What’s with the title? Stick to the end of the episode to find out. Meanwhile, this week was fairly slow and it was tough finding things to talk about — Minecraft has been in the news a lot lately.
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This week we’ve got some crazy statistics that says Red Teams beat Blue Teams. According to a study published last week in a Cyberpsychology & Behaviour journal, during a study of 1,347 matches between “elite teams” in Unreal Tournament 2k4 … and all things being equal, the red team won 55% of the time. Huh?
EA Gets Sued by…The People? The class-action complaint focuses on Electronic Arts’ actions since 2004, when Take-Two Interactive’s NFL 2K5 was released at a $19.99 price point and sold more than 2.9 million copies in the US, according to NPD figures.
Wii and USB! Someone browsing the web came across a Job posting for Nintendo of America. The job posting was for a “Software/Hardware Tester” who can execute a “test plan for Wii’s USB devices.”
Analysts baffled that GTA didn’t move Hardware. How does a game with such powers of popularity manage to NOT sell consoles? Truely a mystery, or expected?
This weeks podcast also discusses the best game cinematic sequences, what are your favorite? Leave us a comment!
This weeks flashback is Where in the World is Carman Sandiego and we start our gaming history on Role Playing Games.
This week, the guys talk about how Yu-Gi-Oh players stink, literally. Aside from that, they also discuss the Star Wars Outlaws‘ $110 and $130 editions, Palworld‘s PvP arena, the Rogue Prince of Persia getting revealed, yet another Stardew Valley patch is on the way, Activision Blizzard and NetEase renew their agreement to publish games in China, and free updates heading to Fallout 4.
The news includes:
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I remember a day when old RPG games had either a level cap or a definite ending. From Pool of Radiance to Secrets of the Silver Blades to Final Fantasy the game had a final boss or stage and often had some type of level cap. Today, gamers don’t want it to end, they’d rather have the option to wonder around aimlessly or completing minor quests in order to soak up every ounce of money they spent on the title.
Now even Bethesda is saying “we’ve learned our lesson” from the whiplash of ending their game title and capping levels. Gamers want to go back and re-try content they missed, they want to run side quests and talk to everyone in the world they want to grind themselves to über powerful levels and become a god in their fantasy world. Can you blame them?
You can’t really blame them for wanting to maximize the content, although it’s slightly more evolved than RPG’s of old. Perhaps it was World of Warcraft and other MMORPG’s that brought us to the stage in life where we all want to squeeze every last RPG dime out of the title. As a kid I wondered the world of Hyrule and covered every tile of graphical color, burned every bush, bombed every stone looking for all the content. However, even Zelda had an end with scrolling credits – you didn’t just land on a platform with your master sword and a dream.
Other titles have used level caps to limit you and draw you into the next release of the game. This was popular in the D&D world because the game is designed to target specific levels of difficulty. They may only allow you to gain level 10 because the enemies are no tougher than level 13, allowing the challenge to be good but not overwhelming. If they allow you to get to level 50 they’d have to design the game so all the enemies grow powerful along with you — that’s not always a desired result.
Final Fantasy is a popular franchise that typically allows you to grow infinitely powerful depending on how much time you want to spend repeat killing the same enemies. Gamers aren’t always into the grind, they just want to grind “enough” to make the challenges a little more do-able.
Today, however, with larger storage capacity, larger development teams and the desire to build more value into your gameplay experience titles have dozens of side quests and sub-plots that are totally optional. The result of so many sub-quests results in a player who is much more powerful at the end of those quests compared to a player who sticks to the narrow path of the main plot. So, games much grow dynamically challenging to keep the fun per dollar high.
Do you like your RPG’s to have a definite end and a high but capped level?
