Second Wind is the new home for the former video team of The Escapist, a fully employee-owned, fan-funded and independent entertainment outlet featuring premium video essays, documentaries, livestreams and podcasts!
On 11/6/2023, the entire Second Wind team was either fired or resigned after The Escapist's parent company fired Nick Calandra, Editor-in-Chief.
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glitter and dog hair, fundamental elements of modern existence.
For me, I am now solo playing tabletop games. That is all about decision making. It is not about telling a story, but experience an environment and trying to reach a more ideal state. Even if my opponent is a random number generator, that is the point. Not all game have stories. Some are a toolbox for generating stories. On that note, the world of solo tabletop games is worth investigating.
Yeah but did you get the true bug ending?
So when are we getting the adventure is nigh season 1 and 2 reduex?
dark souls also asks you to commit to your actions whether you like it or not, no more mashing. you have to think about what you want to do and whether it's safe and behold most people are not used to that which is where it gets its notion of difficulty from
Disco Elysium, internet's beloved commie propaganda.
hey
It's always been funny to me how authoritatively people seem to love Kim, because I can't stand the guy. He's a hall monitor narc, a total stick in the mud. I'm not saying you can't learn more interesting things about him that make him at the very least an INTERESTING character, but he's the definitely of a liberal (I say that from a leftist perspective). Genuinely makes no sense to me.
I remember a different game series I was talking about with my friends where they were angry the sequel assumed a different ending to the previous game than what they got. It took a surprising amount of convincing to get them to understand that it's just not practical to make a completely different game for people who got a different ending, even if "Mass Effect did it" 🫠
Best example I can think of of a false choice is The Walking Dead Telltale game, every time you have a critical choice. Sooner or later, the game doubles back on you and ties the two separate threads up. Regardless of who you saved in chapter 1, the other character dies in chapter 3. Even if you forgive that characters killer, she still leaves the group shortly after. If you choose to save Ben (I think that’s his name), he still dies about 10 minutes later. Ultimately your choices are an illusion.
Don't need Javed to make you pretty Mr Frost ❤
I mean the ending gets affected by Kim, also certain events can lead to getting a different side kick too. No spoilers just examples.
For me I say aesthetic change is important even if nothing seemed to have changed game wise. For an old example I would put forth Mass Effect. For most of the 1st game it was just numbers. The second game plays mostly the same regardless of those choices. Go to planet A. Get complained at by council A or B. Kill evil space bugs. Reapers come next game. Minor choices, minor edits, minor changes, yet it all headed to the same track. Yet when we hit Mass Effect 3 and got the three color endings with no follow up on what happened to everyone we cared about? Oh it enraged the entire community even if you could reduce the fates of some groups to just three lines... But they were 'our' three lines.
Aaaaand HiFi Rush' developer got shut down. More live cervix slop it is!
Rimworld is a game of choice. And each has consequences. Do I butcher that man that tried to kill us because we're out of food, even though everyone will hate eating long pork? Do I abandon my settlement to go trading because we don't have any pack animals (because we ate them), and we need 200 steel to build heaters desperately, and one man cannot carry it? With full knowledge that somebody might show up to burn it down while were away? The calculus in that game makes it my easily fsvorite. I've got 3000 hours in it.
Whenever there are branching paths through a game, I almost feel that you should play the game only once but how you want to play the game. This way, the play through is yours and yours alone. Sadly, this is a hard thing to do as curiosity of other options and the pull to complete the achievement list gives me a feeling of loss value in my purchase.
and this is why the manufacturer of Endingtron 3000s gets so much business - there's another kind of divergence: the "there won't be any choices later so we can fully realize all the options without breaking the budget" divergence
I have played this game so many godamn times and there's always some new nugget of text or interaction to find. It's possible to go through the game so Harry never remembers that certain someone resulting in him actually getting a decent sleep at one point! But my favorite is when you have multiple stats high that they start interacting and arguing with each other during conversations! Spoiler below but I want to talk about the one that stuck with me the most> > > > > > > > > At the tribunal you can try and work out if Raul (The leader of the Mercs) is actually going to go through with it. If you have High Empathy it chimes in and says "He's calm and in control, there's no way he'll do it." If you have High Half-Light it will chime in "He's 100% focused and nothing is going to stop him." If you have BOTH another dialogue option comes up "Wait, Who was right back there?" And Empathy chimes in "He was. I am SO sorry my lord..." It's such a fucked situation and that really hammers it home.
unfortunately, i think your framing of the words 'choices' and 'matter' has distracted people from the points you're making. That happens though.
Kim's reaction is actually the only thing that matters
You are so freaking right about walking dead. I was so pissed off when I realised the choices I made ended up having no point
wtf is Grinderbin doing, is he whittling down a knife with a drumstick? 🤣
A good video highlighting many of the reasons why I personally/subjectively hate narrative choices in games. They're illusions that lead you to the same location anyway so feel like a waste of time. Telltale games are especially bad at this since the narrative choices are the ONLY things those games have going for them so to have them not matter is annoying (steal the food or not? why does it matter when the food is still taken and you're blamed for it?). It's not reasonable for proper choice in games because of how much dev time would be needed but I can't see past the annoyance and lies of the illusion of choice. I think AI (in the future of course, we're not there yet) will help in this regard immeasurably as it could create on the fly new dialogue and paths based on player actions. I can imagine a future where some games have a world and setting and general direction for a story created by the developers but most of the details are procedurally generated so that no two playthroughs are the same. That will be the dawn of true choice and branching story paths in video games. Though I think i'll always have a preference for linear hand crafted experiences devoid of choice.
5:11 Almost had me if not for the blatant BSing. 1) Easy barrier to entry. Pirated games dont require the excess bloatware that many are forced to use. (Steam, Origins, Uplay, etc) 2) Most issues that would go wrong are already patched in the repacked versions of games. Also, most companies dont have any real customer service so you either get zero help or you get lucky enough to get a refund. 3) REFUND would never be necessary. 4) Many games can only be played if you have a pirated copy because most of the games you "own" through those third parties, you DONT actually own. So after you failed on every level of that argument I'll go ahead and file your opinion as worthless and move on. Hope this helps anyone else.
OHH CLEVER WITH THE CREDITS BAIT
I think this is an oversimplification of the topic. I think most gamers know games have a boundary that limits what is possible. In the game The Witness you can complete the game in minutes. Or Persona 4 Golden/Persona 5 Royal where you don't even get to fight the last bosses if you don't take the right choices. These choices do not matter? It has no impact on you as a player?
The more I think about it the more I hate the framing around these concepts. Don't get me wrong they seem like very useful concepts for planning out the choices in your game but... The player IS still making the choice of which rails to follow. Just because they end up at the same place in the end doesn't negate everything that does change getting there. Like by this logic if I go to buy a car... it doesn't matter if I get a truck or a motorcycle because I'm just going to end up driving it to work and back home over and over until I die slipping in the shower one day. Oh the truck will make it easier when I have to move sure, but that's just a "skip divergence" avoiding the U-Haul side quest. Also what about games that have different endings? Framing it as an "illusion of choice" seems hinged on the fact that it always ends up in the same place; so if a game even has 2 different endings (or maybe 3 different coloured ones like ME3) then it ceases to be an illusion and this whole things just becomes a system to help developers plan that choice.
Just so everyone knows you can use the RPG mod to gain levels the MMO way instead of equipment gear score
One of my favorite monster intros is the death claw in concord from Fallout 4. Yeah, it's a glorified tutorial boss, but nothing beats that moment of "Oh shit 0_0" when that thing bursts out of the ground and starts coming for you, especially since you've spent the past few moments mowing down raiders with a minigun in a suit of power armor. Even more intimidating when it grabs you, which I did not know it could do when I first went into it, I thought it was an instakill animation. All in all, while the death claws in FO4 aren't as pants-browningly hars to kill as the other games (even the tough ones can go down easy if you have a suit of power armor and pump them full of enough lead) that intro death claw is still one of my favorite moments
This video is factually wrong
So in other words... Sony wants to reduce costs and converge PC players onto Playstation, which is why they attempted a required PSN account at all.
Ha, yeah, this makes me think of myself a few years ago...deciding that I wanted to do a narrative game where the choices *really* matter and you have many different paths, and then doing the math and realizing just how many branches that could easily end up being. Thus, the game has to get simplified a bit (or a lot), to give choice without having to incorporate a bunch of wildly different plots, because then the story just has no sense of cohesion. So yeah, definitely a topic of interest to me. I love the breakdown of the different types of approaches!
I normally really like these, but feel like you've got this one almost entirely wrong for reasons other commenters have already explained in elaboration.
I'll tell you straight up that the entire premise of this essay is very fishy indeed. To say that there is such a thing as illusory choice implies the existence of authentic or real choice that is made. No such thing has ever been proven to exist anywhere!
But the ironic or cartoonish nature of choices in games does provide people with more radical choices than in life because there is less difficulty attached to the expression. Such as choosing a different gendered avatar in a game is a much easier thing to do than becoming a different gender out on the street. So is a real choice one which we feel is forced upon us by society, law or convention?
I loved Disco Elysium but I found the getting the body down part was the only bit I really hated. I kept missing various rolls (perhaps I picked very bad stats). It meant I felt like I was "grinding" to get stats to enable it. I felt I had done all the "good" content and was scraping around the corners to get enough stats to pass that block. Everything else in the game was stellar and immersive but the feeling of being road blocked from progression by failing random checks again and again was infuriating.
So interesting the elden ring video you did i couldnt watch cause i was mid game, same thing happened again as im now on day 3 of disco elysium
Your choices change the story. The plot stays the same
What matters to me, personally, isn't story choice at all, it's gameplay choice. It's why I prefer Fallout 4 (and even 3) to New Vegas. New Vegas gives you plenty of story choice, but to me it all feels the same: just more people talking. Fallouts 3 and 4 on the other hand, have lackluster stories, but let the players way more off the leash with exploration and (in the case of 4) character builds. And that compels me. I'd rather have the same conversation in 5 different settings than have 5 different possible conversations all in the same room.
I bought this game a couple months ago, but didn't really get in to it.
Okay. After watching this video, I'm going to play it this weekend
Kim can leave if you disappoint him enough, and Kuno can be deputized, AND you can be committed at the end by your old partner. I don't think JM8 is as familiar with the game as they think they are. Yes it all leads to the Deserter at the end, but the circumstances around that can be wildly different.
It's nice to be able to watch Yahtzee videos without an intro/outro that are twice as loud as the actual content.
This reminds me of Bethesda and its Season Passes where it had to define what DLC meant to them when they suddenly started to release new content that you could download but wasn't covered by the Season Pass that included all future DLC. This new downloadable content is not Downloadable Content (DLC), no no no, nor is it paid mods. It is, in fact, modifications that have a price tag, completely different, which are actually called... CrEaTiOnS Oh god... I hate government, but this madness needs government.
Instead of “Illusion of Choice” I would tend to think of it as “player decision” Even if the choice is an illusion, the player still had to make the decision to progress the game, even putting the controller down and letting the game decide which path to go down was a player decision
Never touched disco and I have no idea what the hell you are on about. Definitely not a game I'd ever care about
I would like to add; the games die rolling mechanic soft locked me for a good chunk of time because I am terribly unlucky with die rolls. The games main quest (unless I am terribly mistaken) has breakpoints that require specific checks to be succeeded. This was an issue for me because failing checks does not reward any experience. There was a period of time where I thought I would have to resort to racism in order to raise my Rhetoric cap, but thankfully save scuming saved the day.
I'm actually surprised by the comments that are disagreeing with the various points presented - because they're all so hinged! You've cultivated a very thoughtful audience already! GG Because I have no idea what the train imagery is from and when I saw the pulsating flesh mass beside the tracks, I got SUPER CONFUSED - I am once again asking for a "visuals used" section for the description, to go with the "Music used" section. Pretty please?
Oh my god I’ve never heard of the refrigerator test.
Disco was such an amaizing game, it always felt like such a personal experience because of how it portrayed the effects of my choices and stats, wonderful!