This week’s episode was delayed due to serious Windows issues this past week. The episode was saved, however, and is 90 minutes full of discussion. The podcast deals with a lot of console hardware rumors.
The news items include:
All this and Listener Feedback.
If you’re wondering where episode 652 is, the file was completely distorted, with only one half of a conversation going. So, all the discussion about Sony’s State of Play is lost to the ether.
Baldur’s Gate isn’t too old, it was released in November of 1998, but that’s still a bit dated now. The gaming industry isn’t friendly to the years, often working in what seems to be accelerated “dog years” in terms of technological advancements. It figured this was worth covering because it’s one of the best selling and considered a top tier single-player RPG by most accounts.
It was also developed by BioWare, who, at the time, only had one other game under their belt from two years before called Shattered Steel.
The story begins just after a devastating event in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign called the “Time of Troubles.” This was a great twist in the standard D&D campaign, it caused all curative magic (clerics) to lose their ability to heal unless near their deity, magic didn’t function correctly (I believe this is where the Wild Mage came from) and was unpredictable and gods walked the earth as mortals which caused magic to, in effect, die while the gods were away. Since the storyline starts slightly after this event, the game contains healing and magic but the storyline is impacted by prior events of course, people have trust issues.
The game was made great because it held “mostly true” to the 2nd Edition D&D roots so the learning curve for D&D player’s wasn’t so rough; some things were adjusted to handle the real-time effect of a video game RPG. You could party with up to six Non-Player-Characters (NPC’s) whom would swap in and out of your active party over time as part of the storyline (something also implemented by the US release of Final Fantasy 2).
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This week’s gaming podcast is slightly light on news because nobody wants to inform the market about gaming updates, they don’t want to damage the holiday sales season. We might not be eating Vegemite sandwiches but there is no doubt Men at Work would love this episode. We’re flashing back to California Games, we’re hitting up some gaming history on artist and graphic designer Paul Jaquays. We’re reading some listener comments while handling these news tidbits:
This week’s question of the week, what do you think of Tiger Woods and his role with Electronic Arts? Will they keep him on the cover?
I liked the auction house in Diablo 3 because it allowed for more gear homogenization; if my character got an item that did not help that specific class as much as another item, I could possibly auction that loot and buy a better suited one.
The 6 TFLOPS available on Scorpio make it comparable to an overclocked RX 480, so it might be capable of running Doom without dynamic resolution scaling, and consoles use low-level APIs similar to Vulkan, but we don’t know the CPU specifications.
Thank you for mentioning me!