Quick Look: GBNYCQLS:FTL:AE

Any additional coverage of FTL is good coverage.

The game is fixed at 720p. My guess would be that Alex recorded it in a window at its native resolution while Brad played it in fullscreen, scaled up to 1080p or whatever, which then would have been scaled back down to 720p for the video.

Is this part of the "write shorter headlines" approach envisioned by GB:Chicago?

Regarding the quality stuff, this is one of the perfect games to nitpick as any aliasing is going to be pretty obvious due to its lineart style. I expect its a downscaling thing as already mentioned, probably not recorded at a res other than 720p. Its pretty pedantic and the overall quality of videos given the size of GB is phenomenal.

Is it just me that finds this game really stressful to watch?

I want a FTL QL where they pause the game mid-combat at least sometimes ._.

I got the reward for the whole stasis pod thing once; you get a really awesome unique crystal alien crew-member who I think is fireproof, has a bunch of health and repairs quickly.

Also I will second a GBNYC FTL Daily!

Pretty good look at some of the new things in the game. Keep it up, GBNY.

@lackingsaint:

That's not all, though. With the crystal alien you can encounter a random event that leads to a new sector, the Crystal Worlds, where you can then unlock a crystal ship.

@voodoopc said:

@cikame said:

This is a high quality video, damn Alex.

The display rate of a video on video games is important because it best gets across the performance of the game, being able to see the 60fps and any stuttering is important.

Obviously that doesn't matter for a game like FTL, but this is pretty damn sharp.

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.

Rabble rabble rabble!

(seriously, which is which in your screenshot?)

@bisonhero: I've just started on the new content, what's the point of having the cloning facility over the med bay? Isn't it better to just have your dudes, not die. I've just haven't gotten around to testing it out since I'm reluctant to replace the med bay. Or is the penalty on skills so small to not matter and you just don't care about them not getting healed and dying, thinking especially about my (mantis) boarding parties that get the shit beat out of them regularly.

Before watching this, I had only ever made it half way. After watching, I made it to the third stage of the flag ship before dying (only had 3 health left with no way to heal) :(. Learned a lot, so I think I might look up some stuff to get more out of the game. Thanks Alex!

@tennmuerti: well there's the two sides of it, no? Of course it's better to not have your crew die, but you don't always have a choice there. IF you can keep them alive and useful, the medbay is better (if you can only barely keep them alive by locking them in the medbay while the invaders wreck the rest of your ship it gets murky).

If your crew does start dying the cloningbay is a godsent. But with the cloningbay, your crew is much more likely to actually die as well. The skillpenalty isn't too severe, it's the cooldown of the bay that's more likely to still screw you over if you get back-to-back invadernodes.

If you're playing boardingparty-mantis your dudes are gonna take damage even on nodes w/o invaders because it's you doing the invading.... I suppose the medbay might be best in that scenario (at least until you fully upgrade the cloningbay... at that point it does significant healing every jump which might be enough to get by). Come to think of it, the ability to send in reinforcements when an invasion goes south sounds pretty good as well.

Medbay: crew dying is a disaster to be avoided at nearly all costs... of course the medbay goes a long way in preventing that from happening.

Cloning: crew dying isn't that big a deal... which is good, because they probably end up doing just that.

@tennmuerti: I think the main point of the cloning bay is that you can take risks on the events that have a chance of killing your crew (fight giant space spiders, etc.), because the clone bay will revive your crew from many of those events (not all). The skill penalty is very minor, it's like one or two ticks of experience, so even if your Mantis dies, he only needs to get 1-2 kills to regain whatever he lost. You still want to micro your boarding party smartly to minimize how often they die.

Dealing with intruders on your ship is a pain since you can't just hunker down in the medbay, so more than ever you need get blast doors so you can open the airlocks and trap intruders in a room with no air to soften them up. I find upgrading the cloning to lvl 2 somewhere in sector 2-3 is usually a good idea so they actually get back an adequate amount of HP.

It's...interesting to play the ships that start with a clone bay, since you get a bit more scrap because you can be riskier on events that you know might kill a crewmember, but ultimately I prefer the medbay.

@stimpack said:

*proceeds to keep two power on oxygen system even though that is really only necessary when your oxygen is really low and you want to refill it fast*

*Also keeps full power in the cloning bay at all times, even though the description for the system expressly says you only need to do that when you're actually reviving someone*

Honestly, if you pay attention and read the tooltips on everything (nearly every UI element has one), the game is incredibly self-explanatory.

I haven't see this much abbreviation since NTSF:SD:SUV::

Every time he said "Keeping firing" all I could think of was this.

@north6: if you look at the picture at full resolution and seriously can't tell the difference I think you may need to go to the doctor and get glasses. You shouldn't be embarrassed to wear glasses to improve your eye sight.

The only thing this game needs is an "even easier" mode for those of us who just can't beat the last ship on easy (or really, for those of us who get really unlucky with the RNG too often).

I dont want to tell you how to play this game, but why are you wasting 2/3 of your firepower taking down the enemy ships shield, when you should really prevent them to do damage to your ship. As long as you dont have a problem taking down a lvl 1 shield, why waste both hacking AND ion weapon on the shield alone. Makes no sense.

Edit: Also, from the stasis chamber, you can get the pod. By which means you can get the crystal ship. I love the crystal ship.

If you can get to the flagship on easy, you can beat it. Just pause every 5 seconds to think about what you're doing, kill the crew in the missiles and laser rooms on the first phase of the boss, make sure you have around 50% dodge and good weapons by the end and you should be fine.

GBNYC Representing the east side like a true duder should.

@voodoopc said:

@cikame said:

This is a high quality video, damn Alex.

The display rate of a video on video games is important because it best gets across the performance of the game, being able to see the 60fps and any stuttering is important.

Obviously that doesn't matter for a game like FTL, but this is pretty damn sharp.

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.

It's because they're using analog capture equipment in the studio—component video, I believe—and I assume Alex recorded the direct feed on his PC.

A lot of the time they seem to run PC games at 1080p even though the final output is only 720p, which means that we might also be seeing the effects of downscaling, when Alex's video appears to have been captured natively at 720p.

Honestly, I don't know who it is in charge of their purchasing decisions, but someone there seems to insist on paying for high-end, broadcast-grade equipment—this immediately inflates the price of anything by 10×, but does not necessarily get you any higher quality.

It gets you more robust hardware, more flexibility, and means that they will be using balanced connections for most things rather than unbalanced (resistance to signal interference over long cable runs) but it also means that they're getting worse quality now than they could from a cheap HDMI capture card these days.

Having the high-end gear is what allows them to do a lot of the things we see in shows like Unprofessional Fridays, but for simple things like Quick Looks, it is totally unnecessary, and the high initial cost means that they have been unable to replace outdated hardware.

The most likely reason that everything is still 720p is because their equipment probably only does 720p or 1080i, and not 1080p. (support for 1080p over component was uncommon)

And the overall softness—while partly due to the fact that they're using analog connections—is possibly caused by the fact that they're using broadcast equipment.

Some gear designed for video use will be bandlimited to prevent aliasing, and is not really suited to capturing game footage.

I still can't believe they have two ridiculously expensive scan converters (I forget if it was $10,000 each or total) just for capturing old games hardware.

They would have much better results for those old systems if they switched from composite connections to spending that money on Component—or better yet, RGB hardware—and capturing that. Getting RGB out of all their systems into something like an XRGB and capturing the HDMI output from that would result in much better video than they have now.

@everettescott said:

Some of us are actually paying for this content.

One of the stated goals for the site was to have the best quality video on the internet available to subscribers (both technically, and the content itself) and that is sadly not the case any more—especially now that everything has moved to 1080p.

I feel like the quality of the content has been lacking in recent months, and I find myself questioning whether I will actually renew my membership the next time it is due.

I agree with the other poster that said a lot of the Quick Looks have felt quite lazyhalf-hearted recently too.

@00: Thanks for your post. Really informative. I've listened to streamers discuss their different solution and watched the "How to make a TNT" video, and what you are saying rings true. Broadcast gear is built for speed, which is necessary for the live shows. They have an ungodly amount of gear to pipe in different sources, and do it all live. Upgrading all the gear would be a very high investment of resources. Rather they might want to consider an alternate capture solution when it comes to QL content where the live requirement isn't there and they don't need as much switching and speed, rather than use the live setup.

@uberjannie: You just told me how to play the game. So.

Woo for this!

I also cannot get enough of this game's music.

There is probably too much that could go wrong if they have separate equipment for capturing Quick Looks than they use for the live shows.

For PC games though, it does seem that something like NVIDIA's ShadowPlay running in manual mode might be a good solution though.

They have GTX 670's in their PCs and those can output 1080p video at up to 50mbps with minimal performance overhead as it uses the card's hardware video encoder.

They would not have to bypass their normal capture process to use this, so they would still have a redundant copy of the video if something went wrong with ShadowPlay.

‍⠀

Disclaimer: With a GTX 570 in my PC, I can't say how well ShadowPlay works—it requires a 6xx or newer card. It looks like it could be a solution to providing higher quality PC footage though.

Gees, if this upset you don't watch brads quicklook.

I think given the fact alex wasn't pausing the game probably to make it more interesting to watch (or because he just doesn't) It was probably a bit much for him to be contantly micro-ing the ion between everything else going on. The hack doesn't even last that long early so he would need to keep switching back.

Also anyone who checks a wiki or guide for this game is scum.

What does the S stand for in GBNYCQLS?

double quicklook? Steve Jobs would never allow it

Awesome Quicklook! That was pretty informative, and after dropping only a few hours into the game (way back when) it was cool to see some of the additions highlighted a bit more plainly.

Also as a weird aside; the video quality seemed a lot sharper than the last FTL quicklook for some reason..

Solo.

@voodoopc: Ah! Thank you, I should have got that.

There now also is an aug that's healing your crew on teleport (in and out), forgot it's name but it's pretty awesome in combination with playing boardingparty-mantis. Just make sure to get at least an level 2 teleporter, with that your mantis can board the automated scouting drones, destroy a system and teleport out back again before suffocating, it's damn close but it works.

Too bad they won't let you teleport on and off ships that already surrendered ;)

Why the S for Solo, why not just GBNYCQL? Still cool though. How awesome would rival Quick Looks be, calling each other out?

I actually assumed it was on easy. FTL is too harsh a mistress to try and show off features while simultaneously getting to the end for most runs on Normal.

@00: Thank you for such an insightful post. The difference in quality between the two QLs is significant, but I couldn't figure out why that would be the case, so it's good to get some perspective on the SF studio setup.

GBNY all up in my eye.

@cerberus3dog said:

`O,O' /

Also, okay yep i'm going to have to start playing this game again. DLC looks great.

@toppingman said:

Probably to keep titles consistent. When Patrick does solo videos, he calls them Quick Looks Solos too.

Edit: For example, Quick Look Solo: The Banner Saga

When they do a 30 minute quick look of something like TitanFall and explicitly say "We are just doing this to see how the game looks" then I think it does matter. This video makes it really clear that what you are seeing on the site is not representative of the product they're showing. If you can't see the difference between the two videos then damn you crazy

@flacracker: Its probably because 720p is the standard that they use back at the office or something like that, Alex just captured his screen at what probably is a higher resolution than 720p.

EDIT: Someone already said what I said, I should read comments properly...

Alex is a slug racist.

@dudelongcouch: ONLY GOOD SLUG IS A DEAD SLUG, SON

"I look at it like fuck em"

Mc Ride makes a sudden appearance in Alex's skin.

Fun quick look. Thanks Alex.

OK, so after buying this game a year ago during a Steam Sale and never playing it. I've finally been compelled to put some time into FTL, and I'm really enjoying it.

How great would it be if we could play games such as FTL on any device that could support it by just using the Steam App (such as the Nexus 7 or Nexus 10)?

It didn't really hit me until the end but this was some damn good playing without ever touching the pause button. I really need to try that cause it seems to add a whole new angle to the game.

I approve of anything involving Alex; carrying stuff solo can be tough but Alex is top-notch at it.

And thanks for going ahead with this - I enjoyed seeing Brad's take, but Alex seems to be much deeper into FTL's workings so he makes for a more interesting, in-depth look at the game.

Y'all should all play FTL, yo. It was my #2 GotY in 2012 and now it's even better.