Saturday!
There are a small handful of gaming companies that one learns to keep one’s eyes open for.
And then, of course, be disappointed when the company is bought by EA and subsequently destroyed like the beautiful house in Graham Greene’s _The Destructors_.
There was Bullfrog, Maxis, Bioware, Origin, (and more!) and when you heard that they were putting a game out, you would sit up and say “Man, I’m going to go to the game store and read the back of that box!” (This is how long ago that was.)
Anyway, there are still a handful of companies left that get me to say “OH MY GOSH I NEED TO FIND A MACRO IMAGE THAT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH SPENDING MONEY WITHOUT REGARD!” There’s CDProjekt, Naughty Dog, Rockstar (to some extent, anyway), and, if you’re into RPGs, Obsidian.
Obsidian is the company that a lot of companies rely on when it comes to making a sequel. The Company makes the first game and it takes off like wildfire and then they hire Obsidian for the next one. Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2, Wasteland 2, and (my favorite) Fallout New Vegas. (They’ve got a handful of original games like Alpha Protocol and South Park: Stick of Truth as well, but they’ve got a longer list of sequels that they’ve done than originals.)
The main thing that you’ll hear about them is that they do awesome RPGs that are buggy to the point of being nigh-unplayable. Like crashes and corrupted save games and really, really frustrating errors that make you have to restart from the last save point and that was an hour ago. But you do it anyway because, hey, it’s an awesome RPG and there are only so many of those.
Well, it turns out, Obsidian has a new game coming out. Pillars of Eternity and, I’m told (shout out to James K) that they actually took the time to QA it properly this time. They published it themselves because “they were sick of being pushed to put out games before they were ready”.
Now that’s something, right there. I’ll be picking this one up tomorrow, you betcha.
So… what are you playing?
(Photo is “The Game” taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)
That commercial has stuck in my head for 20 years, and it’s the first time in 20 years that I’ve seen it. I even forgot what the commercial was for, but I recognized it immediately before even clicking the YouTube link.
During that 20 year period, I’ve forgotten a number of important names and phone numbers that I would gladly have used that memory space for. But the commercial still makes me smile.Report
Awesome.
Mine too.Report
Maribou has explained to me that Easter starts at Sunrise. Not midnight.
So there goes that plan.Report
ARGH SUNRISE ISN’T FOR TWENTY MINUTESReport
halfway through a 6 hour downloadReport
And I got a half hour away from playing and Maribou reminded me that we had to go to my sister’s for Easter dinner.
And then when we got back she reminded me that I still had to study.
And so *NOW* the game is *FINALLY* installing.
And she’s going to a wedding to which I was not also invited.
And I have the rest of the day to myself.Report
I want to believe in Pillars of Eternity, but as a somewhat wise man said in a different context, Wasteland 2 wasn’t Godfather 2, it was Emanuelle in Bangkok – it did the job but never really seemed to grab me as if it were a classic like the original.
Mind you, that analogy is considered – the original Emanuelle, like the original Wasteland, was a classic, but very much of its time. That kind of classic doesn’t age well. We might never get a real chance to revisit Wasteland, or Ultima, or Doom, because they were products of the time.
That said, I want a spiritual successor to Interstate 76. Car Wars, but you’re a lone wolf hero, not a nihilist like in GTA.Report
@el-muneco
While it’s been an adjustment playing an Infinity Engine style game again, they have made some changes which modernise the experience a little. You can now speed up or slow down time by a factor of two, which makes it easier to command allies without pausing (if that’s what you want to do) or move quickly through pre-explored territory. Also, the each individual map is a lot smaller than in Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale, which sharply reduces the tedium of backtracking.Report
Wasteland 2 provided a nice break from doing a server rebuild which wasn’t going well. Shooting Red Skorpions was a much better option than shooting my server would have been!Report
I always find myself annoyed that apparently we have to keep creating new RPG engines over and over again. I also find myself not as annoyed about DLCs as some people are, probably for the same reason.
Specifically, I’d been entirely happy to just keep giving game companies $10 for ten hours of content in Fallout New Vegas. Or $40 for another 40 hours created using the same engine.
I’m the kind of guy who will spend four hours downloading and setting up various mods to this stuff, adding some new locations and quests and stuff to the games I enjoy…and I’d gladly pay money to avoid the hassle for professionally designed content that all fits together. (Or set up a system that lets players designed things, and then buy it from them and package it up professionally.)
I mean, that setup works for the Sims, and *they* end up having to make rather large engine changes on every ‘DLC’.Report
Dude, I’m totally with you. NeverWinter Nights had player mods that were *BETTER* than the original story (and the original story wasn’t bad).
I can see wanting to update textures from time to time (and I understand how something that sounds as trivial as “updating textures” can pretty much double the size of a game) and wanting to tweak rules and percentages here or there but, for the most part, I loved how New Vegas (to use your example) worked.
You’d think that they could crowdsource a really good “Fallout: Old Textures, New Story” and have a couple of really good writers out there put something together, a dozen inspired amateur voice actors put out readings of the lines, and some animators change the eyebrows on the available face models and you’ve got yourself a game that might remind you of Dragon Age 2 (for reasons both good and bad but… hey, for free? It’d be easy to downplay the bad.)Report
NWN was really the first game I played that had large amounts of mods.
The NWN mods were usually of the ‘entire new stories’ type, where you made a new character at a certain level, and played from start to end, instead of adding to the existing plotline, which is usually how Fallout mods work.
NWN2 also had mods, and I think that was where I first ran into the odd idea of mods adding back in content that was cut for time. I’ll never understand how something that a couple of people manage to decipher and hack back in a couple of weeks could have run out of time.
You’d think that they could crowdsource a really good “Fallout: Old Textures, New Story” and have a couple of really good writers out there put something together, a dozen inspired amateur voice actors put out readings of the lines, and some animators change the eyebrows on the available face models and you’ve got yourself a game that might remind you of Dragon Age 2 (for reasons both good and bad but… hey, for free? It’d be easy to downplay the bad.)
Who is ‘they’ there? There actually *are* such things, sometimes really professionally done.
And I find myself baffled that the game developers don’t find ones that are fairly well done, license them, polish them up very well and perhaps provide a few engine changes to keep from having weird hacks, and sell them as DLCs.
Or, alternately, the other way around. Why aren’t third parties allowed to create DLCs and *sell them*. (Possibly paying some sort of license to the devs.) It seems like a lot of games have ‘download mod’ areas…why are those not stores? I mean, not that I want to pay money, but if you actually want professional work, you have to pay, even if it’s just a tiny amount.
Oddly, NWN2 *almost had this plan*. Darkness over Daggerford and Mysteries of Westgate were both DLC (Or ‘expansion packs’.) that were supposed to be sold via some sort of online store that fell through.
But it seems like that fell apart due to the fact ‘selling mods online’ was an incredibly complicated thing in those days, whereas now everyone can do it.Report
And now it’s so easy to do that it’d be easy to steal.
So we’re back to people only doing it out of love.
Which means that some things will be really fun in the way that writing Mary Sue Fanfic is fun but it will also suck in the way that reading someone else’s Mary Sue Fanfic can suck.Report
And now it’s so easy to do that it’d be easy to steal.
Uh, not really. That’s how all games and DLCs are sold. I bought New Vegas online, via Steam. I bought the DLCs online, via Steam.
I’ve heard the argument, and I agree with it, that everything being online now has actually reduced piracy. Now everything checks serial numbers on startup, or authorizes via Steam.
Anyway, if they’re willing to sell games and DLCs that way, I don’t see why they couldn’t selI mods that way. The difference between a DLC and a mod is really just terminology and expected size.
In fact, while New Vegas doesn’t do in-game downloadable mods, the one in Civilization are done via Steam.
Or, alternately, there’s the way The Sims does it, where it is a store they themselves run.
Which means that some things will be really fun in the way that writing Mary Sue Fanfic is fun but it will also suck in the way that reading someone else’s Mary Sue Fanfic can suck.
I have to point out there is an *entire industry* of getting people to write ‘fanfic’ and selling it. It’s usually called ‘the expanded universe’ or ‘tie-in novels’.
On top of that, Amazon sells fanfic also!Report
Thief 2’s engine just got unlocked (last year) by some bloke in France. It’s worth a replaythrough (thief one is playable with the engine too), because they finally got the sound right.
Also, now it works on more than one core…
Besides, Thief’s fanmissions are works of art — they routinely get folks hired into the gaming industry.
(and, ten years of fanmissions is a LOT of ideas…)Report
Been doing somewhat of a reboot, playing old stuff.
Currently playing “The Operative” No One Lives Forever.
And Anarchy OnlineReport