Weekend Confirmed 122 - DYAD, Borderlands 2, Metro 2033

It's been funny hearing you guys take Spec Ops to task over its violence.

Your reaction to SOps was basically my reaction to most of the games at E3 yet Garnett and both Jeffs defended games like Tomb Raider and Last of Us with their gratuitous violence.

If you're going to get indignant about game violence, it makes you look silly when you're chastising it with the left hand and defending it with the right. You guys (I'm not singling out a specific person here) need to do a better job with your message because it comes across as a bit hypocritical

Why is it okay for people to cheer someone getting shot in the face during a Last of Us demo at the Sony conference, but not okay for Spec Ops to do executions?

Like I said - hypocritical.

"Can we get back to talking about video games?"

NO! I'm so sick of hearing this in the podcasts. I want you guys to get off topic. Not every single second has to be about video games. The most interesting discussions often happen when you're NOT talking about games. I'm reading through Heart of Darkness because of your somewhat off topic conversation about it. Just let the conversation flow naturally. I don't know why the show has to be so structured. It really bothers me that you adhere to such a strict time schedule as well. This isn't TV or radio you have the luxury to go over! Take advantage of that! I also get really irritated when you come back from break and talk about how you had this great conversation during that break. I want to hear that conversation.


I hate to compare this podcast to others because they should all have their own identity, but I also listen to the Giant Bombcast and they go off topic like no other show. And it's freaking fantastic! I've learned so much about various subjects because of the tangents that take place on that show. I bought a shortwave radio because of recent episodes.

I'm not expecting you to turn this into the Bombcast. I don't want that. I just think you need to relax the structure a bit.

Is the real problem with Diablo 3 that Blizzard doesn't really understand the end game of their own games? WoW included? With every expansion I continue to feel that WoW is being built with the idea that what drives end game players is the loot grinding. The mechanics that they are creating only seem to at once make it easier to get access to content from lower levels through the cheapening of previous levels of equipment, followed by the ever engorging mountain top of the top tier stuff. They don't really offer any incentives other then loot. Same for Diablo. They've created the systems to support the attaining of better and better loot. That loot then leads to different areas that offers more loot then on to other places with addititional loots. The change with 3 was that it added a link in this chain and with the addition of the Auction House where after the second difficulty you only advance in loot tables by grinding money instead of loot directly.

The problem with all of that is that the core reason anyone I've known still plays those games after all these years is the community, not the actual game. We didn't continue to raid in my now non-existent guild because of loot it was so we could say, "look at what our guild did". The loot was the facilitator and the status indicator of achievement and not an end unto itself. Again I'm only talking about the end-game which I would assume is where most of those 10 million people are spending there time now. The biggest gain in my estimation for the game were the strides made to make the raiding more accessible to everyone in the Wrath content, which led to reversals of almost all those gains in the subsequent cataclysm release, then re-gaining some with raid finder stuff.

I mean you see the drop off in players because Diablo isn't capable of recreating the community of WoW becuase the grouping that you can do with the game isn't on the same level. Purely on the level of capacity. Additionally there isn't any interaction with the community in the completion of the goals of the game. I mean raiding in WoW essentially requires you to spend hours on the internet in the community figuring out how to complete the content of the latest release, while Diablo's execution of the content is essentially the same for everyone and easily determined through trial and error.

Anyway, just thinking out loud that maybe Blizzard doesn't really understand the core reason for the success of their game which is why they seem so flustered(?) by the lack of a repeating success with Diablo 3.

Just want to comment on something Garnett said about not talking about DYAD anymore because it's come up the last two weeks...

Who cares? If you enjoy the game, which it sounds like everyone who has played it does, you should talk about it. There's such a genuine excitement about it that it shouldn't matter how often it's been talked about on the show.

And even so, how many times is the Diablo 3 discussion going to come up? It's been every week since the game has been released, and it's usually the same thing regarding the auctionhouse. If there's anything that should be cut, it's more Diablo talk (coming from a non-PC gamer :) )

Anyways, enjoy the show, keep up the good work!

Having listened to every 1Up Yours, Listen UP and Weekend Confirmed I'm officially getting tired of Garnett's crapping on things and especially when he hasn't thought thing things out. I'm going to float an idea as to why Garnett felt the need to crap on PSN Plus. It's because he missed out on the free years membership and felt the need to devalue it in order to protect his ego (see that fact that he admits how hard he is on himself). This is just who Garrnett is, just as Jeff was kinda ambivalent about missing out and Andrea is super bummed but gets over it. Now lets get to him not thinking before speaking, the really sad part is he came into the PSN vs XBLA conversation having already thought it out before hand.

Comparing these two service is fairly simple, you subscribe to them if what they give you is worth what you pay for them. Is playing with your friend online valuable, absolutely, do I want to be forced to pay MS to do it when it's free everywhere else, NO. Not having XBLA Gold almost isn't an option if the majority of your friends are on XBOX and if your a gaming journalist chances are they are. If you want to use the console and enjoy the games on XBOX you essentially are forced to pay a $50-60 a year tax to do so (that's $300+ if you've had one since launch, ouch) Is online gaming better on 360 than PS3, Yes, $50-60 a year better, No. If you have a PC or PS3 and your friends do too then XBLA Gold is a waist of money. XBLA Gold borders on the mandatory and that is why it sucks(and all the adds)

PSN Plus up until E3 2012 really didn't seem worth it personally but if you play a ton of games I can see it been really cost effective and a Garrnett said he doesn't have a lot of time to play games and doesn't to feel forced to play ones before they expire. I totally get this and I'm feeling that pressure my self since I got a 3 month subscription when they announced all the free games at E3. For me the value was too good to say no to, especially since I hadn't played and wanted to play 90% of the games offered. We're talking about at the very least $200 retail worth of games for $18, if I get through just one of these games(Warhammer, Infamous 2, LBP 2, R&C All 4 One) it will be worth it. Even if I don't (I already have) when you throw in the discounts you get on games when you are a Plus member it will have paid for itself, just look at the PSN PLAY deals. For me I'm saving $3 off Sound Shapes, Papa & Yo and CS Global Offensive and then I'm saving another $3-6 because if they weren't on sale I would probably be only getting Sound Shapes. Oh and I just saved $3 on Dyad, so that's $18 right there. Like I said, it pays for it's self. Also you get the added bonus of having all my saves backed up all game and System updates which I'm liking a lot.
In fact Garnett (or anybody) if you intend to buy the same games I am you mine as well give PSN Plus a try it's going to cost you next to nothing. Is that worth it, HELL Yes. Wow that rant was too long.

It's been a little over a week since Riccitiello claimed that the PC is the fastest growing platform largely because of the diverse revenue streams available. Do you think that console makers will ever loosen some of their own bureaucracy to allow micro-transactions to thrive on their platforms?

How are people enjoying the Critical Path Project?

http://criticalpathproject.com/?v=38407251

Can I come at the Polytron Fez patching thing from a different angle? The whole debate is silly.

Patches are not a dirty word. Patches are great! Easy updates are part of what makes PC gaming amazing. I come back to games time after time: Minecraft, TF2, whatever, because every time I come back there are tons of new awesome features. These games never stop giving.

And to go back to the original argument about hardship for small companies:

Fez is estimated at about one million in revenue. Maybe it will do more in the long tail but I wouldn't count on it. In development 5 years. Mainly 2 people, a third person part time. Let's say 3 people to keep it simple and to account for other misc expenses.

MS cut 30% takes it down to 660k.

3 people / 5 years = 44k a year per person.

MS charges 40+ k for cert, not 10k. That's essentially a year of income. You can see how people would balk. Especially with Steam just recently announcing even easier patching.

Spec Ops started a discussion lol gamers are so desperate to have legit story telling they grasp fibers. Garnett you made the great point you can't be taken seriously if your "just a shooter game" and at the end of the day it's a shooter.

I laugh at the notion spec ops started a discussion because years ago gamers grasped at Metal gear solid and toted it as Shakespeare'n like story telling. After that games like halo and uncharted but when you look back you realize it's all a trick of our imagination. Even Heavy Rain you'll realize as Jeff has said its really not a good story.

The discussion of finding the grail of gaming is going to continue, but games keep getting in the way of finding it.

Garnett - *no* developer is adapting their game to what the public wants.

At *best* marketing is cutting trailers trying to appeal to old school RE fans but there's too much money and too much focus testing and market research in blockbuster games to ever adjust things to what the internet wants.

The developers are under the thumb of the publishers who want a focus tested game that is going to reacfh the widest audience possible.

What you're suggesting just doesn't happen.

I think we as a gamer culture place too much excitement and praise on the name of a game and not enough on the minds behind what makes that game so great, and it has contributed to this plague of sequelitis we've experienced this generation.

In movies, when I hear the announcement of Monsters University, it's not because it's a sequel to a great movie that I loved, it's because Pixar are making it. If Disney were to give production responsibilities of Monsters University to some random animation studio you can count me out.

To keep this in the realm of video games:
Bioshock 2 Announcment = :D
...not developed by Irrational = :(

Homefront 2 Announcement = :|
...developed by Crytek = :)

I think we as a culture need to modify how we communicate our excitement and deliver our praise.
Let's keep our 'Game of The Year' award, but instead of 'Best Action Game' and 'Best Multiplayer Experience', how about an 'Achievement in Writing Award 2011' presented to Amy Hennig (Uncharted 3).
Less spotlight on 'Most Anticipated Games of 2013' and more spotlight on 'Developers to Watch and what they're trying to accomplish in 2013'.
As opposed to a review stating, "_________ is the most beautiful game this year, with an equally impressive score", why not, "_________ and his team of incredible artists have built an amazing world to explore that's made even more enjoyable by composer _______'s atmospheric and emotional score. I cannot wait to see what this team creates next".

Let's build up more "named talent" in the industry. I'm not saying that every writer, artist, composer and their dog need to be placed on the same pedestal as the likes of Levine, Miyamoto, Chen, Blezinski and Spector. I just believe that by celebrating the talent behind the product, we'd be less likely to see sequel upon sequel thanks to more creative power given to the guys and girls in the blue collars and not the white, so to speak.

Diablo 3 is the classic example of why having great mechanic in a campagain only game is a problem. It ends and those mechanics just sit there. Inevitably players are going to reach a point where the difficulty below them is too easy not challenging at all, and the level above them is just too daunting and feels unnecessarily cheap.

I do like looting but that feels like the cherry on top (to me). Combat is always engaging in Diablo 3, and as soon as those core players have a even field to play against in PvP the problems with hell and inferno won't be as bad, because users will take care of the middle ground balancing... That is if PvP is actually good.

I'm with Garnett on his reaction to Blizzard's odd handling of Diablo 3. The basic problem is that they have created a strange hybrid of a game that has a lot more replayability than the usual single player action RPG campaign game, yet is not an MMO or a competitive multiplayer game, or even an arcade style high-score chasing game. Fans seem to be expecting some kind of endless gameplay experience but it simply is not that type of game. But then Blizzard says they will continue to "support" the game as if it is. What activities are there to support?

Borderlands 2 is essentially the exact same type of game, yet we all know it will not create anywhere near the level of internet rancor. I don't really get it. I guess because SC2 and WoW are both essentially endless games, that is just what Blizzard fans were expecting?

3 things

On Specs Ops. I just finished the game. I have to say we had more decision to make toward the very end of the game then all the game before a certain point ( from chparter 12 really ). The game has several endings, which is cool. But Yager cleraly failed to deliver on the promises. Still, that's a grat start and I hope they will go fo a more decision driven sequel.

On Borderlands 2. I'm not interested in that agme whatsoever. I don't understand why it is so hyped. I will give it a try as I love Gearbox work.

On Halo 4. That's my most expected game this year ( with Zombie U ). I'm a huge Halo fan and I think 343 are going to deliver ! That was quite mission impossible as nobody really believed that someone could wear Bungie shoes.


Great once again guys :)

I just want to give my piece about patching. First off, games made today are much more complicated than a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. Therefore, the chance for bugs is every increasing. I do not want developers to get so paranoid about bugs that we don't get games like Skyrim. What if Bethesda couldn't patch and had to have no bugs the first time around? The game would not be as creative, robust, or huge.

Second, PC games often have bugs, because the games are made to work on an a huge number of hardware configurations. Therefore, there's obviously going to be more bugs in PC games. I've been a PC gamer for over two decades, and I've never had serious issues that I couldn't fix with some investigating, quick patches, or experimenting. And that is less and less. I have had no major bugs in a PC game in several years. And personally, I like the current way PC games work and the easy patching. Fez is a game that works for most people (like most PC games). A patch was released for the few people that had problems (like most PC games). However, the difference is that on PC, the patches would be free and able to be applied until all (99.9999%) of users had no issues. None of that changes the fact that most people had no issues the first time around (go back to my first paragraph why I think this is "good enough").

Please do not talk about Porn. Jeff Cannata is right. Thank you! :) Love the show, though! :)

When the crew started talking about Borderlands 2 it reminded me of something the Giantbomb crew said about the game. A lot of the people who played the original are already sold on the sequel, myself included. I honestly don't care to read or watch anymore preview coverage on the game. They had me at more Borderlands. Talk to me when the game's out and even then talk to me after I sink an obscene amount of hours into that game. I think Garnett, in his slightly rude sort of way, was trying to make that point while Andrea was talking excitedly about the new features. Basically we care and we don't care. Great new features but I'm already sold so...

For anyone a little peeved about Garnett poo pooing PS+ he has been down on the service since it launched. Judging from were Garnett is coming from he doesn't value those discount and games the same way he values multiplayer. He has consistently criticized Sony for not making the service better through Plus. My take is that I do not care about multiplayer that much and I'm certainly not willing to pay $60 a year just to play my friends online. It's a ripoff to me especially when there are great alternatives. (Steam mainly).

I feel the whole Fez situations ends up making both parties look bad. I feel Microsoft will get most of the blame for the whole charging for patches. I also hate the response from Polytron, they even tweeted after they made the blog post about their decision (they ended up taking down the post) that don't you worry the XBLA exclusive is up in a couple of months. What good is that for the people who bought the 360 version of your game, great your going to Steam and you can patch how many times you want.

Jeff, maybe you didn't see, but they have buffed for the drop rates for all Acts in D3 and now anything you can get in Act III and IV you can also get in Act I and II. Of course the chances of getting those ilvl 63's is increased in Act III and IV.

I typed an incredibly long thing into this text field about Spec Ops, but it wants 5000 characters or less, so that didn't work.

Anyways, I sent it to your facebook. Please do me a favour and check it out. I hope as many people as possible play the game, because as lacking in fun as it is, I feel it is very important to the medium.

Also, Fireball and Diet Dr. Pepper rules. Very complimentary!

I wanted to make this point about the Ouya last week. I guess one thing people should consider when assessing it, is that its not all the different from set top streaming devices like the Apple TV, or the Roku box. Those kinds of devices have a market share simply by nature of how cheap they are, and their compatibility with streaming services.

So I basically think the best chance something like the Ouya has at succeeding is by being a convergence device as much as an independent game console. If the developers can make it compatible with numerous streaming Android apps out of the box that will be an incentive unto itself.

On the controller criticism, I think that its important to note how most devices these days communicate with bluetooth anyway. It would make a lot of sense to have an option built in to use your smart phone as a controller, and simply be able to mirror touch screen games like Angry Birds. Then the actual game pad can be reserved for games that attempt to do something more.

So to me, the Ouya is something that individually probably won't take over the game industry---although it may become a niche device, like a Roku box. But it gets at something I've been pondering for a while, which is that Sony would really benefit from more closely the Playstation brand with Android and Google---in a bigger way than just having Playstation Suit.

In the future it seems clear that media platforms will be software UI---not blu ray discs, or even digital distribution itself. Sony is never going to make a software platform comparable to Apple, Google, or Microsoft. So they shouldn't expend resources on trying to competing with them. I don't think there's any rule that says hardware that uses Android can't itself have proprietary features---games that don't run on other Android devices and so forth.

The idea that you "shouldn't put some things out there at a young age", as championed by Jeff, is from my perspective severely flawed. I find it depressingly defeatist, a form of self-censorship rooted in the idea that people who hear or read what you say, can not deal with the idea of people changing. As if they themselves lived somehow outside the temporal reality of our existance.

You can't self-censor just to deny some idiot twenty years into the future the ability to point an uniformed finger at you. That's horrible. If you said something uninformed as a teen, and someone tries to use it against you when say, you run for some office or another, the way society SHOULD work is that THEY are the problem, not you, because THEY are ignoring context, and without context, what someone say can't be interpreted.

I have a lot of shit out there in the digital world that I wrote when I was fairly young. If someone dug that up to use against me in some way, I would hope that people would be smart enough to consider time, relate, and through relating, modulating their reaction appropriately.

I am sure someone will object that, yes, perhaps that is how things SHOULD be, but people are idiots and so you must protect yourself. To that I say only:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Garnett, I'd like to challenege your assertion that Diablo 3 is a single player game. I hate to e-hash an old point, but the fact that you MUST be connected at all times points to at least, aspirations of multiplayer and co-op content. There's not any good reason to have that feature if it's only a single player game.

Garnett - Biohazard was changed to Resident Evil in the US because of trademark and copyright issues, not because of marketing or branding reasons. If it was deemed impossible back in 1996 it would probably still be difficult now.

Also never do meth. Thank~

If you're curious what the Spec Ops writer was trying to do with the game, this is a great interview:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/gamespot-gameplay-special-edition-spoilercast-spec-ops-the-line-6386587/

He doesn't shy away from answering direct questions, like which parts were hallucinations and which were real. Kinda refreshing to hear a writer willing to lay it out there.

Still listening to the show but wanted to comment on developers reading their fans' negative feedback.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015659/Realm-of-the-Counter-Intuitive

If you watch the first ~15-20 minutes of that GDC talk you see one developer's take on reading super harsh forum feedback, yet seeing game metrics that say the exact opposite thing. I remember other developers saying things like this other places, but this is the only one I could remember and find.

If you have the time you should watch the entire talk. I thought it was a super interesting indie insider's perspective on a F2P MMO.

Great show, good job good effort.