Weekend Confirmed 143 - Far Cry 3, The Walking Dead, Tera

343 Industries is learning the hard way, what happens when you abandon the identity of your game and the desires of your core fanbase to pursue the almighty 'Call of Duty audience'.

Halo Charts tracks the online populations of the multiplayer playlists. Unlike Microsoft's Xbox Live charts, simply playing Spartan Ops or the single-player while your Xbox is online doesn't count towards these numbers. While Major Nelson claims Halo 4 was the second most-played game on Xbox Live behind CoD last month, the real numbers show a different story:

http://halocharts.com/2012/chart/dailypeakpopulation/all

Speaking as a long-time Halo fan, my interest in Halo 4 multiplayer is cratering. And it makes me sad. The core gameplay, buried somewhere beneath the stupid leveling system, the random ordinance drops, the lackluster map design, the [seeming] abandonment of skill-based matchmaking and the culling of multiplayer modes, is still beautifully elegant, competitive and satisfying.

But it has been dumbed down, or in better words, CoDified. I don't hate CoD as much as some. I certainly don't like it as much as Halo, but I see it's appeal. It is a blindingly fast, visceral game that rewards hand-eye coordination above all else and lets players tinker with loadouts to maximize their preferred playstyle. I really do get the appeal. The problem for Halo 4, is that now it's stuck in limbo between the two games - it's not fast or visceral enough to beat CoD at it's own game, and it's no longer pure, tactical or competitive enough to appeal to longstanding Halo fans.

343i could, in theory, stop the bleeding by putting in a host of 'classic' playlists that remove ordinance, spawn weapons on the map in traditional fashion, and limit what weapons you can put in a loadout. But I think the damage is done, and I question if they're too proud to admit the direction they took the multiplayer was the wrong one.

In a genre composed 99% of CoD copy-cats Halo had it's own multiplayer flavor. And now they've tossed it aside to be another copy-cat.

Submit your holiday stories here.

Every year during the holiday specials we share favorite holiday gaming memories. You've possiblyheard many of ours but there are many many more out there waiting to be told and we'd love for you to share them with us.

So, if you have a favorite holiday videogame memory or story you'd like to share with us for the show, please use this thread.

Thanks!

It kinda sounds like Jeff hasn't gotten that far into Tera if he's still talking about enjoying the look of new armor as he upgrades. About halfway through the level progression, the armor starts repeating, and you won't see anything new until you get to the recently released raids. It's really quite a bummer... if they had just spaced out how quick they give you the armor, that feeling would last longer, but they kinda blow it all up front.

I really don't understand the complaints that Walking Dead isn't 'gamey' enough.

To me, it's just an extension of the classic Lucas Arts adventure game, where the choice of what to say or do constitutes a more modern take on the puzzles than combining random objects.

Nobody complained that those classic adventure games weren't interactive enough, it was understood that the player agency in moving the story, however pre-scripted, forward and the thought that went into reasoning your way through the experience was interaction enough.

Likewise with The Walking Dead. The choices put before me in that game with that insufferable countdown bar were infinitely more brain-racking and satisfying than any of the fit this widget on that whatsit that we got in Grim Fandango, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, etc. Not that those games weren't awesome - they're some of my favorites - they just relied on a slightly different gameplay hook than TWD.

God dammit, someone give Cannata his own show. His comments about The Walking Dead and its relationship to the current state of gaming in the cultural ghetto were spot on. I fully agree that we are still in the infancy of games and that we need to overcome that hurdle to get to the good stuff.

I like the Watchmen analogy quite a bit.

It's weird to hear someone (Cannata) go on about losing everything when talking about death in Dark Souls.

You don't really lose anything, just some souls. And even then they aren't lost if you can make it back to the point where you died, which you should generally be able to do if you made it that far to begin with.

The game is not sadistic - you aren't losing any stats or weapons or armor or other items and loot. You are learning from your mistakes and getting better. And even if you do die before reaching your dropped souls, it's almost never a big loss. The amount of souls you obtain on your way to a boss is generally pitiful and insignificant compared to the souls you get from defeating the area boss at the end of your trek. And after taking a boss down and having that abundance of souls from taking them down + the souls from the journey is generally when you use them to level up, so the threat of losing actual significant amounts of anything are pretty rare, unless you are hoarding them boss after boss. Which you shouldn't be doing, really.

You can't get bummed about about a losing a few hundred or thousand souls up front, especially early on when it ramps up and the bosses will soon be giving up souls in the 10k, 20k, 40k, etc range when you down them. And you'll also be finding items / loot of souls that will give you x amount of souls when you use them, useful if you are missing a certain amount to hit that next soul level or buy a certain item. And those solid soul items are never lost on death, same with everything else. Meaning you'll always have a spare cache of souls in your inventory ready to add to your total on demand as long as you are looting along the way. Which you will be. Loot is loot.

Once you get used to the systems and basics, combat especially, you'll die less and less and progress more and more. It's still a very dangerous world and some minions and bosses will kick your ass, but then there's also coop. If you want some boss practice, put down your summon sign and help someone else out before taking them down in your game for good. You'll earn a whole mess of souls for helping others defeat those bosses, too. You can even repeat them as long as your are in level range and there is someone out there in human form with the boss still alive in their game. Likewise in a particularly tough encounter you can summon two people to help you take out the boss in your world for good.

Eventually you'll get to the point where you know how the game works, your gear is being upgraded, your soul level is increasing , and you are familiar enough with the mechanics and systems to destroy some bosses 1v1 on the first blind attempt. There is a hump to get over, but once it clicks you won't be able to put it down.

It really not that much longer than any other RPG out there for the amount of content it contains. The world is unique and interesting, so is the approach to storytelling and character interactions with the NPCs you'll meet scattered about Lordran.

Jeff M. I love you to death but your killing me on the FarCry 3 multiplayer talk in this episode. It smacks of the same thing that has bothered me in a lot of the chatter on the game. When you say the Co-op mode would be good if it was the same thing as the single player is baffling and infuriating to hear. I would think your complaint is more that you wish the single player had a co-op element rather then saying the current co-op mode is missing something for not having the free ranging maps of the single player. I feel like a lot of the complaints about the story are the same thing of people saying essentially that they could have written a better story or because it didn't go the way they were expecting at the end it ruins what's come before. An unfortunate way to view entertainment in my opinion. I don't understand how something can be graded on what it didn't do. As if it was supposed to live up to your expectations. It seems so arrogant.

I've run through the co-op in it's entirely a total of one time and I don't think I'm going back through it but I had a good time doing it. The comparison to Left 4 Dead is pretty accurate. The things you are asked to do and the way the levels are constructed is very similar. You share the character progression and the weapon unlocks with the multiplayer but each co-op experience gives you soooo much XP that you can gain five or more levels in the first few "episodes" that on your first play through you get a nice progression of weapons and component upgrades. The story is just as redic as the single player and the opening scenematic sets a tone for the content that was very popcorn and fun. But overall its just a nice icing on the cake of the game and something that's fun but not necessary. I don't see that as a negative.

Soul Hackers is coming to North America!!

http://www.shacknews.com/article/77116/shin-megami-tensei-devil-summoner-soul-hackers-debuting-in-na#item_29391729

Excuse me while I go clean my pants.

Best Gaming Moment of the year.

I usually go to a Buddy's house once a month to play some game. Finding good couch co-op is usually a challenge- mostly FPSes. So you take what you can get. By far, the most fun we had this year is playing a custom track of Trials Evolution- Super Catapult Pro. You basically launch your rider to see how far he goes and he screams the whole time. We played and laughed for a couple hours. We still go back to it too.

Also that same friend and I attended California Extreme-which is so much free. So many arcade games of my youth really rekindled my love of "retro" gaming.

The Walking Dead Episode 1 is free on IOS right now. After listening to the hype this episode for it, it's a good time to give it a try

My impression of gamers and gaming press.

"The VGAs are stupid why bother watching them. Oh a art house game won. Well this is a turning point for gaming and the VGAs are about as respectable as it gets you know."

Give me a break you all. Look up your butthole some more why don't you. Talking about the walking Dead like its Poe or Hemingway lmao. It's a zombie romp, and now the VGAs have all the street cred from gamers, I can't believe they got ya SUCKERS;)

the enjoyment of hotline miami is its great psychedelic visuals, amazing soundtrack and its combat puzzle mechanics.

i think the style definitely clicks with some people more than others. also has a good sense of balance in its difficulty, while combat comes down to repetition and planning similar to meatboy, sometimes the more difficult sections can give quite a great sense of reward when completed.

got to say guys, i REALLY REALLY REALLY loved the walking dead discussion, this is the type of discussion i would love ot hear about each persons personal game of the year.

but that was awesome and made me wish i was there to talk about things with you, which to me signifies the best of how a podcast is done.

Cannata totally 2012'd me with his comments about how great the Walkind Dead is.

It hink the "game" is alright, but I Think he is totally off base about how he contextualizes it within the games industry as a whole.

First of all, most of his complaints with the way other games handle "choice" are due to the fact that players, apparently including himself, Min/Max Bioware games. This is NOT Bioware's fault. I have always played Bioware games making decisions as I would were I really in that situation and my character is alwasy about 75-80% good. Many times this means I miss out on perks for being evil or holy, but... that's the way my story played out. I think Mass Effect 3 having such binary decision trees is due largely because, as Bioware makes more and more games, it becomes more and more evident to them that players continue to "play the game twice, one as good and one as evil".

The only reason The Walking Dead gets away with being able to be grey is because they've removed almost all the gameplay from the "videogame".

A REAL example of player choice actually affecting the game world and the gameplay experience is Deus Ex 2 (one of my favorite games, despite people hating it) where you come across a super powerful gun. The capitalists want you to give it to the free market so everyone has a shot at owning it. The zealots want you to give it to their side so you can influence the global confict. And the pacifists want you to destroy it so nobody can own it. What decision you make literally impacts the enemies you fight and the strategies you take to complete the game. It's entirely possible to give the weapon to one side you THOUGHT you agreed with only to find yourself fighting against those people at a later point in the game.

The Walking Dead is a great diversion from standard videogames, but it's essentially a choose your own adventure book and it deserves the same standing in gaming as that book series has in literature.

I guess no one here played Zero Escape: VIrtue's Last Reward. For some reason I'm still debating in my head whether or not it's better than The Walking Dead.

Both games have excellent writing with characters that work and stories filled with tension.

The only differences between them are that VLR is much longer and more slowly-paced, and that it's much less mainstream in its subject matter than TWD. That's really the only thing that has given TWD its current status. It really doesn't do much new at all -- adventure games like it have been around almost since the beginning of video games. TWD is just the first one to really reach the mainstream consciousness.

Given the WC crew and many regulars here have some degree of history with tabletop RPGs, I thought I'd pass along the good word about Crimson Shroud, an eShop game for the 3DS created by Yasumi Matsuno, (FF Tactics and Vagrant Story) which uses the aesthetic and storytelling conventions of an old tabletop RPG module.

http://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/eshop/crimson_shroud_eshop

Hey Weekend Confirmed. Im a huge fan of the show and have been going back and listening to the podcast you guys have put up all year and is interesting to see the growth in your opinions on games through out the year,

I am listening to the show and I just have to take a moment and stand up for Mass Effect a second. I like playing games where I am the hero. After hard days of work I don't want to play the smuck in the muck. I don't want to agonize over varying degrees of lousy choices. I want the game to help me play the hero I want to be. It is a game and I am not afraid of the game showing gamey side.

I don't find the hiding of the game elements an automatic bonus. In real life 98% of your choices have clear and obvious consequences.

As to the GoTY discussion, i think jeff mattis said last week that you should do a more granular discussion. i.e. best protagonist, best villain...etc.

for my money this is the best idea. i could suggest best leveling system, best shotgun, best cutscenes, best chase sequence etc.

this would create for some really fun discussions, like what makes for a great shotgun, why was CoDs combat shotgun better than the jacobs shotgun from borderlands. or what makes for great story in videogames.

in my opinion those are the best part of weekend confirmed in general and it would make for some cool and interesting discussions. this is what movies do with best effects and best editing. its a bit more granular, but i think its way more interesting

What story line was so heavy last year... Yeah the 3DS made this holiday but apple is going to sink the handheld market. Now a year later the 3DS is still outpacing the DS (slightly) and currently has a higher install base the the PS3 in Japan. Lol, yeah I guess it's a failure.

Well let me make another statement to follow being ever so correct about the 3DS from last year. The WiiU will outsell the PS4 and next xbox through 2018 at least.

I was about ready to start yelling at my computer over the "stress" discussion, then Jeff Mattas ever so briefly hit the nail on the head. "Enjoying the minute to minute gameplay."

There's something to be said for the connection between your hands and the character on the screen that's at the heart of what I mean by being in the moment, at the heart of not thinking about the game in terms of progress or non-progress.

Every time you shoot a guy, you're shooting a guy, every time you jump over a hole, you're jumping over a hole. They might be different guys, and it might be a different hole, but it's the same action. That's being in the moment: it's appreciating that fraction of a second between when you're feet leave the ground and when they land again, not thinking about what hole you're jumping over, how many you already jumped, or how many more there are to go. Thinking about jumping over every hole can be overwhelming, so instead, only think about jumping over "this" hole, the one right in front of you, the only one that matters right now.

When you die, if you start thinking about the game in terms of doing things "again," you're no longer in the moment, you're now thinking about the past and projecting into the future.

Now, don't mistake what I'm saying as being a state of apathy or indifference, what I'm talking about is more of a Zen approach, digging into the exact millisecond that's happening right now, putting the rest out of your mind. If you are only ever where you are right now, then progress or loss thereof has no real meaning.

Granted, I sometimes have difficulty following my own advice, but it is what it is.

Instead of thinking of it as reading ten pages of a book over and over again, think of it as improvising a solo over a 12-bar blues lick in E-minor.

Obviously Cannata never played Blade Runner. The Watchmen of video games...give me a break.

I know a game that has a more compelling story (very subjective I know) but it's not that I don't rate TWD's, it may be my second favorite story in a game ever. It's certainly my GOTY but to answer Jeff other games with stories on that level do exist.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Firstly no I'm not going to divulge in spoilery territory but that narrative is so well pulled off that it needs to be considered The Watchmen of gaming.

The story is full of what makes all narratives great in any medium. Great characters. Characters which play no menial part in the entire duration of its story and make you love to love or love to hate each and everyone of them. Conspiracy, twists are all present like any Metal Gear but executed much more concisely. Also literally there scary plot points in the game and one's that are very shocking in the non-scary in the 'did they just do that' kinda way. Also added is light wash of comedy and romance to create some relief from the tension and you've got a recipe for success.

There is plenty of awesome meta-narrative elements and yes chances to change some cut-scene outcomes so if you don't consider it the same category initially then I will counter to it that yes it can be mentioned in a similar apples to apples way with regards to TWD.


Nonetheless a possible point could be made that a more linear story creates a more focused narrative. Which comes onto my next point about the shortcomings of TWD for me. This is going to spoil the ending of that particular game. The kidnapper who owned the car is still at the hotel and his motivations are the same regardless of your decisions. Despite the fact in my playthrough I explicitly told him that I did not (and I did not) get the items out of his car. Regardless the same subsequent things happen in that scene. It made the twist feel cheap because no matter what he appears and tries to kill you. This is the difficulty of doing the moral choice feature in games, the connection to my Lee's actions and the guy's motivation was not connected enough to have a justification in any sense, even a little. Plus other consequences of the moral choice games are well ... the Mass Effect 3 ending so there's that.

Anyhow back to MGS3, it perfectly illustrates how a more linear story can not screw with an ending as is the case with ME3 and to a lesser extent TWD. I mean it has the best ending ever in a game that I've ever experienced. It left my spine shiver, it was electrifying, left me speechless, full of intense varying emotions and was just simply friggin spectacular in it's payoff.

Everyone reading this, play this game if you want that comparison. The first hour and a half is perhaps achingly slow but the rest of the 17 hours is perfectly paced. It is self-contained as its an origin story and like I said before it is more concise in the conspiracy aspect that other MGS games are sometimes infamous for so don't worry about it.

So in other words. MGS3... everyone you won't regret it. So Jeff go play it .... or the other Jeff or Garnett perhaps to just to make a point of contention =]

My Holiday Story.

When I was about 13, I would have a split X-mas because by parents were divorced. I would usually go to my Dad's about a week before. One particular year, we head on over, have our X-mas like meal and open presents. The big gift that year for me and my bro was boots. It was hard to hide our disappointment and honestly didn't do a good job of it. My Dad picked up on it and drove us to Target and let us pick out any Atari 2600 game we wanted. We picked Star Wars Arcade. I still feel kind of bad for whining my way into a gift but damn, I loved having that game. Games were a present I never minded sharing with my brother.

also, I remember knowing which gifts were games by the size of the box.

What a GREAT 25th year anniversary for street fighter. Having Daigo the greatest player of all time. Just a constant for 8 plus years being in the top of most brackets incredible. Being beat by the current hottest player in the game infiltration. And fuudo finishing 3rd!!! Incredible finals.

Oh and Street fighter 4 AE is now free on playstation plus. There is no better deal in gaming then playstation plus at this point in time:)

2013 what am I looking forward to Pikmin 3, hoping it really does a little more than the other 2. But I'm most looking forward to the trinity of brawlers DMC, god of war accession, and bayonetta 2. With no real fighters on the horizon the combo system in DMC looks really really good!!!

While I'm glad to hear Jeff acknowledge the importance of writing in games, almost every other single thing he said in this episode about The Walking Dead was wrong. You did not craft the circumstances around which anything happens in the game. You chose a few of the details regarding how the action occurs, but those details are ultimately arbitrary because the game's circumstances are so rigid.

The choices were still interesting to make because the writing was so good, but the impact of the linearity despite your choices did result in pangs of disappointment. The most glaring example for me is the show down between Carley and Lilly. No matter what you choose, or how you manage your relationships in the game, both characters are ceremoniously cut out of the plot in Episode 3.

It hurts the experience because the game telegraphs both characters as potential love interests early on---or at least characters you could choose to bond with---but neither relationship can materialize. This means that if I compare Carley to say Andrea in the comic books, Andrea will always be an infinitely better character because she's existed for over 100 issues now. She is written as well as any character in the game, but more importantly I've watched her personality, her survival instincts and so forth develop over the course of the story.

[walking dead canon spoilage below]
So for that reason, to say that the game is better than the comic books is fundamentally laughable. None of the deaths in the game meant as much as the way Lorie died in the comic. Or the way (Spoiler) Glenn recently met his end for that matter. There isn't a single villain in the game as convincing or brutal as either Negan or The Governor. The interpersonal conflicts and moral confrontations aren't anymore grueling or stark. It is way better than the show, and a noble achievement for being the contained vignette it is, but it sure as fuck aint up to par with the comics.***

Really your only through line relationship in the game is with Clementine, and frankly that ending did not have me moved to tears. I was wondering if there was some way of making Lee survive the whole time, and then the whole thing just ended in a way that actually felt anti-climactic. Now the end of Final Fantasy IX---that is the closest I've come to being moved by a game ending. And that's because it builds such a big dramatic arc that it earns its outcome.

***On that comic/game comparison point there seems to be some real life acting/film bias peaking through Jeff's whole analysis. Like, apparently games can not be good stories unless they could be recreated with real actors right? But one of the things intrinsic about games, that I've always felt was a strength, is that they are animation.

The acting may not be as nuanced, but the audience can relate to the characters based on how they are modeled. Its often more effective to say 'this character has this disposition' by giving their face a certain shape, more than say putting 500 points of animation on one of the dead mannequins faces found in many other games, and relying on the actor's realness.

To Garnet's point, part of the reason the hyper violence and parlell world-ness of The Walking Dead works, is because its done in hand drawn animation. If you look at Kill Bill Volume 1 for instance, the most violent scene in that movie is probably the animation sequence retelling O-Ren Ishii's childhood. As a thesis on violence and fantasy in story telling, there was a point to Tarantino doing that.

Has anyone on the panel/podcast played any of the iphone (and old books) games based on the Gamebook Adventure series?

the walking dead to me isn't an adventure game turned into a narritive game, but really they took what these gamebook adventures did for just reading words and making choices with some dice rolls into a visual gamebook adventure. i mean there are a lot of them, and they are mostly desciptive text with some minor dice mechanics for battle or checking if you can climb a cliff without falling. to me some of these "books" (i played them on ipad) are pretty well written, and i have played the same gamebook adventure over and over, and they often do branch out in different ways that only loop back in the fact you may end up at a hub place, but everything inbetween the hub place and the next is totaly different.

this reminds me so much about what you said about how walking dead will always end up the same but the adventure to geth there will be different. this is how the gamebooks work, and i think a lot of them with actual character art and spoken script would be a good way for an indy company to make some compelling games in the new "narrative game" genre. in other words i would really like more of the walking dead type game, but i dont really want them all to be horror based, or fantasy for that matter. a good crime drama, or sci fi, it could be glorious.

so thats my 2 cents on how i feel walking dead game isn;t so much a puzzle/adventure game as it is a living breathing gamebook type game.i think both games are very close to the same because there are often puzzles to solve in the gamebooks also, but they aren't exactly about finding item a that goes with item b like i feel most advanture games are like. i much prefer the narritive chunk to be acted out and the dice rolls you would normly make in the gamebook to be masked by game mechanics, with the ame branching story. i hope to see a lot more with good to great writing like walking dead game. the only problem i feel like that will make it not as popular is, the gamebooks really do branch off to different endings/failstates and are meant to be replayed, where the narrative aproach of walking dead wasn't about replay (though you can replay it) like a gamebook is in a way, i would still love to see a developer make a game with such branching tree's that you may not ever see 4-5 of them, but i think as a developer they can't justify making that many threads that may never get woven, on a cost/creative basis.

sorry wrote a book, but i have always felt a lot of simple ideas like a choose our own adventure book could be done well in a visual way for video games.