Giant Bombcast 474: “Fun!"

yay.

yay

Da BOMB!

GREG IS BEST

Greg!

This was a fun bombcast for sure!

Hello from Austin.

Gregg rulz ok

It's always nice to see Greg again!

Forever.

Where's that Mass Effect video at @brad!?

Also always so, so great to have Greg on the podcast.

I'll never get tired of MEA bashing. Sorry, but it's just too funny.

Kasavin is amazing

As a person who values animation priority over response, I love the movement animation in ME Andromeda, even outside of combat but I can understand it's not for everyone, but i love the nuance to characters moving around.

I watched a let's play of the first kotor for the first time last year. I can't tell you how it feels to play, but boy was that one of the slowest, most boring games to watch. Made Mass Effect 1 look downright exciting.

Granted, kotor is probably the worst type of game to watch for a let's play. Aliens talk in their own language, so you have to read those tiny subtitles at the same time as the players are talking. And the combat system is this odd diecrolly real time with pause kind of thing that's hard to get a grip on but definitely doesn't look very fun.

Bioware's journey from those dnd systems to actions hasn't been all that great, for my money. I have no interest in like the dnd combat system in a videogame format, but Inquisition's system doesn't feel great either compared to any action rpg developer that came at the genre from an action perspective(Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, even Amalur).

@redhotchilimist: Still plays real good though. Played it for the first time a year and a half ago and it's awesome.

KOTOR 2 is better, if you de-jank it with the Resto Mod.

Great podcast this week. But Rorie, man, I really wish he'd be a more considered and concise speaker. Often he's hard to listen to and makes ill-considered points that slow the conversation way down. He could benefit a lot from doing a little more thinking before he talks, he's at his best (and funniest) when he speaks concisely and carefully.

I do think about this from time to time - sometimes a thought pops up in my head and I wind up blurting something out that winds up being more tangential than I'd like them to be in retrospect. If you have any specific moments in this podcast where you think I was doing that, I'd like to know about them! I'm on the podcast very rarely so I'm not nearly as practiced at keeping things on point as the rest of these guys are.

If you hear any audio pops or skips in this week's podcast, please let me know in this thread over here.

Fantastic episode, always great to see Greg again. Btw, whenever the new Elder Scrolls game is released I really hope Greg is available to play it for some hours for the site on launch day! :)

Hey Rorie,

I only half expected you to read my comment, in retrospect I probably should’ve been a little more specific to begin with. My bad! When you were talking about Zelda, you were a tad scattershot:

“Overall it’s really one of the best games I’ve played in a year or two. I should say I’ve never been a huge Zelda person. I will return that Switch, feel accomplished because I beat Ganon, I don’t feel like I need to go back and 100% it like some people do. I love that the world they built is massive. Verticality wise it is one of the best open worlds I’ve ever seen like you can go from top to bottom, and that’s really cool. And just running around and finding stuff was really fun, but I think that after 50 hours…I don’t think anyone’s going to complain about 50 hours I know I’m certainly not.”

It’s kind of unstructured and hard to follow. I found it particularly difficult to pick up how you felt about the game because, until the moment I quoted above, you praised it in parentheticals and didn’t begin your chat with a clear qualification regarding the game’s general quality. I had to dig for it; when you did spell it out it was followed by a bunch of other mixed feelings regarding the quality of the content, the open world and length. I think a lot of this stuff could be presented more effectively, and in fewer words, if you just bookend a conversation with your primary feelings before getting caught up in details.

I know it is tough to think on the fly. I believe part of that is that you talk pretty fast. If you give yourself more time to take a breath (no pun intended) you might find it easier! On top of that, I think if you consciously try and stay focussed on one point at any given time, you’ll improve really quickly. The other thing –which I think is related to your talking speed—is that you sometimes bring up a point without considering it and immediately start providing counterpoints to what you’ve just said. I can’t think of a specific moment in this podcast, though it can be something of a conversation killer. The problem being is that you’re not soliciting a response from any of the other guys, you’re kinda just thinking out loud.

I hope these are some helpful points, and that I didn’t come off as too harsh. I figured some constructive feedback was better than just avoiding your content or campaigning to get you fired. :P I come from academia, so I might be a bit of a stickler for this kind of thing – I’m sure it bothers me more than most other people. Thanks for listening!

P.S. Your delivery on that "just make me feel!" line was pretty outstanding.

It's great to see the old GameSpot guys back together again!

Rorie is awesome. That is all.

Love to hear from Greg as always! Also, am I the only one who hasn't seen that many weird animations in ME:A? Maybe I'm just oblivious. Particularly the crazy pre-release stuff that was making the rounds. I'm really liking it which I'm a little surprised by considering the general disappointment others seem to have. DA:I in space for the most (fine by me), but I understand the criticism. Guess I'm in the minority on this one.

So, full disclosure, I am going to listen to this whole thing either way. That being said, can someone prepare me for how much dunking they do on MEA? Because I am really enjoying the game, and the last podcast legit put me in kind of a bad mood listening to them just shit all over it. I know that it shouldn't effect me at all, but for whatever reason, it is, so I just want to be mentally prepared.

@purpleoddity: That's good feedback, thanks! I think, in my head, I was trying to sound like I was enthusiastic about the game (which I am) while also trying to make the point that there was stuff that I didn't super care for (which I did), while also being cognizant of how people take Zelda super seriously, and mentally I got a little flustered. Being on the Bombcast is a bit of a different beast than being on a UPF, for some reason. I appreciate the response!

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Destiny 2: A Realm Reborn

ME:A on the PS4 sounds like a completely different experience than on PC.

I'm not sure anyone here has been powering through on PC; have you been enjoying it?

@rorie: I am. I think more highly of the writing than Brad apparently does, but that's certainly subjective. On the technical side though, I've had almost no issues. In 40+ hours I've encountered two very specific bugs and that's it; no T-poses, no broken quests, no animation glitches, nothing. And while the human (and asari) faces have their issues, the rest of the game looks fantastic on Ultra; especially the planet environments.

There's a lot of dunking in the beginning when Brad and Jeff talk about what they've played and compare MEA to ME3, and a little bit more dunking later on when they talk about behind-the-scenes stories of development. I'd skip ahead five-ten minutes if you don't wanna hear that right now.

@redhotchilimist: Thanks, duder!

I found it a bit weird that talked about "Bioware" so much in relation to MEA, because it was Bioware Montreal, previously a support studio, that made the game- one of those Bioware branded studios. OG Bioware is working on it's own thing.

I'm inclined to agree with the Mass Effect discussion. Currently toying with the notion that it's a straight-up bad game.

Soldiering on to see wtf is up.

How on earth did @brad forget about 2013's At Least Top 10 Best Game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which was totally made by Starbreeze Studios AB?

I am on the complete opposite end of that. I would say that it is at worst a sometimes unpolished game. I have been hooked since starting it, despite these moments of lack-of-polish attempting to sway me.

The Supreme Commander Forged Alliance shoutout from Matt was unexpected. That game was so far ahead of it's time. If it came out in today's climate it would be at the top of the steam charts.

I feel like I'm playing a completely different Mass Effect Andromeda than these guys

I've been playing ME:A on PC and after about 20 hours the only glitch I've seen was an npc floating a few inches off the ground and one enemy that spawned inside a wall, I've seen worse in Witcher 3 and of course much worse in bethesda games. The hate really seems overblown.

Ugh, how could I not remember that was Starbreeze?! Thank you for the reminder. I loved Brothers... incredible game that stuck with me for sure, though apparently the part where Starbreeze made it somehow did not.

Really enjoyed being on the show this week -- thank you folks for watching / listening.

Geez, you don't like Mass Effect Andromeda. We GET it. It's probably my least favorite ME, but I love all of them, so that's not saying much. Played it on PC, and had some issues, but listening to them talk about it, I keep having to check they're talking about the same game. The discussion that developed around it is completely baffling to me.

@draugen: In a vacuum, a game like ME:A would come out, some people would like it and some wouldn't, and it wouldn't make a big splash either way.

But the reason Andromeda has caused so much more controversy is the result of dozens of different things. The biggest being that the Mass Effect games were landmark, industry shaking games. To see a new game released in this state raises a lot of eyebrows. It stands out ESPECIALLY in a year that has seen some real masterpieces released in just the first few months.

It's all overblown, yeah, but it's not hard to see why it gets talked about and trashed more than most.

This was one of my favorite Bombcasts in a while. Greg Kasavin is one of my favorite people in the industry. Such an insightful guy.

I don't know why but when I see Greg Kasavin my first instinctual thought is that he looks like a pirate. Harr.

@gregk: Always love it when you're on GB content.

I have a question. If/when the new Elder Scrolls comes out, would you do another first run live stream like you did with Skyrim?

@gregk: always a pleasure having you! good impromptu interview that so wasn't putting you on the spot as well! ;)

Same here, at 50 hours in and have all the loyalty quests done and absolutely loving it. MP is great too, feels like the ps4 version they're playing must be far more broken on the pro than it is on pc or xbone because I've only had one time where a cutscene messed up being the only real bug I've encountered. Also I've loved the story and characters overall, the story really does go places and connects beautifully to the original trilogy.

Similar experience on Xbox one, almost no bugs here. I had one cutscene not load properly the first time. Did a quick reload and it was fine, other than that I've had very few issues.