This episode is a short one as Jonah flies to Los Angeles in the morning. There’s a followup to the Grand Theft Auto 6 leak, and Aaron Judge hits his 61st home run.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
After 11 years, VGRT Gaming Podcast, nee “Technical Diversions (TD) Gaming Podcast”, has hit the magic 500th episode, with not only former co-host Paul Nowak joining in on the celebration, but 2Old2Play’s Derek Nolan and former co-host Dan Quick sending their congrats as well. Paul’s presence is the go-ahead to give TJ and Scott permission to razz Jonah to no end, while Parker Brother board games are compared. This week’s Gaming Flashback is World of Goo.
The news for this magical 500th episode includes:
Question of the Week: “If you were a classic Parker Brothers board game, which would you be?”
[Song: “The Field Of Cormallen” by David Arkenstone.]
This week’s gaming podcast has all three personalities doing their thing. We’re finishing up our historic look back at Sega while answering a couple comments and hammering out the news. No flashback this week, we just ran out of time. This weeks news includes:
This weeks question of the week revolves around a bit of journalistic integrity and who do you trust when reading game news articles on the Internet? Folks like the Wall Street Journal or more focused gaming blogs like Kotaku, 1up, Gamespot and others?
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?
Hi guys.
Thanks as always 🙂
I played a lot of Magic the Gathering because a new expansion was released. And since wrath of the Koch king classic was released for WoW I got back to it for a lot of hours 🙂 I already wrote that to episode 663 which I listened directly before this episode 🙂
First of all: enjoy your holiday in LA Jonah!
Death stranding? Chapeau! I was so damn excited for this game and I was so hard disappointed … can’t remember whenever a game disappointed me that much. I think I managed to play 10 hours to give it a try, but I don’t think I will ever return to it 🙂
GTA6 Leak: I think the only GTA I played was the first one together with a friend sitting together and he played it, I watched it 🙂
KOF: isn’t there a new Street Fighter coming? I don’t know anything about KoF per Samurai showdown … only Street Fighter 🙂
Sorry that I can’t say so much this time, but I don’t know what to say regarding games I don’t know 🙂
Please stay healthy and keep on gaming!
Greetings from Germany
Ralf