Weekend Confirmed 113 - Diablo 3, Max Payne 3, The Last of Us

Regarding Jeffs comments on Max Payne 3.....

Sorry dude, I hate to say this... but you are playing it wrong. Sounds like you were holding LT and shooting a lot. When Max aims through the sights he will move really slowly, having it feel really clunky. You wanna use cover only for popping painkillers and to build your adrenaline meter. Once you have a good amount of adrenaline, pop out of cover and kick into bullet time and line up those headshots while strafing and aiming WITHOUT holding LT. Remember it is Max Payne, not Gears of War or Uncharted.

I think a lot of people who are fans of the originals, but just not digging this one, or not having "fun" is because they are just getting frustrated by being killed so often.

I was really surprised you aren't liking it, since you seem to be more into narrative driven games.

It's pretty awesome hearing the show as a listener.

A couple of times I've caught myself going "what?!!!" and the Diablo 3 talk has me all excited and thinking how the hell I'm going to get in some time to play it this weekend since I'm moving.

Sorry Jeff but I need to call you out on something.

You've excused multiple iterations of douchebag corporate behaviour - but now, suddenly, Blizzard needs to address a situation because you are personally affected.

So when you *aren't* affected (like with Skyrim) it makes corporate douchebaggery acceptable?

That kind of stuff is just exasperating to listen to.

Diablo's poor launch, there's only one person to blame. People that pirate games end of discussion. Yes, jeff MMO's launch like this and now single player games do too stop acting like a old man;) back in the day things where so much better. Yeah as long as you weren't black, Latino, Chinese or a woman. But I'll tell you what a simpler time the 50's where if you didn't like what your wife was saying you just beat the crap out of her. Man I hate the back in the day speech;)

I didn't know Butthead was part of the weekend confirmed show. Love your show its like the CNN of gaming.

The top selling game in Japan is "My Little Sister Cant Possibly Be This Cute".

Read that again.

I will wait for the Japanophiles to explain how the tastes of this country are not, in scientific terms, COMPLETELY FUCKING WACKED.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-23-japan-chart-my-little-sister-cant-possibly-be-this-cute-takes-top-spot

I haven't had a chance to listen to this show yet, so maybe you guys went over this.

Does anybody else feel a little annoyed that Rockstar felt the need to include a cover system in Max Payne 3?

On the surface, it works within the concept of what they were doing with Max Payne - making everything a little more gritty, stylized, and a little less cartoony. The writing and characters were adjusted, and so was the gameplay.

No longer can battles be one by hopping back and forth in slow-mo like a jack-rabbit on an acid-trip. You have choose when to dive, and try to ensure you land close to cover because you'll get annihilated if you're in the open struggling to your feet.

The problem is that the game is balanced so heavily in favor of cover, with bullets doing so much damn damage, that I almost always prioritize staying in cover and taking pot shots over charging in for some cinematic, hong-kong style action.

I've died more playing MP3 than I have any other game on normal in recent memory, and it's because of the adjustment period where I learn 'ok, here's the really fun part of this game.... now don't use it too much, cause you'll get killed'. I've been conditioned to take cover now, and I'm fairing much better, but I'm thinking a second play-through on easy, where I can fulfill my Hong Kong action dream-sequences will actually be more enjoyable.

Still another GREAT game from Rockstar. They've owned this generation with the quality of their lineup.

Yes that's exactly what the vita needs is every game that's on the console to have a port. It was the promise that the psp missed on. And the vita version needs to be able to play online with it's console brother.

I don't believe CoD is the vita's saving grace it'll help, but unless the vita version introduces a whole new single player hook. Then what, CoD is about multiplayer game and you need wifi for that so at home or being the cool guy playing CoD at Starbucks;)

PS man you guys at shack really just troll nintendo at every turn... No joke.

May I ask what those guys were/are smoking when playing Max Payne 3?!
Why are they saying "It's looking really great"? WTH
It looks awful, in comparison. Sure, if you JUST look at MP3 it looks okay, but in comparison to other recent games, it looks AWFUL. Especially the animations. Those are even worse than in GTA 4 (And there some of them were even great). That aside, the "Tony Scott style" (which I love in his movies) they are trying to do is awful as well, because there is no sense behind it at all. Words pop up without any reason. And the autosaves are awful as well (How can a game in 2012 still let you REWATCH cutscenes if you die... Jesus). Ah well. They are excited about Diablo 3 as well, so... Hmm.

So Dragon's Dogma is fucking awesome. Not sure what it is, maybe the combat, but this game seems to hold something for me that Skyrim, Dark Souls, Kingdoms of Amalur, and The Witcher don't. :/

Also the music/sundtrack is crazy and out of place in a good way.

not sure if you cover this later in the podcast but heard the talk about skills moving on the hotbar in diablo 3.

the way it works is you can move the skills around the hotbar but you can't have 2 from the same skill group on the bar, wherever you move your normal left mouse click hotbutton to be it 1-4 or somehting it will always be the one skill you chose that goes in that spot normaly, if you change the skill it just changes where you put it.

i have used it cause i use the defensive skill more often then my attacck 2, so i moves it from hotbar #1 to the right click. but if i change the defensive skill i am using it would just still be on the right click not placed in a new hotbar area.

actualy i have no clue if this changed later once all spots are unlicked because i am not that far enough but i am sure someone else can help clear it up too.

I like the new Podtrac player!

I think it's worth being clear about the fact that there is no single player version of Diablo 3. There's a multiplayer version where the game session is locked to one player, but that's all. This is a result of the fact that people in single player games are allowed to sell items they find in the common auction house. If these items were generated on the client, people will figure out how to create fake items and sell them for what is effectively real money. The players might love this because the value of items would probably diminish to zero, but it wouldn't be that great for Blizzard.

To prevent this, I suspect that all items acquired in Diablo 3, be it in a single or multiplayer game, are generated by the Diablo 3 server and possibly even stored in a database somewhere. With this in mind, even if every buyer of Diablo 3 created a single player game at launch time, each game will generate load on the server, much like if a multiplayer game was running. The server may not have to keep track of player location, etc, but there will be fairly regular crosstalk.

That said, there's still no excuse for having such problems at launch, particularly from a company that has multiplayer experience from a game like WoW. The initial load could have been simulated sufficiently to ensure a stable launch experience, and Blizzard clearly has the resources to build out what's needed. Even if it meant racking a few hundred servers for the first week load spike, then taking them out of commission later, they could have handled this relatively smoothly. That said, if there was a bug that caused instability that they missed, diagnosing and fixing the problem with that kind of load on the system is complicated and time-consuming.

I think it's certainly valid for some percentage of buyers to really want only a packaged single player experience with no social component at all... I imagine Blizzard just didn't think this market was large enough to justify the development cost.

So, how do you guys play Rockstar's more recent games? Shooting-wise, I mean.

I like to play these games mainly for the stories, and more so, the environments, in them, so I go all-out-wussy Easy difficulty / "Hard Lock" (aimbot!) aiming as it's labeled in Max Payne 3. Considering I play most games on the hardest difficulty straight out of the box, I still find Rockstar's experiences extremely fulfilling.

Then again, that begs the question of why I'm buying these games and not just watching play-throughs on Youtube. :/

For myself the launch weekend is more important than the launch day. I am going to guess the average game may log into a game on the first day, but it will not be until the weekend before they really plan to do a deep dive into a game. If I can wake up on Saturday morning, and have a smooth experience I think that is more important.

Hey Jeff, just wanted to say I loved hearing you do the sponsorship spiel this episode. Hearing you get all rambly and over-enthusiastic was very charming.

I hope you get to do the ads more often.

Hey Jeff Cannata,

I'd like to apply for membership in the I Was Completely Wrong About Minecraft Club.

My wife, brother in law and myself were sitting around a few days ago wondering what game to play so I downloaded Minecraft on a whim. All 3 of us entered the world with no idea how to play, knowing only that monsters were coming at night. The next think we knew it was 3am and we were all addicted. It's been a whole since we gamed till such an hour and it's been a while since I spent most of my day at work thinking about what I could do in the game when I got home.

I'd always been turned off by Minecraft's graphics, and let's face it, there's prettier looking SNES games. It truly is an ugly game to watch. But I completely dismissed the gameplay which turns out is incredibly fun. The sense of discovery and choosing how to build with no hints or suggestions is great and as I talked to my Minecraft playing friends it was interesting to hear just how differently they approached the game when they started.

I still think the graphics are terrible, and I can't imagine why someone would play it with unlimited blocks and monsters off, but I'd always judged the game as a crude, pixillated creation tool that limited you to cubes. I regret that it took me so long to discover the amazingly fun gameplay hidden under the low res, blocky visuals.

Would be cool if we heard a little more about games like Dragon's Dogma. Would suck if a game as cool as that flew under the radar.

Am I the only one who downloaded, installed, and played diablo 3 on launch day without a single error message or connection problem?

Jeff I feel there's a need for a little clarification concerning Chuck Norris in The Delta Force. He was in both 1 and 2 and anything else he wants to star in cause he's Chuck Norris.