Diecast – Twenty Sided

I’m spending most of the day asleep. And even when I’m awake I’m still grouchy, distracted, and befuddled. Things are rough, but hopefully they’re about to get better. With any luck, I’ll have better news next week.

Anyway, this is it. The mailbag is finally clear. If you still have unanswered questions now, it’s because you didn’t send them in.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
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Link (YouTube)

00:00 Uremia!
I do not recommend.

01:24 Mailbag: Prey

Greetings, Paulmus (Shaul?)

So, I assume you have already seen this video by Yahtzee on Prey, from a couple of days ago:

While you’ve already discussed this game and the possible reasons for its failing to find an audience, Yahtzee here introduces the possibility of it being too polished for its own good and as such not really having anything memorable to latch onto.

Weird West has now released (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097350/Weird_West/), made by a few of the developers of Prey and being marketed as a non-first person immersive sim, and while first reviews were less favorable due to strange design choices and bugs, it has been garnering more and more positive attention as the days go by, seemingly giving credence to this whole theory, going by what the Steam reviews say.

Do you think it’s possible for a game to really be “too well crafted for its own good”? Have you ran into such a thing before (well, besides Prey, I guess)?

08:02 Mailbag: Modding vs Unity

Dear Mr. Young and Mr. Spooner!

I hope these lines reach you and your families in good health! To cut to the chase: you mentioned that Warcraft 3 spawned several genres, like Mobas and Tower Defense. That made me reminisce about the late 90ies and early oughts, where mods like the ones already mentioned, but also Counterstrike and Team Fortress and several others hade huge impacts on gaming. Often, that was attributed to the tools made available with the base games enabling the creation of mods.

But if it were only the tools, we should have a similar era of experimental games that might blow up into industry defining hits, due to the availablity of tools like Unity or the Unreal engine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Now here’s my hypothesis on why that is, and I hope that might spark a little discussion:

I think it’s because mods already have had a congregated audience of buyers of the base games. If you played HL or WC3, you might seek out mods to either give you more of the same gameplay, or to check out what crazy different stuff people wrestled out of the mod tools to contrast with the original gameplay.
On the other hand, small, experimental games made in Unity or the Unreal engine kind of get thrown into a vacuum, almost impossible to be discovered or garner a growing audience.

The only time that felt somewhat similar were the early years of consumer level VR in 2016/17, where small teams would experiment what was possible, and there was a small target group of owners of VR hardware that were hungry for games and curious to try out anything.

So do you have any thoughts on that? And are you nostalgic for discovering mods?

regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

13:00 Mailbag: Character transposition

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are well.

If you could take any single character from any game and put them in another game, who would you put in which game?
You could put Seymour from FFX in Mass Effect 3 so he and Kai Leng can compete over who is the best villain.
You could put Duke Nukem in Silent Hill 2 so he could give Pyramid Head the mighty boot.
You could even put Mahbu in Nyan Nyan ga Nyan – Light Fantasy Gaiden, the possibilities are endless.

Looking forward to hear what you come up with!

Vale,

– Tim

22:13 Mailbag: Pro-Factorio

Hello Shamus and Paul,

What are your views on using a SAT solver to play Factorio? https://github.com/R-O-C-K-E-T/Factorio-SAT
Is this heresy, or is this a word from the gods beyond? Is this the advent of a dark age, or the new enlightenment? Is this an evil of the old world, or the virtue of a new future?

Take care,
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

27:02 Mailbag: Changing Moral Compass

Dear Diecats! (Yes, I’m gonna leave that amusing typo in!)

We all know the phenomenon of replaying player/moral choice heavy games and still always picking the same options we did on our first play-throughs. But me being on a bender of playing choice heavy games like “Yes your Grace” and “The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante” (which I can both recommend), I replayed Banner Saga. Now excuse my slight spoiler to a six year old game, but the end of the first game has you make a somewhat hidden decision which either had the main character Rook or his daughter Allette survive the final battle. When I played it first in 2016, I remember reloading an earlier save so Rook survived, since I identified stronger with him than with Allette, which was more of a side character in the story, and I didn’t want to “lose” him for the sequels.
Between then and now, I have become a father of two, and it became impossible for me to even entertain the thought of sacrificing Allette in my most recent play-through.
So, have you had shifts in your life that affected your moral compass in a way that made it perceptible via the moral choices in games?

Kind Regards
Norbert “ColeusRattus” Lickl

33:59 Mailbag: Star Trek Picard

Dear Diecast / Shamus,

It is surely low hanging fruit, and apologies if you have already mentioned this, but have you considered doing an analysis of the Star Trek Picard series? I have been indulging in watching reviews (by e.g. RLM) and it seems the writing issues and tonal shift from classic Star Trek are Mass Effect sequels levels of nonsense. I found myself wondering about what technically has been done to the type of story and its telling, vs TNG or other Trek, in terms of your ‘details first vs drama first’ and ‘character driven vs plot driven’ analyses. It occurred that it would be good to hear your story/writing-analysis on the series.

All the best
PPX14

40:20 Mailbag: More Rocketeer?

Dear Diecast,

I’m really enjoying the long-form critique from The Rocketeer on FFXII (despite having never played the game). Like Shamus’s retrospectives, it’s been a deeply interesting and insightful read that’s opened my eyes to/helped illuminate a number of useful concepts and mental models, clothed in highly amusing snark and wit.

So I was wondering if there were any plans or possibility that he’d do more write-ups for the blog afterward, Final Fantasy related or otherwise?

Hope Shamus is doing better and is getting what he needs to help recover.

Warm wishes,
Andrew

41:36 Mailbag: Moon Knight

Dear Diecast

Considering the season finale is this week and while I’m not sure when you guys record, what are your thoughts on Marvel’s Moon Knight show?

Love, bumpkin

46:47 Mailbag: The Blogosphere

Dear Diecast,

Does Shamus still read other blogs? If so, any suggestions? (Namely to do with gaming and storytelling, but other recommendations are also welcome.)

All the best,
Andrew

After recording the show, I remembered that I used to follow developer Jay Barnson. I’m not sure how I lost track of him, but it looks like his site is still going. So I’ve got some catching up to do.

49:24 Mailbag: SqEnix Yard Sale

Dear Diecast,

Hope you’re doing well! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Squeenix just sold its Western franchises to the company that owns THQ Nordic and Saber Interactive – https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/square-enix-sells-tomb-raider-embracer-microsoft-activision/

Most notably, the deal includes Tomb Raider, Thief, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain.

The last name in that list is what I’m personally most excited about. In fact, it’s the only gaming news of recent years that’s made me excited! But what do you think? Did Squeenix do the right thing – especially at that low price point? Are you optimistic about the future of these series?

Keen being Awesome,
Lino

54:35 Mailbag: Worldbuilding

Dear Diecast,

I hope you are doing well.

I was just wondering what you think makes for good worldbuilding? Do you think there any fundamental principles or good rules of thumb for stories in general in this regard, if worldbuilding is to be taken seriously?

Also, I came across a video that used the term “silent worldbuilding”. From that alone, any idea what that means to you?

Kind regards,
Andrew