Giant Bombcast 474: “Fun!"

Sorry Jeff, but that God of war orchestra was incredible. I saw it as an celebration of game music as a piece of art, thought it was amazing.

Still, great podcast.

Greg is such a great addition to this podcast. I wish he would join Giant Bomb at some point. The conversation gets so fascinating.

Nice Greys shirt, @rorie!

That's my brother's band.

It is always great to have Greg on GB content.

what is like to be on top of Leesa?

Audio is low in the video

Far Cry 2 was an excellent game, interesting to hear the Zelda comparisons with that.

It would be nice to see more quality single-player-focused FPS games this generation - meaning when you get to the startup menu it doesn't say "Campaign", it says "Start New Game". Another BioShock, another Far Cry 2. Please point out anything I'm missing, because I feel like these particular types of shooter designs are falling by the wayside.

It's always good to see Greg Kasavin around. He's a very smart dude, and for as much as I like Bastion, I do still sometimes miss him in the world of video games writing.

Greg's reviews taught me much about video games.

I wish he can become a regular.

@sammo21: but what is so great about the Gears combat? I mean I enjoyed those games, but at this point it's an extremely basic cover shooter that feels kinda sluggish. I wouldn't even say the guns feel especially great either since enemies soak up so much ammo before going down. I haven't played Andromeda, but having any sort of abilities in addition to just pumping space bullets into space locust already seems like a huge step up. Gears was revolutionary in 2009 but in 2017 it's just "average" with a forced "weight" to it that is the antithesis of modern game combat design which is built around empowering the player with freedom of movement instead of restricting them to a very narrow style of gameplay.

@humanity: I'm slightly confused as Mass Effect Andromeda basically has Gears combat; its just a looser, sloppier version of it. Sure, you get (3) powers at a time but you also lost the ability to direct teammates and control their powers, have decent melee, melee over cover, etc. I found the addition of boost jump and dodge aren't really that great in combat and are more for straight traversal than "combat options".

Being able to zip around like the avatar of magical ADD doesn't make the combat. The Halo games of old had far more satisfying combat than most games even now and they relied on the combat puzzle of figuring out what to do with the weapons, terrain, and enemies around you. Maybe I'm in the minority but I found the combat of Mass Effect 2 and 3 far more satisfying than what the low rent, fake Bioware made.

@sammo21: I haven't played Andromeda so I can't comment on that, but my point was more that Gears combat is no longer the high watermark other games should aspire to. If anything recent releases have been progressively raising the bar and I feel like Gears 4 somewhat disappointingly failed to meet it. There is an argument to be made that you need to stay true to your roots, but that shouldn't happen at the cost of evolving your own game. If I wanted to play more Gears in 2017 I'd just load up the old games and I'd least get characters I mildly gave a damn about instead of "diversity mix #14".

Then again if you are a person that considers Halo to be to this day one of the best feeling shooters or mention its complex "combat puzzle" of having very basic enemy archetypes attacking you at once as some profound gaming mechanic then I don't think we'll ever come to any sort of understanding apart from respectfully agreeing to disagree.

Seeing Greg and listening to him, always brings back memories of him streaming Oblivion when it launched. It was so great and revelatory for me at the time. So neat to see him on the podcast.

I feel like what was missing from the 'new IP' discussion at the end was that what everyone actually wants is really high quality new IP because there has been a reasonable number of them on this generation of consoles, they just haven't all been winners. The Order 1886, Quantam Break and ReCore all immediately spring to mind when it comes to exclusives. When it comes down to it sequels are so common not only because they are a safe business move but also because sequels tend to be better games than brand new ideas. A game like Horizon is very much the exception as far as being a truly outstanding game first time out. Even Uncharted started out with what can only be described as a decent first game and the true quality of Naughty Dog in recent times didn't appear until Uncharted 2.

Even successful recent new games have often been off the back of very similar games from the teams making them previously. Bloodborne and The Last of Us while both fantastic first up games as far as the IP goes, were both very much influenced by the Souls series and Uncharted.

Greg is such a great guest, this was the best Bombcast in a while. Now if only he had time to drop by like, let's say once a month or so.

One can hope.