Diecast – Twenty Sided

My voice was super dry and scratchy when I recorded this. I spent most of the show hacking and clearing my throat. I tried my best to hide it, but you can probably tell something’s off.

Also, our first mailbag question is really good this week and I’m curious to hear other people’s take on it.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
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Show notes:

00:00 Eh! Steve!

If you somehow want to hear me talk even more, then do check out my chat with Chris, where we discussed about the poison of Twitter, the upcoming console generation, and the amazing value of Microsoft’s Game Pass. It was a really good talk.

03:26 No Man’s Sky

I think my time with the game is winding down. I might dash out one more post. We’ll see.

07:28 Embedded Programming

It turns out this doesn’t have anything to do with programming while in bed.

17:47 Anthem 2.0

It really does look like they might turn it around. Their objectives look reasonable and their diagnosis of the problems with Anthem 1.0 look correct. Now we’ll have to see if EA lets them follow through, and if the community is willing to give the game another chance.

31:40 Mailbag: Dark Souls: Punch in the Face Edition

Dear Diecast,

A lot of discussion has been had on the blog about disincentives for defeat in video games. The typical method is the loss of time. The boss kills you in Dark Souls, so you have to spend ten minutes fighting your way back to it. Or, less directly — you fall into the lava and lose all your gear in Minecraft, so you have to redo all the work you did to acquire it.

This is suboptimal in various ways, depending on the execution, but games do it because there are few other options. However, if in the future technology is developed that allows for a much more direct interface between computer and brain, another form of disincentive presents itself: physical pain.

The boss kills you in Dark Souls, and the computer stimulates your pain sensors so it feels like you’ve been punched in the face. But then it stops, and you reload a save from right at the beginning of the encounter. Very little time has been wasted, but you still have a pretty good reason not to let the boss kill you again.

Obviously, keeping this technology safe and out of the hands of bad actors would be a…challenge. But assuming that could be managed, what do you think of the implications of this for game design? Would you be more or less likely to play Dark Souls: Punch in the Face Edition?

Regards,

Kestrellius

43:59 Mailbag: Covert Action Rule

Dear Diecast,

With the series on Civilization wrapping up, I wondered if you’d ever come across what Sid Meier calls his ‘Covert Action rule’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier’s_Covert_Action#Development

It might explain why Civilization doesn’t have a dedicated tactical
combat mode, like in Total War or Age of Wonders. Sid asserts that getting involved for a stretch in a tactical minigame leaves the player disoriented when they get back to the ‘overworld’ and have to pick what they were previously doing up again.

Given that many successful and popular games have been happy to mix complex subgames together, I wondered what your thoughts were as to whether this rule resonates with your preferences, and whether you think it has general applicability or should be considered more a question of taste.

Yours,
Asdasd

52:45 Mailbag: Next Gen Hardware

Hi Shamus and Paul,

Glad you’re both moving through the recent bumps in the road! I was wondering what your thoughts on PC hardware are going through into the next generation of consoles. Shamus’ PC was basically god-tier level (IIRC) when he got it but the upcoming hardware (both on PC and in the Xbox Series X) looks like it’s going to blow even that out of the water. Do you think there will be a huge divide between those who have ray-tracing “on” and those who have it “off”? Does supporting those different rendering techniques and vastly different hardware performance levels effectively double the work for developers?

It seems like a nightmare just as we were getting out of the limitations of the current generation of hardware: I was expecting big, open, highly detailed worlds but it seems like putting in ray-tracing (while a really cool and probably end-point rendering technology) we’re going to be limited in the types of spaces that can be made when those effects are implemented because it’ll just be too taxing…

All the best,
Duuuuuuuuuoae