Saturday Morning Gaming: On Sonder

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

10 Responses

  1. Greg In Ak says:

    Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is great. The definitions are great as are the youtube vids. Very clever way to talk about feelings and life and experience.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Greg In Ak says:

      Yeah. When I happened to encounter that word the other day (in another context entirely), I thought “HOLY COW! THIS IS WHAT THEY’RE GOING FOR IN THE GAME!!!”

      Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know that they had a video! Thank you!

      Report

  2. Andy says:

    I haven’t played any of the Last of Us series, although it does look good.

    I’m kind of burned out on the zombie apocalypse genre and didn’t even finish Dying Light 2.

    But I like games with moral choices and diverging paths.

    I am conflicted with how obvious those choices should be. I think back to Witcher 3 where to get one of the good endings requires picking some very specific dialog choices that are not obvious. My daughter played the game trying to be a good Gerald and supporting Ciri and she ended up with the worst ending which crushed her a bit and pissed her off when she looked to see what was necessary for a good ending.

    The Paragon system was disappointing IMO because incentivized you to play either max Paragon or max Renegade when something in between would have had more interesting choices and trade offs. I think playing “good guys” who do bad things is more interesting than min-maxing good or bad.

    Cyberpunk is another game that will let you burn bridges, but all that does is cut off content and end game options, it doesn’t give you different paths to explore – although there are some smaller quest lines that do that. So there is no incentive to, for example, piss off and betray Panam. A branching or parallel quest line where you ally with Saul instead would have been interesting.

    It’s probably just really had from a development standpoint to put in all that extra stuff that would be required to give real choice. I’m somewhat hopeful for Starfield given how much more voiced dialog lines there are compared to previous titles – hopefully that is a proxy for more choice-based paths and content.

    As for what I’ve been playing, I’ve always been a 4x fan and finally picked up Stellaris on sale. It’s really good, but an incredible time sink in terms of game length and learning complex systems. I already need a break from it.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Andy says:

      I think that when it comes to choices in games, I haven’t seen better than what Obsidian has pulled off.

      A million years ago, there was a game called “Alpha Protocol” where you played a spy. Pick who you trust, pick who you betray. Maybe it’ll work out!

      More recently, Pentiment has you engage in a bit of murder mystery. Pick where you investigate but pick carefully… picking where you spend your time means that you won’t get to spend it someplace else. You’ll only get to learn a couple of things. Which things do you want to learn?

      Tyranny is another game that, seriously, got slept on (but you were playing a bad guy… a legit bad guy and that could get depressing).

      Other than that, yeah. “Choice” games give you the choice between playing light side or dark side but the good stuff comes from going All Out on one of them. Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, Red Dead Redemption… There’s no real benefit to being lukewarm.Report

      • Reformed Republican in reply to Jaybird says:

        I hadn’t played Mass Effect. Are the Renegade choices actually appealing, or do you just choose then because that’s the path you decide on? I have played a few games that offer each choice, but you often end up missing out on a lot of rewards. That always struck me as backwards, because the temptation for evil often comes because it’s easy, and doing the right thing is hard. If the Paragon path is more rewarding, that could really explain why more people would choose it.Report

        • I would say that “they’re appealing, but”.

          It’s not that they’re evil. They aren’t. But they are definitely taking shortcuts and put a huge amount of emphasis on the primary goal to anything else.

          Like, let’s say that the mission is to get a particular key for a particular door. (Note: This isn’t a particular mission from the game, just an example I’m making up.)

          The key is being held by a guy who has hostages.

          The paragon mission would have you find out that the guy who has hostages has a legitimate grievance against the local government and is trying to change things because of how desperate he is.

          The paragon solution would have you address his grievances, get the key, then have a choice between throwing him in prison or establishing him as a local leader or something.

          The renegade solution would have you kill the hostage taker (or, at best, throw him in prison), deal with his grievances by either shooting the mayor (or whatever) or pointing out that, hey, you signed a contract. Should have read it closer.

          And at the end, you get the key and open the door. WHICH WAS YOUR GOAL.

          You’re not *EVIL*.

          You’re just single-minded.Report

          • Andy in reply to Jaybird says:

            My latest Stellaris playthrough, I played as a Hive-mind race that considered all other races to be food. So I had no diplomacy options at all because, after all, one doesn’t negotiate with prey. The galaxy formed alliances to try to oppose me, but they all ended up on my dinner table.

            I’m actually very impressed with the level of choice and consequence in Stellaris based on the starting conditions you set, but it would be very hard to replicate in an RPG.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Andy says:

              If you have loosey-goosey rules, there are emergent properties that developers couldn’t have imagined.

              And then the developers can brag about how they meant to do that.Report

              • Andy in reply to Jaybird says:

                That is actually an intentional playstyle – You can pick ‘devouring swarm” as a race trait that prevents you from engaging in diplomacy, and when you invade and take over a planet, the existing inhabitants are “purged.”

                At the opposite end are fanatical pacifist egalitarians who can only engage in defensive wars and accept all races in their empire.

                It’s fun and does provide for diverse gameplay and a bit roll-play.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    I watched Ep 1 of the The Last of Us television show.

    It did a great job of recreating the opening moments of the video game. It’s a good show that reminds you of the quality of the writing of the game.

    Only one episode is out and it is pretty intense and violent and there are a handful of cosmetic changes from the video game (they’ve abandoned spores and have adopted something more like a rhizome) and so I don’t know if I can recommend it to anyone that I know wouldn’t enjoy being in the room at the same time as someone else was playing the video game but if you liked the game, you’ll like the show.

    The closing song for the episode was pretty dang good.Report