PixlBit

That all sounds pretty good. I bet they'll have some long-animation execution actions and other things to add visual flare and gore but I really hope those things are optional. Speedrunners need to be able to go from the beginning to end without a bunch of short cutscenes, long animations, and fluff getting in the way. You should literally be free to sprint non-stop and blast lead from beginning to end, in a good Doom game/Doom level that is.

I think it'd be neat if you could run up to a demon then press and hold a certain button to do a scripted ultra violent kill like in Bioshock Infinite, but those would have to be optional and I certainly don't want their to be a "melee" button in the new Doom ala the Call of Duty or Halo stick-click or face button. Melee weapons are a cool part of the original Doom games and you should have to rely on those to do melee. Having a regular melee button that does light damage and has a knock-back ability seems like it wouldn't be in the spirit of Doom. Hopefully any modern tropes they put in the game (not saying they can't be used in a cool way) will be used well and not forced on players; hopefully any modern tropes added to the game won't slow the pace down too much or break the adrenaline rush.

The reason I bring up the idea of dodgeable projectiles is that it changes the flow of combat and feel of everything pretty dramatically I'd think. In modern shooters all the projectiles from enemies and from the player character are all either super fast or instantaneous (they go from the cursor or barrel-tip to their destination in a straight line instantly).

When you play Doom everything is super fast but you have room to wiggle and strafe, usually to greatest effect in boss battles. Doom wasn't a cover-shooter so you had to rely on projectiles you could dodge and on the pure speed/blitzkrieg of the player character. Not all of them could be dodged but the big weapons like rocket launchers and plasma were slow enough to get around. In a Call of Duty I think the bullets travel instantly in straight lines so the second an enemy spawns to attack the player you will be taking damage immediately and thus you have to run for cover. Another factor that adds to that instinct and flow of play is that they use recharging health. You don't have a lot of hit points in a CoD game, but it recharges so you have to take cover often to protect that little buffer you have between yourself and death.

Did they show you what the health situation was in the gameplay? Does it look like they're using a 100-200 point HP scale for player health? I'm pretty interested in this new Doom now thanks to this article, but as a consequence I now have a million questions for you, Travis lol.

Were there some dodgeable projectiles in the gameplay you saw, Travis?

I really hope they make good on the "play fast" style of design just like the old Doom did. If players can't speed run levels in like 2 minutes or less, iD fucked this up. I'd love to see old Doom speedrunners sinking their teeth into a good modern version where they can sprint through and not get bogged down by modern tropes.

Doom 3 was pretty good for what it was at the time, I liked it and the huge expansion it had (resurrection of evil was practically a stand alone game, even longer than Doom 3), but they need to change it up and go back to fast movement speed and quick action. No more 20 hour long Doom.

I would absolutely pay full price for a modern HD DOOM with a whole gaggle of short-to-medium sized levels with some secrets occasionally. As long as it's gorgeous, disgusting, fun, and has a ripping soundtrack with hot squealing solos it'll be on the right track. I'd put my money where my mouth is and buy that for the same price of a Call of Duty. I want more old-school style Doom done with modern tech and a few new ideas here and there. As long as they keep the fast pace, evil imagery, over the top gore, a variety of guns, dodgeable projectiles, and squealing solos.

Julian was wondering if anybody was still making FPSs with sprite based enemies and it brought to mind a game I saw Jeff do a Quick Look of at Giant Bomb. It's called Rogue Shooter and I thought it looked pretty rad and silly. I still haven't played this but it's right up my alley and I remember Jeff having a good time with it. I don't think the game was finished at the time of this so I don't know how it's changed since then.

Quick Look - Rogue Shooter

I don't want to encourage Patrick to take more Ibuprofen PM or do it regularly during each episode, but in this particular show I thought it was funny listening and waiting to see when the medicine would start making him loopy, if at all. At some point during the main Watch Dogs discussion Patrick mentioned how he believes that things tend to even out. He described how he hopes that the beneficial uses of technology as well as the abuse of it can weave a harmony like the double-helix of deoxyribonucleic acid. That's the kind of poetry and beauty I expect from the Kijek brand and Patrick brought a hot teaser of it to this episode.

To be honest I don't think it had anything to do with the sleeping pills, it was just unadulterated Patrick. If I could complain about anything as a long time listener it would be that we don't get quite enough of Patrick's Poetry Corner. Bring the truth, Patrick. Straight from the synapses of your brain and out into the cosmos. That last bit should be the intro for Patrick's Poetry Corner segment.

The discussion over the main topic was really interesting. I'm plugged-in to social media, mainly twitter, and I'm on Pixlbit, Giant Bomb, twitch, and youtube every day reading or watching. For me that connection feels somewhat necessary socially since I don't get out of the house as much and don't have many friends in real life to talk about games and nerdy things with. It also feels very beneficial to me because I live in Colorado, and even though there's an indie development scene in certain cities here and several dev companies in this state, I feel quite disconnected from the game's industry. Being connected to twitter and to game sites helps me build context as to what the game industry actually is (clearly in an abstract way, and in broad swaths), what's new and interesting, what's sucking, and what is happening in the news or at least what the perspective of the events is from the people I'm reading. Being connected to everybody has had a 99.9% positive impact on me up to this point.

Privacy within that connectivity was more the focus of this episode though, and when it comes to privacy I'm more like Julian, so ditto to what he said. Facebook is really gross and I consider deleting my account there all the time since I don't actually update it or use it, but I haven't since there's some family on there I don't see often. At some point Facebook quickly became not only the asshole of the digital world but the online version of the Christmas dinner table. In your heart of hearts you don't want to be there and it's not terribly comfortable, in some ways it's even outright gross, but you can't bring yourself to get up and walk out.

I think it'll be interesting to see how all this connectivity and the lack of privacy affects politics and culture in the next couple decades. Soon we are going to get to a point where people who run for offices will be tech babies, perhaps even gamers to some degree. The culture shift that started last-gen where being a nerd is rad and sexy became super mainstream and is still getting bigger, but how mainstream I wonder? I can only hope that we get to point where we can have a weird president who played Minecraft, Journey, or Civilization V as a kid. In the future we are going to have to get used to every body having dirt on every one else, things will have to get socially more liberal in that sense. Even the most uptight people on all sides of the fence still have to let loose or do stupid things to blow off steam, and odds are that stuff ends up on youtube in this era.

It's going to be much harder to be a cookie-cutter rich old man stuffy baby boomer president in the near future. Maybe this lack of privacy and nearly constant connectivity could ultimately lead to some better degree of transparency and honesty in the political world. Right now people on all sides seem so scared and desperate to stay still in a rapidly changing culture. People try so hard to appear perfect, they get fashioned by our political machines into idols and wannabe godheads, and less a person.

Imagine a presidential debate a couple decades from now where every candidate has videos on youtube of them doing something really dumb and nobody can hide from it or try to hold up some false sense of superiority, piety, or wholesomeness over the others. You're all running for office, you're all educated and went to good schools, but you're all kinda dumb in your own ways, none of you are saints, it's fine if you believe in God, it's fine if you don't, I probably won't agree with most of you on a variety of issues, and that's okay, let's just hear your ideas and see where we go from there.

I'd love this upcoming tech baby generation to be less tolerant of that polarized, billionaire funded, strictly branded, dog & pony nonsense. Just find videos of all the politicians scratching their foreskins, picking the thongs out of their butts, and farting on their cats. Do something to break the tension and bring everyone back down to Earth.

I never heard Cynic or Athiest before, so last night while I was playing Spelunky for a couple hours I listened through all of Cynics albums and liked all of them. I especially liked that first album, Focus. I didn't love the robot voice but everything else was beautiful and weird in all the right ways. The consecutive albums are really great too, and thankfully they don't have the robot voice lol.

Since I still have Athiest to listen to I think I'll try to find some of that while I play games tonight.

Death.

That's all that really matters, Blake.

Just kidding. It's cool you're teaching yourself some piano. Have you ever listened to the solo pianist Dax Johnson? I love his music, he could pack a lot of emotion and nuance into his solo piano work. He was a big metal fan so even though his music is purely solo piano there's a certain darkness, power, and intricacy to his style. If you haven't heard of him I can come back with songs of his if you like. I'm pretty sure there's at least a couple of his songs on youtube I could bring.

Did you end up liking Metro Last Light, JBone? I still haven't played it. I'm waiting till I get a PS4 to play it, they're upgrading the visuals, doing gameplay tweaks and releasing both Metro 2033 and Last Light on next gen consoles with upgraded fixins, and you will be able to get them separate or in a bundle.

Remember how I was saying a year ago that I was going to wait to buy a next gen console, and just buy a PS3 in the meantime while I wait? I probably won't be doing any of that, almost every single game I wanted on PS3 is getting ported to next gen consoles in some fashion. Tomb Raider is coming out gussied up for next gen, the whole Metro series, The Last of Us, and some others. Basically if I wanted to get a PS3 at this point I'd only be getting it for Demon's Souls, and I bet it's only a matter of time before that gets a re-release on PS4, or just ported with Playstation Now. The PS4 is the new PS3, who would've known?

This was the best podcast of all time. Julian was right, this was custom built to put a smile on my face. You resurrected the ghost of Pixlbit past in bringing on JBone, and on top of that this was the first time that you had JBone and Nick on an NWP, right? It was funny, entertaining to listen to, and to place a cherry on top you all embraced the truth. Golf got no limits. I never thought about it that way until Jules brought it up, but EA could totally mine that idea out with other EA properties. Golf courses with a Mass Effect twist etc. That sounds ripe for DLC to me, I hope somebody at EA thought of that. If not they better listen to NWP.

As E3 went on I found that the press conferences that each company held were the worst way to show off the games. The conferences only went skin deep, and only on a handful of games. The good in-depth stuff all came during Twitch live-streams afterwards and news coverage afterwards.

I watched a bunch of the Nintendo Treehouse stream and saw a ton of 3DS and Wii U stuff they didn't show at the Direct. I watched the Gamespot stream and saw like 45 minutes of Shadow of Mordor gameplay which finally sold me on that game and blew my mind, and I watched a bunch of the Giant Bomb live-streams and video content. I learned more about Bloodborne and MGS V: Phantom Pain by watching the Giant Bomb stuff and now I'm super excited for both of those games. Patrick Klepick went to the showing of Bloodborne and asked a lot of question directly to Miyazaki that Souls people should be excited about. If you're interested in hearing their impressions of Bloodborne and MGS V they have that archived on youtube in this video: Giant Bomb - E3 Coverage Uncovered

Splatoon looks like a pretty fun riff on the types of paint mechanics and tech that were used in Tag: the power of paint, and eventually found their way into Portal 2 when Valve hired the Tag people from Digipen. I loved the paint tech in Portal 2 and Tag, I was wondering when somebody else was going to riff on those ideas and do something with them. It figures Nintendo would be the guys. Splatoon looks pretty fun, but in the big picture it's only a curiosity. I can't get hyped for a multiplayer only shooter on Wii U that will probably be downloaded and might even have some free-to-play in it at some point. Nintendo is surprising a lot of people lately and really going out of their historical comfort zones, I wouldn't be surprised if some F2P happens.

In the sense of just being a curiosity, the same might be true for No Man's Sky. They have a beautiful visual style to that game, but I haven't seen any gameplay that's compelling, so for me that game is all rhetoric right now. They're literally promising us the universe. Not just that but a procedurally generated infinite universe (and it's an indie team with 4 guys working on it). No Man's Sky is like Peter Molyneux multiplied by infinity, literally. If ever there was a time to keep your hype at a reasonable level and be skeptical, No Man's Sky is that kind of game. I don't doubt they'll deliver on the procedural infinite idea, with those 4 people they could make the algorithms and programs to do that I'm sure, but can that world possibly be interesting for very long? By it's procedural and infinite nature that world can't possibly feel handcrafted. It might feel that way for a little while but eventually you'll start running into familiar tile sets, patterns, and combinations of variables so that the procedural nature of it will begin to shine through.

To wrap it up, I liked this years expo overall to not be sour on it. I'm most excited for Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne, MGS V Phantom Pain, the new Zelda, Halo 1-4 collection, Destiny, Dragon Age 3, and Far Cry 4.

I thought they said all the right things about the new Zelda, but the only thing that really matters to me is what kind of open world they're going for in practice and if they're trying to design for emergent gameplay. I play open world games, some of them end up being some of my favorite games of all time despite their flaws, like Fallout 3, then some of them I end up hating despite how much people say I'm suppose to like them, like Arkham City (most annoying open world game I've ever played. Arkham City makes me want to hang myself).

Open world action games need at least three main things to be pretty great. Skyrim has two out these three, Far Cry 3 has all of them, Arkham City has the first one down perfectly but everything else is so obnoxious in that game that I can't stand it. I'm hoping Zelda has all of them. You can almost guarantee it'll have the first one.

1) Satisfying combat at the core - Zelda can certainly do this, so I'm just assuming this will be a given. I'm really agreeing with Julian on the hopes that you will be able to choose from a wider stable of weapons and focus on certain styles of combat instead being forced into the standard sword/shield/occasionally bow scheme. I want to use a shield and a lance when I'm on horseback in this new Zelda. I want to be able to aggro enemies from afar with my bow like I do in Dark Souls, and only use melee when it's necessary and things get up in my face.

2) Plenty of systems to interact with when you're not in combat. I put 200 hours into Skyrim and I don't like the combat very much. Combat only takes up short bursts of time every now and then, so where did most of that 200 hours come from? I hunted, crafted armor, weapons, leveled, did alchemy, talked to people to learn their stories, read lore books, searched around for good deals from merchants, and engaged with an incredibly robust and polished collection of systems that were interesting to use. - Zelda doesn't need to be as robust, but it absolutely needs to give me more than tunics to wear, stuff to craft and upgrade, and a little bit of personalization to make me feel like my character is mine. Put some lore books in there, tell me about the kingdom and the people in it. Let me find hidden poems, tell me about the gods and beliefs of the people, show me paintings in caves that give you clues to the world you're in and times long past. Give me interesting things to do during downtime between dungeons and combat. Not just mini-games to earn heart pieces.

3) Emergent gameplay out in the wilds. Action stuff that can happen during exploration, when you're not in a dungeon or town. Even if the combat is great it's not going to be enough if you just run into some static enemies occasionally out in the wilds like you do in every Zelda game. I want there to be monsters with actual behavior and scripting outside of standing around waiting to be aggroed by Link. Monsters attack each other, villagers, weird shit needs to happen and be interesting to look at, engage with, or even run away from. Since they're being like most other games right now and trying out the "be more like Skyrim" thing, they need to adopt the good parts and not the crappy parts.

When you play Skryim or even moreso Far Cry 3, the wilds truly feel wild, at any moment some crazy shit can happen whether it's directed at the player or not. Sometimes you're just a bystander. If this Zelda is really going open-world in the way I think that term means, they really need to make that open world worth exploring and exciting to run around in. It won't do any good to make a gorgeous world that's just there for show. If the world is too barren you'll realize that pretty quickly and the whole thing will feel without personality. You'll dread the downtime between dungeons, and you'll only be left with pretty vistas, even as beautiful as they are. I'm hoping there will be more than vistas and the occasional bat, skeleton, or goblin.

No mention of PGA Tour 15 from the EA press conference? Trust me, watch the trailer they showed. It won't waste your time, it's about 30 seconds and it was the one thing that had me laughing all day. Instant meme. That PGA Tour 15 trailer is dumb in all the right ways.

PGA Tour 15 - gametrailers

This E3, Electronic Arts fired off the hottest truth bullet of all. Phantom Pain, Sunset Overdrive, Battlefield, Destiny. Do you know what they all have in common? They got limits. Golf got none. Even EA's other sports games like FIFA have limits.

Golf?

Golf got no limits. PGA Tour 15 is the truth.

Awesome metal monday showing.

Since the last time we talked about metal I listened to a lot of different things and bands I hadn't heard of, but one of my new favorite bands I heard recently is the Italian power metal band Ancient Bards. Sexiest lady singer ever, I really like her voice. She's super good.