Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This evening’s show is a bit of an odd one, but we are living in very interesting times within other interesting times. We start off with some discussion about choosing a game controller with a good D-Pad and how most just use 4 independent microswitches these days. This leads into a discussion about Celeste and Kodra attempting B-Sides. From there we talk about Crying Suns which effectively feels like a more mature version of FTL. Then we deep dive into why Games are extremely important and what happens when “Players” start applying the same system breaking logic to the real world. What we witnessed with the GameStop stock is precisely what gamers do best, evaluating a system, findings its weaknesses, and then exploiting the hell out of them for fun and profit. This leads to one of the stranger conversations we have had but one that is nonetheless interesting.
Today I will be releasing my sixth video in my Hardcore Minecraft series, and it represents the culmination of a few side projects and me stepping forth into a very changed Nether. That however is not exactly what I am going to talk about this morning. What I am going to talk about is how I don’t fully understand what lead me to start a Minecraft series after having been largely dormant on my YouTube channel with anything other than the weekly podcast videos for years. The last non-podcast video that I released was me trying to record evidence of an issue I was having with Avengers.
My Minecraft videos are relatively low quality as far as videos go. I am doing next to zero editing… and that is in part because the first few attempts at recording from OBS were using a format that I could not easily import into Adobe Premiere. I’ve since remedied this and that might shift up my workflow to do some stuff like add title cards to the beginning or something simple like that for starts. I like the concept of Streaming, but I always feel super anxious and awkward whenever I do it. I never know what to say and the fact that I am trying to interact with people makes the gameplay experience odd. Truth be told I don’t actually watch many streams and the only time I do tune in is for a few minutes when one of my already established friends is streaming.
I think the way I am recording short snippets of gameplay feels more comfortable because it is a lot like blogging. In order to sit down and make it through a blog post in the morning, I sorta pretend that I am just talking to myself. I am having an internal monologue and not something that is then going to get read by other people. I am letting you into my own thought processes and then just happening to write those down on paper, or in this case the digital page. For my Minecraft videos I have been trying to do the same sort of thing. I talk through what exactly I am doing and why I am doing it, and some of my long term goals.
The big thing that has sort of hampered me to this point is there are projects that I have that are ultimately going to be time consuming. Given that I am playing Hardcore… I have been super hesitant to do much of anything while the “camera” is not rolling for fear that something significant would happen and take place “off air”. However I think as I open up the world a bit more I am going to be spending more time working on those larger goals which are going to make my base feel like more of a home.
That is the other thing that has happened as I have been recording these episodes. I’ve found myself getting rather attached to this little hovel that I started with. I’ve never really started up on a hillside like this before, and I have to say I really like various aspects about it. The problem in the past has always been that it was very hard to tell if it was day time or night time because digging into the side of a mountain at ground level meant that something was always blocking my field of view. However being up high like this and overlooking the nearby village means that I actually have something resembling a proper view of the world.
This is the danger I guess of getting attached to something as fleeting as a hardcore world. There are ways of course to fix this, but they involve some shenanigans. I am enjoying myself and since I am absolutely allergic to trying to turn a profit from anything that I do… it isn’t like I actually need much of an audience to make it work for me. I’ve always sorta felt like an outsider artist that blogs, podcasts and now apparently records gameplay just for the fun of it and can not give two shits about how popular it is. That said I have been a bit shocked at just how many of you have been watching along as I did this particular brand of nonsense.
This is the playlist that I attempt to keep up to date as I release new videos. Right now I am shooting for 20-30 minute segments. They started rather long and have been getting a bit shorter as I recorded the last few of them. So here is the moment of letting you all behind the scenes… I am about to release episode 6 today, and I recorded 7 yesterday and will likely record 8 today. So I am a few episodes ahead of the release schedule at this point. This is going to get awkward as folks share advice because there is going to be a bit of a delay between when I read the comments and when I am next recording something.
As always I am going to plug the REAL person you should probably be watching as I am just a pale imitation. DavidAngel64 otherwise know as X, is the real reason why I am back engaged with Minecraft. In August of 2010 it was his “X’s Adventures in Minecraft” series that sold me on the experience of playing this game as an Adventure and I was completely hooked. As soon as I realized he was back playing the game, I was absolutely going to start watching these adventures on a daily basis. I am doing what I do because I enjoy it, but he is absolutely the real deal in a way that I likely never will be. I still find it criminal that this man does not have more subs than he does, because for me at least this is what started so many future hours of enjoyment. That original video has almost 5.5 million views so I am guessing that he was also the first entry into Minecraft for many people.
For now however I think I am going to keep doing what I am doing because I find a surprising amount of enjoyment from the process. What I am doing is not special or good but going through the motions is currently engaging for me. I sincerely doubt that I will ever gain much in the way of a following, but that is okay because I don’t really need that. I will never turn these hobbies of mine into a career and I have avoided monetizing any of them for fear of tax liability. So for now I am just going to keep piddling around and doing my thing, and apparently occasionally writing about it on the blog.
Over the last several days there has been quite a bit of information coming out about the potential of a game set in the Knights of the Old Republic currently in the works. The curious thing about these rumors is the fact that according to Jason Schreier the Dev Whisperer… it is supposedly being worked on outside of the greater EA/Bioware hegemony. Which leaves a whole bunch of questions about who and where and what. I almost tacked this bit of conversation onto yesterdays blog post but I also did not want to make that one span thirty pages of rambling. So this morning I am going to talk a bit about where we have been and where we are going.
While Darth Malak is the big baddie of Knights of the Old Republic, really for me it is the story of Darth Revan and his redemption arc. I say “his” because thanks to Star Wars the Old Republic we have a Canon Male Revan right or wrong. The first game legitimately changed so many things I thought a game like this could be and will likely always have a special place in my top games of all time. This represented the transition from Neverwinter Nights style top down isometric roleplaying games that I so regularly consumed and the later Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of third person environmental narrative driven experience. As I have been back playing KOTOR2 I have realized just how much of a period of transition these games truly were and as such were the heralds of so many things to come.
While I have not completed the game and there is a new big baddie in a cool mask, I would very much say that Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is STILL the story of Revan. The entirety of the game so far is effectively an epilogue to the first experience. You see the damage wrought by Revan on the galaxy and the fact that it isn’t doing too well on its own. The power vacuum of Revan going off into deep space to find his destiny left the Republic and Jedi Order without a charismatic leader to guide them into a new era. Generally speaking when a vacuum is formed someone else steps in to take the place but between the Mandalorian crusades and the Jedi Civil War… all larger forces that COULD step in were wiped out meaning what happens instead is a slow inevitable collapse of the galaxy.
There is some heavy debate about whether or not Star Wars the Old Republic the MMORPG counts as being part of the cycle of Knights of the Old Republic tales. I personally believe so and that is largely because it sets the ground work for the conflict to come and also reveals to us where exactly Revan went and what he was doing. Revan sensed something and went out to find it, and his struggle against that presence ultimately dominates much of the back story of Star Wars the Old Republic whether or not it is apparent and clear from the start. For me at least the true continuation of the KOTOR storyline would be the Jedi Knight story arc because it seems to deal the most directly with the Evil that Revan was trying to guard us from.
So ultimately the question is where do we go from here? As I stated before, I still firmly believe that Knights of the Old Republic is the story arc of Revan, and I think were they to continue the story it would need to take place after the events that have already played out in Star Wars the Old Republic. This causes a bit of a problem of bookending the story of a live service… but also it isn’t as though a lot of content is being delivered. There is also the option of setting the story in that time between the end of the Shadow of Revan expansion and the beginning of Knights of the Fallen Empire. There is a high likelihood of KOTFE and KOTET being washed away by the giant eraser of “Legends” as well.
Who Will Build It?
The first candidate that my friend Storm threw out there was Larian Studios. I absolutely think that they would do an amazing job with the franchise. However I also think this is a bit of a long shot given that they are already currently in active development of Baldur’s Gate III which expects to still have another year or so of incubation before release. Then after release I fully expect to see expansion content and more games in the D&D realm from this studio. Basically I think they are overcommitted at the moment given the size of the studio.
We already know that there is a deal in the works for the Massive division of UbiSoft to create an open world Star Wars game. However Massive is the studio behind The Division 1 and 2 and given the way that UbiSoft loves to make formulaic games I am fully expecting the Star Wars adventure to be in that model. I’ve said this before but I am expecting a single city setting like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant where the entirety of the game takes place but also gives the player plenty of room to explore different environments. Hell I might be wrong here but I am expecting this one to also be off the table.
I personally would love to see what Spiders could do with the franchise given how phenomenal of a game Greedfall was. The problem with Spiders is that they have come really close to greatness a number of times but never quite pushed across the finish line. I think maybe with a high profile franchise like KOTOR, they might have the attention needed to make sure the final product was perfectly fine tuned. Again however this is a pipe dream because they were recently purchased by Nacon and duringa reveal show announced the next game they are working on. Steelrising looks awesome but is this baroque automata French revolution game that seems to be nothing like Knights of the Old Republic. They are a small studio and as such I think fairly single threaded so we can push them off the list.
Right now at this very moment I am playing a Knights of the Old Republic game built by Obsidian Entertainment. While they are now owned by Microsoft they have also been shown to not necessarily be building exclusive content. It would not be outside of the realm of reality for them to take over the franchise. To add fuel to the fire, Casey Hudson just left Bioware to join Microsoft Studios as Creative Director. He was the director on Knights of the Old Republic so maybe the cards are aligning in such a way as to have the franchise return to its Microsoft roots. If you remember KOTOR was originally an Xbox exclusive that later got a Windows release.
So in a bit of a dark horse pick, I want to throw out ArcheType Entertainment. This studio is backed by Wizards of the Coast and seems to be made up of a bunch of Ex-Bioware folks. One very key player would be Drew Karpyshyn the writer of KOTOR and some of the SWTOR content. Additionally James Ohlen and Chad Roberston were both in leadership roles over Star Wars the Old Republic and represent the Head of the Studio and General Manager respectively. The only thing that does not align is that when the studio was spun up in February of 2020 it was announced that they would be working on a brand new Science Fiction IP. Maybe fates shifted and the break up of the EA Star Wars license opened up other opportunities to pivot what they were working on into the Old Republic setting.
Another studio that I would not rule out either is InXile entertainment. These are the folks the modern Wasteland and Bards Tale games as well as Torment: Tides of Numenera. As a studio their jam seems to be really good isometric roleplaying games. However they would also have the same Microsoft connection that Obsidian has. I think this is a really long shot however because the wealth of their experience is in modernizing the isometric genre and creating games that feel like we remember the classic PC RPG era feeling. It is because of this nostalgia based approach that I am not really certain they would be screwing with the formula just yet, that is unless they themselves are feeling like the isometric thing is getting a bit stale.
It’s All Rumors
The problem with all of this is the fact that right now none of it is tangible. For all we know it could be Aspyr working on remastering and modernizing Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Excitement is getting the better of games media and myself included. I would love to see a new Knights of the Old Republic game, but also I know it is probably two or three years out there if it even ends up happening. So friends, what are your thoughts? Who do you think might be developing this game and what sort of game are you expecting it to be? Do you think it will be a continuation of the KOTOR lineage or just something new set in the same Old Republic era setting? Drop me a line below, because I am curious about your thoughts.
I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004.
There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.
Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game.
The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.
The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them.
Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.
So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat.
This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through.
Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently.
