A podcast about what makes the best experiences in gaming. Along with a few friends, we explore the past and present, to appreciate the craft and joy of gaming…when I have time.
NieR Automata is a great game. The open-world is a well polished “End of Days,” theme-park filled with interesting combinations of realtime actions, RPG progressions, and a story that grabs your attention.
2B, 9S and A2 are designed to be sympathetic heroes attempting to prove to themselves, and you the player, that they are indeed alive. As they roam the killer robot filled husk of a battered earth, they uncover conspiracies about their nature and the other beings in the universe.
For all of it’s design aesthetic, the deeper questions being prodded at are somewhat obscured by mandatory repetition and cryptic in-game NPC dialogue. The vast and sometimes lonely feeling world, hides ideas about the self and consciousness that can be explored.
The clever folks at Wisecrack did an amazing video on the ideas that are buried in the game’s multiple endings and character experiences. Personally, these ideas would have been otherwise really interesting to me but I wasn’t as captured with the setting and characters enough to grind past three endings.
The game is worth your money, but not at full original asking price. If you don’t want to repeat yourself, you probably won’t make it through to the more compelling story elements.
1 out of 3 stars. While I enjoyed the mashup and mechanics, the repetitions required to un-earth the remaining ideas in the game proved too high a cost for me.
Tell us about your favorite cursed earth robot adventure RPG and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
Something you create and also take with you. A reflection of you, but not of your image.
Avatars in games are not a new thing. Being represented as a 3D photo
realistic polygonal model, is a far cry from our humble start. Our
beginnings as paddle in space, or a hungry little mouth running from
ghosts, or even a plumber trying to rescue a princess.
Inanimate objects in I Am Toast, anthropomorphized Raving Rabbits, or
a simple adventurer with pointy ears and sword are us. They are extend
us in that virtual plane as we conduct their movements, agonize over
their steps.
These pixel powered apparitions are more than figures moving on our
every whim. We can find ourselves attached to these surrogates,
especially the ones we design ourselves. Spending an hour or more in a
character creation screen, tweaking every possible combination until we
have designed that next perfect reflection.
My friend David Diers will tell us about his, a red headed paladin that fights to protect those less fortunate. She has had a long history with him and it is amazing.
Tell us about your an Avatar you have and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
There isn’t anything more frustrating than losing your focus. The trance-like state that you can be in while playing games, like a spell, gets broken by choices that seem to be available.
The frequency and quality of games over the last 5 years have been incredibly high. As a pro-casual gamer it is all but impossible to keep up with the relentless release schedule. I myself am contending with a backlog of titles that, I dread, will never be complete.
With such limited time to devote to this hobby it should be easy to avoid pitfalls. The well tread loops of loot drops, discovering shortcuts to interlocking routes, mastering enemy patterns, etc… all serve to keep us in one place. Six feet from the couch.
But even with all these studios producing high-quality computer generated adventures, patterns slip through QA that can remove all commitment. Josh Hunt joined me to examine some of these dark user patterns and catalogue experiences that if removed, would have made for a flawless game.
Tell us about your favorite Quality of Life in a video game and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
Howdy friends, this is Zach, with another Single Player episode as I attempt to promote the value of a game that you should sink some of your hard earned dollars into. Today I am your virtual sherpa to what I see is the best multiplayer shooter of 2016 and 17, even though we are in 2018.
And that, my friends is the robot buddy-cop first person shooter TITAN FALL 2.
Even though the 4th quarter of 2016 was overflowing with FPS choices, and I will get back to that point later on. TitanFall 2 is empirically a game you should be playing. Respawn Entertainment, has been continuously releasing new modes, Titans, maps, and balancing patches over the course of the games life. And they have been doing it without asking for a single extra nickel.
Oh, did I just say that all the DLC has been free? As in beer?
Yeah that’s right! FREE. No loot boxes, pay to win, blah blah, content locking expansions, etc.. Free.
And yet even with all this commitment from the studio, TitanFall 2 hasn’t been able to grow an audience equal to the first title’s.
When the first Titanfall came out, there wasn’t anything even close on the market. It had the pedigree that came from the Call of Duty series of solid gun handling and arcade like speed. Thanks to a brilliant team of passionate ex-Infinityward employees. But making a future space shooter wasn’t enough. What they added was piloting a Robot. A robot who could help smash and blast your way through the enemy team. That was the revelation. And they made it look easy. But I’m not here to talk about history.
TitanFall 2, picks up where TitanFall 1 left off, and then proceeds to kick the ball further downfield by adding a superb single player campaign. Something that many people said was missing from the original. Along with this a more refined class based system for the Titans. Plus, a few new pilot abilities, weapons, and progressions that upped the challenge in multiplayer.
They took that already delicious future combat sandwich and added more meat.
With all the accolades and praise coming out for the sequel, I am perplexed by the lack of adoption. The gameplay experience is something that is fun and addicting. If you like nimble, yet sharp gunplay, combined with some of most intuitive, albeit dizzying movement mechanics, look no further.
TitanFall 2 does something that none of the other shooters on the market seem to be able to capture or accomplish.
They set up the players for blockbuster heroic moments.
Something that Mark Brown at Game Maker’s Toolkit would describe as a positive feedback loop. Regardless of you or your team’s actual status as winning or losing, individual player moments feel like major accomplishments. Whether it’s goal denials in capture the flag, multi-kill sprees that slow the opposing team’s progress in Attrition, or narrowly escaping fire to deposit cash into the team bank during Bounty Hunt, TitanFall has an ebb and flow that builds in a cinematic way.
There are so many little examples of this sort of thing that a whole episode on all the aspects of these moments could be easily produced. And this loop makes the draw of aggressive play styles feel rewarding.
The value of these big spectacle moments can be felt as either a lone-wolf player or a team member. Combining the strength of the Titan’s skills or timing an attack on a defender will happen many times in a single match. Last-ditch efforts can snowball into a victory. And this sense of being able to turn the tables is the foundation of the risk and reward of playing TitanFall’s multiplayer.
Now I want to take a second to acknowledge the fact that while TitanFall borrows many simple mechanics from MOBAs. Think Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends. It doesn’t dwell on being a hybrid in the strictest sense. Yes there are powers on cool-down that are earned from kills and other actions. And these are for both the Pilots and the Titans.
I heard you liked cool-downs, so I put some cool-downs on your cool-downs.
Yes, there are small hordes of enemies that are at different levels of artificial intelligence and offensive power. But they aren’t anything to trifle with. They add a fuller feeling than the 6v6 rooms would be otherwise.
The multiplayer game play isn’t a horde-mode, combined with defense on laned choke points. Unless you are playing Frontier Defense. You don’t gather teammates and push behind a single tank as the clock runs down.
TitanFall truly operates as a first person shooter, with some MOBA mechanics to add layers to every match.
Level design is spectacular in both multi-player and the single player campaign.
For multiplayer, each of the starting maps has several vertical slices that pilots, and sometimes your metal sidekicks can roam around.
Part of learning these maps includes maximizing your routes to reduce travel time. Speed in each level area is critical to success and stagnation is punished swiftly.
A quick note on the single player experience. The 6-10 hour campaign (depending on your difficulty level and shooter skills), contains levels and chapters on par with the likes of Half-Life 2, and Portal. Without spoiling anything, the future planets, and massive industrial complexes contain truly memorable mechanics that are both challenging and exciting.
Visual puzzle solving in shooter isn’t something you see everyday. And in games that are strictly about puzzle solving you have time to reflect on your object. TitanFall asks you to take the new tools and then run as fast as you can. Never looking back. And it works. So well that they could have made a whole game with just that mechanic and I would have been thrilled to play it.
On the topic of the new movement options introduced in TitanFall 2. The introduction of the grapple hook has to be one of the greatest mobility augments in a video game. Pairing this tool with malleable gravity and momentum rules, the Pilot Jump Pack transforms you into a WIRE FU futuristic Jon Woo shoot em up superbeast.
So what could deflate the success of a title with such a wide range of fun and value?
Two words, Electronic Arts.
Titan Fall 2’s launch was suffocated by EA’s ridiculous plan to release it within a week of Battlefield 1. Another “AAA” shooter, whom, insert personal speculation, until now has been the real in house favorite. This coupled with Overwatche’s late year traction, seems to have bogged down the potential adoption to a shadow of what it could be.
I see this as a terrible tragedy. An opportunity to build on a solid rock and expand out further with a community that is genuinely fun to play with. Not to mention, rewarding a company, that listens carefully and reacts with quick amicable solutions.
TitanFall 2 is my hero shooter of the last two years. Everytime I hop onto a match on PSN I am reminded of why I like it so much. Everything else right now pales by comparison.
TitanFall 2 is a solid 2 out of 3 stars making it more than worthy of your money and time to play.
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode about a shooter I love, and you can find me playing on the weekends. Feel free to drop me a comment and let me know how you like the show and what you would like to hear about in the future.
Until then, this is Zach, keep playing.
Tell us about your favorite FPS games and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
Howdy friends, this is Zach, with a quick Single Player episode. Today I want to tell you about my retirement from the e-sport shooter sensation that is Overwatch.
Overwatch, is a class based hero shooter in case you have never played or heard of it before. Blizzard has poured tons of money and talent into a game that is designed to capture both the e-sport craze and the adoration of filthy casuals. Marrying together MOBA like mechanics and map styles with a FPS twist.
I started my journey playing with two close friends and we were a merry trio learning the ropes. We began playing with bots at first to get the feel of things. But slowly we started playing matches with actual real oxygen breathing people.
After a few weeks of getting used to the flow of the basics, controlling and defending, denying and succeeding, we each started finding the characters that matched our play styles the best. I found myself playing a flex role for the most part, either support or tank rarely a skill shooter. In general support is the play style that I gravitate to in multiplayer games. Even during my short stint on DOTA2, I found support to be an appropriate role for myself.
In the beginning, we had good nights, we had bad nights, we drank
deep the fun of learning how to manipulate aspects of the characters to
our advantage. But, as the weeks went on I started to have compounding
frustration with Overwatch. There seemed to be this uneven yo-yo of
failure and success.
As I started looking at my win to loss stats as well as the those of
the players around me, it appeared that most players don’t have a much
greater than 50% win loss ratio. What does this mean? It means luck has
more to do with victory than skill. Overtime this percentage will change
as the game becomes more sophisticated. But for those first 6-8 months,
it felt like a coin toss.
One of the things that contributes to Overwatch’s feeling of a lack
of balance, is the introduction of new heroes. With each new hero or an
existing hero retooled (could be nerfs or buffs), the match balance
breaks. Without fail, the new hero is either overpowered or enhances
another character to the point of OP as well. This seesaw shift in the
power dynamics nullifies any skill you accrued in the previous season.
And forces you to begin the process of relearning familiar characters
and developing new strategies of play.
Even without this difficult development challenge that Blizzard has
of play balancing so many unique heroes, Overwatch is a game that is
very over-extended. It can’t decide whether it wants to be an E-Sport or
another casual friendly, competitive power fantasy.
Game modes in Overwatch are an example of this fence sitting approach
to design the team has taken. Overwatch launched with two core game
modes, point defense/capture and escort. Point capture or defense is
what it sounds like. You death ball your way from one defensible point
to a second one. It uses a king of the hill mechanic to capture that
location and move the next.
Escort, has your team following or riding an superbly sluggish
vehicle from one point to another on the map. While the fury of the
opposing team descends upon you. Like a bunch of hangry pigeons pecking
away at a loaf of bread dragged along by a string. This mode has a very
Tug of War ish feel mechanically but the driving team has way more
momentum and speed when driving.
The ranking system also seems to be unable to decide how to reward
you. Players who have crossed the 100lvl mark multiple times are more
often than not, people who have invested time but perhaps aren’t that
skilled. And many of these are single character players. Such as the
Pro-Genji or the Pro-Macree. Unwilling to switch their roles to help
support the team they are currently on.
Tilting. A term coined in poker to describe a mental state of
frustration that leads to poor decision making. Even with the aide of
industry leading communication tools, games range from fun to complete
melt-downs. I don’t want to dwell too much on this because you know what
I am talking about. Things start to go bad and nothing seems to turn it
around. Everyone’s moral drops and all of your positive endorphins
commit seppaku.
I don’t hate Overwatch. It’s a beautiful clone of Team Fortress 2. The characters are super imaginative and fun to play. The diversity and variety of roles give you tons of agency and cool swag to collect when loot (dupe) boxes don’t screw you over. The combinations of play styles and environments combined with lore give the game a real sense of depth.
After a year of playing the game casually I had reached my fill of
it. I miss playing with my friends, but the overwhelming sense of
failure I got from the game led me to stop. Overwatch has a lot going
for it and if you haven’t already tried it out, you should. Play it for
yourself and you may experience what I am talking about. Or you might
love it. And that is just fine.
Thanks for your time friends and until the next, keep playing.
Tell us about your favorite quick players and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
A short reflection on this long awaited/forgotten title that doesn’t quite hit all the notes for me.
Hello there friends and listeners, thank you again for your time in
listing to my thoughts and ideas. On this occasion, I wanted to be
able to deliver all my thoughts regarding the latest title from Fumito
Ueda while it was still a strong impression.
I wasn’t necessarily waiting for The Last Guardian to ever arrive. I
figured it would have had the slow death of silence that so many
titles like it experienced during the generational changes in hardware.
Clearly, TeamIco had missed the PS3 window entirely, and aside from an
HD Collection re-release of the first two games, I had assumed Trico had
been put to bed.
But lo, in the final quarter of 2016, just as it seemed the universe
was opening and interdimensional rift above us, a shower of titles came
rushing through the gates.
Trico seemed to crash through many reviewers without much of a
beating, and I think it could have been a little more seriously
critiqued as something of an exercise in too little, too late. While
filled to the brim with captivating art and mysteries to behold in our
imaginations, gameplay controls and frame-rates all seemed to bore down
on the quality of the title.
Do you think I have missed the mark on this?
Tell us about your favorite quick players and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
Updated: 10/16/2019 I remember I used to have time to play games.
A recurring theme in this podcast is the notion that, both myself and the people I interact with are Hard-Casual Gamers.
I am apart of the Millennials, which anyone born between 1977 and
2000. Although, there is no a universal agreement on this definition.
Millennials in the US total more than 80 million.
In the past we would have been considered extremely dedicated gamers,
sacrificing long hours to Playstation or Nintendo gods without a second
thought. We didn’t have a lot of money but we had time.
Now that we have a full load of adult responsibilities we look for
opportunities to unwind and decompress but with an ever growing surplus
of games in our Steam accounts, it seems like a task that will never be completed.
We want to play, but what do we choose based on our limited time?
How do you find time to play games?
Tell us about your favorite quick players and let us know if you are enjoying the show or what we can do to improve it via electronic mail or on twitter @betweenplayers
You can also leave comments on our tracks on SoundCloud
When games were younger, it seemed like there was one level of difficulty. And apart from secret codes, there wasn’t much you could do to improve your chances of success other than practice.
Is the challenge what makes a game compelling, interesting, or even valuable?
What are we getting out of the experience as a whole, without consequence?
Why does there appear to be an obsessed recently with the difficulty?
Do you remember the first game you played where you tried to crank it up to hard and decided it was too much?
Somehow, the notion of difficulty has migrated into the realm of modern game mechanics. Or more appropriately, difficulty has been sort of singled out in some cases as a pseudo mechanic.
Everything about the gaming industry in its current state is very clearly built around appeasing their primary audience or whom the industry sees as the largest audience.
Gender representation, and more specifically, the portrayal of women is a big topic right now in video games. Within the vast library of content we have to pick from, how is it that the portrayal, roles, and playable options for female gamers and game characters appear to be so narrow?
When I refer to narrow options, I am referring to how these characters look and interact with the environment they are confined to. Not just as a different skin on a model 3d model, but a wholly unique character.
As a male gamer I have a myriad of well designed options to choose from when representing myself in a game. But I am rarely impressed with what publishers produce as a Strong Female Protagonist.
In this first episode I sit down and have a chat with my buddy and fellow gamer, Stacie about her thoughts on female representation in games.
