, I decided to try to team up with strangers from the internet. Unfortunately there was no one playing at my level range and difficulty, so I started a game and set it to public. One of the features when you set a game to public is the inability to pause the game with the escape button.

Often when I play I like to have videos in the background. Alex is out with a new video of FLT. Sure, I'll put that on while I'm slaughtering the enemies of Sanctuary. In the beginning of the video Alex shows off the new ship and race. Cool, I figured, I want to see what that is about. I pause the game and look at Alex showing them off.

When I alt+tab back in, I realize what has happened. I quit the game. Finish the video. Go to bed.

Good night and good luck.

RIP in pieces

The only time I beat the game was with the Engi ship as well. Having multiple offense and defense drones make the boss far easier. Also, having 2 ion blasters is clutch for the boss' multiple shields.

@luck702: I've found the best way to consistently beat the final boss is to have stealth to avoid the power surges, defensive drones to take out missiles, and the ability to fully penetrate the shields. Usually it's the last one that gets me, as I have the worst luck at finding good weapons. If you have those three things, and you have a boarding party, then it's easy money.

The only time I beat normal was with the Zoltan ship, though the only person I know to beat hard was with the Engi ship, so what do I know?

Through this QL Alex has sold at least one copy of FTL. So gooooooood~
Now if only we could get the same quality QLs with things like Mercenary Kings and other games

Alex, great job. I love Brad, but sometimes his QLs are so lazy. This is a much better presentation of the new features of this game. Wish you would do this more.

GB New York showing you all how it's done.

Does Alex at least pause mid-combat? I couldn't help but wonder why Brad refused to ever pause to make forming good strategies easier.

One of these days real soon I'll follow through on paying for a year subscription to this dumb/awesome video game site. I have after all been Giantbombing for the past 7 years after all. What am I waiting for? You guys are awesome, and by you guys I mean everyone, the personalities on the site, the community, everyone.

The mind control reminded me of when Brad and Ryan went one-on-one in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Now I'm sad.

@sunspots: One of us!

@crashtanuki said:

Alex pauses even less than Brad (I'm actually not sure Alex ever pauses in the whole video), but plays like...40% more competently than Brad. Go figure.

I'm guessing for both Quick Looks they figured that not pausing would make things move along quicker, as even with Alex not pausing, this video is a solid 70 minutes to get from sector 1 to the final boss. With the appropriate amount of pausing and strategizing, it probably would've been more like 90-120 minutes, though also Alex might've actually beat the boss had he done that.

Also, Alex said he has played this game for 100 hours and only beat the game once (on Normal, I think). That is baffling. While I think your first 30-40 hours with the game can be pretty rough, I feel like you should pick up most of the tips and tricks by that point? Good runs can end up taking 90-150 minutes depending on how much pausing and thinking you do at various points, but still, that's a LOT of failed runs, especially when he says he mostly uses the Kestrel or Engi ship, which are both solid (unlike some of the ships with crap starter weapons that are super luck-based whether you find some better weapon or not).

I can't even imagine how you could play this game for 100 hours and not beat the game a few times more than that, unless Alex just never pauses and/or has no ability to appraise what weapon combinations are good. He was doing a lot of the right things in the Quick Look (upgrading shields early), but he did toss away a bunch of good weapons and drones, so who knows.

Good stuff Alex. I'd love to see more of the New York gaming scene if there are any events etc.

Love this. So good. Alex, any chance you could make this a regular thing? Perhaps until you uncover the mystery of the stasis pod? That would be awesome.

Does anyone know if this was ported to Android tablets yet?

@pr1mus: I think the problem is that the quality of the SF videos have taken a hit in this last month or so compared to before. It has nothing to do with the resolution vs bitrate argument (is Alex's video even recorded at a higher res? I thought this was still 720?), and more to do with why the main GB videos have taken a hit.

I'm not someone who cares much about this stuff, but I understand why people are bummed out by the quality. Something is wrong when a video Alex uploaded from his home computer looks better than what is uploaded from the main office.

That's 7 years too long! Pony up, duder!

This video looks great, but for those of you griping about the shitty quality of video on the Brad/Drew Quick Look...seriously? I must be missing something, because it's not worse by much. I mean, just look at the screenshot @voodoopc posted. Honestly - nothing against Alex - but without the banter, I tend to get bored watching QL Solos. I'd much rather watch a video that's almost unnoticeably lesser quality with two people on it.

Not sure why Alex's video looks better. They both seem to be encoded with the same x264 profile and bitrate.

One of my favorite things to do with that ship is run no-oxygen. Also beam weapons are amazing, but you usually can't just autofire or slice them out there. If you wait precisely for when their shields are down and target 4-5 rooms at once, then you rip through guys. Halberd beam can take you all the way till the end if you have some way to get shields down.

Quick Look?! Quick?!

GBSF caps over tens of meters of component cables (how they get their switching gear to work, watch the awesome TNT BTS). I presume GBNY is just screencapping direct (a la FRAPS/OBS/whatever).

Yes, you'll lose some clarity with the Digital / Analog / Digital conversions. No, you typically don't notice.

What I do typically notice (and cringe at) is the low bitrate, which is especially noticeable in 60fps content:

This looks like garbage. Yes, I've intentionally chosen a place where Brad was spinning the camera. But hey, it's a game: that shit happens.

When you're capping at 60fps, you have double the number of frames to encode - your total amount of entropy goes up, hence you need more bits to encode it to the same visual quality. Was a little grating to hear Brad and Vinny going on about how pretty the game was, when the encode looks bad.

Some of the time, you get horrible macroblocking in still content (look at the Titanfall 360 QL from 1:04). The mean frame quantizer here is in the low 10's (20 is generally accepted to be great quality, 28+ is bad). So it wasn't the last compression step to blame here, it was something else in the chain. If I had to guess, they're double MPEG4 compressing the content. The first compression pass has already lost a shit ton of clarity, and the second pass can't know about that, which is why the frame quanitzer numbers look great, but there's no detail - and what detail is there flutters.

Gallery

Open those up in tabs and flick between them. The background flutters. It shouldn't.

These comments, wow. Talk about nitpicking and being quality whores.

@everettescott said:

Hardly nitpicking - if you consider the effort and expense that the GB crew lay out in trying to produce great quality product, it'd be nice to see that attention to detail carried through to the finishing line.

I'm not being a quality whore. I just fail to understand how Alex's video, who I imagine does the processing or whatever right on his PC, looks so much better than the Giant Bomb videos from the office that I imagine use thousands and thousands of dollars worth of equipment by professional producers Drew and Vinny.

Haha. I don't know man, stuff like that just seems obsessive. Do you really need every single pixel in the right spot to get the point of a video or enjoy something? Does the minor differences really matter at that point to the commentary on Quick Looks? In the picture that VooDooPC posted, I can't even see any difference from those two screen shots. I feel like you need a magnifying glass to parse out the problems he's trying to point out. Both of those screenshots sure look like FTL, though.

Don't get me wrong, if that's how high you want to set the bar that's fine. If that's what's important to you. I feel really fortunate I don't get caught up on that stuff, because it seems like a nightmare to worry about. And it's always weird seeing the hyperbole that gets thrown out when "the background flutters" or whatever.

The technical side is definitely interesting with the length of cables and such. The 'how' and 'why' is neat, for sure.

Alex does it right. Screw that VHS shit on the original QL.

*All crew members requiring oxygen die*

"Well, you can never have too much oxygen."

@voodoopc: @taemun: I'm just stating my opinion. Like someone else said if you're ok with setting the bar that high and needing it to be then that's up to you. I just don't think it matters as long as the video is still able to show what it needs.

Whores have may sounded a little harsh but I wasn't meaning it in a total harsh way.

I think as we get off of the older systems and more games run at native 1080p with higher quality textures having clearer video quality will be required to show that extra detail.

Maybe this one will make the difference more obvious :)

At a panel I was at during Pax East I think Jeff Green, veteran game reviewer, said he played 90 some hours of Spelunky before ever even learning about the Jungle. Which is world 2. So... I dunno. Game reviewers, eh? Sometimes they be strangely bad at games.

I used the Kestrel a lot when I was starting out. I played on easy and couldn't beat the flagship. I think my second or third time playing the Engi ship I beat the game on normal, first time I'd beaten the game at all. Then beat the game on easy with a bunch of other ships. So if you ask me the Kestrel just sucks and the Engi ship just gets the damn job done.

Regarding the stasis pod:

Regarding beating the game:

I skipped to the end after about 20 minutes in to see how far Alex got. The Quick Look is very well presented, I just already know FTL inside and out so I got a little bored. He was a bit under-upgraded for taking on the flagship, especially considering he was playing on easy, but just getting there is still an accomplishment regardless of difficulty.

I started playing FTL again (I have never beaten it on normal) and I forgot how hard this game is...my first runs went pretty terrible and I only managed to get to sector 2. I always rename the crew members to friends and family names and watching your whole family explode can be pretty cruel...and hilarious at times.

Alex

@sweetz: You got it exactly right. Beating the boss gets much MUCH easier with the teleporter. I was shocked when Alex passed it up. The weapon system rooms have no doors, so you can teleport in, take out the system, teleport out, and repeat.