Diecast #366: Albion Quarantine Matrix
It looks like we’re going to be taking a couple of weeks off from the Diecast. This year our recording days fall directly on Christmas and New Year. So the podcast next week will be the last of 2021.
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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast366
Link (YouTube)
Show notes:
00:00 Quarantine!
Like I said on the show, my wife is stuck in quarantine 300 miles away. Although she ought to be home in time for Christmas.
Also, she’s visiting our kids in Indiana, not Illinois. This blunder wouldn’t be so bad, except this is like the 10th time I’ve made it. I knew all my states back in 1981, but 40 years later I find that Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois all blur together in my mind as a single mass labeled “middle-ish states that start with I.”
06:39 Albion Online and the mystery of the FPS Limit
I’ve thought about it some more, and I’m still baffled.
17:10 Matrix Awakens
Link (YouTube)
Yes Games Industry, that is all very impressive. Well done, etc etc. But please don’t assume that the resulting adulation indicates we’re hungry for graphically intense rail shooters built around shooting car tires.
21:17 Xbox Game Pass … on Linux?
Once again the megacorps seems to be ravenous when it comes to gathering user data, and incompetent when it comes to using the data.
24:24 Guardians of the Galaxy – QTEs and Linear design
After the show I did find an option to turn off the obnoxious QTEs. It was filed under “accessibility” and not under “difficulty” as I originally expected.
This game is… a lot. I can tell I’m in the home stretch now. I think the game will weigh in at around 20 hours when all is said and done. That’s not particularly long by modern standards, but most 20 hour games are content to leave you alone with the gameplay for a few hours at a time between story beats. But in GotG, the story beats are non-stop. This is a very talkative game.
I’m not saying the dialog is bad. In fact, if we rate it against its AAA contemporaries it’s farking genius. It’s just that I find it sort of exhausting to go on an adventure with these four manic motor-mouth murderers.
36:22 Mailbag: Hub Worlds
Dear Diecast,
Once again, as inspired by Design Doc’s coverage of the topic, I ask you, what do you think makes a great hub world in video games? And what makes a bad one?
All the best,
Andrew
40:40 Mailbag: The Metaverse
Dear Diecast,
I remember reading on older blog post of yours where you wrote about your experiences in the dot-com era, where companies were trying to create things like virtual reality shopping malls and such, and how that was kind of a dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons.
I’m curious now what you think of Facebook’s Meta stuff and whether or not you feel like history is just kind of repeating itself? I actually work as a 3D developer for a company that’s trying to take advantage of the “virtual reality brick and mortar store,” type idea and that old blog post just plays on endless loop in my head whenever I work on it lol
– Zach
For those of you curious about my history with this topic, check out Crash Dot Com Part 1: A World Gone Mad.