The Giant Beastcast: Episode 42

I think they get a little too over analytic in their talk on The Division. The outbreak starts on Black Friday and the game starts on Christmas Day so its not like things went to shit in like three days. This is one of those situations where you need to step back and say "this is a video game story, it's not gonna be the most logical thing in the world."

@cagliostro88: Played it a lot when I was younger!

@kingpk: yeah they over analyzed it when in the end its just a game ass game. "Why is there a chest with a weapon inside, located right behind that hostage you rescued?" because its a loot based video game. But honestly the BEAST crew aren't the only ones trying to find justification and real world logic for the going ons in this game, I've seen it from many others online. I believe the reason this game is getting critized for doing typical game things is because of the setting and tone of the game. They brought up Destiny and said they weren't sure why they were fine with some of the things that game did, but weren't willing to let it past on The Division, again it is because of the tone and setting. Destiny is a sci-fantasy game, so it gets a pass when enemies have shields while The Division does not. This tells us two things, 1) you can't add a modern real world setting to a rpg shooter 2) but if you do you better have lore/logical explanation to all the rpgness you've added to it and that's hard because how much of that explanation will turn your game into pseudo scifi/fantasy.

@austin_walker: then you are a good man in my eyes, sir. Long live Prokhor Zakharov!

Alex has played over 2000 hours of Civ V and doesn't build the Hanging Gardens?

It's one of the most powerful early game wonders. It basically allows you to feed 3 citizens for free, which allows you to exploit high production tiles early in the game, or run specialists, while still growing. This synergizes really well with the free Garden, speeding up your Great Person generation, which in the early game can be such a huge multiplier.

Allow me to submit, "Harry Bakalar" as in, "My first college roommate made his girlfriend shave his Hairy Back-alar"

The whining and over analyzing the lore and logic of the Division has gotten really dumb guys.

If you wanna get excited for VR, watch eXistenZ. Or maybe don't watch it? I'm not sure.

The division invites reaction and "ha ha what cmon" because it takes itself seriously and is trying to tell a gritty and realistic story about a gritty and realistic plague taking over a gritty and realistic new york city with gritty and realistic FMV and gritty and realistic audiologs.

Which makes me p. much hate it's attempts at storytelling when the game itself is me shooting guys like 5 times in the head with a Mosin and them still fighting just fine.

I've played a lot of Warframe and Borderlands and those games actually make the gameplay exciting and varied in an interesting way which The Divison doesn't. The Division is basically a generic TPS with decent graphics.

So SOMEONE is going to get sued for this. Definitely should, and if they wanted to I expect you could prosecute someone for fraud for this. Can someone direct me to where you submit story ideas to @austin_walker for stories? As a registered lawyer - I could write about this from a legal perspective along with the copyright paroxysms going on in the anime/video game community over on youtube.

Also for flavor in space strategy games - go to Sid Meirs Alpha Centauri. And in Beyond Earth reading in the Civlopedia does give it a good flavor.

The always online for Destiny is likely an anti-piracy thing. I am ok with this.

And I don't know I like my reviews to be reviews and not be cultural criticism ... a lot of cultural criticism is only going to make me angry I have enough doing that right now I don't need more of it.

Seriously... it's been one of the best things to happen to this show. I remember how Bakalar seemed hesistant to even talk about it the first time he brought it up a few weeks ago, then it got even nuttier with the PCI card stuff, and now it's dead. It just got more unbelievable as it went along.

Also that first time they discussed it and Austin circled back and compared it to him lying to his parents while Alex said "...and that's how the Coleco Chamelon got the belt again" is probably my favorite thing to ever happen on the Beastcast. It was such a perfect tie-in to their earlier conversation and genuinely fitting.

It comes from the cultural criticism he does. I don't share his feelings on shooting hoodlums or rioters either. Peaceful demonstration is fine rioting is not.

The Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen is exactly the kind of game that they go on to describe after the Beastcast play down the idea of liking "bad games".

Blood Omen isn't bad, it has a lot of quirks that early disc games had such as loading times but this was really only noticeable when loading the item screen.

Aside from that it is a very competent top down "Zelda" game with vampire powers that actually inform the character and their situation, something that most games can't even dream to achieve.

Blood Omen also tells a straightforward but effective story that is well executed. Told mostly in succinct monologues that beautifully capture the essence of the scene better than any 10 minute cinematic could.

This was before the series was requisitioned by Eidos and given to Crystal Dynamics to pump out a sequel. Amy Hennig was masterful in being able to write something that wasn't "Blood Omen 2: Nosgoth Boogaloo" even though Eidos probably just asked them to make a 3D platformer like Tomb Raider. But the sudden rush to release by Eidos and cliff hanger ending of Soul Reaver left the series to take a dark turn down the messed up convoluted plot it is now known for. Blood Omen's story has little if nothing to do with this and shouldn't be held up as a culprit to it at all.

@austin_walker Go look at the tech tree from Endless Space. Don't play the game because the inevitable combat is terrible but the tech trees have some of the best sci-fi flavor text I've ever seen. Do you like the effect of time dilation on intergalactic trade or the creation of material so strong that it overpowers the forces of entropy. Of course you do. The game has four tech trees filled with great comprehensible space gibber gabber.

@redking56: I think the first Blood Omen is an okay game with an okay story but it's the evolution into sheer madness that made that franchise somethin' special. I love it.

Amy Hennig went on to do arguably better things but I'll always be sad that she wasn't able to tie up the rest of that beautiful frayed carpet of a story.

Jay Be Smooth.

@blackout62: Not only are the techs in ES great, the different cultures are too. Nothing will ever be as creepy and cool as the Horatio!

Damn you Dietrich!

@efesell: Blood Omen does a lot more with the plot and character than most modern games and stands out from any game at the time. Sure the Circle of Nine and history of Nosgoth are big elements of the story but the most compelling is to do with the former human Kain coming to grips with the monster he is becoming and it is communicated to you in a way only a game could.

Kain's vampirism and twisted morals aren't just empty gimmicks, restricted only to the game manual and cutscenes. They are the very engine of the whole game, and the single most crucial and defining element of the experience. The decision to massacre a whole village for blood is yours to make and influences how you feel about Kain.

This is reason why it remains so compelling in spite of its datedness. It was not simply designed as a "vampire game;" the choice of casting its lead as a bloodsucker was settled upon because it seemed the best way of achieving its overall aim, to thrust the player into the role of a convincing anti-hero whose every act toward the greater good is tarnished by self-interest and violent murder. And for all this, Blood Omen never forgets that it is foremost a video game, not an interactive film or art piece. It might not be the best game ever made, but it stands as a model of how they should be designed.

Soul Reaver starts off strong, there's no better opening line than "Kain is deified." But Soul Reaver is an unfinished story. It has neither a climax nor a conclusion, it just stops. It could've been "Paradise Lost" of video games, Soul Reaver's original ending makes a point about free will and autonomy in video games nearly a decade before BioShock achieved critical accolades and mainstream recognition for doing just that. But this never happened and the game was cut short and given a different cliffhanger ending to lead to a sequel that had nothing to offer but a mess of retcons and nonsense plot.

Starbreeze also hired real graffiti artists for The Darkness. But they hired Swedish artists, and some of the stuff was in Swedish, which got pretty weird as the game was set in New York, for example in the screenshot below it says "Hata alla!", which means "Hate everybody!" in Swedish.

@blackout62 said:

Man, the mistakes Amplitude keeps making in combat design are insane. I feel like the answer of "Hey, just let me control each unit and select who they attack" is staring them right in the face and they keep inventing other, more asinine ways to let you half-control units in combat.

Endless Space, I don't even need to get into, because we can all agree it is A) way too fiddly when you're deciding which weapons to put on ships, and B) takes ages to actually watch resolve so at a certain point you just autoresolve it. And C) it never really feels like the different stratagems you can choose do much of anything so I don't care to focus towards them on the tech tree.

Endless Legend is so much closer, but then they still manage to screw it up. The fact that you don't just command each unit individually, and have to instead just issue commands to each of your units before the combat round begins and then let it all play out, is still really unnecessary. Especially because if I tell a slow guy with low initiative to kill some unit, if by the time slow guy's turn comes up his original target is dead, he just wildly moves somewhere or attacks some random target completely outside of my control, often wildly to the detriment of my army's positioning, as he's now blocking some chokepoint or has left some flank exposed. So often I find myself just telling all of my melee units to just stand still and keep formation, and the same for my ranged units, and then just hoping that the enemy AI walks into my attack range because I just don't want to deal with the myriad ways that my own unit AI will fuck up my carefully planned positioning.

@bisonhero: While I think Amplitude has put themselves in a position where they're going to have to create a decent combat system one of these games, I wouldn't be disappointed if they just threw everything out and went with a Crusader Kings II like solution and just had the army with the most troops/spaceships/masochistic nanomachine witches win.

Crash Bakalar

I've been wondering what it is about their opinions on games that seems so foreign to me, but this episode Vinny put it succinctly when he said something like "I come for the narrative, stay for the gameplay." That's just not what I come to games for at all; narrative is one of the last things I care about.

Nearly all game narratives seem so dumb and poorly paced that it's just not something I ever expect from a game. The only time I've had it work for me is in smaller indie games where the narrative is the primary focus of the game, and the Division has so much other stuff going on that there's no way the story was going to be anything note-worthy, and that's fine.

So for me, the Division has been fantastic. I'm constantly starved for online co-op games to play with people. Halo, Saint's Row, Gears of War and Destiny have been the only recent games that really fully integrate co-op into the entire game while still being fun to play, and I'm so happy that I can add the Division to that list. So hearing complaints about why collectible laptops are still powered in the middle of the street seems so petty compared to the great, unique stuff that the Division is doing.

I guess I see your side of that , but a lot of people feel like the actions they are doing (gameplay) have to make sense in an overall scheme (I being one of them).

Yeah, maybe I'm downplaying narrative too much. Especially when it's connected to gameplay, it has some amount of importance so you aren't doing baking minigames in your gritty FPS. But I guess my tolerance for "dissonance" with that sort of thing is a lot higher if the gameplay makes up for it.

I wish my name was Jeff. having a non English name sucks

How many more times is austin gonna bring up that Division radio narrator who says not all prisoners are bad...?

Jak 3 is far and away the best Jak game. Jak 1 is one of the better Mario 64-like games of its day but ultimately is just OK. Jak 2 is solid, big action game yet Jak 3 is just a more complete and much more polished game.

I agree with Vinny about Jak & Dax 3. That's my favourite of the three.

It was the peak in the franchise for both the mechanics and story.

Yup I totally back Vinny on this. It was the first Naughty Dog game that Amy Henning worked on and it shows in the story which wraps up the trilogy nicely. It is a short game especially compared to Jak 2 but it has a ton of variety to the gameplay, doesn't overstay its welcome and the wheeled vehicles are much more fun to drive than the previous hover vehicles.

The discussion of the weird narrative hooks of The Division is great.

It might be my favorite highlight of the Beastcast so far.

@mcblemmen: Well, this is the third time so far...I don't think you can get away with telling an anecdote more times that that.

Weirdly Clint is always the first name I also think of