Giant Bombcast 503: Virtual Kevtris

WOO!!!

HOO!!!

Oh yeah :)

YEAH!!!

Stoked to hear some Gran Turismo thoughts

Oldschoolcast. Back to basics.

When I feel heavy-metal!

As dark in the Studios as a Matt Rorie shower.

Audio only Bombcast?

CrashPlan was the company that's ending it's home-user cloud backup plan. I'm also looking in to Backblaze - good to hear Jeff's experience on it.

3, 2, 1 backup your perishable data!

Ben Pack's house just got a head start on everyone else's, it turns out. I've watched some videos of the fires. It looks terrifying.

VR, remember that thing? Me neither.

I find the lack of video refreshingly old-school!

Peter Brown sounds like he's in a bad relationship with Gamespot's audience. ' maybe your audience appreciates me talking about GT '.

Nothing stops the Giant Bombcast.

Having now spoiled myself on the Shadow of War plot: I can confirm it's dumb.

He can hope all he wants, but I don't wanna hear about Gran Turismo either.

Yay Bombcast! I definitely have gotten used to the privilege of video, but this is the OG way.

...but I'll miss all the strange looks. :P

How is this episode not called "Ork Cloud" !?!

Looks like the Super Famicom version of the Super Nt doesn't have the dished controller buttons.

Gamespot guy seems to have a huge crush on Kevtriss (or however it's spelled).

I googled EA profits and found a pdf of their earnings. It's a public company they have to share that stuff, I don't know why their saying EA's finances are inscrutable http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1034792 They seem to be doing well.

If games become games as a service I will not buy them, and a single player Star wars adventure sounds like something I would have paid full price for. I hope companies know that they lose sales from people like me when they chase their subscribers and whales.

When the dudes starting talking about GzmeBoy and Snes, nes and other things, things got a whole lot more interesting. Then they talked about HDMI, MTmini, SDcardofun, ANALOG, TDA, PSP, DOA. M&M and lost me in the alphabet soup.

But that's the problem, it's a numbers game. As long as they gain more than they lose, they'll keep doing it. And years of experience with mobile games, as well as with things like EA Sports Ultimate Teams and Dota 2 chests says this is currently a winning strategy as long people like the game enough.

This was a battle that was lost years ago.

Does EA know how to cancel a game without shutting a studio?

R.I.P. Visceral. Enjoy the company thought! Victory Games, Maxis Games, BullFrog, Dreamworks Interactive, Pandemic, Mythic, Origin, Westwood, EA LA, Black Box... that's only the ones I can recall off the top of my head, ffs. The EA Studio Graveyard is filled with talent, and I'm sure there are a dozen more who didn't deserve to "be EA'd" either.

I just want to shout out to Respawn to get the fuck away from them. Get as far as they possibly can! Go and sign with any other publisher for the future, Respawn!

I really hope that Anthem bombs. I know it won't, because there's so many stupid people who only seem to acknowledge games from EA, Activision, Take-Two/Rockstar, Microsoft and Sony and don't pay attention to the other 99% of the industry, but you just know it deserves to. Its one, if not the most, cynical productions EA's ever shoved through Bioware - they just want their Destiny. EA's whole movement to turn games into online-focused, service-based, loot-crate dispensing skinner boxes masquerading as games :/

@benpack

In Super Mario World, it goes back to that ghost house because that's your last save point. It works the exact same way with the real cartridge on real hardware. SMW only saves when you defeat a ghost house, castle, or switch stage. Period. If you did the same run on a real console you'd get the same result.

Oh boy, some of this Gran Turismo Sport stuff sounds rough.

Shame on the guys for not discussing the Naughty Dog sexual harassment story. They could've inspired some people to speak out against abuse and encouraged victims of abuse to tell their stories.

@eazeapeazea: Giant Bomb doesn’t really tackle those stories. Not their strong suit which I don’t mind. I bet they will bring it up on the Beastcast at least.

@re_player1 I don't care if it's not their strong suit. Notable people in any given industry should feel a moral obligation to speak on this stuff.

@re_player1: These guys are legends of the industry and community. They should have comment on something of this much weight, at least as much comment as they have on various shit bandits in the industry.

@eazeapeazea: Giant Bomb *has* touched on issues such as the sexual-harrassment in the video games industry before - particularly when Patrick Klepek was on the crew (and, it should be noted, he opened himself up to significant whining from a small group of GB forum community members about "being a white knight", "being a SJW" and "but but but Gamergate").

I'd like to think the GB crew simply don't know enough of the details to comment on the Naughty Dog allegations at this time. With SOE and Naughty Dog saying "whoops we can't find any HR reports from Mr. Ballard" (my cynical view of the industry says, "Well isn't THAT convenient"), there isn't much they can discuss. Hopefully the recepient of the harrassment saved their copies of any and all compliants filed with HR so they can proceed with evidence.

(Pro-tip to anyone in a company with its own Human Resources department: often, HR is shorthand for "cover our own ass and protect our finances". ALWAYS save copies of reports and grieviences sent to HR in a location where they cannot be accessed by co-workers or company representatives.)

Virtua Davis playing some Virtual kevtris.

Can someone specify what/who the guys are talking about when they reference some people coming out of CD Projekt Red unhappy with their time on development of Witcher 3?

Something I've been thinking about today since the Volition news. To some degree maybe scaling back games SOME is part of the answer. But what about looking at tools. It isn't cheap, but investing in coming up with new tooling for art asset building, programming, etc might have short term costs but improve productivity in a way to in the long run make something at least close to the old model still work.

For those that don't follow him on twitter/twitch, Blow has been working on a new programming language that, while it may not pan out, at least he's taking a stab at trying to make programming games easier/more pleasant/etc. to code.

Instead of giving the standard "we don't comment on rumours and speculation", CD Projekt Red inexplicably put out a statement in response to anonymous complaints from employees who have left the studio:

https://kotaku.com/witcher-3-developer-puts-out-vague-statement-about-stud-1819513628

it fucking kills me that nobody made an Oort Cloud/Orc Cloud joke.

I tried looking for the youtube channel for... was it kevin horton? The guy who programmed the cores for the nt mini that Peter Brown was talking about. Could anyone help me out with a link or point me in the right direction? Much appreciated!

*Edit*

NM, I found it. Was under his username Kevtris.

Here ya go for anyone that is interested:

https://www.youtube.com/user/kevtris

@bisonhero: Thanks!

Also, uhhh, that sure is a weird comment from them. Having to say your morale is great doesn’t say great things about your morale, I guess.

I'm really not into games as a service. If EA (who has trashed every single franchise and studio of theirs that I liked except Battlefield and DICE) and other big companies stop making AAA single player experiences, then I imagine another company will come along and step in to make them. I don't like indie games much, either, so if single player games disappear then I guess I'm done with modern gaming.

I don't care about Overwatch. I don't care about Rainbow Six: Siege. I don't care about Anthem. I don't care about Destiny. This list could go on forever (though I do like a few mmos). I'm sure there are millions like me, too. If single player disappears, we will just stop playing new games. Like I said, though, I'm sure in the lack of big budget AAA single player games someone else would take up the mantle.

They're not defending it , they are trying to shed some light on the issue. People being angry about it can be found everywhere already and Jeff did also call it fucked up.

I kind of wonder what this news means for Anthem though. Now the audience knows that EA might have a similar type of game around the corner but star wars themed. Do you expect both babies to get an equal amount of attention, or will more people be attracted to Star Wars and therefore EA will throw more support behind that game? Maintaining such a game for years, is quite intense. Look at how busy Bungie was with Destiny after it was released. Can EA handle two of these juggernauts at the same time?

@onemanarmyy: yeah I'm pretty tired and misheard them. Gonna delete that last bit from my comment. I took Brad saying that games should probably be shaved down of the extra fluff as sorta kinda defending it. Apologies.

Dead Space 3 best Dead Space game, co-op for life!

Anthem next year, Star wars probably 3-4 years away so it'll be fine.

@smackosynthesis: it's all good. It's understandable to be annoyed at the news, no one likes to see a promising project being destroyed and people getting kicked out of their jobs for reasons beyond their power. It sucks and reflects poorly on EA. If you never really believed in a strong singleplayer experience, why the hell do you bring in Amy Hennig to make such a game? Comes across as such a kneejerk reaction, It boggles my mind.

What is the Square Enix investor's meeting that they're talking about?

my 2 cents on star wars battlefront 2, droids shouldn't run. I also loooove the Pandemic battlefronts, played them with my sister, who doesn't really play games. So I'm not going to play the new one. Janina Gavankar seems cool, so I'm hoping the story mode pans out.

On a happier note, I always enjoy when "Downtown" Peter Brown joins the podcast! That dude is awesome!

Love me some Peter Brown!

Nintendo keeps making very successful singleplayer games, like MR Kingdoms, and BotW. It's sad that Prey and Rise of the Tomb Raider didn't sell more. But Horizon was successful again. I don't think singleplayer games are not profitable. The Witcher 3 was profitable I think, but Evil Within 2 is struggling. (Could have to do with the exposure by reviewers?) They just seem unpredictable in some ways.

Either way, whether singleplayer games are making money or not, they are going to run into this 'problem' with all types of games at some point. Even online games. Because the 'problem' is they want to spend ever more money to get ever more money to the power of x out of it. They want as much as they can get for their investment. But at some point you run out of additional customers, and customers will not want to spend ever more. Customers also need to buy food. So at some point you hit a ceiling. The ever increasing pool of money you want in return for a bigger investment will just not be there. And I think they are hitting that ceiling now with some genres, and the other genres can't be far off.

That doesn't mean those types of games don't sell anymore, but the company is spending too much to ever turn a profit. I guess that is why Squenix was disappointed with the first Tomb Raider reboot. It sold very well (3.4 million sales which is fantastic!) but it was a failure in their eyes, i.e. they messed up their spending.

EA is notorious for making games as expensive as possible to make for everyone in the industry by upping their spending on the audiovisual spectacle, which is one way to price your competition out the market. The solution is for other publishers/developers to not always go for the most money. Bite the bullet. Your game won't look like a real movie, but it could still be great and turn a profit by saving costs on things like mocapping horses.

I laugh when I hear them talk about GT Sport and saying there is 'not enough variety in tracks and cars'. For me that's like hearing Dan Ryckert comparing DOTA to old school RTS games.

Jeff likes racers, but not sim racers obviously. GT is all about the driving physics and the clean racing. People beating you because they have been going around the track better and being able to save fuel and tyres while doing it.

I would be fine if this game had 4 cars in total (heck, I play F1 sims where there's basically only 1 car type) and 4 tracks.

The fact that the game with these kind of realistic physics is trying to match me with drivers of equal skill and race against them without weird lag spikey warping cars is already making it worth the purchase. And I'll be playing the shit out of it and there are a lot like me who feel that way.

Also; this is an online game. Just like PUBG and Destiny; if the servers are down you can't do anything but wait for them to get back up. I don't get why that is so baffling.