Giant Bombcast 462: Got the Shaky Jakes

@ripelivejam: Maybe I'm just an optimist (really, I'm not) but I don't understand consumers resigning themselves to this kind of "this is the best we can hope for, so we best just get used to it" mindset. There's nothing about the status quo of Day 1 patches, et al. that the industry cannot change, they just have zero incentive to do so because the consumer will still line up in droves for most of these games because they've bought into the hype, and the bandwidth to upload and download these patches costs publishers nothing. But you can't dissuade that behavior by charging publishers for patches, because then they'll just never patch their games and they'll be a mess forever. Really the only viable option is for people to stop with Day 1 purchases and preorders until we know if a game is shipping broken or missing a bunch of features. It's the reason why publishers get away with shitty PC port launches, because everyone just assumes everything will be swell, despite all previous evidence to the contrary.

That said, the platform holders are the most responsible for the current situation because frankly, their QA and approval process is atrocious. The amount of legitimately broken games that launch on PlayStation, XBox and Steam is pathetic and honestly, Sony, Microsoft and Valve just aren't doing their jobs when it comes to maintaining a standard of quality on their stores. Granted, it's a Herculean task with the number of games launching every day, but thems the breaks if you want a cut of every game sold on your store. At least when a game is fundamentally broken on Steam, Valve will give a refund with little to no fuss. I'm not sure of Microsoft's policies on XBox, but Sony's policies are downright shameful in my experience and those of my friends.

TL;DR: If chronic Day 1 patches cost publishers money, either in fees or in lost business, they would be gone faster than you would believe possible. But people have no patience and thus publishers have no incentive to change.

@graf1k: i'm totally with you on being patient; i'd rather wait for a game to be feature complete and mostly stable/polished at release. there is a problem, sure. i don't think it's as huge an epidemic as you suggest, though. in reality the majority of games aren't "broken", and what constitutes "broken" is usually one or two fair sized issues or a few smaller ones. it's a Herculean task to make just about any game, really. i think it's amazing most come out with so few issues, and we tend to forget how much work has to go in to make it that way; we just raise holy hell if things aren't near perfect. id say games press, steam forums, reddit, etc. tend to exaggerate this stuff and they become bandwagons everyone hops on. not trying to make excuses; we can always strive to improve, and it isn't impossible just very difficult for any dev. and there ARE those few games where it most definitely can't be excused, and they should have been delayed for good reason.

The patch argument makes me think how console games existed before they could be patched or how they weren't a complete mess. They make it sound like they couldn't have.

Fuck. Wearing my belt the wrong way. My hands barely know how to even make it go counterclockwise.

All this Frog Fractions 2 talk and no mention of Patrick.

"I want the porn NASTY. Or SPECIFIC."

Matt Rorie: Hero

TIL Dan looks like he's taking dick pics when he pees because he uses his phone at the urinal

@halogamer2145: i believe they are getting 2 people. One for each coast

Does anyone know the exact name of the retro game magazine Jeff mentioned containing the Gameboy interview? I wanna pick it up.

Last time I was a casino I was playing a Shinobi branded slot machine.

He definitely is. I like Dave but that was one of the most clueless things I've ever heard a game developer say.

Every time internet data caps are brought up I still shake my head in disbelief at how bad consumers are getting bent over by the ISPs. I live in the UK My internet speed is about 35 ish mb download speed generally; there is a capped option of a ridiculous 25gb a month for £20... but then the unlimited option is only £10 more. Do Comcast and co charge you by the mile for when you go over or is there a set price increase for it?
Is it even an option to pay straight up for unlimited or do they literally just treat you like you're a naughty schoolboy and "fine" you for going over the cap?

Every time internet data caps are brought up I still shake my head in disbelief at how bad consumers are getting bent over by the ISPs. I live in the UK My internet speed is about 35 ish mb download speed generally; (sadly that's actually fairly good speed for the UK) there is a capped option of a ridiculous 25gb a month for £20... but then the unlimited option is only £10 more. Do Comcast and co charge you by the mile for when you go over or is there a set price increase for it?

Is it even an option to pay straight up for unlimited or do they literally just treat you like you're a naughty schoolboy and "fine" you for going over the cap?

I swear, hard drives either die when they're 2 years old or they last forever.

@deadpanjazman: They way I understand it (I don't have Comcast, but Jeff mentioned in the podcast) is that you pay your standard rate, and then if you go over the cap it's a $50 overage charge and at that point you're unlimited. So the de facto unlimited plan is just pay the overage charge every month.

@deadpanjazman: Wow 25gb is a joke. Well here, Comcast didn't start enforcing data caps until a couple of months ago. We've got a 1 tb a month limit, and they definitely charge if you go 30 gb's over or something like that. They give you the option of upgrading to unlimited for an extra $50 a month. The most difficult thing is deciding what games to buy on steam or physically for console, I'm feel like I'm going to buy a lot more physical games in the future, because we actually got pretty close to the limit last month.

It's definitely community but the core is how shitty the reward and progression systems in that game are. It's so easy to not get anything good or useful in that game and it creates that toxicity. If you don't have players taking tomes on in that game you will not get any good loot.

The game is very poorly designed in those kind of ways.

It's not clueless. He's just defending the developer point because no one did and yeah he is one sided but so were the GOTY podcasts for the most part. As the case often is, the truth is in the middle. Patches are a good thing but there is nuance and the ability to do patches better.

Also keep in mind there is a difference between a developer and publisher angle on this even.

America why you have such tight bandwidth quotas/ have them at all?

"I want my porn NASTY! Or specific!" - First great Jeff quote of the year.

Interesting hearing about Let It Die from Jeff. Either by chance or maybe they took a page from Wargaming that having express pass is similar to having premium time in that you get a clean subway like you get a clean garage or whatever for your tanks and such. A purely cosmetic thing for people who pay money.

I love a Rorie Bombcast! Great show, thanks to everyone involved.

Hey now. I liked it.

I HAVE THAT SHIRT!!! YES RORY

NES Classic is done. Nintendo had its window which now has nobody outside to grab them That window was two months wide and there were easily over a million people WERE outside that window.

If there were a Black Friday to Dec 24th itemit was NES Classic. And, as much as I wanted it in November is as much as I don't care in January. Even if I saw a stack of them I'd say. "Meh, not as interested anymore...sorry"

The only upside I can see is Nintendo doesn't seem to have anymore, so those idiots who bough one for $600 might be okay to not fee totally burned because they might never see a stack of them.

Skeletons

@wastrel: Listening to Jeff talk about the Chess mini-game reminded that I did enjoy the game homages. I just found TXT World to be a bit of a slog.

@watkinzez: He totally did!

Rorie snuck a Will Smith "executable" through at around 1hr 9m. I miss Ryan :(

No, you can go 'over' many times in a single billing cycle, up to a total fee of $200 for the month. You're referring to paying $50 more for a plan that is specifically unlimited, which isn't even available to XFINITY users right now - so no matter what, if you're an XFINITY user in the Bay Area, you have a 1TB data cap with a total of $200 possible charged to you per month.

EDIT: I'm actually still not clear if this is or is not available to us in the Bay Area. One help article says it isn't, another says it is. Regardless, the $50 extra per month is what you were referring to. https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/exp-unlimited-data

WOW talk. Still unbearable

They talked about Odin Sphere at 50:02.

The Odin Sphere remake is an absolute masterpiece. I've got the Storybook Edition and the overall quality is simply superb.

The Grand Kingdom Collector's Edition is also super nice (which I also have)

@amyggen: Davis would be proud

I just remembered that Jeff mentioned something about Nintendo kind of lucking into the Gameboy in a magazine article in the podcast, and now don't remember what magazine it was. I kind of don't want to listen to a 3 hour podcast again just for that, but it sounds like an interesting article. Anyone happen to know which article he was talking about?

Yet again, Brad gets it wrong about Destiny. The Dawning event included a strike scoring system and half the yearbook is dedicated to strike scoring. Also, this isn't the only time that you can do sparrow racing. You can do them in private matches after the event ends.

I'm not trying to sound like a jerk - but maybe the GB crew should just stop covering Destiny at this point. Neither the crew nor GB's core audience cares about what's going on in the game, so why spend any time at all spreading false information?

FYI GB Crew; you don't need PS+ to play ANY ONLINE F2P GAMES. Let it Die isn't some special case because of asymmetrical multiplayer ;) From before launch, Sony was saying, "We're not getting in the way of developers who want to go Free to Play", and on Day 1 you could play Warframe, DCU Online, Blacklight and whatever else was there for free, online, without PS+. All Free to Play games, and Closed Alphas, and Open Betas, etc. operate with free online play too. No PS+ required.

I'm constantly surprised people don't know this. Even if people aren't clued into announcements and news stories, does no one check the "free" section of the PSN?

Nice podcast, you guys! I was worried it was going to sound a bit... weaker(?) with only 3 guys at the helm, but y'all did great!

While listening to the day one patches e-mail i was thinking "this sounds like a developer who doesn't do PC ports".
Dave Lang is ok to say what he did when it comes specifically to console versions, because they do still for the most part release in a completely fine state, 98%+ of console games release in a condition where they are beatable, they may crash or freeze up on occasion but it's rare. PC games on the other hand, as we saw last year, are releasing in unplayable states, the day one patches feel like extensions of issues that were fixed in the console versions and so they require further patching, which at best occurs throughout the first month or two of the games release, at worst the publisher decides to end support for a game early and it is never fixed.
It's not even just PC, that recent Garou port to PS4 is apparently awful, and from what i can tell the developer Code Mystics has only been given permisson to patch it once, and has now abandoned it in a less that good state, the PC port of the game by DotEmu has better online but some outstanding technical issues the first patch didn't cover, 1 month later and we can only hope there are more patches on the way.

Brad really should do lvl 1 no-restart run on the Dead Rising. It surprisingly doable and entertaining to beat the game on a single run without restart, all while defeating most psychopaths and rescuing all the survivors.

@freedom4556: We should listen to Dave Lang on this. After all, his studio is largely responsible for Giant Bomb's Hottest Mess of 2015, so he probably knows what he's talking about.

THIS AXE SHOOTS GRENADES

@depecheload: I mean, Dave is right in a way. At the eleventh hour, when your game is supposed to ship next month, those are the only two options. Consumers just wish publishers and devs would fix the problem in the long run. I don't care if Mass Effect Andromeda has to have a huge day-one patch, but by the time we get to Playstation 5, this needs to be a solved problem.

@depecheload: also realize game making isn't easy and don't pull out the pitchforks whenever there's a minor issue.

there's a grey area where patches are acceptable, especially with how complex some games get nowadays. either that or you get games that never improve, or never get released. i concur the patch size issue is something that needs to be remedied.

it surprises me how much of a free pass witcher 3 got even though by many people's metrics it was "broken" and it had NUMEROUS big patches.

Kind of a mischaracterization of The Dawning in Destiny. Yeah, the sparrow racing is half of it. The other half is strike scoring related. I mean, why bother commenting on it if you took a day to look at it.

Jason has another son? I had no idea.

Now I can't stop saying Shaky Jake.

I too will sometimes randomly start saying "shaky jake" and quietly laugh to myself.

Yeah, for real. That conversation was baffling, something must've gotten lost in translation when Jeff was talking to whoever that was.

Also, the 40k game they talked about is indeed called Space Hulk: Deathwing. It's based on the Space Hulk tabletop game, which isn't really treated as part of the main 40k canon - hence the omission of "Warhammer 40K" from the title.