Fun thing about the bethesis SWAT team is usually they're going to glitch out at some point so you can just open up the developers console when their pathfinding gets stuck and delete them
Re Danny's points aroind 1:04:00 Theres no feasible way video games graphics could be increasing at the rate they did in the early days. It's quite literally the law of diminishing returns in action. Happened with cameras, audio recording and playback etc. Also, the fact we have real time pathtracing in video games is pretty incredible. Something that was reserved for pre rendered scenes and movies until very recently. Yes these changes don't st first glance appear as overtly amazing as, say, going from 2d to 3d, but literally what would the equivelant of that be today? Vide games jumped from 0% realism to 80% very quickly, but we can't expect the same kind of improvements as we near the theoretical point of absolute realism, it's just not possible. It is easy to criticise the developers but really, graphics and technology in games continues to increase at an impressive rate I think. Fundamentally games like starfield (presuming it isn't a dud) literally couldn't work on last gen machines, mostly owing to memory restrictions etc. The scope of games design recently had increased a lot because of these technical progressions even if in screenshots they appear similar. They can load assets so quickly and have much more detailed animations. Yes, texture quality could be pretty much photo realistic in 2013 and The Order 1886 screenshots look like a new game but the reality is the game tech has improved a lot and continues to do so. I agree the state of AAA gaming is bad tbf, but I don't agree with the stuff about tech and graphics isn't fair
I wasn't trying to have a go btw lol, just wanted to make that point. And AAA is total filler crap now and that's shit, just boring and grey. Even if I do think the tech is progressing quite well, lol.
Does anybody else remember those in-depth abstracts that Computer Gaming World Magazine used to do..? They did a huge shift in format for a little while.. and instead of a review it would be this essay basically.. and it was in combination with a lot of really good articles that really broke the entertainment magazine as a promotional feature for industry products kind of mold.. granted they they paid for it kindly, as their name was changed to games for Windows magazine, the format went away and then they were taken out back to EAs shed or something once they had truly accepted how sorry they were for what they did.. but for a minute there.. like a good long minute, it really was the peak of the last bastion of the modern magazine. Sure it wasn't a return to the multi hundred page tome, but for the small size magazine reduction that happened in the early 2000s, this this was definitely as far as I'm concerned the peak.. just you know.. clear why no one else has tried it cuz they didn't just get put down they got shamed first and had to do some purgatory before they were finally allowed to release to Sweet nothing.. nobody talks about it but.. man that was a bizarre thing.
The real Texas chainsaw massacre story inspiration.. the guy wasn't really a serial killer.. he was just mentally completely broken, having a really problematic relationship with his mother and then when she died he kind of just didn't accept that. But the whole creepy part about it was that the the guy wasn't about to waste a good corpse really.. so when he killed that lady, naturally.. like perfectly good skin for tanning I guess.. I think the guy killed that one lady over an argument or something.. cuz I think they caught him because he had the receipt from the store still or something.. now I might be mixing more than one story together but I think he also had a habit of digging up corpses..? But he wasn't like Dahmer, Gacey, Bundy or anything like that.. If you ever saw the movie May, probably closer to that.. but for his mom.. which if you haven't seen it... great movie. Like for sure the guy was definitely not okay.. it's actually a really sad story all in all but it's just kind of one of those things where he just was raised at the very beginning into this hyper fantasy world with no real external input from The real world with his mother.. And then after the whole thing he was put in a mental facility I guess and from what I understand he was just kind of chill and broken and just kept himself, probably I assume he died at this point like there was a while ago.. I remember somebody talking about having interviewed him in the '80s.
i find the talk about how "niche games can't really go mainstream", when we live in a world of Undertales and BG3s. sure, most games can't break through, but just because it's niche doesn't mean it can't go mainstream. time and time again, the new big thing was NOT the shiniest, most expensive thing.
It has to something to do with the fact that they had to walk 5 miles in the snow, with thumbtacks in their shoes... While dodging German gunfire sporadically.. and they were thankful.. at least back when they were our age or something.. But I would like to make the argument that they had way better drugs than we do on a legal basis so it's not really a one-to-one..
I just wish that we would go back to trying to improve the Fidelity of the interactivity, mechanics and world simulation factors.. rather than using all of them extended processing powers to try to render the cavity in somebody's teeth.. like.. how many games let you pick things up and throw them? How many games have things that could even have been thrown if you could pick them up LOL? How many slashing games have bodies that are visibly identical to when you started the fight as to when you kill them finally... I mean quake 2 had body deformation LOL, and a massively improved visual suite.. like sure they walked it back with Doom 3, but they sure added a lot more where you could kind of.. well maybe not forgive but.. like at least theamount of things they were bringing to the table in addition worked towards enhancing the environmental realism and immersion.. When you had a game like fear where the environment just explodes in the shooting.. including the bodies LOL.. with the attention to detail being maximized in the primary form of interaction for that game. And let's not even get into the mechanical agency with leaning kicking sliding slide kicking jump kicking punching LOL.. and then you have a game like cysis that may have pushed visual boundaries sure.. but it was also a game where the opening cutscene tried to give you a preview of the things you could do in their game.. and somehow still managed to undersell just how much cool stuff you could do, especially when giving so many mechanical options and so many interactive options in the world.. Like I remember fighting out that I could manually parkour my way up a rock face with a combination of jumping, punching and running and it actually genuinely looked like you were actually parkouring your way up a rock face, not just punching it and going higher.. I have no idea if that was intentional, or if it just happened to be a lucky accident because they had so many physical interactions that were visualized.. but yes you can punch your way up a wall, and it looks like they professionally made it so that you punched your way up a wall if you could do that.. pretty sure you could beat somebody to death with a tree, absolutely no you could beat somebody to death with a teacup or a frog.. or the other guy's friend.. And while there would certainly a lot of contextual moments where it applied.. it took the approach that this was a manual action.. when you went and grabbed a guy.. you grabbed him, you could then throw him.. you could use them as a body shield, you could just break them right then and there with a a punch or a melee smack.. I actually can't remember if you could let them go, I think there was a chance that they could get out of it..? And what you could throw many things into a shack, throwing them into the shack was definitely one of the better options.. cuz then the shack would explode.. and you could take the rest of the shack and continue to beat upon them with the pieces of the shack.. It wasn't a kill move, although it was somewhat close to that.. but even back then a game like riddick escape from butcher Bay and dark Athena, especially the latter as they added a whole suite of new mechanics and and polish to the original campaign in addition to the new one.. but it was like a it was an actual event if you wanted to do a takedown.. yeah there were quick one hit executions for sure.. but then there were the stealth ones that required you to grab them and then spam a key to slowly snap them... If they caught you, or you came up from the front and they managed to get their rifle out or what not.. you would have to fight that in a similar way to flip their gun around on them.. you didn't have to though.. that just was one way to do it.. if you were cool, you'd get a couple of low shanks in.. while avoiding their melee smacks.. and then come in and put that hair pin right down their throat.. And yeah you could punch a guy until you can do a counter and work your way to a finishing move.. or you can get around them and engage in the grapple from the stealth aspects... Outside of very specific bosses, it doesn't matter if you're in stealth mode or not.. if you get behind them they're yours... Definitely a mouse and keyboard recommend on that one, as it has a soft lock system for the melee giving its origins on a controller.. but mouse and keyboard can break a soft lock and let you play the game.. wish that were the case for most things. I think they kind of almost made an ode to this as a concept with the Hitman reboots.. but it's like.. games have been able to move things around, and have more mechanical complexity than move look shoot button.. maybe other shoot button.. and now aim button of course.. which is fine but like.. somehow it seems like most of them managed to make that as immersion breaking as possible when suddenly you turn into an owl with binocular vision and are close enough to inspect the serial number when shooting. Half-Life 2 had a really good implementation of what could be possible with the newer rigid body physics systems that havoc had been pushing.. previously coming out of the driving game physics simulation.. and applying it to every game.. we saw it with Oblivion, and it's problematic as Oblivion was as far as a Bethesda story character world etc.. like all the things that they were in the elite class at with daggerfall and Morrowind.. and then suddenly they wrote dialogue so bad that Patrick Stewart couldn't even pull it off and yet at the same time.. you can pick up anything in that game move it around and it wasn't a big deal go figure.. cuz it it was a thing that you could do with the implementation of the havoc middleware.. They didn't really make it a huge part of the necessary game mechanics or anything like that to progress.. and didn't need to, although would have been cool if they did... But it made that feel so much better and so absolutely cool and and as far as any characters as long as they weren't speaking.. that kind of immersion was incredible and exactly the kind of awesome that you thought everything was going to be from now on.. and it made sense too because the price you paid for it was Bethesda could no longer write story characters or dialogue.. so it wasn't even too good to be true.. Now we've seen time and time again in the most modern engine releases.. and a lot of cases very specifically unreal engine releases.. where you're kind of lucky if you got physics at all.. and you kind of wonder what happened with how that was supposed to get processed by the engine or the middleware available because when you look at a game like the system shock remake, a game that if there was ever going to be a full Half-Life 2 style physics system, it would be that game as it was something they pioneered in the original game that it was remaking.. and yet LOL.. well it did have the bones of something like that.. most of the objects actually somehow managed to defy physics when you tried to interact with them.. I remember trying to get a explosive barrel that was from a pile that was there so the robot could throw them at you with a gravity gun of some sort.. except when you try to actually just even nudge them.. I think I took a full hour to get that thing over there.. we're not talking about a large distance here.. It's like you could get the object to manipulate if you jumped on it sort of and then it would somehow try to counteract your action and do the opposite so you can never really get it across.. and in the demo and alpha builds.. you would basically get launched 20 ft in the air if you would step on something wrong.. but you couldn't move it across the floor and anything other than maybe an inch every 10 minutes.. and then occasionally it would just launch itself.. This is a remake of a game where you could reach up over something, pick it up off the shelf and put it anywhere.. you can kind of do that, it seems like there's the bones of that with the menu system.. but clearly.. they didn't like this as an idea so you couldn't do things like move chairs or shelves or boxes etc basically anything bigger than a tray table.. and the only way to do that was to have the menu open and for some reason despite that you could sort of look around, you had to hold down a mouse button, and then you had to let it go and reset it to turn more.. just like.. how did you make this more miserable for something that would have been a home run if you had just made it less miserable even if it didn't really help the game much..? Like how do we exist in a world where the detail has been poured over down to the very pores, and find threading textures of even your basic enemy grunt but.. half the time when you shoot them.. there isn't a single scratch on them.. despite that they clearly cut themselves shaving that morning.. and clearly there was blood and particle effects and maybe even some sort of blood on the wall but well like with elder rain there's a giant spray of blood and it lands on the ground and apparently it missed the thing that you hit.. there's not a single mark on them.. it fades through them and hit the ground.. Like.. so we don't usually get environmental destruction anymore in any cooler competent way.. but one thing that seems to always be there is bullet holes in the wall.. whether it disappear or not.. but for some reason bullet holes in the thing that you shot.. no.. why would why would we need to do that.. we spent all that time modeling the cavities.. Like seriously, don't model cavities unless I have a mechanic that lets me take the tooth out.. and it's a visual indicator or something about how hard I'm going to have to hit it to shatter it..
That's hilarious vodka even in the fanciest varieties isn't that expensive, it's also not that fancy which is why it's not expensive LOL.. I once went on a journey to try to find vodka with flavor... I failed.
Great chat as always. Damn it's been a long time coming but I can't wait to dig into Starfield and listen to what people have to say... one more week.
FYI, there needs to be a timestamp at 00:00 for youtube to enable chapters
L A D D S… I N… S P A C E ! ! !
Yay! Danny is back!! Missed you in the last podcast 😢
I'd put Jet Set Radio in a category with the spider-man games. Doing missions by flowing through the city in a fun cool way.
As a Star Control II fan, really appreciated the ‘Juffo Wup’ reference, Jeremy. 😂 Timely given Todd Howard referenced it as an influence on Starfield.
They should do a Noclip crew video on Texas chainsaw massacre where all 3 of them are the killers.
Danny: “We CANNOT talk about Starfield.” Proceeds to mention it the most 😂
Fun thing about the bethesis SWAT team is usually they're going to glitch out at some point so you can just open up the developers console when their pathfinding gets stuck and delete them
Re Danny's points aroind 1:04:00
Theres no feasible way video games graphics could be increasing at the rate they did in the early days. It's quite literally the law of diminishing returns in action. Happened with cameras, audio recording and playback etc. Also, the fact we have real time pathtracing in video games is pretty incredible. Something that was reserved for pre rendered scenes and movies until very recently.
Yes these changes don't st first glance appear as overtly amazing as, say, going from 2d to 3d, but literally what would the equivelant of that be today? Vide games jumped from 0% realism to 80% very quickly, but we can't expect the same kind of improvements as we near the theoretical point of absolute realism, it's just not possible. It is easy to criticise the developers but really, graphics and technology in games continues to increase at an impressive rate I think. Fundamentally games like starfield (presuming it isn't a dud) literally couldn't work on last gen machines, mostly owing to memory restrictions etc. The scope of games design recently had increased a lot because of these technical progressions even if in screenshots they appear similar. They can load assets so quickly and have much more detailed animations. Yes, texture quality could be pretty much photo realistic in 2013 and The Order 1886 screenshots look like a new game but the reality is the game tech has improved a lot and continues to do so.
I agree the state of AAA gaming is bad tbf, but I don't agree with the stuff about tech and graphics isn't fair
I wasn't trying to have a go btw lol, just wanted to make that point. And AAA is total filler crap now and that's shit, just boring and grey. Even if I do think the tech is progressing quite well, lol.
Does anybody else remember those in-depth abstracts that Computer Gaming World Magazine used to do..? They did a huge shift in format for a little while.. and instead of a review it would be this essay basically.. and it was in combination with a lot of really good articles that really broke the entertainment magazine as a promotional feature for industry products kind of mold.. granted they they paid for it kindly, as their name was changed to games for Windows magazine, the format went away and then they were taken out back to EAs shed or something once they had truly accepted how sorry they were for what they did.. but for a minute there.. like a good long minute, it really was the peak of the last bastion of the modern magazine.
Sure it wasn't a return to the multi hundred page tome, but for the small size magazine reduction that happened in the early 2000s, this this was definitely as far as I'm concerned the peak.. just you know.. clear why no one else has tried it cuz they didn't just get put down they got shamed first and had to do some purgatory before they were finally allowed to release to Sweet nothing.. nobody talks about it but.. man that was a bizarre thing.
I love how you tried to talk around starfield
The real Texas chainsaw massacre story inspiration.. the guy wasn't really a serial killer.. he was just mentally completely broken, having a really problematic relationship with his mother and then when she died he kind of just didn't accept that. But the whole creepy part about it was that the the guy wasn't about to waste a good corpse really.. so when he killed that lady, naturally.. like perfectly good skin for tanning I guess.. I think the guy killed that one lady over an argument or something.. cuz I think they caught him because he had the receipt from the store still or something.. now I might be mixing more than one story together but I think he also had a habit of digging up corpses..? But he wasn't like Dahmer, Gacey, Bundy or anything like that.. If you ever saw the movie May, probably closer to that.. but for his mom.. which if you haven't seen it... great movie.
Like for sure the guy was definitely not okay.. it's actually a really sad story all in all but it's just kind of one of those things where he just was raised at the very beginning into this hyper fantasy world with no real external input from The real world with his mother.. And then after the whole thing he was put in a mental facility I guess and from what I understand he was just kind of chill and broken and just kept himself, probably I assume he died at this point like there was a while ago.. I remember somebody talking about having interviewed him in the '80s.
Hope you had a great time in Mexico Danny. Glad to see you back.
i find the talk about how "niche games can't really go mainstream", when we live in a world of Undertales and BG3s. sure, most games can't break through, but just because it's niche doesn't mean it can't go mainstream. time and time again, the new big thing was NOT the shiniest, most expensive thing.
i still dont get why we have to keep feeding grandpa…
It has to something to do with the fact that they had to walk 5 miles in the snow, with thumbtacks in their shoes... While dodging German gunfire sporadically.. and they were thankful.. at least back when they were our age or something..
But I would like to make the argument that they had way better drugs than we do on a legal basis so it's not really a one-to-one..
I just wish that we would go back to trying to improve the Fidelity of the interactivity, mechanics and world simulation factors.. rather than using all of them extended processing powers to try to render the cavity in somebody's teeth.. like.. how many games let you pick things up and throw them? How many games have things that could even have been thrown if you could pick them up LOL? How many slashing games have bodies that are visibly identical to when you started the fight as to when you kill them finally... I mean quake 2 had body deformation LOL, and a massively improved visual suite.. like sure they walked it back with Doom 3, but they sure added a lot more where you could kind of.. well maybe not forgive but.. like at least theamount of things they were bringing to the table in addition worked towards enhancing the environmental realism and immersion..
When you had a game like fear where the environment just explodes in the shooting.. including the bodies LOL.. with the attention to detail being maximized in the primary form of interaction for that game. And let's not even get into the mechanical agency with leaning kicking sliding slide kicking jump kicking punching LOL.. and then you have a game like cysis that may have pushed visual boundaries sure.. but it was also a game where the opening cutscene tried to give you a preview of the things you could do in their game.. and somehow still managed to undersell just how much cool stuff you could do, especially when giving so many mechanical options and so many interactive options in the world..
Like I remember fighting out that I could manually parkour my way up a rock face with a combination of jumping, punching and running and it actually genuinely looked like you were actually parkouring your way up a rock face, not just punching it and going higher.. I have no idea if that was intentional, or if it just happened to be a lucky accident because they had so many physical interactions that were visualized.. but yes you can punch your way up a wall, and it looks like they professionally made it so that you punched your way up a wall if you could do that.. pretty sure you could beat somebody to death with a tree, absolutely no you could beat somebody to death with a teacup or a frog.. or the other guy's friend..
And while there would certainly a lot of contextual moments where it applied.. it took the approach that this was a manual action.. when you went and grabbed a guy.. you grabbed him, you could then throw him.. you could use them as a body shield, you could just break them right then and there with a a punch or a melee smack.. I actually can't remember if you could let them go, I think there was a chance that they could get out of it..?
And what you could throw many things into a shack, throwing them into the shack was definitely one of the better options.. cuz then the shack would explode.. and you could take the rest of the shack and continue to beat upon them with the pieces of the shack..
It wasn't a kill move, although it was somewhat close to that.. but even back then a game like riddick escape from butcher Bay and dark Athena, especially the latter as they added a whole suite of new mechanics and and polish to the original campaign in addition to the new one.. but it was like a it was an actual event if you wanted to do a takedown.. yeah there were quick one hit executions for sure.. but then there were the stealth ones that required you to grab them and then spam a key to slowly snap them... If they caught you, or you came up from the front and they managed to get their rifle out or what not.. you would have to fight that in a similar way to flip their gun around on them.. you didn't have to though.. that just was one way to do it.. if you were cool, you'd get a couple of low shanks in.. while avoiding their melee smacks.. and then come in and put that hair pin right down their throat..
And yeah you could punch a guy until you can do a counter and work your way to a finishing move.. or you can get around them and engage in the grapple from the stealth aspects... Outside of very specific bosses, it doesn't matter if you're in stealth mode or not.. if you get behind them they're yours... Definitely a mouse and keyboard recommend on that one, as it has a soft lock system for the melee giving its origins on a controller.. but mouse and keyboard can break a soft lock and let you play the game.. wish that were the case for most things.
I think they kind of almost made an ode to this as a concept with the Hitman reboots.. but it's like.. games have been able to move things around, and have more mechanical complexity than move look shoot button.. maybe other shoot button.. and now aim button of course.. which is fine but like.. somehow it seems like most of them managed to make that as immersion breaking as possible when suddenly you turn into an owl with binocular vision and are close enough to inspect the serial number when shooting.
Half-Life 2 had a really good implementation of what could be possible with the newer rigid body physics systems that havoc had been pushing.. previously coming out of the driving game physics simulation.. and applying it to every game.. we saw it with Oblivion, and it's problematic as Oblivion was as far as a Bethesda story character world etc.. like all the things that they were in the elite class at with daggerfall and Morrowind.. and then suddenly they wrote dialogue so bad that Patrick Stewart couldn't even pull it off and yet at the same time.. you can pick up anything in that game move it around and it wasn't a big deal go figure.. cuz it it was a thing that you could do with the implementation of the havoc middleware..
They didn't really make it a huge part of the necessary game mechanics or anything like that to progress.. and didn't need to, although would have been cool if they did... But it made that feel so much better and so absolutely cool and and as far as any characters as long as they weren't speaking.. that kind of immersion was incredible and exactly the kind of awesome that you thought everything was going to be from now on.. and it made sense too because the price you paid for it was Bethesda could no longer write story characters or dialogue.. so it wasn't even too good to be true..
Now we've seen time and time again in the most modern engine releases.. and a lot of cases very specifically unreal engine releases.. where you're kind of lucky if you got physics at all.. and you kind of wonder what happened with how that was supposed to get processed by the engine or the middleware available because when you look at a game like the system shock remake, a game that if there was ever going to be a full Half-Life 2 style physics system, it would be that game as it was something they pioneered in the original game that it was remaking.. and yet LOL.. well it did have the bones of something like that.. most of the objects actually somehow managed to defy physics when you tried to interact with them..
I remember trying to get a explosive barrel that was from a pile that was there so the robot could throw them at you with a gravity gun of some sort.. except when you try to actually just even nudge them.. I think I took a full hour to get that thing over there.. we're not talking about a large distance here..
It's like you could get the object to manipulate if you jumped on it sort of and then it would somehow try to counteract your action and do the opposite so you can never really get it across.. and in the demo and alpha builds.. you would basically get launched 20 ft in the air if you would step on something wrong.. but you couldn't move it across the floor and anything other than maybe an inch every 10 minutes.. and then occasionally it would just launch itself..
This is a remake of a game where you could reach up over something, pick it up off the shelf and put it anywhere.. you can kind of do that, it seems like there's the bones of that with the menu system.. but clearly.. they didn't like this as an idea so you couldn't do things like move chairs or shelves or boxes etc basically anything bigger than a tray table.. and the only way to do that was to have the menu open and for some reason despite that you could sort of look around, you had to hold down a mouse button, and then you had to let it go and reset it to turn more.. just like.. how did you make this more miserable for something that would have been a home run if you had just made it less miserable even if it didn't really help the game much..?
Like how do we exist in a world where the detail has been poured over down to the very pores, and find threading textures of even your basic enemy grunt but.. half the time when you shoot them.. there isn't a single scratch on them.. despite that they clearly cut themselves shaving that morning.. and clearly there was blood and particle effects and maybe even some sort of blood on the wall but well like with elder rain there's a giant spray of blood and it lands on the ground and apparently it missed the thing that you hit.. there's not a single mark on them.. it fades through them and hit the ground..
Like.. so we don't usually get environmental destruction anymore in any cooler competent way.. but one thing that seems to always be there is bullet holes in the wall.. whether it disappear or not.. but for some reason bullet holes in the thing that you shot.. no.. why would why would we need to do that.. we spent all that time modeling the cavities..
Like seriously, don't model cavities unless I have a mechanic that lets me take the tooth out.. and it's a visual indicator or something about how hard I'm going to have to hit it to shatter it..
Dwarf fortress?
I don't think games are on a decline, but the AAA industry? Quite possibly.
A+ rant on why AAA gaming is boring today.
That's hilarious vodka even in the fanciest varieties isn't that expensive, it's also not that fancy which is why it's not expensive LOL.. I once went on a journey to try to find vodka with flavor... I failed.
❤
Yawn.
Can you catch up in the Green Room beforehand?
No